One of the compelling discoveries about The Brown Homestead was its use as a tavern between around 1809 and the late 1830’s, but our modern assumptions about what that means may not be accurate. In this episode, we raise a glass and swap stories about the complex role of taverns in Colonial society with medical historian, Dan Malleck, director of Brock University’s Centre for Canadian Studies.
One of the compelling discoveries about The Brown Homestead was its use as a tavern between around 1809 and the late 1830’s, but our modern assumptions about what that means may not be accurate. In this episode, we raise a glass and swap stories about the complex role of taverns in Colonial society with medical historian, Dan Malleck, director of Brock University’s Centre for Canadian Studies.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:09.3] ANNOUNCER: Welcome back to season two of The Open Door, where we work to create a better future by exploring the past. Presented by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:29.6] AH: Thank you Jennifer, yes, we are back for season two of The Open Door and we’re celebrating with a drink, which is in keeping with today’s conversation about colonial era taverns, drinking, and – this is Canada after all – early regulation of alcohol. Fortunately, I’m joined today by the ideal drinking partner, Professor Dan Malleck, who is the director of Brock Centre for Canadian Studies, and the person who quite literally wrote the book on the history of the regulation of alcohol in Ontario. In fact, he’s written more than one. Welcome Dan.
[0:01:02.4] DM: My pleasure.
[0:01:02.6] AH: I think we can get away with having a drink or two here today as long as we don’t mention that we’re recording this on a Tuesday morning at 10 AM, nobody will know. Now, one of the reasons we’ve chosen this topic today is that the Brown House at the Brown Homestead operated as a tavern for over 25 years in the early 1800s.
We should start with a little bit of historical background. When the family first settled the homestead around 1785, they were among the very first settlers to this area coming inland, probably along the Mohawk Trail, which ran roughly along the top of the escarpment and the short hills area at the time was virgin wilderness, very different than it is now. In fact, the Browns neighbour to the east, John Deque, wrote that in the early days, he had to sleep in a hammock to avoid the rattlesnakes.
By the beginning of the 19th century though, things were very different. Deque had presumably wrestled control of his land from the snakes and built a mill and other business interest and Duncan Murry had built another mill near Power Glen, which was sold later to Robert Hamilton. Most importantly for our purposes, the Mohawk Trail had been expanded to become a major travel artery and was now the root of Dundas Niagara stage coach line, which ran passed the front door of the grand Georgian house that John Brown built by the time of his death in 1804.
[0:02:20.7] DM: Because taverns were really way stations for traveling, right?
[0:02:24.9] AH: One of the intriguing things that you’ve said is that you could tell the house was a tavern from looking at it. I’m intrigued by what led you to that conclusion?
[0:02:33.8] DM: It’s a very classic layout for a colonial tavern. If you look at – there’s a lots of pictures of colonial taverns, the door in the middle, two or three windows on each side, two floors. What happens is you have that social space and food accommodation and drink accommodation on the main floor and then the upstairs would be rooms, right? People can go on and search for images of Ontario taverns. Well, you’re going to get a lot but historical Ontario taverns will be the Brown Homestead all over the province, so yeah, even the classic picture of Montgomery’s Tavern from the 1837 rebellion looks a lot like that.
It’s the same sort of layout because it was a place of accommodation. It’s a place of hostelry, where you put your horses, where you stay, where you eat, where you drink across the province while at the colony.
[0:03:22.4] AH: And you're absolutely right, it is, as you go through the front door, you have that centre hall and then separate parlours left and right of the hall and upstairs, a large assembly space, which we call the ballroom.
One of the interesting elements of that, in addition to being a tavern in a house, the taverns were very much domestic space is often run by a married couple, which to me, speaks to the role of taverns, and which you’ve likened to having a drink in someone else’s house when you can’t have one in your own.
[0:03:51.8] DM: Yeah, yes, I don’t know if it evolved across the century but as government started to regulate more strictly the tavern space, there was always this notion of accommodations “for the travelling public,” right? The idea that this was a home away from home. That is why even as the governments become even more strict in the regulation that there was very little question that a tavern, in other words, we would call it a hotel, would allow drinking, would sell drinks, right?
So over the century, there was nothing but places with sleeping accommodation, dining accommodation, and drinking accommodations, whether or not that was good accommodation was a whole different thing. But in the time we’re talking about the Brown Homestead, when it was a tavern, there was a range of types of taverns but the Brown building would have been more of a widely accessible tavern that types of people in a few different classes would go to.
[0:04:54.5] AH: A little more upscale but also more of a traveller’s tavern than a local gathering players.
[0:05:00.3] DM: Well yeah, upscale is a tough one to call because there’s lots of stories of people, administrators, or we may call, upper class people going into a tavern and sort of going, “Wait a minute, there’s a lot of kind of working-class types here” but, you know, it’s the tavern.
Part of it is location, I mean, as you mentioned, the location of the tavern was essential. If you’re the only place for accommodation in the area, you're going to get a range of people, be it colonial authorities going across the province doing their work, or farmers travelling with their stuff they’re selling, or new arrivals coming through on their way to their plot of land they’ve been assigned, or any other types of people.
It really was – I can’t say this specifically for the Brown Homestead but at the tavern it was one colleague, in her book, calls them mixed assemblage of people. In fact, there’s a quote from someone at the time.
[0:05:56.6] AH: In our contemporary thought process, we think of taverns as primarily drinking spaces but as you’re touching on, it’s about more than drink and even about more than drink, food and lodging. There were very much important space for business transactions, mail delivery, and things like that as well.
[ 0:06:12.4] DM: Yeah, we have to remember that prior to the Internet, prior to even mass postal service, people traveled across the province selling their wares but also selling products of their company to stores, right? So those were called commercial travellers, this tavern was essential for their work. If you roll into town with a wagon of goods, you need a place to not only put your wagon but to put your goods, to stay, to do your business.
There would be times when later in the century and into the 20th century when certain laws were causing taverns to be closed, commercial travellers would complain to the government saying, “Look, we need a place to stay. You don’t have to have a licensed tavern but we need a place to stay,” and the license, the liquor license was what often made a tavern, later in the century, more financially possible, right? Because they didn’t have as many people staying as they had making revenue from drinks.
In the earlier period, you still had that, you have people starveling across the province selling wares and they need a place to stay. I mean, you couldn’t always just sleep in the back of your wagon.
[0:07:20.3] AH: And presumably not just people selling goods but also trades people, cobblers. There wasn’t necessarily a cobbler in every location and they were often traveling people. They would need a place to stay as well.
[0:07:32.6] DM: Yeah, it was a real centre for commerce. The idea of a tavern today is very much about a drinking space but that is fairly distorted. It’s a really tough history to excavate but there’s some great history about the urban tavern, where it’s working class people coming together after work and drinking, and socializing, and finding work opportunities because this is a time when, if you were a day labourer, literally every day you had to find work so you go to a factory and see if they could hire you.
Going to a tavern was a place where people built their networks as well. That kind of urban space, it still had rooms and, uniquely, most of them needed to have accommodations. I’ve read histories of these, where the author was kind of surprised that there were rooms, like here’s a tavern but they let them sleep in the back. Well, actually, the key role of a tavern was sleeping, right?
It was providing that accommodation, it just became the drinking and the eating and the socializing, but it did really become because that was always interconnected, except for a few places that were given an exemption in Ontario, and they would call them saloons, but they were really taverns without sleeping accommodation. Everyone had to have sleeping accommodations.
[0:08:53.7] AH: Those were all very important elements and one other one that we haven’t touched on yet was in addition to being very important role for social interaction, that they sometimes, especially in the early 19th century were event spaces for community events and we know about the Brown House that the upstairs ballroom was used for early church services but it would be reasonable to speculate that it was likely it had an important role during the tavern era as well.
[0:09:19.2] DM: Yeah, I mean, we think about the term public house, it has a different history than a house that is public in general but the notion of this public space was embedded in the licensing for example, especially after prohibition. If you owned a tavern or a hotel, they called it at that point, you had to get special exemption from the government to have your own booze in your private space because the hotel, the tavern is considered a public space and this stretched back into their early 19th century.
This is a public space and it was licensed by the government, inspected by the government, it had to be open to inspection because it was that public space. A good tavern and, by good, I mean one that could succeed, would have those spaces for different things, right? It would have – I haven’t seen the ballroom but would have and usually they would have some kind of what we might call a function space, right? Where, if something was coming through, your cobbler coming through to do is cobbling or sales people coming to sell products, they might set them up there.
[0:10:26.6] AH: Something you were touching on is that in a society, there was the inclusiveness, although, I don’t think we could probably go as far as to say inclusive. In a society there was fairly divided along class lines and racial lines, taverns were, is it fair to say, something of a more neutral space?
[0:10:43.5] DM: Some of them were. There were taverns that really spoke to the elites, usually in Toronto and some of the other cities but even those places, I haven’t read that they would bar other people but there were certain social norms that might make people not want to hang out with their social betters.
At the same time, there are stories of people hanging out with their managers’ sort of thing, right? At the tavern bar. Colonial society was the stratified to a degree but it was also not, because they were colonial administrators, your inspectors, all of these people who may have been kind of lower or middle class, a really loose term that is problematic in itself, they didn’t necessarily have a lot of money.
They may have been of a different class by occupation but not necessarily by how much money they had. You have these places where you could go in and there would be some farmers there and there would be some local workers there and you would need lodging for yourself as you’re traveling through doing your work and yeah, it would really be that mixed assemblage.
And at the same time, working class people, a lot of them, especially in the cities, didn’t have necessarily much social space, right? The working-class homes in an industrial city were small and they were crowded and they were dirty, and so a tavern would be this social space.
A lot of working men would live in boarding houses, right? Where, depending on who is running the boarding house, they might not be even allowed to drink. They would leave them to go to public spaces. Those houses were essential for that socialization but they could also, as the temperance movement thought, become places of degradation, which they would fixate on the degradation.
[0:12:37.2] AH: It seems like that openness really can be attributed to two things. Number one being commercial realities. If you open a tavern to earn some money, you’re not going to earn a lot of money by turning people away but, secondarily, the implied social contract, maybe more than implied that came with the regulatory elements that you were given a license because you fulfilled certain things that were deemed as necessary, that were outlined very specifically in your license, that you were going to provide those things.
[0:13:04.9] DM: I’ve been looking through the older laws, they weren’t nearly as detailed as the later century laws were and even then, usually what would happen is, a law would be created to administer the licenses but then, the regulations up until – gosh, up until the 20th century, were really local in nature.
When the Brown Homestead was a tavern, you would have a justice of the peace I think, it was the justice who would be distributing the licenses, would be granting licenses. I couldn’t quite figure out who was inspecting them but there was probably some inspectorate and that would have been a local inspector.
In the middle of the century, as right before and after confederation, the licensing responsibility was given to the municipalities, so it was no longer a justice. It would have been a clerk, a licensing clerk, who would issue the licenses and then there would be a license inspector who would be inspecting to make sure the taverns were up to snuff. They had those four bedrooms for example or six bedrooms and they had the room for the horses and all that stuff.
Often, these were the same person because, you know, you didn’t have a lot of work for a licensing clerk. So the licensing clerk and the inspector would often be the same person. The challenge there was that the licensing clerk got – their wage came out of a proportion of the license they issued, right? The fee for license.
The inspector was the one who was supposed to stop them because he was supposed to shut down licenses if the weren’t up to snuff, so you had this inherent conflict of interest in one person’s work. By the middle of the century, there were many cases in the ‘60s of an explosion in the number of tavern licenses being issued.
Partly because the inspector license clerk thing was the same, also because municipal authorities would make more money the more licenses you issued, and then that then led to concern about the amount of drinking going on in some communities, right? That’s where the temperance movement to just start to complain more loudly.
[0:15:04.0] AH: It’s interesting when you talk about that, the overlapping roles and a lot of individuals who were in good standing in society would collect those positions, which could cumulatively be lucrative and I wonder if there’s a connection. In our case, it was Johnson Adam and his wife, Elizabeth, who ran the tavern between about 1809 into the late 1830s.
Adam was also the gatekeeper along that road, he was in charge of maintaining the bridge, which was lucrative endeavour for him, and toll collector at one point. Is the tavern license may be one of those little perks that he was collecting along the way?
[0:15:39.8] DM: Yeah, it could be. The odds are, he had some friends in the government. It was a heavily partisan period. Its clientele, is what it’s called, where the electors elect the members of parliament, members of legislature, their councillors, alderman, but then there was this kind of reciprocal relationship where I have elected you, make it worth my while. We think that is very corrupt today, if someone’s getting kickbacks for voting for someone but this was sort of the nature of the political system.
It was accepted when your party came into power, let the good times roll, right? If you had a friend in the local government and, if you were considered to be relatively responsible, it wasn’t they were – I mean, you had a lot of people grinding for these jobs. Part of the characteristic was, is this person respectable, are they going to bring disfavour on the government?” Are they going to do a good job and enforce the government’s rules?
It’s one of the reasons you hire a partisan supporter is that they are theoretically, they’re not going to do something that makes your party look bad, that makes your government look bad So he probably had some connections in the local administration, and by local, it may have been the colonial legislature but it was probably the municipality and yeah, so he could do these things and he showed himself to be responsible.
[0:17:04.5] AH: Adam was a young man but his father was a respected person within society but I suspected it leans more towards his uncle Joseph, who was much more well-connected who actually notably ran a tavern at Brown’s Point along what is now the Niagara Park Way in Niagara in the lake. I suspect Adam’s connections were more through his uncle more so than his father.
[0:17:28.7] DM: It could have been. I mean, it really depends on the political, I don’t know that much about the political parties at the time but there would have been, you could say they got this house, they got this place, they’re responsible. They are good people.
[0:17:42.2] AH: We’ve mentioned the taverns were not all about alcohol but alcohol did play a significant role and the social perceptions of alcohol. One area in which the social perceptions came into play was the evolution of those early temperance movements, which you have referenced.
[0:17:56.9] DM: In about 1820s and ‘30s there was a growth of temperance. It waned a bit and then it came back in the 60s, you know, middle class industrialist and business owners wanted a sober working class. As industrialization became more mechanized, think of if you’ve ever been into a replica of a textile mill, it’s kind of scary to imagine being drunk in the space because you could literally get your arms pulled off, which people did.
Some have argued that was a big impetus for the temperance movement. There is others who would say, no it was a lot earlier than that but then, there is also the issue of workers themselves saying, “You know, we are really disadvantaged here. I and my colleagues keep going to the tavern and getting drunk and spending all our money. We need to dry up, we need to sober up,” so there is part of that.
Some of the early temperance movement was self-help, inspired also by middle class, evangelically-minded folks who figured, if you get rid of all the sin in society, Jesus will return. So far, we haven’t gotten rid of all the sin, I guess. This also inspired this idea of helping the poor or helping the disadvantaged rise up both for their sake and for the sake of the next phase of millennial evolution of Christian faith.
There are all of these different things coming in. In the UK for the example, the temperance movement was really seen as sort of liberal approach to helping the working class. There was also an evangelical element to that. In North America, the evangelical aspect was bigger but there was also just kind of a – this is a mess. The caveat is: these were the perceptions, the perceptions of a certain group of people that had the position to be able to argue about it, that had the money to be able to publish rampant amounts of really extreme literature on the horrible devastation of drink, which was pretty histrionic, right? It was pretty shrill and not necessary representing everyone’s experience with drink let alone most people’s experience of drink. There were also certain social conditions.
For example, what I mentioned about the licensing clerk and the licensing inspector being the same person, the government needing [inaudible 0:20:19.7] certain economic downturns, so they would license more places and, because the laws of supply and demand kick in, right? If there is a lot of competition for the product you are selling, you need to get more people in and you are not going to jack the price up, you are going to drop it to get those people in and that means people are going to drink more, right?
Because it is cheap booze, so then in some communities, not all communities, there was more drunkenness on the streets and in communities where the municipal government was more temperance minded, they wouldn’t issue more licenses but in the communities where the governments were, the municipal councils were less temperance minded or I don’t want to set up a binary of history, which is dries versus wets.
Most people were moderate, they didn’t drink their faces off but they weren’t part of the liquor industry and they weren’t part of the temperance movement, so I just have to clarify that, but if there were people who had the position to go, “Look at all these drunks in our streets. We need to do something about this, our municipal government isn’t doing anything about this. We need to organize,” and then that started this frustration building into a movement.
[0:21:30.8] AH: It sounds like it really was a very complex social evolution that was going on and I want to touch on a couple parts of that. Number one, you referenced earlier the transition to the urban hotels and the fact that dry hotels couldn’t make a go of it and the connection of that to the industrialization to a degree. Did the railways play a role in that as well? It changed the whole nature of travel once the railroads came through?
[0:21:55.8] DM: Yeah, so the short answer is yes. The longer answer is the railways didn’t go everywhere and railways didn’t go into the less settled areas because they were unsettled and if you look at the railway maps of Ontario, in say 1860, they are remarkable. By the end of the century, they just sort of spokes out from the central access of Toronto. Railways often built hotels along the way for obvious reasons.
You needed to put your workers up somewhere but also you needed a place for your travellers to stop in but there were also many areas that we’re not as accessible by the railway and they still needed those taverns. What really changed the tavern landscape was much later when the bigger highways were built, right? Like 400 level highways were built in the ‘40s and ‘30s but interestingly, a lot of those railway taverns by the end of the century were dry because they could do it because sort of a captive audience, right?
It is right by the station but there is also this thing about not wanting your railway workers to be drunk, go figure, right? They’re running the engines and running the cabooses and coupling cars together and you probably want them to be sober. There was this, I don’t know if it was a legal probation but definitely the railway companies often wanted to keep those areas dry.
[0:23:18.5] AH: Now, the other thing you touched on that I found interesting was this idea of political discourse. It makes sense I guess if taverns were more neutral spaces that they’d be places of mixed ideas and so on. I wonder if there is a connection between some of the regulatory movements or even temperance movements and some concern over the nature of that political discourse? We are after all in the ‘30s talking about the time of rebellion and reform..
[0:23:44.5] DM: The interesting thing about the tavern space they is that it was the domain of the tavern keeper and the tavern keeper determined the political discourse. At a time when it was hard to get a lot of news, if the tavern keeper only stocked the Tory paper, you got the Tory news. The tavern keepers stock the weight paper, you got the weight news and depending upon the politics of the area, the tavern keeper who knew his or her license might be tied to the political interest of the municipal government, they might be a little less willing to seem balanced when the government was one way or the other, right?
It wasn’t exactly the most neutral political space. They were hot topics, discussion happened there, newspapers were available there, people could read to each other there if they were illiterate. From what we know, the tavern might have been a range of people but you weren’t necessarily getting a completely egalitarian political view, right?
[0:24:52.4] AH: It wasn’t centrally governed, it was governed by the tavern keeper in their own political outlook.
[0:24:57.8] DM: Yeah, until much later.
[0:24:59.6] AH: So we see in this complex change, the origins of regulation and the growth of the regulatory elements around taverns and stuff and I guess if we jump forward a little bit, that takes us to your most recent book, Liquor in the Liberal State, and in that you addressed the history of liquor regulation in Ontario and talk about some of these things in more detail, the attempts to balance temperance and even probation ideals with notions of personal freedom and property rights. Maybe you can tell us a little more about that?
[0:25:29.2] DM: There was this huge discussion about liberalism over the last 20 years, this idea of a state that was designed to allow people to have as much freedom as possible and the classic notion of freedom. We have heard this a lot in the last couple of years is freedom to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, right? That’s the class that’s called the harm principle, John Stuart Mill introduced that.
When you look at liquor regulation, the other aspects of liberalism is individual freedom, equality, property rights, all of those sorts of nice ideas, but when we look at liquor regulation, it really gets messy. Very messy because, if I drink something, it doesn’t affect anyone else but if I drink something, go outside of the tavern and punch someone, is that a drinking problem? I am using this sort of extreme language that the temperance people would manifest because it wasn’t as bad as they made it sound.
It was that kind of thing where people fixate on their fixation, so if they were concerned about drunkenness, they’d find drunkenness everywhere when most people weren’t drunk, there are a few people that were drunk and it was socioeconomic, it could have been different ethnic groups were drinking more. Germans, for example, were known to drink more but they were known to drink not as strong spirits.
There was part of that was the manufacturing but the temperance movements saw it all as the liquor industry trying to destroy society. The liquor people are saying, “Hey, we’re not trying to destroy society. We’re members of the society. We have a legitimate right to sell our wares, we’re licensed by the government.” What it did was it refocused licensing at the provincial level and because this person, the inspector was provincially appointed, he was no longer beholden to the municipal authorities, right?
His responsibility was to the provincial authority, so he didn’t have to kind of license the guys, the men and women, because tavern licensees could be women, he didn’t have to license the ones that the local municipal masters wanted. The board of license commissioners said the board of license commissioners was unpaid. These three people were unpaid and they were considered to be well-off, more respectable members of the community that the idea being of course, well-off people are always more respectable and more ethical.
So, this was this idea, that they were going to be looking out for the welfare of their community. They knew their community well and they knew what it needed. Whether it works, it certainly reshaped the way licensing happened but then, the interesting thing about this, and this is one of the myths we have of probation and the liquor licensing. The myth is that it was just temperance legislation in sheep’s clothing. But it is better to say this is a government that did not want probation. It did not often like the temperance people but they were shrill, man, they were really persistent.
They were trying to balance the need to allow drinking because if you make it illegal, you just have a whole bunch of illegal drinking and the temperance movement kept saying, “Look, so here is the tension between freedoms.” Does an individual have the freedom to drink themselves into oblivion, right? The stereotype of temperance were the classic images that the working man who is introduced to drinking in the tavern, who is encouraged to buy rounds, at the time it was called treating. You buy me one, I buy you one, if there is six of us, we’re drinking six bottles, and this is considered to be like kind of its own social contract that could lead to devastation.
If you look at any temperance literature, you’ve got this thing of the well respectable young father who goes off to work and he is introduced to drinking and he has to drink more and then he starts selling his furniture and he starts beating his family and either he ends up killing himself, or in jail, or dead in the street and his family is on the street, right? So it was this dire image of the effect of over-liberal laws that in themselves hurt people, right?
The midst to your freedom as this might hurt, my pain. The temperance movement was saying, “You know, we have to balance these freedoms and it’s more reasonable to restrict or to eliminate this horrible trade than to say they have the freedom to trade.” The liquor industry was saying, “We’re licensed by the government. If you want to shut us down, go ahead but you have to reimburse us for our investments, right?”
It was making millions of dollars a year on revenue from liquor and many examples from dry communities showed, as I mentioned, it just didn’t work. The wonderful thing about alcohol is it’s a natural fermenting process, it is happening all around us, right? So, you’re not going to get rid of alcohol, you’re just going to get rid of well-produced alcohol and you are going to end up with the so-called bathtub gin, right? So, that is kind of the long version of a much longer story.
[0:30:47.2] AH: The condensed version of the much longer version and for people who would like to learn more about this, we’ll include on our website a link to where they can find out more about your book. If you are interested in history of alcohol and the social and political impact of alcohol regulation on Ontario, it is definitely a must read. What’s interesting to me in all of this, you’ll be amazed that I am listening to you speak about this and, in my desk drawer here, I have my great grandmother’s women’s Christian temperance union medal, so it sort of connects me to it.
I wonder if she ever knew that her great, great grandfather’s house was a tavern and we’ll also include a link to another wonderful book that you referenced earlier about colonial taverns. The title is, In Mixed Company: Taverns in Public Life in Upper Canada by Dr. Julia Roberts from the University of Waterloo. Another great read that I would recommend to people who were interested in this topic as well.
Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today Dan. We didn’t quite finish the bottle but we gave it a pretty good shot I think.
[0:31:45.3] DM: Yeah, you were making me thirstier as it happens.
[0:31:48.7] AH: Well, it is not 10 AM on a Tuesday morning as we said earlier, so take care of your thirst.
[0:31:55.5] DM: Those drinking times were also very much legally constructed because until the 1890s, taverns could be open 24 hours a day, except between Saturday at about 7:00 and Monday morning. So yeah, Tuesday is completely, 150 years ago, this would be completely legitimate to be having a drink at 10 in the morning.
[0:32:14.3] AH: That’s what I’ll tell my great, great grandmother.
[0:32:18.6] DM: Yeah.
[0:32:19.9] AH: All right, have a great day Dan. Thank you very much.
[0:32:21.6] DM: Thanks, it was great speaking with you. Take care.
[0:32:23.4] JENNIFER: All right Andrew, set me up.
[END OF INTERVIEW}
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