General Wayne Inn

The date 1704 is still painted on the gable at 625 Montgomery Avenue, but the sign underneath it now reads "Chabad Center for Jewish Life". The building that ghost books call America's oldest continuously operated tavern has not served a drink in some twenty years: it stood largely empty from the late 1990s, was bought in 2005 by Chabad of the Main Line and reopened in the autumn of 2006 as an Orthodox synagogue and community centre. What is left is a much better story than the folklore. Its two famous ghosts can be dated: Edgar Allan Poe never wrote "The Raven" here, as his own scholarly editor said in print in 1969, and the Hessian soldier called Wilhelm cannot be found in the two detailed local descriptions of the inn published in 1905 and 1922, both of which happily tell ghost stories about other places. The oldest account of him anyone can date is from 1986, and the local paper named the man who told it: the landlord. And in December 1996 a real killing happened here, with a court record and a victim's name — which is exactly why it does not belong in a ghost story.

The building at 625 Montgomery Avenue, in Merion Station just west of Philadelphia, still carries the date 1704 painted on its gable. That is also the date the federal government accepted. The National Register nomination form drawn up in December 1974 by Elizabeth M. Brown and J. Robert Mendte states that "in 1704 the Welsh Quaker leader, Edward ap Rees, purchased an acre of ground on which a wayside inn was erected", and the property was listed on 1 January 1976 under reference number 76001655. Local historians are less certain. Writing for the Lower Merion Historical Society, Mary M. Wood and James B. Garrison open their account of the inn with a warning — "Myths overlaid facts about this special gathering place for more than 250 years" — and date the surviving walls to 1709, built for Robert Jones (Robert ap John), a member of the Provincial Assembly who, they point out, was never an innkeeper. On their reading the first person known to have served food on the site was Anthony Tunis, who rented the property from Jones's grandson Silas some time after 1746 and ran it as an "Ordinary", a house serving meals at a fixed price. Whichever date is right, the reason the place mattered is the same: it stood on the King's Highway, the Great Conestoga Road, the route by which Philadelphia reached Lancaster and the country beyond the Susquehanna. Abraham Streaper bought the tavern in 1775 and probably enlarged it. On Sunday 14 September 1777, after Brandywine, Washington's army forded the Schuylkill at Levering's ford and camped in an open field by the Merion meeting house next door; the Lower Merion account quotes a participant's journal on "the water being nearly up to the waist" and then adds, drily, that "perhaps Washington had a bowl of soup at the Streepers, but proof is lacking". The 1974 nomination form is far more generous: it has General Wayne dining and lodging at the inn, Washington and Lafayette staying the following night, the British holding it as an outpost from 20 December 1777 to 1 February 1778 and Captain Allen McLane running his spy operations from it afterwards. The form cites four general histories for the whole statement and gives no source for any single claim. Where the name came from has three incompatible answers in print. Phebe Westcott Humphreys, in a 1905 motoring guide, attributed it to Wayne encamping there "probably in 1792" on his western expedition. The 1974 nomination form dates it precisely to 9 February 1795, when three troops of Philadelphia Light Horse supposedly rode out to Streeper's Tavern to fete Wayne on his return from Fallen Timbers. Wood and Garrison demolish that version with a document: Joseph Price, a neighbour who drank at Streeper's bar and was courting Mary Streeper, kept a diary, and for the days of the supposed reception he recorded fox hunting, coffin making and attending Merion Meeting. They also cite an advertisement of 1790 for a stolen horse, to be returned to "Abraham Streeper, living at the sign of General Wayne" — five years before the celebration that is said to have produced the name. The long civilian life of the place is better documented than any of it. The inn was the district polling place from 1806 to 1867; the General Wayne post office opened on 5 February 1830, closed, reopened in 1850 and moved away in 1882. Yerkes's daughter sold the property to David Young for $13,500 in 1854; James Baird owned it from 1883 and Edward O'Dell from 1897; a sheriff's sale delivered it to I. Newton Smith in 1936. Humphreys described it in 1905 as a two-storey stone and plaster building painted yellow, its oldest walls twenty-six inches thick. In 1922 Dora Harvey Develin recorded the old signboard on its pole outside, lettered "Established in 1704", and added a footnote: since Prohibition came in, the sign had been taken down. A brick dining room went up at the rear in 1940 and a fire in 1964 seriously damaged the interior, which was rebuilt around what survived. When the nomination form was filed, the owner of record was Barton B. Johnson — the landlord the Main Line Times would later remember as the man who told the ghost stories. On 17 November 1995 the inn was bought for $1,286,000 by two chefs, James Edwin Webb and Guy Angelo Sileo Jr., each holding half the stock of the company; the restaurant opened that December. What happened next is in the public judicial record. On the morning of 27 December 1996 Webb was found dead in his third-floor office, killed between 7 p.m. and midnight the previous evening by a single .25 calibre bullet to the back of the head. On 1 August 2001 a Montgomery County jury convicted Sileo of first-degree murder; he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and on 1 September 2011 the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, sitting en banc, affirmed the denial of his post-conviction petition. The court's summary of the evidence is financial and mundane: the restaurant was insolvent, a $650,000 policy on Webb's life was payable to the business, and Webb had told an advertising salesman he meant to end the partnership after New Year. The restaurant never recovered. It passed through three owners trying everything from Cajun food to a sports bar; in May 2002 its own website announced a re-opening under Frank Cacciutti of the Seven Stars Inn, and by 2004 the domain had become a parking page. The building stood empty for most of the decade. In 2005 Rabbi Shraga Sherman and his wife Michal, directors of Chabad of the Main Line, assembled a partnership to buy it, and after roughly two years of restoration the Chabad Center for Jewish Life opened in the autumn of 2006, in time for the Jewish New Year. It is a synagogue and community centre today.

There is nothing here to visit as a haunted inn, and this is the single most important thing to know before setting out. The General Wayne Inn has not been a restaurant since the early 2000s. Since 2005 the building has belonged to Chabad of the Main Line, and since the autumn of 2006 it has operated as the Chabad Center for Jewish Life: an active Orthodox synagogue and community centre, with daily and Shabbat services, a Hebrew school, adult classes and youth programmes. It is not a museum, it runs no ghost tours, and it is private property in daily religious use. The address is 625 Montgomery Avenue, Merion Station, Pennsylvania 19066. The congregation's site is chabadmainline.org and its published calendar of services and events is the only sensible way to know whether anything is open on a given day; anyone wanting to attend a service or an event should approach it as they would any working synagogue, by asking first. Do not use the old generalwayneinn.com address: the restaurant's domain died around 2003 and has since been a parking page. What you can do without troubling anyone is look. The building is plainly visible from Montgomery Avenue, a stuccoed stone block with a double porch running the length of the facade and the date 1704 painted high on the gable end; the modern sign beside it reads "Chabad Center for Jewish Life", which is the whole story of this place in one photograph. Next door stands the Merion Friends meeting house, which Humphreys in 1905 described as "erected long before the historic inn" on adjoining land, and which is the reason the crossroads existed at all. In 1998, on a petition described by the Lower Merion Historical Society, the two buildings were brought together into the Merion Friends Meeting/General Wayne Inn Historic District. Merion station, on SEPTA's Paoli/Thorndale Regional Rail line at 293 Idris Road, is the nearest rail stop. Montgomery Avenue is a busy suburban road with narrow footways at this point, so take care where you stand if you stop to photograph the building.