NEWCOM TAVERN
Col. George Newcom still revealed the flinty quality that tamed the wilderness when he sat for this daguerreotype in 1852 at the age of 81. Dayton was already a bustling town, with a classic courthouse that ranked among the country’s finest structures.
Newcom’s first cabin, of round logs instead of square-hewn logs, later served as kitchen for the structure now in Carillon Park. Smaller building disappeared many years ago. (Etching courtesy of Otterbein Press.)
By the mid-1700s, a few intrepid men from “back East” had explored the land of the Miami Indians. Upon their return to the seaboard these scouts sat about their firesides painting attractive word-pictures of the territory beyond the Alleghenies. It was “rich, level and well-timbered.” Clover, rye and bluegrass were abundant, along with enough small game, deer and wild turkey to keep any number of settlers from want. The countryside, in the words of one report, was “just waiting to be tickled with the hoe that it might laugh with a harvest.”
It was to be almost another half-century, however, before anyone packed up his wife, musket and hoe and established a home in these fertile lands of legend. The Miamis—a tribe of the Algonquin family in powerful league with the Shawnees, Wyandots, Potawatomies and the Ottawas—were determined to keep the white man off the prime hunting grounds that lay between the Great and Little Miami rivers. They frequently crossed the Ohio to raid threatening settlements in Kentucky territory, and the doughty Kentuckians in return made bloody sorties into the Indians’ Miami Valley. Two of the fiercest encounters were fought on the triangle of land where the Mad River meets the Great Miami.
1896 view of the Tavern on Monument Avenue, four years after it was moved there from the southwest corner of Main and Monument.
Late nineteenth century photograph of Tavern’s yard shows brick oven, split-log bench and primitive sharpening wheel.
In 1896, on the hundredth anniversary of Dayton’s founding, these women donned pioneer dress and demonstrated the skills of their mothers and grandmothers. The picture, taken in one of the two upstairs rooms at Newcom Tavern, shows spinning, knitting, use of the flax wheel and quilting.
Things were desperate—hardly secure for family life and farming—until that able general, “Mad Anthony” Wayne, led a force of 3600 daring men into Ohio country. The eventual surrender of the Miamis (led by Chief Little Turtle) resulted in the Treaty of Greenville, and the end of the strife that had kept the Valley a wilderness. The treaty was signed in 1795, a little over a decade after Ohio, as part of the Northwest Territory, had come under control of the United States, and Congress had authorized sale of the land.
In the year of the treaty, Jonathan Dayton, head of a New Jersey land company which also included Generals Wilkinson and St. Clair and a Colonel Ludlow, acquired the so-called “seventh and eighth ranges” between the two Miami Rivers, and employed surveyors to lay out a town site. The town was to take Jonathan Dayton’s name, although he was never to lay eyes on the holding. Ludlow (in the company of the surveyor, Daniel Cooper) was the only member of the land company to make the westward trek.
Newcom Tavern was one of the first structures to be erected in Dayton, and it is the oldest Dayton building now standing. Long a familiar landmark of Van Cleve Park, on Monument Avenue in downtown Dayton, the Tavern was moved to Carillon Park in the summer of 1964. Here, it is much more accessible to the public than it was in the congested business district, and it has the wooded setting that a frontier relic deserves.
It was in the spring of 1796 that three groups of settlers headed north from Cincinnati. One party came by flat boat, or pirogue, which was laboriously poled up the Miami. The other two groups came overland—one by wagon, the other on foot, leading packhorses and driving cattle.
Early household utensils include, on shelf at left, a hearth rotisserie and a foot warmer. Corn crusher stands in the corner and on shelf at right are various grinders, a dough board and a cypress knee in which salt was kept.
The latter party was led by Colonel George Newcom, a veteran of Wayne’s campaign against the redskins. Newcom immediately chose a lot on the southwest corner of Main and Water (now Monument Avenue) Streets, where the Newcom Manor apartments were later erected. He put up a one-room cabin of round logs as temporary shelter, then engaged one Robert Edgar to build a permanent house—18 by 22 feet, of square-hewn logs, with a loft above reached by a ladder. The small original shelter served as kitchen to the larger house for a while, but eventually was razed.
Simple furnishings and venerable logs bring extraordinary warmth and charm to this first-floor bedroom. Corn husks were used as fill for the mattress; bed was used by the Newcoms, and was probably made in Dayton.
John F. Edgar, son of Robert, left a detailed account of those early days in his book, “Pioneer Life in Dayton and Vicinity,” published in 1896. Concerning construction of the log tavern, he wrote:
“The agreement was that Newcom should pay Edgar six shillings (seventy-five cents) per day for cutting and hewing the logs for the ‘best house in Dayton,’ to front on Main and Water Streets, and Edgar for his board agreed to furnish Newcom the carcass of a deer once every week, retaining the skin. This was full payment for his board and lodging. In order to comply with this part of his contract without breaking a day’s work, my father would rise early, hide in the bushes on this side of the river at Main Street, and watch for the deer to come down to the river on the north side for their morning drink, when, choosing the best-looking one, he never failed to drop him. He would then, with his canoe, bring his week’s board across the river before breakfast....”
Main room of Newcom Tavern contains long table at which early travelers were served. Utensils in the fireplace include a griddle, pots of various types and, visible at lower left, a bread toaster that could be moved up to the hot coals by a long handle. Board at right of the fireplace holds rifle, powder horn and bullet mold. Items in the Tavern are appropriate to Dayton’s earliest years, although not all of them were actually used by the Newcom family. Fireplace facing was rebuilt with original stones, which probably came from Miami River bed.
View of the Tavern on its downtown site, from across the Miami River. Steele high school is at right, Memorial Hall at left. Picture was taken sometime between 1910 and 1918, because Memorial Hall was built in 1910 and the Engineer’s Club, built in 1918 on the southeast corner of Monument and Jefferson, is not yet in evidence.
Elsewhere in his book, Edgar tells us that Newcom was born in Ireland in 1771, and came to America with his parents in 1775. The family first settled in Delaware, then moved to the vicinity of Middletown, Pa. In 1794, Newcom and his wife, the former Mary Henderson, migrated to Cincinnati—and thence to Dayton. Of their arduous northward journey, historian Edgar wrote:
