Throwback Thursday: Tavern Troubles (Part III)

Back to the Beginning: Tracing Yellow Springs’ Earliest Tavernkeepers Through the Great Valley

Setting the Scene

For the past few weeks, we have researched Yellow Springs Tavern ownership and operation history. In our last post, we continued working through our list of potential tavernkeepers.

We looked for connections that could help us rule possible tavernkeepers out. We used 30,000 Acres and Annals of Phoenixville and Its Vicinity to separate nearby taverns from Yellow Springs. We then investigated early names on our list, including Ruth Hoskins and Edward Smout.

We found evidence that their tavern was located in the town of Chester. We also learned more about James Benson’s connection to the Anselma Mill. That evidence allowed us to remove Benson from our list of candidates as well.

Each name we remove makes the timeline clearer, but it also raises another question. How far can we trace the Yellow Springs Tavern by working backward through the records? Where did the Revolutionary War-era tavern come from? Who operated it before the first names we can document with certainty?

Now, we are taking a different approach and returning to the tavern’s earliest known origins. Rather than familiar names, we will examine the earliest evidence of a tavern at Yellow Springs. We will also consider what that evidence can tell us about how the tavern began.

Today, the tavern forms part of the modern Washington Building at Yellow Springs. However, its foundation dates to the 1720s and shows the structure predates its modern facade.

Meanwhile, our earliest reference to an established colonial tavern at Yellow Springs dates to 1722. The American Weekly Mercury, a Philadelphia newspaper, published this reference in its “foreign affairs” section.

The paper reported on ships arriving and departing when it printed the following note:

Yellow Springs: A Traveling Gentleman’s Recommendation

The “new bath” in the Great Valley, 30 miles from Philadelphia, was Yellow Springs.

The traveler praised the cures he believed Yellow Springs’ waters could provide. His identity remains unknown, but researchers presume he came from Long Island. The paper said it had heard of Yellow Springs and visitors praised it. However, the paper withheld his full letter until editors could verify it.

Later, editors printed a page-one anonymous letter about Bristol Springs, the King’s Bath.

The writer praised Bristol’s curative waters, seemingly suggesting they surpassed Yellow Springs. Someone who favored Bristol may have used this report for additional publicity.

On July 19, 1722, the American Weekly Mercury reported Bristol Springs’ curative properties. The King’s Bath took the spotlight from Yellow Springs in that paper. We cannot tell whether the paper investigated Yellow Springs or compared cures.

Even so, this confirms Yellow Springs operated as a mineral spa by 1722. So, the tavern and resort must have existed there by that time. However, several important details about this early history remain unknown to us. The Bristol letter says people discovered the King’s Bath “about three weeks ago.” In contrast, the Yellow Springs report gives no date for discovering its mineral waters.

It also does not explain when European settlers recognized their medicinal qualities, nor does the report say when anyone first built the Yellow Springs establishment. Still, references to a “famous doctor” reveal much about colonial spa culture. The atmosphere described at Bristol offers useful clues about colonial spa culture.

Early records mainly track the tavern at Yellow Springs, while licensing likely allowed regular alcohol service. However, the spa may have attracted visitors while the tavern remained secondary. With this possibility in mind, we searched colonial newspapers for Great Valley references. We hoped those references might reveal names connected to Yellow Springs’ history.

The Great Valley

It is important to note that these newspapers used “Great Valley” differently than we do today. In 18th- and 19th-century Pennsylvania, that name referred specifically to Chester Valley. Today, historians also know this area as the Limestone Valley in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Low, fertile, and stretching across the region, the valley supported extensive early agriculture. Its rich farmland helped fuel settlement and encouraged colonists to move westward during the early 1700s. For those settlers, the valley became an important agricultural center and a major route west.

Although this region once shared its name with the Great Appalachian Valley, it remained geologically distinct. Today, that broader “Great Valley” usually includes the Lehigh and Cumberland valleys farther north and west. In Chester County, however, the name refers to a separate geological formation.

Early colonists regarded this landscape as something of a remarkable geographical marvel. Carved between surrounding mountains, the narrow valley stretched westward from Philadelphia in an unusually flat line. Rich soil covered its limestone floor, creating ideal conditions for farming and settlement. The limestone beneath the valley also shaped the region’s natural waterline. Those same geological conditions eventually revealed another important resource: the area’s numerous mineral springs.

Geographically, the valley floor begins near the Schuylkill River around Bridgeport and King of Prussia. From there, it extends southwest through Tredyffrin, East and West Whiteland, Exton, and Downingtown. Beyond Coatesville, the valley continues toward the Lancaster County border.

Much of eastern Chester Valley also formed part of William Penn’s original Welsh Tract. Early accounts frequently describe Welsh Quakers and Baptists establishing homesteads throughout the region. These communities began establishing homes here as early as the eighteenth century.

Today, Yellow Springs technically falls outside the true Chester Valley floor. Chester Springs instead sits among the rolling hills of the Pickering Creek watershed, just north of its boundary. In the 1720s, however, people often used “Great Valley” more broadly as a regional name.

Settlement at Chester Springs remained closely tied to the culture, commerce, mills, and transportation developing throughout the Limestone Valley. So, in less formal sources, “Great Valley” could also encompass early Yellow Springs.
Newspaper notices, runaway servant advertisements, property auctions, and travel logs all used the term this way.

Names Associated with the Great Valley in the 1720s

Now that we have more context about what people of the era most likely would have referred to this area as, we can look through the newspaper records for references to the “Great Valley” and cross-reference those with what we know.

Above, we find an advertisement from James Thomas offering a plantation and orchard in Whiteland Township, in the Great Valley. What we now call East Whiteland and West Whiteland were still one township during the 1720s.
Although Whiteland did not directly border what are now Vincent and Pikeland Townships, it sat close enough to Yellow Springs to matter. What happened in the Whitelands could affect Yellow Springs, and developments at Yellow Springs could likewise affect the Whitelands.

Additionally, the general ‘location fuzziness’ that we have been dealing with in terms of older records and reporting is also at play here. That being said, for now, we will consider that the plantation James Thomas is aiming to sell off is indeed located in Whiteland Township. This piece of information tells us that there was indeed settlement activity in this general area as early as the 1720s, and we will keep the name “James Thomas” in mind should it come up again in the future.

Further on in November of 1727, a man named Peter Lloyd advertised that he is selling a tract of land in the Great Valley along the Conestoga road.

However, as we continued searching, we finally found, in 1737, a surname that we recognize associated with the Great Valley.

Reese Pritchard

In this advertisement from 1737, a man named Reese Pritchard is selling a plantation in the Great Valley. “Pritchard” is a surname that is quite familiar to us at Yellow Springs. The mention of merchant mills and access to lime on the property piques our interest as well, since those are descriptions that often are applied to the Yellow Springs property in later advertisements. Also notably, this advertisement is published in both English and in German.

According to what we know about the history of the Washington Building, before 1750, a Pritchard had submitted for and was granted a tavern license at the Yellow Springs. Our records name this tavern applicant alternatively as either “Robert Pritchard” or as “Joseph Pritchard”, but by May 28th, 1751, it is conclusively a man named Robert Pritchard who is mentioned as the previous tavernkeeper during Samuel Lewis’s application to operate the Yellow Springs tavern.

Pritchard Connection

To learn more about the Pritchard family and their landholdings, we turned to another index created by the Chester County Archives for their digitized records. Instead of the tavern applications, however, we turn now to the index of deeds from 1688 to 1918.

Perusing these indexes, we can trace the Pritchard family through their land-ownings.

In 1715, a man named Griffith Pritchard was listed as the grantee for a deed issued by a man named Joseph Wilcox. In 1718, Griffith Pritchard sells that deed to a man named David Llewelyn.

• In 1728, a man named Rees Pritchard of Whiteland is the grantee for a deed issued by John Davis. In 1737, Rees Pritchard and his wife Hannah are listed as the sellers of a mortgage to a man named Richard Hayes.
• In 1747, Rees Pritchard Jr. (it is currently unclear if this is the same man as Rees Pritchard in 1728 or if this is his son) is listed as the seller in a mortgage arrangement with a man named Joseph Parker.
• In 1757, Rees Pritchard (likely Jr.) and his wife Elinor are listed as the sellers in a mortgage to a man named John Havard.

Referencing these property transfer events to our running list of tavern keepers, we can conclude that the entry we have for Robert Pritchard in 1750 (in the “List” and in Volume 8, page 124 and 125) is likely a relation of Rees Pritchard. We will need to do some genealogical work to confirm this, so for now, we will leave the Pritchard family as a soft confirmation for now and investigate them further at a later date.

The Ogden Family

Going back to our revised list of candidates, we find that the oldest names we have left to examine are Richard Woodworth in 1721 and Jonathan Ogden in 1721. We started with the index of deeds again to see how the property the Ogden family was involved with changed throughout the years.

As we can see in the excerpt above, the name Jonathan Ogden is associated with two lease agreements in Middletown township in the year 1717. In both situations, Jonathan is listed as the seller (or grantor) of the lease, and in both situations, he is leasing some property to a man named Peter Hunter.

In 1740, Jonathan Ogden is listed again, but is indicated as being deceased. The township of where the property that was in question was located was not recorded. However, we know that from this document, Jonathan Ogden died before 1740.

Doing a bit more genealogical research, we found a lead that accounts Jonathan Ogden as the tavernkeeper for an establishment known as the Boar’s Head Inn.

Because this is a lead that we found on Ancestry.com, we needed to find supporting evidence for this claim. Doing further research, we found a source on the History of Delaware County, published by the organization PA Roots, noting that the The Boar’s Head Inn was a foundational landmark in early Pennsylvania history.

Though it seems the Boar’s Head Inn no longer exists physically, we can conclude that from this source, the structure was located in the modern-day city of Chester. We can exclude Jonathan Ogden and James Trego from our list of candidates.

However, the Samuel Ogden mentioned in the index of deeds in the 1800s cannot be the same Samuel Ogden who submitted tavern applications in the 1720s. To find more about this Samuel Ogden, we turned back to the tavern petitions index and the digitized records maintained by the Chester County Archives.

We are referencing this application for Samuel Ogden:

• Applicant Name: Samuel Ogden | Township: (not recorded) | Tavern name: (not recorded) | Outcome: A | Volume & Page: 1/160 | Year: 1727

So, we will go to Volume 1 of the digitized records of tavern petitions. On page 314 in the digitized record, we located Samuel Ogden’s 1727 application.

Here, Samuel Ogden appears to have purchased a separate tavern somewhere else. It was separate from the property Jonathan Ogden already operated in Chester. He also says the tavern stood on the “public road” and may have served patrons previously. His application, however, does not name the tavern or identify its previous operators.

To locate this tavern, we need to reconstruct the “public roads” serving this area in 1727. Until we place Samuel Ogden’s tavern, we cannot confidently remove him from our Yellow Springs list.

‘Till Next Week…

After searching these newspapers and records, we now have several more pieces of the puzzle. We know Yellow Springs operated as a colonial spa by at least 1722, and we know “Great Valley” could describe the wider area around Yellow Springs. A potentially important connection between the Pritchard family and the tavern has also emerged. However, genealogical research must still establish how the people in these records were related.

This research also lets us remove several more names from our tavernkeeper list. Jonathan Ogden and James Trego can be ruled out because their tavern stood in Chester. Their tavern, the Boar’s Head Inn, was located in Chester, separate from Yellow Springs. Samuel Ogden, however, presents a much more complicated case for our research.

In 1727, Samuel Ogden applied for a tavern license after purchasing another establishment. His application says the tavern stood along a “public road,” but gives no location. That detail leaves us with an important new question about the roads around Yellow Springs.

To answer it, we need to step away from tavern petitions for now. Instead, we need to trace when these roads were established and where they originally ran. We also need to consider how people traveled through this part of Chester County in the 1720s. Those details may help us determine where Samuel Ogden’s tavern actually stood.

Next week, we will follow these roads backward and see where they lead. Perhaps they can help us locate Ogden’s tavern and push this mystery further!

You can read more details in the extended version of this post on our Substack!

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Featured History Event at Historic Yellow Springs

Historic Yellow Springs is thrilled to host Dr. Sara Ray, as she explores Medical Thought, Philosophy, and Practice During the Transformative Revolutionary Period, at the Washington Building on October 15th, 2026 at 5:30 PM!  

We hope you stop by!

Interested in learning more? Check out the course listing here!

More upcoming speaker events can be seen here!

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Learn more about the history of Yellow Springs

You can read the more in-depth version of this post here

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