Another American Adventure: The Brush Creek Inn

Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Brush Creek Inn

We went over to the Brush Creek Inn tonight. It is a 100+ year old inn, one of the "33 mile" houses located along old Route 19. We figure that means that the horses traveled just 33 miles a day before stopping. The food was ok. We had turtle soup and beer battered Walleye fish (from Lake Erie). Nothing to write home about, especially since I compare it to the Old Talbot Tavern in Bardstown, which is 100 years older.

Note the hatchet for a door handle...

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.