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."