What Was It Like to Stay in a Colonial-Era Inn?

Long before luxury hotels and room service, weary travelers in colonial America had more or less one choice of public accommodation: roadside inns. There, they might “supp” on plates of “fry’d” chicken and bacon and cold apple “pye,” catch up on the news of the day, then share a room with bed lice and bedmates tipsy on hot toddies.

In 1774, Scottish-born traveling doctor Alexander Hamilton (no, not that one) bunked with three strangers in a New York country inn—“two great hulking fellows, with long black beards,” and “a raw-boned boy”—he wrote in Itinerarium, a narrative of his journey across the Northeast. Another night, Hamilton turned in at 8 p.m., only to toss and turn as “chit-chat and noise kept me awake 3 hours after I went to bed.” At one New Jersey inn, he “supped upon cold gammon and a sallet”—cold ham and salad.

Such was a typical stay at a roadside inn in 17th- and 18th-century America, where the mostly male guests sought rest and sustenance as they traveled. But inns—also known as taverns or “ordinaries” for the ordinary, common rooms in which travelers and locals mixed—also served as vibrant social centers where people from across all social strata found entertainment, conversation and connection over tankards of ale and shared plates.

“You met people in the tavern great room you normally wouldn’t rub elbows with,” says Vaughn Scribner, associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. “Taverns were these incredibly important spaces enmeshed in people's lives—anything that happened in colonial America happened in or around a tavern.”

Inns often started as simple spare rooms rented for the night by families living along major travel routes. Expansion came as some innkeepers added additional rooms and built dedicated spaces for dining and socializing. In 1731 in Philadelphia, nearly 100 legal taverns operated. By 1750, there were 120. In an advertisement in the June 8, 1774, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia innkeeper Joseph Price extolled his inn’s “stock of good liquors, bedding, stabling, [and] hay and oats” for horses.

The mostly male innkeepers tended to be prominent—and affable—community members. In 1686, London bookseller and author John Dunton called George Monk, the landlord of Boston’s Blue Anchor, “a brisk and jolly man whose conversation was coveted by all his guests as the life and spirit of the company.” Women infrequently ran taverns; more often, they prepared meals and scrubbed floors—as did enslaved people. Fewer women arrived as patrons.

When 38-year-old boarding house keeper Sarah Kemble Knight showed up at a tavern late one night during her 1704 horseback journey from Boston to New York, she was “interrogated” by the innkeeper’s daughter, who exclaimed, “I never see a Woman on the Rode so Dreadfull late in all the days of my...life,” Knight wrote in her travel diary.

Despite the rarity of Knight’s solo stay, her arrival at the inn would have been much like that of any other guest. Travelers often took to the road at dawn, and pedestrians averaged 14 to 18 miles a day before stopping at an inn, noted Theodore Dwight in his 1834 travel guide The Northern Traveller, and Northern Tour. Those who came on horseback or via stagecoach had their horses led to the inn’s stables to be fed, brushed or shoed. If travelers showed up early enough, the inn’s common room would have been their first stop. “People are coming in, and they’re sizing each other up,” says Scribner.

In winter, crackling fires roared in common rooms, with their “bare, sanded floor and ample seats and chairs,” wrote historian Alice Morse Earle in her 1900 book Stage-coach and Tavern Days. Patrons smoked ceramic tobacco pipes, perused newspapers or penned letters home. “Any tavern worth their salt would have had multiple newspapers lying around,” says Scribner.

Locals looking for news out of distant towns—and the chance to opine on politics—chatted with travelers as they played billiards and cards together in great rooms, despite some colonies’ attempts to curb gambling. Worried about disorder and vice, authorities in a number of colonies eventually banned dice, cards, bowling, billiards and other gambling games in taverns. But keen on profits and social bonding, innkeepers and their patrons largely ignored those rules.

Tavern guests might also gather outside to cheer on cockfighting matches, or inside to enjoy a traveling show passing through town. A 1749 New-York Gazette ad promoted the showing of “Bonnin’s Philosophical Optical Machine,” a 3D exhibit made of mirrors that displayed fanciful scenes of European palaces and gardens.

Some taverns hosted local government meetings and legal hearings or rented rooms to private groups. Benjamin Franklin’s Leather Apron Club, for one, met in taverns to trade books and talk politics, literature and science. “There were rooms where elite patrons were able to divorce themselves from the rabble,” Scribner says.

Taverns served simple, hearty meals prepared by innkeepers over an open hearth from ingredients in their cupboard. Guests didn’t order off a menu. Instead, they shared a communal breakfast, dinner, sometimes tea and supper. One Dutch- and English-speaking landlady served Hamilton a “dish of fryed clams.” In a New York City tavern, he dined well on "veal, beef stakes, green peas and raspberries for a dessert.”

Still, tavern food didn’t always hit its mark. When Knight lodged at an ordinary kept by a Frenchman in Rye, New York, she “desired a Fricassee which the landlord undertaking managed so contrary to my notion of Cookery that I hastened to be su[p]perless,” she wrote in her journal. Beverages, on the other hand, were typically more widely enjoyed.

Patrons usually downed hard cider and ale. By the 1770s, rum became the drink of choice in colonial taverns. Hot toddies—whiskey combined with hot water, lemon, sugar and cloves—were popular, as was flip, a hot blend of beer, rum, molasses and eggs or cream.

When John Tripp and his wife put up at the Bowen Inn in Barrington, Rhode Island, on May 11, 1766, they paid six shillings for a night of lodging, according to Earle. A bowl of toddy cost nine shillings, while bread and cheese went for seven.

Sleeping quarters at colonial inns drew endless complaints. Mattresses were typically ticking (cotton or linen covers) stuffed with straw, wool, corn husks, or most comfortably, feathers. Often, innkeepers packed two or more strangers to a room, or to a single bed. In rural areas, even six to a bed was possible, “no boots or spurs, please.” It wasn’t unusual for a bedmate to arrive in the middle of the night, with the innkeeper escorting them into the room—and bed—by candlelight. Taproom floors or even the stables served as spillover sleeping spaces.

Knight, who as a woman wouldn’t have shared a room, found “a sad-coloured pillow” in her quarters one night and she “laid my poor Carkes and found my Covering as scanty as my Bed was hard.” According to Earle, an English officer traveling through America wrote that “the general custom of having two or three beds in a room to be sure is very disagreeable.” And guests who showed displeasure at sharing a bed were regarded as “obnoxious and unreasonably fastidious,” she wrote.

“Oftentimes your roommate was drunk,” says Scribner. “There were lice and bedbugs. People were being loud. You’re trying to sleep, and they won’t shut up.” By the 1760s and 1770s, the fiery words of American rebels plotting independence would have echoed through inns’ thin walls, too.

For most travelers, privacy came with a price. While many colonies regulated maximum rates for shared rooms, private ones were negotiable. All guests typically had access to drawn water to take to their room for light bathing, says Scribner.

After a fitful night of sleep and more gossip over breakfast, travelers set off in a stagecoach, on horse or by foot for their final destination—or the next inn. It wasn’t until the late 1700s, following the American Revolution, when taverns and inns began to move away from being all-in-one stops for food, drink and lodging.

Driving that change, in part, was the French Revolution, when chefs working in aristocratic households in France fled elsewhere, including to America where they opened restaurants. And in 1794, New York became home to one of America’s first true hotels—the City Hotel—a place that didn’t require guests to share beds, cloth napkins were furnished at dinner and a gong called patrons to meals.