DRUNK HISTORY
Tour tracks revolutionary watering holes in the Hub
Ye Olde Tavern Tours highlights Boston history with a buzz, pairing the city’s rebellious past with popular contemporary craft brews.
“Beer makes history even better,” said author, historian and Ye Olde Tavern Tours founder Brooke Barbier as she led the Boston Herald and about a dozen tourists around downtown Boston on Sunday. The walking tours run year round but are more frequent here in the summer (yeoldetaverntours.com).
The itinerary includes stops at several sites on the Freedom Trail, plus three taverns with historic street cred. Guests sip suds from local breweries such as Cisco, Harpoon, Mayflower and Samuel Adams while learning about the role taverns, beer, rum and cider played in fomenting the American Revolution.
“The revolutionaries were surprisingly efficient,” said tourist Caroline Sutton of Tampa, Fla., while enjoying a pint of beer at the Green Dragon. “They get a lot accomplished despite how much they were drinking.”
Bostonians in the 1770s were prolific tipplers, said Barbier, a San Diego native who has a Ph.D. in American history from Boston College and wrote the book “Boston in the American Revolution: A Town Versus an Empire.”
“Colonists drank 3 to 4 gallons of alcoholic beverages per week,” she tells tourists as they grab their first beer at the 21st Amendment on Beacon Hill. “When you keep in mind how much people drank and how easy it was to get drunk in Boston, then you’ll understand more about the violent mobs we’ll talk about.”
More often than not, those mobs were getting jacked up not just on beer, but on the hard stuff, especially locally distilled rum.
“If you were drinking rum in any of the colonies, it was likely distilled in Boston,” Barbier said. “It was made all over the city in the 1700s.”
Boston’s most famous revolutionaries were no strangers to tavern life and hung around at long-lost pubs such as Three Doves, Dog & Pot or Bunch of Grapes.
“Paul Revere drank all over Boston and never met a tavern he didn’t like,” Barbier told her guests. The fabulously wealthy John Hancock, meanwhile, “loved to buy rounds of beers. It’s one of the reasons he was so popular.”
And when George Washington first visited Boston, he ate, drank and slept (pubs at the time doubled as inns) at a tavern on School Street named Cromwell’s Head.
Many of Boston’s most popular watering holes in the 1770s lined King Street (now State Street), around the site of the Boston Massacre. Bostonians began to antagonize a group of Redcoats on that fateful winter night in 1770. The situation grew more volatile when word spread through the pubs and drunken Bostonians began to pour out onto King Street. Five colonists soon lay dead.
In modern times, a group of tourists from Ohio were delighted to discover Buckeye State history in the old taverns of Boston. A plaque on State Street marks the site of the former Bunch of Grapes tavern.
It states that Boston businessmen gathered at the pub in 1786 to form the Ohio Company, which launched the settlement of Ohio under Revolutionary War general and Massachusetts native Rufus Putnam.