The Keeler Tavern was a famous hostelry for travellers between New York and Boston. Its old sign-board is shown on page 205. During the Revolution, landlord Keeler was well known to be a patriot, and was suspected of manufacturing cartridges in his tavern. The British poured a special fire upon the building, and one cannon ball lodged in a timber on the north side of the house still is to be seen by drawing aside the shingle that usually conceals it. A companion cannon ball whistled so close to a man who was climbing the stairs of the house that he tumbled down backward screaming, "I'm a dead man," until his friends with difficulty silenced him, and assured him he was living. A son of the landlord, Jeremiah Keeler, enlisted in the Continental army when but seventeen; he became a sergeant, and was the first man to scale the English breastworks at Yorktown. He was presented with a sword by his commanding officer, Lafayette, and it is still preserved.
When Lafayette made his triumphal progress through the United States in 1824, he visited Ridgefield and the tavern to see Jeremiah Keeler, and a big ball was given in the tavern in his honor. Jerome Bonaparte and his beautiful Baltimore bride stopped there in 1804. Oliver Wolcott and Timothy Pickering were other sojourners under its roof. Peter Parley gave to the Keeler Tavern the palm for good cooking.
The old Conkey Tavern at Prescott, Massachusetts, saw the gathering of a very futile but picturesque windstorm of Revolutionary grievance. It was built in 1758 by William Conkey, on a lovely but lonely valley midway between the east and west hills of Pelham. The Swift River running through this valley was made the boundary in the town division in 1822, which made eastern Pelham into Prescott. Captain Daniel Shays, the leader of Shays' Rebellion, lived half a mile from the tavern on the Centre Range Road. In the cheerful rooms of this tavern, Shays, aided by the well-stocked tavern-bar, incited the debt-burdened farmers to rebel against their state government. Here he drilled his "flood-wood," and from hence he led them forth to Springfield, and on January 25, 1787, was promptly repulsed by the state militia under General Lincoln. Eleven hundred men trooped back to Pelham, and after four days of what must have proved scant and cold fare in those barren winter hilltops, again sallied out to Petersham. Here he was again routed by Lincoln, who, with his men, had marched thirty miles without halt, from eight o'clock at night to nine the following morning through a blinding, northeast New England snowstorm. A hundred and fifty of Shays' men were captured, but their valiant and wordy leader escaped.