Tag Archives: Taverns

The Golden Ball Tavern

It’s spring break week and I’m slowly making my way down to “New Sweden” but as I write this I’m stuck in a snowstorm at my brother’s house in New York! I should be able to get out tomorrow and want to spend three or four days looking at old houses in Delaware, south Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This was supposed to be a Revolutionary tavern tour, but I think it’s going to be a bit more general: we’ll see! But because it was supposed to be a tavern tour, I did visit a tavern back in Massachusetts on Sunday: a sunny day which seems like it was weeks away rather than days away. I’ve driven by the Golden Ball Tavern Museum on the old Boston Post Road in Weston for years but never ventured inside before, and decided to take advanage of its monthly second Sunday open houses to take a tour. It was very interesting: a spacious eighteenth-century building left quite deliberately in a lived-in, layered condition. Weston is a very wealthy town, and I expected the house to be in mint restored condition but that is not the approach here: the ceilings were sloping in places, patchy plaster was everywhere, and I read a cautionary note on the central stairway: “original avocado paint—do not paint.” This house museum is an independent, self-sustaining operation which is staffed by enthusiastic docents who appeared to be discovering the house right alongside its visitors: it all felt very personal, like we were all just dropping in, or into a house built by tavern-keeper Isaac Jones in 1768 which sheltered six successive generations of his family. In the heated environment of the early 1770s, Jones gave shelter and sustenance (in the form of tea!) to British soldiers, prompting his neighbors to attack the tavern on March 28, 1774 in what later became known as the “Weston Tea Party.” He later came around to the right side, but the interpretive identity of the Tavern as museum seems to be focused on family history and Loyalist history. And layers, literally. If you’re into material textures, this tavern is the place for you: the historic paint, paper, and hardware was on full revelatory display.

The first floor of the Golden Ball Tavern: proceeding from the rear old kitchen, with many layers exposed, towards the tavern room in the front. LOVED this little Sheraton settee! Original paint and plaster in the central hallway and the right-side parlor and bedroom have been refinished.

Upstairs there are bedrooms, of course, but also a room which was used for more public purposes: and consequently it has one of the most interesting and practical architectural details I have ever seen. Doors that open up to the ceiling and are affixed to hooks! Hooks which are still there! And right across from this room is that in which poor Mrs. Jones was lying in bed with her newborn infant when her neighbors broke in in search of her Tory husband (these little notes are everwhere in the tavern, another aspect of its very personal presentation). I really loved all the colors and textures in this room, including the adjacent “office” and stairways upstairs and downstairs. So many details in this one space, just a corner of this one house.

Details, details, details! The door on the ceiling, hooks, paint, stairs, and a colonial filing system.


Watered Down

Salem is such a foodie/libations town now; I’m surprised there is so little culinary history served up. With countless restaurants, several bakeries and food shops, one brewery and another on the way, a cidery and distillery—all very busy—you would think there would be an ongoing audience for deep dives into the historical production and distribution of foodstuffs and beverages, but the only serious purveyors of such presentations (with ample samples!) are Salem Food Tours, and their affiliated attraction, the Salem Spirits Trolley, which runs in October. Good for them, but I think there’s room for more food-and-drink history, because Salem is not just a foodie town now; it always has been. The Peabody Essex Museum is hosting a brewing-themed event this week for which several area brewers have produced beverages based on the Museum’s collections: but only those collections that are right here in Salem so that’s not much to go on—the results must be somewhat watered-down if historical inspiration is the objective. A few trips up to the almighty Collection Center in Rowley and its encased Phillips Library would reveal more sources and more inspiration: here are some avenues of exploration that look particularly promising:

Women Brewers & Tavern-Keepers: there seem to have been quite a few in Salem!  One old Salem source that is quoted in all of the books about early American taverns and libations (quite a large genre) is a bill presented to the Parish Committee of the East Church for “Punch, Flip, Sangrey, etc.” by Abigail Brown, Tavern Keeper in 1767, and when Katherine Clarke inherited the Ship’s Tavern, one of Salem’s first, from her husband in 1645 she was licensed to keep it as long as she found a “fit man yt is godlie to manage the business”. Hannah Lemon Beadle also became the keeper of her family’s tavern on Essex Street following her husband’s death a bit later in the seventeenth-century, before it became the site of Witch Trial interrogations in 1692. 10 boxes of inn, tavern & retail licenses will yield lots of more information about just who was selling what.

Salem Spirits

Beadle's Tavern New England Magazine, 1892.

Spruce Beer. Logic tells me that Salem would have been a big producer of Colonial North America’s major contribution to the global world of beer, spruce beer, which compensated for shortages of both barley and hops in the New World and at the same time was recognized as a cure for scurvy. It was increasingly popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Dr. Bentley refers to it in his diary, and Jane Austen in her letters. It’s generally referred to as a home or “family” brew, however, so I supposed it was not produced commercially. I think there were alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions, and it seems to have been particularly popular in the summer. Here is General Jeffrey Amherst’s (of smallpox infamy) recipe:

Salem Spirits Spruce Beer

And here is Amelia Simmons’ recipe, with hops, from American Cookery (1796): it is notable that this is the only beverage recipe in the acclaimed “first” truly American cookbook:

Take four ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissol|ved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bot|tle, add one spoonful of molasses to every bottle.

What’s in the mix? I suspect that a lot of brewing was home-based so it might be in the “black box” which historians cannot open, but the Phillips Library has manuscript and printed recipe collections which might yield some interesting intructions for all sorts of beverages. The most comprehensive of the latter seem to be Joseph Coppinger’s American Practical Brewer and Tanner (1815) and MacKenzie’s five thousand receipts in all the useful and domestic arts: constituting a complete practical library … : a new American, from the latest London edition (1829), but there are “small beer” recipes in many contemporary cookbooks. Beer is seldom advertised before the later nineteenth-century: I looked through the Salem Gazette and found every single beverage BUT beer referenced in the first decade of the nineteenth century, although Mr. Ropes (below) was always in the market for barley!

Salem Spirits American Practical Brewer

Salem Spirits Mackenzie's 5000 Reciepts Phillips

Spirit collage

There are more references to beer when it is mixed with something else: as in flip (which Abigail Brown furnished to the East Church Parish Council), the famous and “terrible” Salem drink Whistle Belly Vengeance, Bogus or Calibogus (spruce beer with rum), and Rattle-Skull ( dark rum and/or brandy and beer). Rum improved everything, of course, including cider (Stone-Wall or Stone-Fence).

Where are all the Tavern signs? I’ve got to admit that I’m as much, or more,  interested in the material culture of taverns as the consumption–especially tavern signs. Salem tavern licenses were granted with the requirement that “there be sett up in some inoffensive sign obvious ways for direction to strangers”, and apparently signs for The Sun and the Bunch of Grapes once existed in the collections of the PEM’s predecessor, the Essex Institute, but all I can find are Washington Hotel signs at present: as you can imagine, Washington taverns and hostelries were as common in every American town as Washington streets in the nineteenth century.

Washington collagePeabody Essex Museum and Alice Morse Earle, Stage-Coach and Tavern Days (1900).


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