be found mentioned in old documents and papers, including the famous
American House, Buckeye Hotel, on the present site of the Board of Trade
building, etc. West of Columbus the celebrated Four Mile House, which
has been referred to previously, was erected in the latter half of the
century. In the days of the great mail and stage lines Billy Werden's
Tavern in Springfield was the leading hostelry in western Ohio. At this
point the stages running to Cincinnati, with mail for the Mississippi
Valley, left the Cumberland Road. Across the state line, Neal's and
Clawson's Taverns offered hospitality in the extreme eastern border of
Indiana. At Richmond, Starr Tavern (Tremont Hotel), Nixon's Tavern,
Gilbert's two-story, pebble-coated tavern and Bayle's Sign of the Green
Tree, offered entertainment worthy of the road and its great business,
while Sloan's brick stagehouse accommodated the passenger traffic of the
stage lines. At Indianapolis, the Palmer House, built in 1837, and
Washington Hall, welcomed the public of the two great political faiths,
Democrat and Whig, respectively.
At almost every mile of the road's long length, wagonhouses offered
hospitality to the hundreds engaged in the great freight traffic. Here a
large room with its fireplace could be found before which to lay
blankets on a winter's night. The most successful wagonhouses were
situated at the outskirts of the larger towns, where, at more reasonable
prices and in more congenial surroundings than in a crowded city inn,
the rough sturdy men upon whom the whole West depended for over a
generation for its merchandise, found hospitable entertainment for
themselves and their rugged horses. These houses were usually
unpretentious frame buildings surrounded by a commodious yard, and
generous watering-troughs and barns. A hundred tired horses have been
heard munching their corn in a single wagonhouse yard at the end of a
long day's work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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