September 1988

The Crooked Lake Review Visits The Benjamin Patterson Inn Museum

by Bill Treichler

The Painted Post Tavern

Charles Williamson was a man with foresight. He could see the great possibilities of this beautiful new country and he wanted to make the vast tract of property he had for sale as attractive and convenient as possible for land buyers.

To make it easier to travel he had laid out a trail and had it cleared from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to the junction of the Tioga and Conhocton Rivers in the southeastern corner of the tract purchased by the Pulteney group for whom he was land agent. The road ran on from there to his newly planned city of Bath along the route of the Bath Great Bend Turnpike that came up from Binghamton. From Bath, the Williamson Road, as it came to be known, continued on north through the heart of the new Genesee Country to a projected town, Williamsburgh. Also from Bath, the Bath Great Western Turnpike went on as far as Ohio.

For the immigrants travelling these roadways and following the rivers, Williamson wanted to provide accommodations for their comfort. He built four inns: one at the Tioga-Conhocton confluence near the Indian landmark "the painted post," one at Bath, one at Geneva, and another at Canandaigua. All but the building at Painted Post disappeared.

Williamson spent $6703 of Pulteney funds for the site and construction of this hostelry at Painted Post. It was the first timber framed and clapboarded two-storied structure in the region. When it was erected in 1796 there were between twelve to twenty log cabins nearby. The new inn stood along the new road and was just a short distance from the river. The building was nearly 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. It stood high with two full stories and a loft above them. Williamson may have wanted a structure of imposing size to impress the investors arriving from the cities and farms of Pennsylvania and the plantations of Virginia and Maryland. He wanted them to know that they had come into a promising new region where people were already building and prospering. He may have had other motives beyond impressing the new arrivals. Perhaps, he wanted to set an example for others to imitate as he hoped his own mansion at Lake Salubria would set an example for setting up fine estates.

When the inn opened it was called The Painted Post Tavern. Today the building is called The Benjamin Patterson Inn because its first and most famous innkeeper was Benjamin Patterson. Ben Patterson would understandably be Williamson's choice to run the inn. Patterson was already regarded as the ablest scout in the whole territory. He had travelled over much of the Pulteney tract and would be able to advise prospective buyers and settlers where they would find land to suit their special needs. He was also a great hunter and would be able to provision the inn with abundant game. And as valuable as his experience, knowledge, and skill would be to the travellers, his genial personality and reputation as a storyteller would make him a popular inn host. Anyway, Williamson knew Patterson well and had previously hired him to supervise the construction of the roadway north from Williamsport to Bath and beyond.

Patterson accepted the offer and in the spring of 1797 set out with his brother and their families from Northumberland (now Sunbury), Pennsylvania, poling their boats up the Susquehanna and then the Chemung to Painted Post.

From 1797 until 1803 the Patterson families operated the inn for the Pulteney Estates. They lived in the inn and fed, lodged, and entertained the inn guests.

The Inn's Accommodations

People arriving at the inn entered a central hallway that opened into a parlor on the right or east side that was reserved for women. On the opposite side of the hall was a public room where ladies were not expected to go. In this room were a number of small tables with chairs around them. Here travellers and local men met to sit and converse, eat and drink, play games and smoke. This meeting room was a place to transact business or just to relax. Likely, there was a washstand against the back wall with a mirror hanging above and a bowl for guests to wash up. In one corner was a partitioned space with an opening through which the innkeeper sold beverages and tobacco or rented clay smoking pipes. Patterson even had a still to make his own liquor and he raised tobacco for his own use and sale, also.

Behind the tap room was the pantry where provisions were kept. Behind this room was the kitchen where food was prepared. Along one side was a large fireplace with cranes to carry kettles for cooking over the flames. In front of the iron dogs that held the logs was a wide hearth. Here were trivets for supporting casseroles over coals pulled forward from the fire. Bread was baked in a bee hive oven built into the side the fireplace. It had a domed chamber where a fire could be built to heat the brickwork. When the bricks were judged hot enough to bake bread, the hot ashes and coals were pulled out and the risen loaves were set in to bake from the heat radiating from the hot bricks.

Doorways opened out on either side of the kitchen to vegetable and herb gardens and to a well. Firewood was probably stored in a woodshed behind the kitchen. The kitchen must have been a very busy place. Not only was it the room where food for the guests was cooked but also it was the part of the building where the people who ran the inn spent much of their time. Very likely there was a way from the kitchen to the room directly above where the two couples and their six children all slept.

The inn guests went to the upper floors by a handsome balustraded stair rising from the front hall and originally going to the loft on the third level. On the second floor level on the left side over the public room and the pantry was a ballroom. This was the room for community social activity of men and women. All of the rooms in the inn were lined with wide boards running horizontally. In the ballroom they were whitewashed to reflect more light from burning candles, the only source of illumination at night. Usually the dances would begin about four in the afternoon while there was still some daylight coming through the windows. This room had few furnishings, but like all the other rooms it did have a fireplace for heat and a woodbox to hold the fuel wood.

Across the second floor central hallway was a bedroom for guests. It, too, had a fireplace for warmth. This room had as many beds as could be conveniently arranged to walk between. Both men and women slept in this room and as many as five to a bed. People slept in their clothes. A sign on the wall stated two rules: No boots in bed; no more than five people in one bed. People slept head to toe in a half sitting position. Turning and tossing was inconsiderate.

For the overflow crowd or people who couldn't afford the conveniences of the second floor bedroom there was on the third level a loft above all of the rooms. Here was space where a traveller could sleep on his own blankets on the wide boards or on a pile of straw.

The inn provided shelter and refreshment for travellers, a meeting room for visiting or transacting business, and a gathering place for social entertainment. It was the center of community life as well as a stopping place for people travelling through the area.

Patterson's Life

When Patterson left the inn to buy a farm in Irwin in 1803 he may have quit because Charles Williamson was replaced in 1801 as the Pulteney group's land agent. Ben Patterson must have been a close and sympathetic friend of Charles Williamson.

Patterson had been born in the Blue Ridge country of Virginia in 1759. He had moved as a child with his stepfather to Milton, Pennsylvania, grown up along the Susquehanna and had become famous as a scout and hunter. His mother was a cousin of Daniel Boone. Patterson had been at the Battle of Freeling's Fort on the west branch of the Susquehanna and in other battles of the Revolutionary War. He had been on the Sullivan expedition and had been provisioner for Saxton and Porter when they were surveying in New York in 1789 and the same year had taken the first lumber raft from Bradford, New York, down the Conhocton, Chemung and Susquehanna rivers. He had been provisioner for Frederick Bartles' lumbering operations at Bradford.

When Williamson first met him, Patterson was living in Northumberland on the Susquehanna. It was the largest town in northern Pennsylvania and a jumping off place for the new country in New York. Williamson hired him then to supervise the men hewing the "Williamson Road" north from Williamsport. On that expedition he discovered the coal vein at Blossburg. Most of his life Patterson kept up his hunting and scouting and later while he was innkeeper at Painted Post he went as the guide for Talleyrand to the Niagara country. When he left the tavern and bought his farm in the town of Irwin he cleared his own land. Ben Patterson may have slowed down, but he lived on there until 1830.

Innkeepers

Several innkeepers followed him at the hostelry until 1813 when John Jennings took over the Painted Post Tavern. The inn flourished under Jenning's management even piped cistern water was added. The year before he died the Pulteney Estate turned over to him the title to the inn. His daughter inherited the inn from him in 1834 and the property remained with her descendants until 1873. Sometime in this interval they gave up running the inn.

The next owner was Samuel Robertson who made great changes in the building in 1884. The property passed to his children and eventually to Miss Carrie Stewart in 1933. She sought to restore the building to the way it looked in earlier times. She also introduced modernizations. After her death in 1945 it changed hands and was then divided into apartments. Eventually the building was neglected.

Restoration

The Corning Painted Post Historical Society acquired the property in January 1976 and began a careful restoration of the building to as near its original appearance as can be determined from old records and accounts. Mrs. Phyllis Martin is the director of the museum and has worked carefully to restore and exhibit the tavern as it must have been in Ben Patterson's time.

There was some question whether the building really was the same structure that had been built in 1796 as The Painted Post Tavern, but documents were found that clearly established the building's present location as that of the original inn.

The work that has gone on since the Society came into possession has been done entirely by the efforts of the members. Much of the early clean up work and reconstruction of the building was by the manual labor of Society members and friends. Many people remain very much a part of the ongoing projects at The Benjamin Patterson Inn Museum.

DeMonstoy Cabin

Next to the inn building is the DeMonstoy Log Cabin which is representative of the pioneer cabins that were nearby when the inn was built in 1796. The actual time of the cabin's construction is unknown. It may have been built in 1784 by Orlando Mack, but it may have been laid up as much as fifty years later. It stood on Wixon Road in Campbell. The cabin was purchased in the 1900s by the DeMonstoy family and lived in for fifty years. In 1975 the cabin was torn down and stored until 1978, when it was given to the Society. It was then rebuilt with some new logs replacing the original bottom logs that had rotted. The reconstruction of the cabin was finished by July, 1980. The cabin is simply furnished. The floor is earth and the place for the cooking fire is in front of a stone section of the back wall. The cabin does have a wide overhanging roof across the front which gives protection to the doorway and provides shade and rain shelter for summertime household work. Nearby is a well cover and sweep. A tree stump fence and a section of rail fence run across in front of the cabin yard. Close to the DeMonstoy cabin is a garden plot with the kinds of vegetables growing that might have grown there in earlier times: beans, corn, squash. Beyond the garden is a new building which is called the carriage barn. It was built to house and display farming and homesteading tools that the Society has acquired. This barn and its new addition, a shed attached to the end close to the inn have rough sawn board and batten walls and wood shingle roofs. The new shed houses a forge and blacksmithing equipment. Ben Patterson was a practicing blacksmith.

Browntown Schoolhouse

Another feature of the Museum is the Browntown Schoolhouse which the Society acquired and brought to the museum grounds in December 1980. Built in 1878 in the Town of Caton and used as a one room schoolhouse until 1956 it was bought by the Society with funds given for its purchase. The building was partially dismantled for moving and then reassembled. Since that time it has been repaired and the interior refurnished to depict a one-room school in the 1880s. The restoration of the schoolhouse is complete to the pump in front and the outdoor privy close to the back of the building.

From the schoolhouse pump a walkway runs toward the front of the museum property and alongside a garden with many sorts of herb plants: camomile, heartsease, santolina, evening primrose, lavender, pennyroyal, yarrow, hyssop. The plants growing in the garden are marked and their uses are listed on a lectern that stands close by on the long porch just off the inn kitchen.

Festivities

A local group of women and men have sought out old recipes and menus that would represent the meals that might have been prepared and served in the inn. They have become skilled preparers of many old dishes and desserts made from ingredients that would have been available in the early years of the inn. Using primitive utensils they cook and bake at the huge reconstructed fireplace. Several times each year these cooks prepare fundraising affairs they shamelessly call "sinful feasts."

Be sure to visit the inn at Christmas time, too, when it is festively decorated and lit. Evening candlelight tours are available to groups by arrangement and with special group rates.

The museum is open weekdays from 10:00 to 4:00. Admission fees are: one dollar for adults and 50 cents for students.

The inn is open by special advance arrangement on weekends and evenings. Dial (607) 937 5281.

In September each year the museum is the setting of an all day exhibit of many early crafts and entertainments.

Whingblinger Whirl

Don't miss the Tenth Annual Whingblinger this year at the Benjamin Patterson Inn Museum on September 10th. A contribution of $2.00 entitles you to tour the restored rooms of the Inn; to view the DeMonstoy Cabin, the Browntown Schoolhouse, the Carriage Barn and Forge; to enjoy the cool kitchen porch and its herb garden; to watch the spinners and weavers, the cordwainer, the blacksmith, while listening to entertainers with bagpipes; watch apple butter making, learn about old-time vegetable gardening and beekeeping; listen to the sutler with his provisions to sell, the politicians electioneering, and see the rifleman load and discharge his gun; and browse the offerings of the 20 antique dealers who will be showing on the grounds—all in addition to a Society sponsored flea market!

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