Old Talbott Tavern

Two dates are painted on the stone front of the Old Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky, and both of them read 1779. The claims that grew out of them — the oldest surviving building in the state, an inn that has never closed since it opened — do not survive the building's own paperwork. The federal survey of the Bardstown Historic District dates the tavern to about 1797 and never prints 1779, and an electrical fire on 7 March 1998 shut the place for twenty months. The 1972 nomination form that is cited for its ghosts does not contain the word ghost at all. What the house really holds is better than its legend: Louis-Philippe of France did stop here in May 1797, ill, and was refused attention by the landlady because a puppet show had come to town; and on 1 August 1858 Alexander Walters was born in a room behind the kitchen, son of a woman enslaved by the innkeeper, and went on to become a bishop and a founder of the NAACP. The tavern is open, serves dinner and rents six rooms above the bar.

The date is painted twice on the front wall of the Old Talbott Tavern: 1779, to the left of the door and to the right of it. The federal record is less sure. The building entered the National Register of Historic Places on 30 October 1973, on a form signed in Bardstown on 28 June 1972 by Sarah R. Smith, the Kentucky Heritage Commission's Nelson County representative and the author of two local histories. Her form gives 1779 and describes the fabric with care: an eastern block of solid stone two feet thick, two storeys and four bays wide, with two front entrances and the cooking done in two rear fireplaces; a loft, reached by a staircase whose traces remained, where men slept in one room and women in the other, because "the practice of giving individual rooms to guests was not introduced into the United States until about 1805". What faces the street today is a gable end; the original facade is now the east side wall. A parallel brick building, in 1972 only "thought to be over 100 years old", was joined to the stone one by a two-storey connecting wing whose upper floor is a veranda and whose ground floor holds the main entrance. Ten years later a second federal document reached a different date. The nomination of the Bardstown Historic District, prepared by the consultants Phil Thomason, Nancy Tinker and Andrea Stewart of Thomason and Associates and dated 11 October 1982, surveyed 279 properties and dated the tavern three separate times as ca. 1797. The figure 1779 does not occur once in its roughly 18,000 words; 1797 occurs ten times. The same survey records that Bardstown was settled in 1780 and incorporated in 1788 — which is what makes the older date awkward, since it puts the tavern a year ahead of the town it was built to serve. Something did happen here in the spring of 1797. Louis-Philippe, duc d'Orléans and future king of the French, was crossing the American back country in exile with his brothers Montpensier and Beaujolais. Reconstructing the journey from the prince's own journal, Morris Bishop places them in Nashville on 10 May and then riding north to "Bardstown, a metropolis of a hundred and fifty houses". Louis-Philippe was ill and asked the landlady for some special attention. She refused him: an Irishman in a clown costume was parading the town announcing a puppet show — the first public amusement Bardstown had ever seen — and the whole staff of the inn was going. The hostess took all her children, "so that when they are old they will be able to say they have seen it." On 21 May, in Bardstown, the prince wrote the last surviving entry in his journal: the new settlers of the region, he concluded, were "the lowest sort of men I have ever seen". By about 27 July the brothers were back in Philadelphia, and in early October they left it again — for New York, Providence and Boston. The murals in room five are attributed by everyone, including the 1972 nomination, to "one of the entourage" rather than to the prince, and always in the conditional: "Legends say", "is believed to have painted". The tavern says they were uncovered in 1927 and that two visitors from the Art Institute of Chicago examined the pigment before the fire and concluded only that the paintings predated 1820. The person with the strongest documented claim on this building appears in none of its histories. On Sunday 1 August 1858 — the weekday checks out — Alexander Walters was born here, "in a room in the rear of the kitchen of the Donohue Hotel, now the Newman House". He wrote it himself in 1917, in a memoir whose photograph of the building is captioned "In the kitchen of this house Bishop Walters was born". His mother, Harriet Mathers, was enslaved by Michael Donohue, the innkeeper. Walters records that Donohue once sold her to a trader for 1,200 dollars without telling his wife, and that Mrs Donohue confronted the trader in the street — "Harriet shall never leave this place" — until the sale was called off. Alexander Walters became a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at thirty-three, president of the National Afro-American Council, and one of the founders of the NAACP. The tavern's own list of its former names — Hynes House, Bardstown Hotel, Chapman's House, Shady Bower Hotel, Newman House, Talbott Hotel, Talbott Tavern, Old Stone Tavern — does not include Donohue. George Talbott bought the house in 1886, when it was the Newman House, and gave it the name it still carries. What happened to his children is told two irreconcilable ways. The version that circulates on ghost tours, and that Wikipedia took from Alan Brown's book, is that six of them died in the building within two years, one falling down the stairs and one hanging herself after an unhappy love affair. The version the tavern itself publishes is that George and Annie had twelve children there, that seven died of childhood illnesses at different ages, that George died in the house in 1912 and that Annie renamed it afterwards. In August 2014 an editor calling himself SutcliffeTalbott twice deleted the first version from Wikipedia; another editor restored the deaths but dropped the manner of them, on the ground that the cited book might not be reliable for that detail. Queen Marie of Romania lunched here in 1926. An electrical fire broke out on 7 March 1998, destroyed the roof and most of the second floor and damaged the murals; the tavern reopened in November 1999.

The Old Talbott Tavern is open and working, which is the first thing to say about a place whose own legend is that it never closes. It stands at 107 W. Stephen Foster Avenue, Bardstown, Kentucky 40004, on Court Square and opposite the site of the old Nelson County courthouse; the phone is (502) 348-3494 or 1-800-4TAVERN. The restaurant serves from 11:00 to 20:00 Sunday to Thursday and 11:00 to 21:00 on Friday and Saturday; the bar closes at 21:00 from Sunday to Wednesday, at 23:00 on Thursday and at midnight on Friday and Saturday, with live music at weekends. There are six guest rooms above the tavern — the Lincoln Suite, the General's Quarters, the Jesse James, the Anton Heinrich, the Daniel Boone and the Washington Irving — with check-in from 16:00 to 20:00 and check-out at 11:00; guests arriving later are asked to warn the desk. Fifteen more rooms are next door in the Talbott Inn, a 1913 building on the same square. No pets except licensed service animals. The Mural Room, where the paintings attributed to Louis-Philippe's party are, is open to the public; the murals themselves were damaged in the 1998 fire and, according to the tavern and to Wikipedia, have not been restored. A free self-guided audio tour of about fifteen minutes is available as a phone app. The documents are free too, and they are the best part. Both National Register nomination forms — the 1972 one for the tavern and the 1982 one for the Bardstown Historic District, which is where the ca. 1797 date lives — can be downloaded as PDFs from the National Park Service's NPGallery. Alexander Walters's memoir, with the photograph of the building he was born in, is online in full at Documenting the American South.