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| Ladies weren't allowed inside Colonial coffee houses like R. Charlton's in historic Williamsburg, VA |
Editor’s note:
Reposted from the Colonial Williamsburg Journal (The Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation).
GUEST BLOG—By Mike
Olmert, Colonial Williamsburg Journal.--The coffeehouse had it over the
tavern, because it was widely thought you wouldn’t get drunk there.
Coffeehouses served such other libations as tea, chocolate, and sometimes
alcohol. But the strongest stimulant on offer was conversation: such talk as
was the natural and obvious precursor to early modern revolutions, social,
political, scientific, and intellectual.
Still, coffeehouses had their critics. Almost from the start
of the English coffee craze, which dates from 1651, coffeehouses were pilloried
by churchmen who suspected they were occasions of sin, by women who weren’t
allowed inside, by tavern-keeps who resented the competition, and by the
establishment who saw them as nurseries of murmuring and sedition.
The complaints went unheeded. Once people started drinking
coffee, they could scarcely be stopped. More than 2,000 coffeehouses are
documented in and around 17th and 18th-century London.
Wander down to the eastern end of Williamsburg’s Duke of
Gloucester Street. Here, the site of the Exchange, the Capitol, and the Public
Records Office conspire to suggest a more serious world, where considerations
of money and property and power once filled the air. Until recently here stood
the Cary Peyton Armistead House, a vast yellow-frame anachronism built in 1891.
Beneath and inside it were the bones of the colonial capital’s most famous
coffeehouse, R. Charlton’s. On this spot, in 1765, Governor Francis Fauquier
reported that he was accosted by a Stamp Act mob, confronted by an angry throng
while he was at “the Coffeehouse, in the porch of which I had seated myself
with many of the council.”
A truck carried the Armistead house off its foundation to a
North Henry Street lot in November 1995. An inspection revealed that two of the
cellar’s brick walls dated to the mid-eighteenth century and were part of R.
Charlton’s. More than a hundred wooden framing members from the original
structure were reused in the nineteenth-century house. The angles at which they
were cut, the tenons, framers’ scribe marks, and bits of the original plaster
and paint were eloquent about the size and shape and decoration of the
coffeehouse.
The continuing investigation of Colonial Williamsburg's
coffeehouse site is interdisciplinary. Historians looking at legal documents
are supported by architectural historians examining bits of brick and wood.
They turned to dendrochronology for the 1749 date. Seasons of digging found
archaeological evidence for what sort of fare, gustatory and intellectual,
could be had at R. Charlton’s. At the site archaeologists found a set of human
vertebrae and a finger bone with copper wires and a pin attached, possibly from
an exhibit or an articulated human skeleton used in lectures.
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| "Frankly, I don't read anywhere where it says women are allowed in coffee houses..." |
Reconstruction detective work suggests the building was
wooden, one-story high, and stood on a full-height brick basement. It was
thirty-five feet square, erected on a plot hardly bigger than the footprint of
the building, which had been carved out of the original Williamsburg Lot 58 in
1747.
The building was covered with sawn weatherboards painted
Spanish brown, later painted white. The roof had wooden shingles. The basement
was entered through a large door that opened out at grade level into the ravine
outside the southeast corner. Goods would have been unloaded there before being
taken upstairs. A vast base of brickwork smack in the center of the cellar may
have been a kitchen; its chimney running up through the structure could have
supported other hearths and other flues.
In time, coffeehouses also began providing tea, chocolate,
and tobacco, three other benefits of England's growing global sway. But the
most important innovation of the coffeehouse may have been news. The latest
advices and circular letters with news of London and the world passed from hand
to hand, were read aloud, and sometimes posted on a notice board. The
coffeehouse was changing the way of life.
The coffeehouse had become the new court, an egalitarian and
yet somewhat elite space, where men of all classes could mix and exchange
ideas. Merchants and intellectuals who had no voice at court were heard out
here. It is not too much to say that the American and French revolutions
started out ab ovo —that is to say, from the egg—in coffeehouses. The
coffeehouse had become, like the royal court at the height of the Restoration,
a center for serious public discussion and for civilizing thought in general.
Inside the history of the coffeehouse may reside one of the
secrets of America’s strange success as a new nation. Coffeehouses were an
experiment in learning how society could regulate itself with something other
than a royal court. In the best sense, coffeehouses were little parliaments,
little universities, little news centers, and, despite their occasional
inhumanity, little chapels.
NEXT WEEK:
Pillar to Post online
daily magazine in next week’s Coffee Beans & Beings column will feature a
photo essay on creative re-use of existing, often historical sites, which have
been turned into modern day coffee houses.
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