Travel in the South in the Thirties. Frontispiece. STAGE-COACH AND TAVERN DAYS By ALICE MORSE EARLE Author of Home Life in Colonial Days , Child Life in Colonial Days , and other Social and Domestic Histories of Colonial Times NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1900 All rights reserved Copyright , 1900, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. TO MY HUSBAND HENRY EARLE...

THE PURITAN ORDINARY In reverent and affectionate retrospective view of the influences and conditions which had power and made mark upon the settlement of New England, we are apt to affirm with earnest sentiment that religion was the one force, the one aim, the one thought, of the lives of our forbears. It was indeed an ever present thought and influence in their lives; but they possessed another trait which is as evident in their records as their piety, and which adds an element of human intere

OLD-TIME TAVERNS By the close of the seventeenth century the word ordinary was passing into disuse in America; public houses had multiplied vastly and had become taverns, though a few old-fashioned folk—in letters, and doubtless in conversation—still called them ordinaries—Judge Sewall was one. The word inn, universal in English speech, was little heard here, and tavern was universally adopted. Though to-day somewhat shadowed by a formless reputation of being frequently applied to hostelries of

THE TAVERN LANDLORD The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure. Travellers did not fail to note him and his virtues in their accounts of their sojourns. In 1686 a gossiping London bookseller and author, named John Dunton, made a cheerful visit to Boston. He did not omit to pay tribute in his story of colonial life to colonial landlords. He thus pictures Ge

TAVERN FARE AND TAVERN WAYS In the year 1704 a Boston widow named Sarah Knights journeyed “by post,” that is, went on horseback, in the company of the government postman, from Boston to New York, and returned a few months later. She kept a journal of her trip, and as she was a shrewd woman with a sharp eye and sharper tongue, her record is of interest. She stopped at the various hostelries on the route, some of which were well-established taverns, others miserable makeshifts; and she gives us so

“KILL-DEVIL” AND ITS AFFINES Any account of old-time travel by stage-coach and lodging in old-time taverns would be incomplete without frequent reference to that universal accompaniment of travel and tavern sojourn, that most American of comforting stimulants—rum. The name is doubtless American. A manuscript description of Barbadoes, written twenty-five years after the English settlement of the island in 1651, is thus quoted in The Academy : “The chief fudling they make in the island is Rumbulli

SMALL DRINK “Under this tearme of small-drink,” wrote an old chronicler, “do I endow such drinks as are of comfort, to quench an honest thirst, not to heat the brain, as one man hath ale, another cider, another metheglin, and one sack.” Under this title I also place such tavern and home drinks of colonial times as were not deemed vastly intoxicating; though New England cider might well be ranged very close to New England rum in intoxicating powers. The American colonists were not enthusiastic wa

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS Before named streets with numbered houses came into existence, and when few persons could read, painted and carved sign-boards and figures were more useful than they are to-day; and not only innkeepers, but men of all trades and callings sought for signs that either for quaintness, appropriateness, or costliness would attract the eyes of customers and visitors, and fix in their memory the exact locality of the advertiser. Signs were painted and carved in wood; they were carved

THE TAVERN IN WAR The tavern has ever played an important part in social, political, and military life, has helped to make history. From the earliest days when men gathered to talk over the terrors of Indian warfare; through the renewal of these fears in the French and Indian War; before and after the glories of Louisburg; and through all the anxious but steadfast years preceding and during the Revolution, these gatherings were held in the ordinaries or taverns. What a scene took place in the Br

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 scor

FROM PATH TO TURNPIKE The first roads in New England are called in the early court-records “trodden paths.” They were narrow worn lines, scarce two feet wide, lightly trodden over pine needles and fallen leaves among the tree trunks by the soft moccasined foot of the tawny savages as they walked silently in Indian file through the forests. These paths were soon deepened and worn bare by the heavy hobnailed shoes of the white settlers, others were formed by the slow tread of domestic cattle, the

PACKHORSE AND CONESTOGA WAGON Our predecessors, the North American Indians, had no horses. An early explorer of Virginia said that if the country had horses and kine and were peopled with English, no realm in Christendom could be compared with it. The crude means of overland transportation common to all savages, the carrying of burdens on the back by various strappings, was the only mode known. Travel by land in the colonies was for many years very limited in amount, and equally hazardous and in

EARLY STAGE-COACHES AND OTHER VEHICLES The story of the stage-coach begins at a much later date than that of the tavern; but the two allies reached the height of their glory together. No more prosperous calling ever existed than that of landlord of an old-time stage-tavern; no greater symbol of good cheer could be afforded. Though a popular historical novel by one of our popular writers shows us the heroine in a year of the seventeenth century conveyed away from her New England home in a well-eq

TWO STAGE VETERANS OF MASSACHUSETTS There still stands in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, at the junction of the Westborough road with the old “King’s Highway,” a weatherbeaten but dignified house, the Pease Tavern; it is shown on page 292 . This house was for many years a popular resort for the teamsters and travellers who passed back and forth on what was then an important road. Behind the house was originally a large shed with roof and open sides for the protection from rain or snow of the great n

A STAGING CENTRE The story of the tavern and stage life of the town of Haverhill, New Hampshire, may be told as an example of that aspect and era of social history, as developed in a country town. It shows the power the stage-coach was in bringing civilization and prosperity to remote parts of the states, what an illumination, what an education. Haverhill is on the Connecticut River somewhat more than halfway up the western boundary line of the state of New Hampshire, at the head of the Cohos va

THE STAGE-DRIVER In a home-library in an old New England town there were for half a century two sets of books which seemed strangely alien to the other staid occupants of the bookshelves, which companions were chiefly rows of encyclopædias, Scott’s novels, the Spectator and Tatler , a large number of books of travel, and scores of biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of pious “gospellers,” English and American, chiefly missionaries. These two special sets of books were large volumes, but wer

THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD The traveller in the old stage-coach was not tantalized by the fleeting half-glimpse of places which we gain in railroad travel to-day. He had ample time to view any unusual or beautiful spot as he passed, he had leisure to make inquiry did he so desire, he had also many minutes, nay hours, to hear any traveller’s tale that could be told him by a fellow-journeyer or by the driver. This last-named companion, going over the stage road day after day, talking constantly, quer

THE PAINS OF STAGE-COACH TRAVEL In describing the pleasures and pains, the delights and dangers, the virtues and vicissitudes of the travel of early days by stage-coach in America, I have chosen to employ largely the words and descriptions of contemporary travellers rather than any wording of my own, not only because any such description of mine would be simply a transcription of their facts, but because there is a sense of closeness of touch, a pleasant intimacy, and indeed a profound sympathy

KNIGHTS OF THE ROAD It is impossible to read of the conditions of life on the public highway in England and not wonder at the safety and security with which all travel was carried on in the American colonies. In Great Britain shop-robbing, foot-padding, street assaults, and highway robberies were daily incidents. Stage-coach passengers were specially plundered. From end to end of England was heard the cry of “Stand and deliver.” Day after day, for weeks together, the Hampstead, Islington, Dover,

TAVERN GHOSTS England was ever the birthplace and abiding-place of ghosts. Thoroughly respectable most of these old residents were, their manifestations being stereotyped with all the conventionalities of the spirit world. When the colonists came to the new world the friendly and familiar spectres did not desert their old companions, but emigrated also, and “sett down satysfyed” in enlarged log cabins, and houses built of American pine, just as the planters did; and in these humbler domiciles bo