CHAPTER IX

THE TAVERN PANORAMA

We have to-day scores of places of amusement, and means of amusement, where in earlier days all diversions centred at the tavern. The furnishing of food and shelter to travellers and to horses, and of liquid comfort to neighbors, was not the only function of the tavern, nor the meeting for cheerful interchange of news and sentiment. Whatever there was of novelty in entertainment or instruction, was delivered at the tavern, and it served as the gathering place for folk on scores of duties or pleasures bent. There was in fact a constant panorama passing within the walls and before the doors of an old tavern, not only in the shape of distinguished, picturesque, and unwonted guests, but through the variety of uses to which the tavern was put. It would be impossible to enumerate them all. Many of the chapters of this book indicate some of them. We can simply glance at a few more of the most common and of the most interesting ones.

Though guests of colonial days are often named as having visited the old taverns which still linger intact, the names of importance which are most frequently heard are those of Revolutionary heroes and visitors, those of Franklin, Washington, and Lafayette being most proudly enumerated. Franklin was a great local traveller. His post-office affairs took him frequently along the road. He was fond of visiting, and people were naturally fond of having him visit them. He was such a welcome guest that he need not have entered a tavern from Maine to Georgia. Washington made several trips through the states, one of much ceremony. He gives the names of the taverns at which he stopped.

I have been in tavern-rooms honored a century ago by the sleeping presence of Washington, but I have never slept in them. I would rather look at them than sleep in them; and I have moralized over the simplicity and lack of luxury which was the best that the tavern could offer, even to that great man.

Lafayette was made welcome in many private houses in his tour in 1824, but he also was a tavern guest. His journal is preserved in Paris, untranslated. In it he tells of seeing the well-known Landing of Lafayette plates and dishes for the first time at a tavern in a small town in western New York.

All the statesmen of the South stopped at taverns on the old National road: Harrison, Houston, Taylor, Polk, and Allen. Homespun Davy Crockett, popular General Jackson, stately Henry Clay, furnished a show for the country by-standers to gape at. In the Northern states Daniel Webster was the god whose coming was adored. A halo of glory shed by his presence still hangs round many a tavern room, and well it may, for he was a giant among men.

[Illustration: Washington Tavern, North Wilbraham, Massachusetts.]

To show the variety of the tavern panorama let me quote what Edwin Lasseter Bynner wrote of the inns of Boston:--

"They were the centres of so much of its life and affairs, the resort at once of judge and jury, of the clergy and the laity, of the politician and the merchant; where the selectmen came to talk over the affairs of the town, and higher officials to discuss the higher interests of the province; where royal governors and distinguished strangers were entertained alike with the humblest wayfarer and the meanest citizen; where were held the carousals of roistering red-coat officers, and the midnight plottings of muttering stern-lipped patriots; where, in fine, the swaggering ensign of the royal army, the frowning Puritan, the obnoxious Quaker, the Huguenot refugee, and the savage Indian chief from the neighboring forest might perchance jostle each other in the common taproom."

Naturally the tavern proved the exhibition place and temporary lodging-place of all secular shows which could not be housed in the meeting-house. It contained the second assembly room in size, and often the only other large room in town save that devoted to religious gatherings. Hence, when in Salem in 1781 "the Sentimentalists and all Volontiers who are pleased to encourage the extensive Propogation of Polite Literature" were invited to attend a book auction by a "Provedore and Professor of Auctioneering," this sale of books was held at Mr. Goodhue's tavern. At the American Coffee-house in Boston the firm that vendued books within doors also sold jackasses on the street.

"Monstrous Sights" found at the tavern a congenial temporary home, where discussion of their appearance was held before the tavern bar, while the tavern barn restrained and confined the monster if he chanced to be a wild beast. A moose, a walrus, a camel, a lion, a leopard, appeared in succession in Salem taverns, chiefly at the Black Horse. Then came a wonder of natural history, a Pygarg, said to be from Russia. We have a description of it: it had "the likeness of a camel, bear, mule, goat, and common bullock"; it is spoken of in the book of Deuteronomy,