“Blue Anchor Tavern was the only business standing in Philadelphia when William Penn landed here in 1682!” Rich Wagner declares. But when he says here, he is talking about the poorly maintained municipal flower bed we have climbed onto from the sidewalk. We scrambled up a granite wall onto a matrix of crunchy little vines pockmarked with rat holes. Forty feet below, the midday traffic buzzes on Interstate 95 following the bank of Delaware River through downtown Philadelphia. That highway, and everything between it and the river, Wagner tells me, is reclaimed land.
When Penn landed, he didn’t actually land here–sort of like how the Pilgrim’s didn’t crash into a rock in Plymouth. But when he did arrive in Philadelphia, the city was only a few houses built by Swedish and Dutch farmers. The famous Quaker had come to the New World with the explicit purpose of building a city. Wagner explains that a lot of Penn’s writing needs to be read through this lens–he was advertising the colony to folks back in Europe.
“Come here. There’s opportunity. There’s religious tolerance.”
Wagner might add, “There’s beer!”
Wagner is a sight to see gesticulating above a major highway, but no one can bring the history of Philadelphia (and its beer) to life like he can. He has spent decades doing extensive research on the history of brewing in the city and across the state. He has reviewed well over a century of brewing literature, from The Western Brewer Journal, to local brewing records, to modern craft publications. With his research, he designed brewery history tours throughout Pennsylvania, built a colonial brewing system, and published Philadelphia Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in the Cradle of Liberty.
There is no better tour guide to explain the role of beer in Philadelphia’s history. Beer was a cornerstone of Philadelphian development, economically, socially and politically. Philadelphia, of course, is foundational in the story of America.
I meet Wagner at the Old City Tavern on a sunny Monday morning in a city chastened by the collective hangover of losing the Super Bowl. Beer cans strewn in the gutters of bar districts are a sign of mourning, but also a reminder that Philadelphia still loves the drink. After introductions, Wagner transforms himself into a tour guide with the simple addition of a The New Brewer baseball cap. He equips me with a series of spiral bound tour booklets he has put together, replete with period maps, historical drawings, and detailed summaries. He tells me he hasn’t done this tour since 2013, but he is beyond prepared.
Our first stop, The Old City Tavern, is not actually that old, but its story is important to Wagner’s own knowledge of the taverns and breweries of Old City Philadelphia. In the 1950s, Philadelphia looked to the Bicentennial with an eye towards creating a historical district for tourism. They wanted to demolish stretches of downtown buildings, but they commissioned a historian to determine if any had been taverns in a past life. That historian compiled nearly 2,000 index cards on taverns in Old Philadelphia, but none were still standing, so the National Park Service built a replica of the Old City tavern in 1975. Wagner has reviewed all of those index cards for his own research and the enrichment of those who go on his tours.
The original tavern was built in 1773 by 56 prominent Philadelphians at the cost of 25 pounds each. These were political men and business men looking to find a meeting place. The tavern would go on to be the birthplace of several institutions of consequence including the first chartered bank in the United States, the Bank of North America, Pennsylvania Bank, and the local Committee of Merchants and Traders. The building was destroyed in 1854.
We scurry across the city streets and come up to the cobblestone pavement of Dock Street, which winds through the Old City diagonally. Wagner stands in the middle of the street, indifferent to cars, and explains that these cobblestones were once a creek, Dock Creek.
Across the cobblestones of Dock Street stands a historical marker for Fraunces Tavern. Wagner explains how unique this marker is. Samuel Fraunces was a mixed-race tavern owner from the West Indies. His taverns served George Washington on multiple occasions and he built a well known resort called Vaux-Hill Pleasure Gardens that served the elite of New York City.
Down at the head of the creek, the city’s first brewery was built in 1683 by William Frampton. That is just one year after “the Proprietor,” William Penn, arrived. Wagner explains that Dock Creek was a hub of breweries in the earliest days of the city. The next 50 years saw several more breweries and malt houses open along the bends of Dock Creek. Many of them doubled as bakeries, nourishing the earliest settlers with their main foodstuffs. One tavern had a drawbridge across the creek, the only place where it could be crossed down by the Delaware.
Dock Street behind us, we huff up a pathway into the Society Hill neighborhood where an old tavern building still stands. Some men are doing work on the building and Wagner waves them over for a brief history lesson on signboards. Signboards are the signs that gave many old taverns a name without the use of words. This is a topic that Wagner has documented in detail. He has a 10 page document sorting all of these Philadelphia signboard tavern names by category: animals, events, people, places, trades. Some choice signboards–Fox & Grapes, Battle of the Kegs, and X-10-U-8 (to which Wagner quips the vanity license plate is nothing new.)
The tavern before us was once the Man Full of Trouble. Wagner explains to his audience that the name was taken directly from a tavern back in England. He reads the British sign inscription to the workers and myself, ending in the rhyme, “A monkey, a magpie, and a wife, Is the true emblem of strife.” This tavern would have been a more blue-collar institution than the Old City Tavern. An archaeological dig of the tavern suggests that the cups were all made of pewter, leather, or wood.
Wagner’s knowledge of historical breweries in Philadelphia is unmatched, but his appreciation for local brewing heritage goes beyond the books. Just as his animated tours bring the geography and life of bygone Philadelphia back, he has invested significant effort into bringing colonial brewing to a modern audience.
Decades ago, Wagner decided to figure out exactly how colonial brewers made their beer. He wondered how they made their barrels, how they heated their wort, how they sourced their water. With this research, Wagner set out to build a historically accurate brewing system. He collaborated with a cooper in building a barrel based on colonial models.
Since building the system, Wagner and his wife have attended historical events as reenactors. Clad in period garb, they perform demonstrations on the system for the public’s enjoyment and education. Wagner tells me that war reenactors are missing the point, he and the housewifery crowd are trying to understand and demonstrate how people lived day-to-day back then–not just during times of violence.
When I ask him about his beer, he reflects on what colonial brewing was, and how a modern audience might perceive it. He starts, “My beer sucks.” But then clarifies what he means. When he built his brewing system with the cooper, they used cypress wood because it was readily available. Now, whenever he brews, the sap from the cypress sours the beer.
The modern beer drinker might be disappointed, but Wagner is bringing the colonial reality to life without apology. Colonial brewers would have made do with whatever was available, just as he did. Moreover, Wagner explains, there is the belief in the public imagination that things back then were good and natural. In reality, people stank, beer was sour, and poverty was the rule. It wasn’t about flavor. In this regard, Wagner brings brewing to life like no one else.
Wagner comes down from the flowerbed overlooking Interstate 95. I now have a clear sense of where the Delaware River once flowed. Centuries of stone ballast unloaded from ships at mooring in the river began to push the riverbank back. Eventually, the city intentionally backfilled the riverbank with gravel from upstate.
Along the shores of Interstate 95, Wagner enumerates the taverns, breweries, and coffee houses that once served a cosmopolitan crowd of merchants and mariners. Some of the earliest drinking establishments along the river were built into its banks.
Wagner explains how a tavern came to exist in a cave. William Penn gave land along the river bank to a man named George Guest to make bricks. Bricks were in high demand in a city that was not yet built. George Guest, however, died shortly after, and his wife took up residence in a cave in the river bank where she sold beer. The arrangement bothered Penn, but Alice Guest guaranteed good behavior and eventually built her own tavern.
The riverbank, too, attracted some of the earliest coffee houses in the New World. First amongst them in Philadelphia was Carpenter’s Coffee House which was built along the river at the terminus of Walnut Street in 1700. The James’ Coffee House and the London Coffee House would open in the same district in the coming decades. They served coffee, and often served beer and wine as well.
Finally, Wagner directs me to a placard for Tun’s Tavern. It is the mythical birthplace of the US Marine Corps. The tavern got its name from the tun, a 252 gallon barrel used for beer and wine. The name, Wagner explains, would indicate that the tavern had one tun of beer on premise for serving.
This tavern would become the meeting place of the first Grand Lodge of Freemasons in colonial America in 1732. This organization was influential in the American Revolution, and in 1775 Tun’s Tavern witnessed the authorization for the acquisition of two ships for war. The tavern would go on to be a major recruiting location for Marines fighting in the Revolution. In typical Philadelphia fashion, the institution served beef stakes and would later become Peggy Mullen’s Beef-Stake House.
At the conclusion of our detailed walking tour, Wagner and I have a beer. He explains that brewing is unavoidable in Philadelphia’s history. The elementary school he attended in his youth, even, is named after a tavern.
The impression he gives is that the earliest days of Philadelphia were essentially the reproduction of British life in a new city. Taverns copied their signboards from London establishments and coffee houses facilitated business between England and the colonies.
While Philadelphia inherited many of England’s drinking habits, many taverns and coffee houses in the Old City would become important centers of revolutionary thinking. Taverns spread news and gossip, facilitated business and strategy, and kept workers and owners happy. It is no wonder that a walk down the street in Philadelphia necessarily involves passing by the former sites of several dozen drinking establishments.
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