The Munroe Tavern, Lexington, Massachusetts |
President George Washington decided to visit every state in the union in
1789. He started his tour in New
England, and one of his stops was in Lexington to see where the first shots of
the American Revolution flew on the town green. During
his visit in Lexington he stopped for dinner at the Munroe Tavern. My Munroe ancestor, Major Andrew Munroe (1764
- 1836) served in the Revolution, but was too young to have participated in the
Lexington battle. His second cousin,
William Munroe (1742 – 1827), lived at the tavern, and was the sergeant of the Lexington
militia. As sergeant, he was assigned to
guard John Hancock and Sam Adams before the battle, and stood next to Captain
Parker on the Green when the British arrived.
When
George Washington arrived in town, William Munroe and his daughters entertained him in an
upstairs room of the tavern. When I was
a little girl, we would visit the tavern and see all the relics displayed from
that visit. The table was set with the
china used that day, and Washington’s cup was under glass. Even the petticoats the daughters had worn
that afternoon were displayed with tender care.
Some of the details told at the museum in those days may be fiction
based on a letter written in 1879 to celebrate the 100th anniversary
of the event. It doesn’t matter now,
because the Munroe Tavern has been “re-branded” to become a museum telling the
story of the British Regulars during the battle, and the Munroe family history
has been put into permanent storage.
According to the letter, the
children of the family were climbing trees to peek at the President dining
upstairs. One of the younger children
had to be rescued from a tree by President Washington’s black servant. Later evidence showed that these stories were
probably true, but others were false, such as who dropped by during dinner, and
names of townspeople he greeted on the Green.
George Washington may not have “slept here”, but he did leave a bunch of
great stories behind in the Munroe family.
The
grandson of William Munroe, James Phinney Munroe, was a recent MIT graduate in 1889 when
he made up the fictional letter since he couldn’t find any actual family
letters describing Washington’s visit to the Munroe Tavern. He later sent many corrections to the Boston
newspapers that published his fictional letters, but the myth lived on. He later wrote a Munroe genealogy, and
included his corrections to the story in his book A Sketch of the Munro Clan: Also
of William Munro Who Deported from Scotland, Settled in Lexington,
Massachusetts and some of his Posterity, 1900. I married an MIT grad, and was surprised to
see that J. P. Munroe also wrote the well known history of the Institute, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
1902.
The
details of what happened during Washington’s dinner at the Munroe tavern may be
lost to time, It is still fun to know
that on 5 November 1789, two hundred twenty three years ago today, the
President of the United States was in my distant cousin’s house, and the
children of the family were sneaking peeks at what was going on. Since my Munroe ancestors still lived in
town, near the tavern, maybe even one of my ancestors was doing a little
peeking, too!
An article by the Lexington Historical Society about
Washington’s visit to Lexington:
http://lhsoc.weebly.com/uploads/6/5/2/1/6521332/washingtons_dinner_at_munroe_tavern-d.pdf The Munroe Tavern website http://lhsoc.weebly.com/munroe-tavern.html
William Munroe at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Munroe_(American_soldier)
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To Cite/link to this blog post: Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "5 November 1789, George Washington Dined Here!", Nutfield Genealogy, posted November 5, 2012, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/11/5-november-1789-george-washington-dined.html
What an exciting and fascinating piece of your family's history!
ReplyDeleteThis is my family too... our line with the name ends with Lucy Munro marrying Joseph Waterman (Their daughter Ruth married into the Mayflower Bartlett line)
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