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Date: 21 October 2013
Rev. Dr. Theodore S. Horvath
1353 Valley Forge Road at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania
U.S. Mail via P.O. in Wayne PA 19087-1345
Phone and Voice Mail via: 610-688-6773
October 21, 2013
Mr. Carl Davies, Manager
Black Powder Tavern
1164 Valley Forge Road
Via P.O. at Wayne PA 19087
Dear Mr. Davies:
I appreciated the opportunity to talk with you by phone recently about the information in the Suburban story on the Black Powder Tavern, and I look forward to meeting you in person.
As I pointed out in our phone conversation, the “legend” based on your Tavern beginning as an inn for stagecoach travelers about 1746, later serving as a “covert rendezvous point for General Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, and other Revolutionary War leaders,” and its name taken from the “secret black powder munitions stash for continental army couriers” purportedly kept on site is totally without historical foundation. Further, your statement that your building has been some form of restaurant or gathering place since the mid- 1700’s is off by about 100 hundred years.
Let me put down the facts in writing in case you may ever need resort to the actual history. You will also find this information in various resources in the Local History Department in our Tredyffrin Township Library in Strafford., from which I have gathered the information I reported to you in our phone conversation and repeat here for you now.
To begin with, to get our geography straight, Swedesford Road was not south of your Tavern, as it now is, but swung up north on Baptist Road (now named Valley Forge Road) for about 800 feet before veering straight west on what is known today as West Anthony Wayne Drive, north of where your Tavern stands today.
On the northwest corner as Swedesford Road left Baptist Road, the earliest known house was a two-story occupied by a tenant farmer, on land owned by John Havard, who owned several parcels of farm land in this valley. During September 18-21 1777, when the British, with 14,000 troops, made camp along Swedesford Road (a brigade of Hessians was camped only a few yards away from the very land on which your Tavern now stands), they burned this house owned by Havard, leaving its stone chimney standing. When a few weeks later in December Washington moved his troops into Valley Forge, he established a picket line along Swedesfod Road as the south boundary of the encampment. A picket post was established at the stone chimney, a small camp of 20 men, ten of whom patrolled singly going east and 10 patrolled singly going west. You now will find a historical marker at this spot.
On the southwest corner of this intersection, on land where your Tavern now stands, was another house that stood since before 1732, then owned by Dan Richards. In 1843, Evans Kendall bought this house and used it as a hotel, known as the Kendall Hotel. Note the date: a hundred years later than any claim that an inn was to be found here in the mid-1700’s. At a later time, Kendall’s granddaughter, Mrs. Frank Jones Walker, lived in this house until 1956. It was then torn down and became a Gulf gas station (where I first bought gas when I moved my family here in 1962.). Currently the property, with a new building, is occupied by Sherwin-Williams.
In 1845 Kendall built a structure about 50 feet south of his hotel to serve as a general store and saloon, also to be owned later by Kendall‘s granddaughter. It is this building that at a later time became the Crossroads Tavern, then Miss Jeanne’s Tavern, eventually J.C. Winberie’s Restaurant, and now your Black Powder Tavern.
If there had been an inn or a tavern at this location as early as September 1777, without a doubt the British troops would have plundered the place and removed everything removable and destroyed the rest, perhaps burning the inn, as they did burn the house across the road , leaving only a stone chimney standing. “History of Chester County Pennsylvania,” by Furthy and Cope in 1881, gives a two-column report in fine print of the hundreds of items either confiscated or destroyed by the British at the Dilworthtown Inn, south of Paoli, owned by Charles Dilworth, on September 16, 1777. The list includes cattle, sheep, hogs, horses, tons of hay, hundreds of bushels of wheat, barley, corn, and potatoes, barrels of whisky, gallons of rum and brandy, beds, tables, chairs, dishes, utensils, ovens, wearing apparel, fruit trees cut down, fences taken or burned, much damage to the house, inside and out. It wasn’t until 1782 that Dilworth submitted a bill for the damage and loss to the Tax Assessor, a bill that was never paid, since the new federal government could not afford to reimburse anyone for damage and losses caused by its own troops let alone damage down by the British. If there had been an inn or a tavern here at Swedesford and Baptist Roads, with British troops camped only yards away, it would hardly have been spared the same devastation. Moreover, with winter coming on, it would have taken months or even years to recover from such loss, if ever. After such davastation, some innkeepers quit the business.
Where the British did not plunder, Washington’s soldiers did so. The record shows that the men, half starved and half naked in the winter cold, raided the farms for food and for wood for their camp fires. Washington tried especially to keep his men from taking fence rails from farmers’ lands, but he did not always succeed. An inn or a tavern, had it existed here, would have been an easy target for food and fuel, even by Washington‘s men.
Further, if an inn or tavern had existed here and was not damaged or destroyed by the British, Washington hardly would have established a picket post right across the road from it, since the job of pickets was to keep intruders out and troops from deserting. That job would have been made more difficult by the comings and goings at an inn or a tavern.
As for such a tavern or inn, had it existed, being the location of “a secret munitions stash for Continental Army couriers,” this too is hardly likely. For one thing, the cellars of some of the sturdy stone-built farmhouses within the encampment would have been a far better choice for stashes of munitions. Further, military couriers just leaving the encampment would hardly be stopping right across the road to equip themselves with munitions.
As for Washington and his generals indulging in drinks at such an inn or tavern, this, too, is hardly likely, since Washington was known to be stern against such conviviality. When one of his generals was recovering from some injuries and was on the road to recovery, a houseful of guests was wishing him well with drinks, causing Washington to leave the place, since it was highly inappropriate for such carryings-on when his men, as he put it more than once, were “half-naked and half-starved” in the winter’s cold.
Finally, to turn to the claim that the Black Powder Tavern from 1746 onward was a “respite for stagecoach travelers expanding westward,“ history shows that stage coaches were seldom seen outside of Philadelphia until AFTER the Revolution. In Philadelphia itself there were only about eighteen stage coaches, most of them private coaches of “aristocrats.” Beyond Philadelphia, the general public either walked or rode horseback, making use of narrow Indian trails, broadened two or three feet for horseback travel or for pack-horse trains to carry pelts and furs and other goods to Philadelphia for barter.
Only on Lancaster Road, several miles south of here, was a stagecoach line from Philadelphia to Lancaster attempted in July 1777 but abandoned because of impassable roads and not revived until 1784, when the roads were still in wretched condition. A stagecoach line did not become a success until 1794 when the Legislature authorized the construction of a turnpike on the Lancaster Road at a cost of $465,000, allowing the first regular stagecoach travel. It took 12 hours to make the 65-mile trip from Lancaster to Philadelphia. Stagecoach travel in our area on Swedesford Road, because of slow progress in improving road conditions, may not have taken place until almost the time when Evans Kendall turned his house into a hotel in 1845 to accommodate travelers and built his saloon in 1845, all of which was 100 years later than the year claimed in your “legend.”
So much for the “legend“ vs. history. Let me turn to the subject of the geographic location of your Black Horse Tavern. I have already commended you and your company for designating your actual address in the Verizon phone book as 1164 Valley Forge Road, Tredyffrin. 1,000% correct! Unfortunately, in your several websites you give your location as Wayne, which is actually the location of your Post Office that delivers your mail and is not YOUR location. Travelers, or locals, looking for your Black Powder Tavern in Wayne will never find it, since Wayne is not only in another Township (Radnor) but in another County (Delaware).
When we moved here 52 years ago we were dismayed to discover that relatives or friends of ours, passing through, looked for us in Wayne but could not find us there. Right off, we started to designate our address in four lines, indicating our street address and stressing Tredyffrin as our location, and adding a fourth line for our postal address to show that our mail came via the P.O. in Wayne 19087. Note how I did it above in my letterhead. The only reason for mentioning Wayne at all in your websites or in your advertisements would be if you would want the public to send you mail orders for products or to send you fan mail, when actually you mostly want them to come in person. So help them to find you.
Therefore, I strongly recommend that you correct your location on your websites. For a geographic location, you may or may not want to use Tredyffrin as the name of the community. Some local businesses avoid any mention of a community but add to their street address: Rt 252 at U.S. 202, as further identification of the location. Some also explain in the text in their websites or ads that the location is in the “Valley Forge Area.“ You can’t use “Valley Forge PA,” since there is a small village west of the National Park by that name, with its own post office. You could avoid saying IN Valley Forge PA by saying AT Valley Forge PA, AT clearly meaning “near” or “alongside” of the Valley Forge National Historic Park or of the original boundaries of the Valley Forge encampment, which came within a 100 feet of where your Tavern is now at the Stone Chimney Picket.
Those in the Gateway Shopping Center or in Chesterbrook have a ready-made name for their location, but the intersection of 202 and 252 no longer has such an easy identification. Historically, in the 1700’s this locality was called Valleytown or Valleyton, an awkward attempt to translate into English the Welsh meaning of Tredyffrin, “a town in a wide valley.” Then later it was named Walkertown, after the Walker family, the earliest residents, and subsequently became Centerville, then New Centreville, and finally New Centerville, with its own stop on the railroad and its own post office. The railroad stopped running in 1935 and the post office was closed that year, but the U.S. Geodetic Survey map and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s road map to this day still carry the name of New Centerville for this community. If I had the power to name it, after trying a dozen variations, I would name it Valley Forge Glen PA. Take it from there.
I hope all of this gives you some helpful background. I look forward to meeting you. Best wishes to you in your enterprise! Sincerely yours,
THEODORE S. HORVATH
References
History of New Centerville
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