Stage-coach and Tavern Days

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 earn...

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-fashio...

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...

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 retur...

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...

"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, a...

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;...

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 terro...

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 traveller...

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 fa...

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 i...

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...

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...

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 tow...

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...

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...

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 larg...

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 America...

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 convent...