Because they dealt with the entertainment of strangers and the serving of strong drink, taverns were
among the most highly regulated of early American enterprises. Across New England, "innholders"
or "taverners" had to be certified by local selectmen as men "of good character" before they could be
licensed by the county authorities. Once a tavernkeeper had received his license and put up his sign,
he was bound by law to perform his function. An innholder could be prosecuted for "refusing to make
suitable provision when desired, for the receiving of strangers, travelers or others, and their horses
and cattle, or for any public entertainment"; if convicted, he would lose his license and have his sign
taken down by the sheriff.
Sabbath regulations bore hard on tavern operations. On the Lord's Day inn-holders were barred from
admitting local customers or new traveling guests; they could feed and lodge only those who were
already staying on the premises. Tavern Sabbath infractions were heavily punished in the 1830s, with
fines beginning at $5-$10. Continued violations of Sabbath restrictions by a tavernkeeper would
result in progressively heavier fines—and eventual loss of license.
Taverns were also intimately, and sometimes perilously, involved with popular entertainment.
"Games, shows and entertainments" were widespread in early English popular culture and ranged
from performances of Shakespeare and other dramatic presentations to puppet shows,
sleight-of-hand, magic and ventriloquism, tight rope walking, juggling, trick riding, animal
exhibitions, and acrobatics. New England's Puritan founders were deeply hostile to such popular
entertainments and sought to eradicate them. The laws of seventeenth-century Massachusetts and
Connecticut lumped traveling performers of all kinds with beggars, rogues, and wandering preachers,
calling them all "vagabonds" and providing that they should be whipped, fined, and either removed to
a place of settled residence or expelled from the colony. The official view of ministers and
magistrates was that such sportive, "wanton" entertainments took men, women, and children away
from their work, worship, and community responsibilities and tempted them to even greater
licentiousness. In the small and generally tightly controlled communities of the seventeenth century,
traveling showmen and players seem to have indeed been rare. However, as New England's
population increased and its links to the transatlantic world multiplied in the eighteenth century,
entertainers began to appear in greater numbers, along with increasingly explicit legislation that
signified their growing presence.
In Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, the statutes passed by the first state legislatures after the
Revolution kept all the old colonial prohibitions intact. But in 1805 in Massachusetts and Maine (then
still part of the old commonwealth), and 1813 in Rhode Island, local authorities were given broad
authority to license exhibitions and shows. In these relatively accommodating states, showmen could
stay within the law if they could simply persuade the local authorities—although this was sometimes
a difficult task.
The other New England states were far more restrictive. In New Hampshire, local licensing was
possible, but the fee demanded by the law was $30-$50 for each day of performance—a large and
seemingly prohibitive sum. Connecticut and Vermont were even less welcoming. As late as 1839
Connecticut statutes still forbade "any company of players, or persons whatever," from exhibiting
"tragedies, comedies, farces or other dramatic pieces or compositions, or any pantomimes, or other
theatrical shows whatever." They also prohibited the public presentation of "any games, tricks, plays,
shows, tumbling, rope dancing, puppet shows, or feats of uncommon agility or dexterity of body,"
and outlawed "any circus of any description" and "the exhibition of any extraordinary feats of any
horse, pony...or any other animal." Vermont's prohibitions were slightly less detailed but identical in
substance.
These prohibitions and the weight of official scrutiny bore heavily on taverns, since they were almost
invariably the places where entertainers stopped and sought to perform or use as their headquarters.
Thus everywhere in New England, performers and their tavernkeeper hosts had to step carefully not
to run afoul of the law. It is not surprising, then, that so many of the showmen traveling through the
region sought to present themselves not as entertainers at all, but as educators. Instead of Punch and
Judy shows, performers offered painted scrolling dioramas that illustrated historic battles, Scripture
stories, and the wonders of foreign lands; other entertainers exhibited menageries of exotic
animals—not as vulgar spectacles but as instructive examples of natural history. In Connecticut, it
appears that for this reason menageries and dioramas were usually considered outside the scope of the
statute prohibiting shows and were often allowed to perform. It seems likely, however, that less
"respectable" activities such as trick riding and puppet shows at times took place surreptitiously
alongside animal exhibitions.
Although many local officials were suspicious and restrictive, others were more willing to wink an
eye at what seemed to them minor violations of the law. Despite New Hampshire's rather restrictive
laws, for example, Susan Baker Blunt had a vivid memory of a traveling diorama that came to the
tavern her parents kept in Merrimack, New Hampshire:
"One day a man came along with a show and stoped at the Tavern. He had a great
Box looking waggon, with a door in the rear and steps to enter. I went in with
Mother. On each side of the little room were little pieces of glass which we looked
through and could see pictures. And on a shelf accrost the front end, little wooden
Puppets would come out and dance. It was a very hot day, and the Man used the door
for a Fan."
It seems inconceivable that the modest show wagon proprietor recalled by Susan Blunt would have
paid the enormous sum of $30—five weeks' wages for a skilled blacksmith or the price of a new
cookstove—for a one-day New Hampshire license in order to stop at her father's tavern. Such
small-scale individual performers seem often to have been judged harmless enough to be ignored by
the local authorities.
Contrariwise, Nathaniel Hawthorne described an episode when the circus (that is, the menagerie)
came to town and licensing did become an issue. Staying at a western Massachusetts tavern,
Hawthorne observed the proprietor of a caravan of animals arriving "in a wagon with a handsome
span of gray horses." The showman had left the rest of his troupe behind in Worcester while he
looked for places to perform. A show of this size (perhaps 10-12 members of the troupe, several
wagons, and dozens of animals) could not be ignored by the selectmen. In order to perform in town
the showman needed a license, which he sought to obtain. However, the selectmen were at first
unwilling to grant it, convinced that the show would only induce people to leave work early and
waste their money. Both tavernkeepers in the village, Hawthorne noted, took the side of the
entertainers; after all, the two would "divide the custom of the caravan-people" for food and lodging,
as well as gather customers from the audience. One of the innkeepers rode off to persuade the
selectmen to reconsider; Hawthorne did not think that he would succeed.
From time to time, other entertainers who confined most of their performances to the
cities—magicians, ventriloquists, jugglers, and "rope dancers"—stopped at rural taverns as well.
There were a few French and Italian, as well as British performers, along with Richard Potter of
Massachusetts, America's first native-born magician and a remarkable showman. One New
Englander noted of him that "Potter, the ventriloquist, visited the place to give his entertainments,
which consisted of juggling, song-singing, legerdemain, and ventriloquism....How I sought in vain to
penetrate the secrets of the dancing egg, the ring in the pistol, and the pancakes that he fried in his hat
without fat or fire."
In the countryside such performers were often subject to great suspicion as "conjurors," because
people did not always distinguish between wholly natural sleight of hand and the disreputable
remnants of supernatural magic. Magicians were sometimes welcomed and sometimes ranked with
vagabonds of the lowest type. In every New England state it was always possible that a
narrow-minded justice of the peace might apply the traditional laws against vagabondage to an
itinerant ventriloquist, prestidigitator, or juggler, assuming that no matter how hard they worked for
their livings, they were up to no good.
An abundance of evidence tells us that dancing was common, even customary, in New England
taverns, but in Massachusetts, "dancing or revelling" in taverns was forbidden by statute from the
time of the earliest colonial laws (1646) until 1832. In other New England jurisdictions, only
"revelling," or disorderly conduct, was banned, not dancing itself. During the seventeenth century this
prohibition appears to have been enforced from time to time, yet it is clear that by the early eighteenth
century dancing was no less widespread in Massachusetts taverns than it was in Rhode Island,
Connecticut, and New Hampshire. This prohibition had evidently remained unenforced, however,
until 1832, when the section prohibiting dancing was quietly dropped from a revised statute
regulating the licensing of taverns. Thus tavern dancing was taken off the law books just when
drinking and gambling in taverns were actually coming under tighter legal control.
The games of New England, as Charles A. Goodrich described them in The Universal Traveller of
1836, were "billiards, cards, ninepins, shovelboard, domino, backgammon, bagatelle, checkers and
drafts." Some of them were a continuing preoccupation for many tavern-going men, but sternly
frowned on as gambling or "gaming" by the legal authorities in New England. Statutes on the books
in all New England jurisdictions forbade taverns to keep "dice, cards, bowls, billiards, quoits, or any
other implements used in gaming." Yet these laws, too, seem to have been inconsistently enforced.
"Gaming, especially the playing at cards," recalled country lawyer George Davis of Sturbridge, was
widespread in the New England countryside after the Revolution, and most rural taverns "had their
recesses for gamblers." Davis thought that the rage for tavern card-playing "continued to prevail,
more and more extensively" until about 1820. After that, "a blessed change had succeeded," almost
certainly linked to the beginnings of temperance reform, leading to stricter enforcement of the laws
and community pressure that banished dice and card games for money from the taverns, or drove
such activities underground.
This did not mean that all games were forbidden to respectable men at a country tavern, however.
Drafts, checkers, and dominoes were never banned and could be played even in Temperance Hotels.
(Of course, these activities were nevertheless considered unseemly and improper for women.) Dice
and billiards, with their strong associations with gaming, were unlikely to be found in respectable
taverns that wished to keep their licenses, but in many regular taverns it is likely that bagatelle,
backgammon, and cards, although technically illegal, were acceptable as long as no wagering was
going on. Backgammon, in fact, seems to have become quite popular with well-educated New
England professional men in the 1830s; the young Worcester lawyer Christopher Columbus Baldwin
several times recorded playing backgammon with friends, including a session that involved the Rev.
Aaron Bancroft, Worcester's preeminent Unitarian clergyman.
Nowadays visitors can sample some of the gaming and gambling "entertainments" of earlier New
England at a Village Tavern Evening in the Bullard Tavern. Refer to the calendar supplement in the
center of the Visitor for specific times and ticket details.
Larkin, Jack, Old Sturbridge Village Visitor, Fall 2005
Copyright: Old Sturbridge Inc.