Map of Dedham before 1775 showing location of Ames’s tavern at the town’s center (from Samuel Briggs, ed., The Essays, Humor, and Poems of Nathaniel Ames, 1891). This confluence of functions–mercantile activities, judicial proceedings, information exchanges–made tavern rooms significant sites for the creation and manipulation of public opinion, and blessed tavern keepers with lucrative opportunities for participating in a wide variety of social, economic, legal, and political exchanges.įig. Much to the chagrin of professionalizing lawyers who worked to root out these “pettifoggers,” or untrained advocates, tavern keepers’ physical location at the center of business and legal activity poised them perfectly for representing clients at justices’ courts, filing writs and appeals, and keeping track of fees and accounts.
As a result of their proximity to legal proceedings, many tavern keepers worked as common lawyers in addition to running their hostels. In all towns, local justices of the peace held “justice’s courts” for adjudicating minor offenses and disputes in tavern rooms. In the county seat, or “shire” towns, the courts of law often sat in taverns or in meeting houses until the shift to purpose-built courthouses at the end of the eighteenth century. Most significant, they were vitally important public spaces–places to conduct business and communicate information. They served up food, drink, lodging, entertainment, news, and gossip to both townspeople and travelers. Taverns were key sites for economic, social, and political activities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England towns (figs. Captain Fisher was the master of a Dedham ordinary (as taverns were called) that had been in business perhaps as early as 1658. In 1735 Ames married Mary Fisher, the daughter of Captain Joshua Fisher, who had died in 1730. His move to Dedham brought Ames closer to the intellectual ferment of Boston and Cambridge, but it also, ultimately, brought him an economically and politically strategic position as a tavern keeper. Nathaniel II’s estate inventory lists approximately twenty-eight medical volumes including “Turner’s Surgery” and “Keil’s Anatomy.” Most likely he learned his craft from his father, “Captain” Nathaniel Ames (1677-1736) of Bridgewater who was a mathematician, astronomer, and “physician,” but books also played a role in the younger doctor’s practice. In court documents he called himself a “physician” and he regularly visited patients, dispensing medicine, performing surgeries, and giving advice. In addition to almanac writing Ames practiced medicine. His son Nathaniel continued the publication until 1775. Nathaniel Ames published his best-selling almanac from 1726 until his death in 1764. By the 1760s, according to one estimate, he was selling almost sixty thousand volumes a year.įig. His sharp-tongued commentary on Massachusetts’ politics, religion, and social life made Ames’ Almanack a bestseller. Around 1730 he moved to Dedham, approximately twelve miles southwest of Boston, and continued to publish the almanac until he died in 1764. Ames, born in 1708, began publishing the periodical when he was just eighteen years old and living in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Nathaniel Ames was well known in provincial Massachusetts–and perhaps all of New England–as the publisher of the humorous, satirical, somewhat useful, and enormously popular Ames’ Almanack (fig. But in Dedham, Massachusetts, in the late 1740s, tavern owner, almanac writer, physician, and common lawyer Nathaniel Ames used his sign to skewer five of the province’s most powerful politicians: the justices sitting on the Superior Court of Judicature, Massachusetts’ highest court of law. The use of tavern signs to display political alliances accelerated during and after the Revolution. Tavern signs advertised the availability of food, drink, and lodging, but they were also meant to entertain and, sometimes, to broadcast the tavern owner’s political sympathies. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a scepter, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON.” Washington Irving’s choice of a tavern sign to symbolize the social and political transformation of Van Winkle’s village accurately reflected the central place these objects had in the streetscapes of colonial towns. the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe but even this was singularly metamorphosed. When Rip Van Winkle stumbled, gray-bearded and confused, into his Hudson River town, one of the first indications that his little village had changed dramatically was a tavern sign.
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