Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 July 1893 — Old Virginia Taverns. [ARTICLE]

Old Virginia Taverns.

Here in Virginia we have had sonic famous hostelries. The old Raleigh Tavern at Williamsburg lives in romance and history. It must have been well kept, for contemporaneous writers speak of it so very respectfully. They could not have written of it as they did had the proprietor furnished them with tough beefsteak or bad bread, or sent them to shabby chambers, or hired a man with a Kohinoor in his frilled shirt bosom to give them short answers to civil questions. Tavern was once the great name here. The Bell Tavern, which preceded the present St. Charles, was a famous place of resort when Byrd’s tobbacco warehouse stood on the opposite side of Main street, and it had a worthy contemporary in the Washington Tavern, which is now the St. Claire. The Eagle Tavern was of later date and was a grander house thau the other two. In it Lafayette was entertained in 1824. The Eagle stood on the south side of Main street, between Twelfth and Thirteentn, and had an archway—the porte cochere of the present day—into which the stage-coaches drove landed their passengers. Fire destroyed it early in the forties, and from the city’s need for another good hotel the Exchange arose. The Exchange, the Ballard House, the Columbian Hotel, the Pohawtan v Ford’s) Hotel, the Monumental (St. Claire), and the St. Charles and the Spotswood were all in operation here at one time. —[Richmond Dispatch.