Part Two of my history of the Pittstown Inn ended with the death of Moore Furman in 1808. Part three will describe the Inn’s 19th century owners and its innkeepers—quite often not the same people.
Alexandria Twp
Pittstown Inn, part two
I ended part one of the Pittstown Inn when the Revolution came to an end. The Treaty of Paris was finally signed on September 3, 1783, thanks to the efforts of America’s representative at the negotiations, Benjamin Franklin.
The next stage in the history of the Pittstown tavern should cover the years from 1783 to 1800, when the tavern’s owner, Moore Furman, began thinking about replacing the old tavern house with a new one.
The question becomes—what was going on with the tavern between those years? Much to my dismay, I can say next to nothing about what was going on with the tavern. Clearly, there were tavernkeepers at work there while the owner, Furman, had returned to his home in Trenton.
Pittstown Inn, part one
In her excellent book All Roads Lead to Pittstown (2015),1 Stephanie Stevens called attention to the early roads that converged on the village of Pittstown. Roads were certainly important, but just as important were creeks in creating the locations of Hunterdon villages.
In the 18th century, there were very few power sources. It was basically wood (a lot of it) and water. The water powered sawmills for shaping lumber into wood for building, grain mills to turn wheat into flour, and fulling mills to clean and prepare wool for spinning into yarn.2
It was the fulling mill of Edward Rockhill that gave Pittstown its start.