Roger Sherman Chapter NSDAR, inc. New Milford, Connecticut
Ebenezer gaylord
Born 1746 Died 1816 ~~ Buried At Gaylord Cemetery
Greetings to you, good friends and countrymen! If we met on more auspicious terms, I would ask you to pull up a seat in my tavern and stay for a spell. My name is Ebenezer Gaylord, born in the summer of 1746, and I ran a respectable establishment right here in town for many years. In my tavern, folks could count on savory foods like stews and roasts, hasty puddings, hominy, and even those pepper cakes that Martha Washington made so popular.
Patrons could then wash it all down with tankards of rum, beer, and cider, and mixed concoctions with names like Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Mimbo, Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, and Flip. Always, however, my patrons could count on good company and cheer. In my day, taverns were places where people gathered frequently to hear the news of the day, to laugh and to play games. Sure, the church may have been where residents went to nourish their souls, but my tavern took care of the rest of their earthly needs.
As the dissatisfaction and tension between the colonies and the crown grew in the 1760s and ‘70s, taverns like mine grew in importance. They became places for people to express their grievances with the British government, to organize protests, and even to plot acts of resistance. Predictably, spies for both sides were common in such places, listening and collecting what information they could gather.
When the muskets began firing, city taverns played especially vital roles, like the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston, Massachusetts, which was a key meeting place for revolutionaries like Paul Revere and John Hancock, where plans for the Lexington and Concord battles were discussed; Fraunces Tavern in New York City, which served as a headquarters for George Washington; and Keeler Tavern in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which was targeted by British soldiers due to its role as a gathering place for patriots.
Though New Milford was but a quiet town, taverns were no less integral to the Revolutionary cause. My own tavern became a welcoming haunt for Minute Men who kept close watch on the Tories as they crossed over from New York. One day one of those damned loyalists shot at my poor young wife, Catherine. She was standing in the dooryard when a bullet whizzed over her head, the musket shot coming from Tories hiding in the woods on a hill. My dear wife dropped the ground and laid there as if dead until she thought it safe to move and go back into the house.
In 1780, I became a member of the Committee of Inspection of Provisions. Our committee was responsible for overseeing the boycotting of British goods and collecting pledges of loyalty. We even helped the patriot cause fiscally by enforcing frugality and discouraging unneeded expenses in the community, which included everything from lavish funerals to extravagant parties.
All through those difficult war years Catherine and I were raising three young children. Our fourth child, Nathan, was born 1783, the year Washington finally accepted British surrender at Yorktown. Finally, we could breathe free.
I lived for another 33 years, in the end laying my bones to rest in Gaylordsville Cemetery in 1816. So please, the next time you're enjoying a strong drink, raise a toast in memory of patriots like me and my dear Catherine, humble common folk who kept the hearths burning and the cause of freedom aglow on the home front.
