NEWCOM TAVERN
Col. George Newcom still revealed the flinty quality that tamedthe wilderness when he sat for this daguerreotype in 1852 atthe age of 81. Dayton was already a bustling town, with a classiccourthouse that ranked among the country’s finest structures.
Newcom’s first cabin, of round logs instead of square-hewn logs, laterserved as kitchen for the structure now in Carillon Park. Smaller buildingdisappeared many years ago. (Etching courtesy of Otterbein Press.)
By the mid-1700s, a few intrepid men from “back East” had exploredthe land of the Miami Indians. Upon their return to the seaboardthese scouts sat about their firesides painting attractive word-pictures of theterritory beyond the Alleghenies. It was “rich, level and well-timbered.”Clover, rye and bluegrass were abundant, along with enough small game,deer and wild turkey to keep any number of settlers from want. The countryside,in the words of one report, was “just waiting to be tickled with thehoe that it might laugh with a harvest.”
It was to be almost another half-century, however, before anyone packedup his wife, musket and hoe and established a home in these fertile landsof legend. The Miamis—a tribe of the Algonquin family in powerful leaguewith the Shawnees, Wyandots, Potawatomies and the Ottawas—weredetermined to keep the white man off the prime hunting grounds that laybetween the Great and Little Miami rivers. They frequently crossed theOhio to raid threatening settlements in Kentucky territory, and the doughtyKentuckians in return made bloody sorties into the Indians’ Miami Valley.Two of the fiercest encounters were fought on the triangle of land wherethe Mad River meets the Great Miami.
1896 view of the Tavern on Monument Avenue, four years after itwas moved there from the southwest corner of Main and Monument.
Late nineteenth century photograph of Tavern’s yard showsbrick oven, split-log bench and primitive sharpening wheel.
In 1896, on the hundredth anniversary of Dayton’s founding, these womendonned pioneer dress and demonstrated the skills of their mothers andgrandmothers. The picture, taken in one of the two upstairs rooms at NewcomTavern, shows spinning, knitting, use of the flax wheel and quilting.
Things were desperate—hardly secure for family life and farming—untilthat able general, “Mad Anthony” Wayne, led a force of 3600 daringmen into Ohio country. The eventual surrender of the Miamis (led byChief Little Turtle) resulted in the Treaty of Greenville, and the end ofthe strife that had k