Tweed's Tavern

Tweed's Tavern today

When we hear “tavern” today, we think of a place to meet up with friends, have a few drinks, and maybe grab a good meal. Taverns in the 18th and 19th Century fulfilled those roles for locals as well, although their function did evolve a bit over time. In the 1700's, taverns primarily served as resting places for weary travelers.  At the time, Limestone Road served as an important transportation route for farmers bringing their crops down from the fertile fields of Pennsylvania to the shipping centers of Stanton and Newport. However, the roads were poor and travel was difficult, so resting places were never far apart.  At the roadside inn or tavern the traveler could get a hot meal (consisting of whatever the innkeeper happened to have), a bed (usually in a room with others and sometimes, especially in the winter, a bed shared with others), stables for his horses, needed repairs for his wagon, a few good stiff drinks, and all the gossip and news he could take in and share. In those days, taverns served as one of the main ways for news and ideas to spread.

While many 18^th and 19^th Century taverns were no more than family homes lightly outfitted to host guests, the establishment that would come to be known as Tweed's Tavern seems to have been built specifically as a tavern. But as well-documented as its later history is, the earliest years of the tavern have some frustrating holes. The history of the land goes back much further, of course, but for our purposes here we'll start in the 1790's. It's here that I have a quiet disagreement with some of the published histories. I've seen it written that in 1790, Brandywine Hundred native Stephen Foulk purchased 96 acres of land along the Limestone Road from John Gregg. Stephen was the younger brother of William Foulk, owner of the former Evans mill on Red Clay Creek that would later become the Fell Spice Mill.

The people are correct, but unfortunately the 1790 deed that's referenced (in a 1997 DelDOT report) is not available for me to see. What I have found is a December 1796 indenture tripartite between John Gregg, Stephen Foulk, and John Crow. Admittedly it's a little confusing to me, but it sure seems like Gregg is selling the 96 acres for the first time. I believe he's selling it to Foulk, but with a one year lease agreement between Foulk and Crow. [Thanks to our friend Walt C., I think we have an answer now. For the full explanation, check out his comment from 2/10/2023 down below. The short version is that this 1796 transaction was a sort of legal end-around to make sure the 1790 sale from Gregg to Foulk was legit and binding. I still feel it's not a coincidence that Crow was involved in this maneuver.]  The significance of this is that John Crow was a well-known innkeeper in New Castle and Wilmington, and is identified in the deed as an innkeeper. The prevailing thought is that it was Crow who built, on the northern end of the 96 acre tract, a two-story log house for use as a tavern.

The list of rates for inns and taverns in New Castle County, as issued
by the NCC Justices of the Peace in 1797. John Crow or Isaac Wilcox
would have posted this in their tavern

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Crow actually ran the tavern, but there is tavern license application in the 1790’s from Isaac Wilcox. Figuring out exactly who ran a particular tavern when can be tricky for a couple reasons. First, much like with mills, sometimes the property owner operated it and sometimes an outside "professional" was brought it. And while with taverns there's the extra step of licensing, that procedure and the records of it are often spotty. So perhaps Stephen Foulk ran the tavern himself for a while, but if he did, he didn't for long -- that's because in April 1799, he died.

His widow Hannah and brother William were left as the administrators of his estate, and over the next few years they sold off the nearly 100 acres in several pieces. Joseph Phillips, a blacksmith who already owned land to the west of the property, bought 31 of the acres fronting Limestone Road. He quickly sold 2½ acres on the road just above the tavern to another blacksmith, Ezekiel Reece. This lot would make its way back into the history books in another century and a half, but we'll return to that later. The largest portion, the southern 64 acres which included the mansion house, was sold to Samuel Lindsey. 

But most importantly to our story, in early 1801 Hannah and William Foulk sold about 10¾ acres, including the tavern, to a cooper from Montgomery County, PA named James Harvey. Harvey did apply for a tavern license, and from his application we learn that it had recently been operated by the blacksmith next door, Ezekiel Reece. Harvey didn't stick around long, though, because in September 1802 he sold the property to a house carpenter from Lancaster County -- John Tweed.

The tavern license was briefly held by Samuel Johnston in 1803, but in May 1804 Tweed applied for himself. Interestingly, a road plat of the area drawn in 1804 labels the establishment as "New Tavern called Mudfort Tavern". To the best of my knowledge it's not known where that name came from or even if it was used for long. Another plat from four years later labels it as John Tweed's Tavern, and it would remain so for about the next 20 years.

Tweed expanded his holdings in 1804 by purchasing 23½ acres from Joseph Phillips, part of the land which he had acquired from the Foulk estate. The innkeeper did this by taking out a mortgage on his property, and it seems he remained in debt the rest of his life. Judging by what records remain, Tweed's Tavern was on the smaller end of the spectrum as far as tavern size, and was never as prominent as the next inn down the road, the Mermaid Tavern. This could explain his financial problems, or maybe his situation explains why the tavern was never bigger.

Portion of the 1820 Heald map,
with Tweed's Tavern circled

In 1814 Tweed purchased the 2½ acre Reece lot next door, and five years earlier had bought 15½ acres north of Hockessin, along the new Newport and Gap Turnpike. This purchase was likely speculative, and ties into the first of the two forces that ultimately killed Tweed's tavern. The turnpike movement was in full steam in the late 1700's and early 1800's, but Limestone Road was not a part of it. The Newport and Gap Turnpike, and its Lancaster Turnpike branch, took much traffic from Limestone Road and consequently from the taverns along it.

By 1823 Tweed's financial situation had become so dire that a sheriff's sale was imminent. He apparently died during the proceeding, and his property and tavern were sold to Joseph Roman, the New Garden, PA resident whose blacksmith and/or wheelwright shops were just north of the tavern on Limestone Road. Roman finally paid off all of Tweed's mortgages, and in January 1825 sold the tavern and most of the land back to John Tweed's widow, Elizabeth, and his sons Curtis and James. Curtis had actually applied for a tavern license in 1824, and presumably ran the inn for the next few years.

Elizabeth Tweed sold her share of the property in 1830 to her sons, who also had acquired another adjacent 33 acres. The Tweed brothers, like their father, were saddled with debts they couldn't pay, so in 1831 they were forced to sell it all (now totaling 67 acres) to Ross Dixon. After this point there are no identifiable tavern licenses associated with the property, and it's very possible that the site's use as a tavern ended along with the Tweed family's connection to it. Plus, at this time the other force negatively impacting taverns was just ramping up -- the railroads.

The first railroads were constructed in the late 1820's and early 1830's, and as they grew over the next few decades the role of the wayside inn evolved. As passenger and freight traffic shifted from carriages and wagons to trains, the taverns and inns along the turnpikes and roadways lost most of their lodging function. The only ones lucky enough to continue in that manner were the ones that happened to be near railroad stations. The most of the rest either closed up or shifted even more towards food and drink service to local residents. They became less of a motel and more of a bar. Oftentimes it's difficult to discern exactly when a site stopped being used as a tavern. For instance, there's no direct evidence of Tweed's Tavern being used as such after 1831. However, in the 1852 estate inventory of the next long term owner, Thomas Baldwin, there are items and amounts of those items (chairs, beds, tables, beverages) that hint that he may have continued to operate a tavern here.

Back in 1831 the Tweed brothers had been forced to sell the tavern, to Ross Dixon. Dixon died a couple years later, and his estate sold the 67 acres and the tavern to Dr. Andrew Murphy, who immediately sold it to Baldwin. The Baldwin family would own the old log house for the next 71 years. When it was constructed in the 1790's, there was nothing unusual about the fact that it was a log house. Up until well into the 19th Century, most of the houses in Mill Creek Hundred were of log construction. The only thing unusual about the one-time tavern is that it survived, and that it survived for so long in nearly its original state, with no large additions. Most of the area's log houses were either torn down and replaced by stone or frame structures, or encased early on inside larger houses. This would be Tweed's fate, just much later than most.

After Thomas Baldwin died in 1852, his widow Lydia retained the home and surrounding farm. After her passing in 1873, George Klair, the Baldwins' son-in-law and executor of the estate, sold the property to their son Thomas L. J. Baldwin and his sister Mary Jane Baldwin. Mary Jane passed away in the 1890's, and after her sister Sarah Baldwin Klair passed in 1901, Sarah's husband George forced a sheriff's sale on the property the following year. In 1902 the 67 acre property passed out of the Baldwin family and was purchased by Thomas Hewitt.

1930 view looking north along Limestone Road

Hewitt owned the old tavern for eleven years, then it passed through several owners and a couple banks before Joseph and Frances Baccino sold the house, now on 34 acres, to Alfred and Catherine Giacomelli in 1934. Meanwhile, remember the neighboring 2½ acres on the north side, sold to Ezekiel Reece back in 1801? It had a house built on it sometime between 1816 and 1825. The lot was never again part of the Tweed's Tavern tract, and originally, when Valley Road was laid out around 1807, the road ran between the two houses -- on the north side of the tavern instead of the south side. It would be rerouted sometime prior to 1820.

This smaller lot would change hands many times, until purchased in 1925 by Fred Bulah. The Bulahs were part of Hockessin's African-American community, but in 1950 would become a part of the nation's history. Like the other African-American children in the area, their young daughter Shirley attended the Hockessin Colored School #107C. When Fred and Sarah Bulah's simple request that the school bus taking the white children to school also take Shirley to hers was denied, they took their case to Wilmington lawyer Louis Redding. In 1951 Bulah v. Gebhart was combined with another case concerning Claymont High School, and the following year became the first cases in the US to ever successfully challenge legally segregated schools. Two years later, the Delaware cases were consolidated with four others to become Brown v. Board of Education, one of the most significant court cases of the 20th Century.

Aerial view of Tweed's Tavern from the early 1950's, looking south.
Valley Rd is visible, as is the addition on the north end

Returning now to the former tavern, when the Giacomellis arrived in 1934 the original log construction of the house was present, but had already been stuccoed over, although it's unclear when that was done. At that time the house had neither electricity nor (presumably) running water, and the only heat source was the fireplace. It wasn't until the early 1950's that the first addition (aside from an early kitchen lean-to) was a built -- a two-story section on the north end of the house, on the site of the earlier kitchen. In 1981-82 a two-story addition was built on to the west side (rear) of the house, as well as an enclosed porch on the front. 

The house stayed in the Giacomelli family until 1989, when it was sold and converted into office space. The final (or at least, current) phase in the tavern's history was initiated by the very thing that made it possible in the first place -- Limestone Road. In the late 1990's, DelDOT drew up plans to widen Limestone Road and to reconfigure the Valley Road intersection. To that end, the state purchased the home with plans to demolish it. However, when archeologists started investigating the house they rediscovered the long-hidden log structure within, and the movement began to save the old log tavern.

The Giacomelli House in 1990, with front porch and addition on the right

What came next is a story unto itself and there are others who could tell it better than I. The short version is that after some frantic activity, and help from Preservation Delaware and the newly formed Hockessin Historical Society, the house was moved in 2000 a few hundred yards north to a safe spot. The race was now on to figure out what to do next with the 200+ year old tavern. Within a few years a plan was developed to relocate the tavern to a new site nearby, and Tweed’s Tavern Park was born.

The Giacomelli House (with Tweed's Tavern inside)
after the temporary move in June 2000

In 2005 the tavern was disassembled log by log and rebuilt (minus the 20th Century additions) in its new home, restoring it to its original 18th Century appearance, using about 40% of the original material. Before it was moved, samples were taken for a dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) report. The results showed that the logs were from trees cut down between 1795 and 1797, fitting perfectly with a construction date soon after the original sale from John Gregg to Stephen Foulk in late 1796.

By late 2006, 210 years later, the tavern was ready for its new role, and the Hockessin Historical Society’s new museum was ready for the public. Along with the exhibit hall behind it added a few years later, Tweed's Tavern again serves the local public, only now satisfying its thirst for local history instead of home-brewed ale and whiskey and a place to sleep for the night.