FADDIS' TAVERN

Former Faddis Tavern, 1849 (Benson J. Lossing)

Faddis's tavern, 1768 Sauthier map excerpt

From Mary Engstrom's July 24, 1975 News of Orange County article "Faddis’ Tavern of Happy Memory":

The inn appears to have been built in 1767 or 1768 by the Halifax merchant, Ralph McNair, the shrewdly enterprising representative of the Halifax-based firm of Young, Miller & Co., and the business partner and close friend of Francis Nash...McNair and Nash together already owned Lots 27 and 28 on the north side of E. King Street, and in November, 1767, Nash deeded to McNair his own halves of those two lots plus the east half of Lot 26, thus giving to McNair the sole ownership of two valuable acres, ever after to be known in town records as “the Tavern Lots"...McNair apparently secured the services of a most accommodating inn-keeper, Phillip Jackson, the close friend of Nash, Thomas Hart, and McNair himself...On April 3, 1772, [McNair] sold the Tavern Lots with all their buildings for 600 pounds to the Quaker William Courtney...During Courtney’s long ownership a whole succession of General Assemblies patronized his “house,” and various records of committee meetings in the “Billiard Room” have been preserved. Cornwallis, also, occupied the Tavern during his brief stay in Hillsborough in February 1781 (when legend says his name was scratched on one of the mantels). Lossing labeled his sketch, “Cornwallis’ Headquarters,” and wrote in his text: “We (The Reverend Alexander Wilson and Lossing) next visited the headquarters of Cornwallis, a large frame building situated in the rear of Morris’ Hillsborough House, on King Street. Generals Gates and Greene also occupied it when they were in Hillsborough, and there a large number of the Provincial Congress were generally lodged"...In the late 1790’s Courtney died intestate, and U.S. Marshal John Spence West on August 22, 1799, sold the Tavern and the Tavern Lots for $1850 to John Hogg of the Scots mercantile firm of Hogg & Adam. But Hogg found the Tavern far more dilapidated and run-down than he had supposed, and he promptly re-sold the property to John Faddis, “Tavern-Keeper,” for $1,900...

After John Faddis died in 1829, his son, Thomas Jefferson Faddis "attempted only briefly to operate the Tavern. A succession of proprietors in the next 30 years included Thomas D. Crain (or Crane) who apparently first adopted the new name “Hillsborough House,” James Jackson, Jr., Robert F. Morris, who advertised a “Variety Store with a little bit of everything” in the storeroom next door to his exceedingly well-stocked bar, William McCauley, and Richard Tapp. On June 2, 1858, Tapp advertised the Tavern in the Hillsborough Recorder as having “…thirteen rooms and ten fireplaces, a good cellar, a good kitchen, with two fireplaces, a smokehouse, and stables with thirty six stalls, a good spring and spring house within thirty steps of the kitchen, and a front house on the street for business and nearly two acres of land, the best stand in town…”"

It is not known when the structure was demolished, but it appears to have been demolished between 1911 and 1924.

Faddis's tavern site, 2008 (site is behind 115 E. King Street)