Two Henrys & One Inn

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow & Henry Ford

It’s been months since I’ve posted about a New England place of interest. This post is about a MA historic site we visited and stayed at in late fall 2021 on a road trip under an hour from Nashua, NH. While the location itself was interesting, the backstory of individuals connected with it was even more so.

The post title is in reference to these well-known Americans — poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and industrialist Henry Ford. While, they never met, the two men are connected through a well-known New England building in Sudbury, MA, now called The Wayside Inn. 

Formerly known as Howe (or How's) Tavern, it's been in operation since 1716 and staked a claim as the oldest continually operating U.S. inn. In 1973, The Wayside Inn Historic District  was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Undated photo, The Wayside Inn

Longfellow’s connection dates to 1862, when he visited the inn and was inspired by the natural beauty of the surrounding area which led him to write a famous book of poems. In 1923, over 60 years later, Ford Motor Company founder, Henry Ford purchased the inn planning to create a museum of colonial American history. 

To backtrack to the inn's start, in 1716, David Howe not only doubled the size of his two-room country home but was granted a license for a house of entertainment that he named (what else) Howe’s Tavern to host travelers along the Boston Post Road. (This was the first postal route between Boston and New York that evolved into one of the first major highways in the U.S.) For the next 145 years, four generations of the Howe family provided travel hospitality. In 1744, Ezekiel Howe took over his father's tavern and renamed it the Red Horse Tavern. 

Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863

Longfellow visited the inn with his publisher in 1862 and toured the building with a Howe relative who told him the history of the building and her family. The poet, who lived in Cambridge, MA, was grieving from his wife’s 1861 death and his visit was in the middle of the American Civil War; his son had been injured in battle. Longfellow was said to be suffering from writer's block.

The book was presented as a series of stories told by guests at the inn and each is in the form of a poem. The storytellers are real people who were friends of Longfellow but were not named. The collection's best known inclusion is the previously published poem Paul Revere's Ride. Longfellow planned to call it, The Sudbury Tales, but a friend was concerned that the title was similar to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and persuaded him to rename it Tales of a Wayside Inn which was  published in November 1863. 

Two years before, The Red Horse Tavern had closed after the last Howe owner, Lyman Howe, died in 1861. It would not reopen as an inn until 1897 when wool merchant Edward Lemon purchased the inn from Howe’s descendants and after restoring it, he renamed it Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in tribute to the poet.

After Lemon's death in the early 1920s, his widow Cora found it hard to keep up the old buildings. A Boston stockbroker, Loring Brooks, who lived nearby, joined other businessmen to form a Wayside Inn Trust to preserve the inn and its antiques in their original condition and to maintain it as an inn. Like an early form of crowdfunding, an appeal was sent to philanthropists and others throughout the Northeast. Shares were priced at $100. The goal was to sell 2,000 shares using the raised $200,000 to purchase the property and place it in trust for future generations.

Undated photo of former Red Horse Tavern (Internet source)

As often happens, there was much enthusiasm, but little money came in despite support from Boston newspapers and prestigious historical organizations. Brooks boarded a train and visited Henry Ford in Dearborn, MI, to persuade him to purchase 10 shares, in hopes that doing so would attract other industry giants to do the same. When Brooks left, Ford was non-committal.

Henry Ford outside The Wayside Inn (Internet source)

Then, in July 1923, Ford asked to see all the property on which the trust held options, scribbling down acreages and prices. After an extensive tour, Brooks asked Ford if he wanted to invest in 10 shares. Ford said he would take it all buying the inn and 60 acres of land within days of the initial transaction. Ford's agents had options on 1,300 more acres and when the deal was done, he owned 2,000 acres and was one of the town’s leading taxpayers. Ford foresaw transforming the Colonial era inn into a living museum of American history. The first five years were spent in refurbishing the inn, its farms and outbuildings. Crews of laborers and stone masons dug a new millstream and erected the two-foot-thick stone walls for what would become the Wayside Inn Grist Mill. 

Henry Ford & Thomas Edison

By 1925, Ford’s agents had tracked down much of the original Howe family furnishings. Crews, under the supervision of American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison, were installing electric lights with bulbs shaped like candle flames. (Edison and Ford were good friends who had met for the first time in 1896 and again in 1907 before Ford released the Model T auto.)

Under Ford’s ownership, The Wayside Inn continued operating as a hotel and restaurant. His stature brought it a level of recognized significance and it attracted prominent men of the day like Calvin Coolidge, Charles Lindbergh, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, and naturalist John Burroughs.

In 1926, when engineers determined that heavy truck traffic on the Boston Post Road was damaging the inn’s foundations, Ford paid $300,000 to relocate 1-1/2 miles of Route 20, known as the Old Boston Post Road, further away from the inn. He sold the road to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1928 for $1 (but never cashed the check).

Redstone Schoolhouse at The Wayside Inn

In 1927, after finding a red schoolhouse in nearby Sterling, MA, being used as a church storage shed, Ford had it dismantled and rebuilt across the brook from the inn. Ford approached the Sudbury School Council with an offer to fund the teacher's salary, supplies, and transportation to operate the school. The one-room school for grades 1 through 4, was attended by children of workers on the Wayside Inn property and surrounding area and operated from 1927 to 1951. 

Interior of one room Redstone School

For years, it's been said that the schoolhouse is the one the poem, in Mary Had a Little Lamb. Two plaques installed near the building claim that it's the one from the poem, but there's scant historical evidence to back up the claim. Even the poem's author, Sarah Joesepha Hale, was said to have stated that the poem was not based on an actual event or place. By coincidence, there's a connection to Thomas Edison. In 1877, the first incident of recorded human speech was when Edison spoke the poem into his new invention, the phonograph.

Over the next six years, Ford spent over $2 million restoring the inn and several adjacent buildings. 

The Wayside Inn Grist Mill

Completed in 1929, the grist mill ground its first cornmeal on Thanksgiving Day that year and still processes grains sold in the inn's gift store and used in the restaurant. In 1952, Pepperidge Farm leased the mill which provided the company with whole wheat flour monthly until 1967. The mill even led to design of the company's logo.

A bit of trivia: Pepperidge Farm was founded in 1937 by Margaret Rudkin, who named the brand after her family's 123-acre farm property in Fairfield, CT, which in turn was named for the pepperidge (black tupelo) tree. The Pepperidge Farm logo with its image of a red mill on snow wasn't based on a CT mill, but the Wayside Inn grist mill. 

From 1928 to 1947, the Wayside Inn School for Boys was a trade school that prepared indigent boys for potential employment in Ford’s factories. It began with 31 underprivileged boys between ages 16 to 18, all wards of the state. Ford’s goal was to give each boy a high school education, salary, and the chance to learn a trade while working half a day on the inn estate. Salaries were considered generous by depression standards, ranging from $435 to $504 annually, depending on age, class and ability. Each student was responsible for room and board, clothing, medical, entertainment, and laundry costs and was expected to start and maintain a savings account.

Martha-Mary Chapel at The Wayside Inn, Sudbury, MA

In 1940, they helped build the Martha-Mary Chapel with trees damaged in a 1938 hurricane.Ford directed that the timber be cut and sawn and the lumber used to build a non-denominational chapel. It’s named after his and Clara Ford’s mothers, Martha Ford and Mary Bryant. A wrought iron weathervane was placed on the steeple on July 30, 1940, Ford’s 77th birthday.

Interior of Martha-Mary Chapel (seen through window)

In 1944, before Ford's 1947 death, Henry and Clara Ford placed the central 100+ acre parcel and nine buildings into a non-profit organization to preserve the inn’s historic legacy. It was later given to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1960, Boston-based trustees assumed responsibility for the inn, with no further involvement or support from the Ford family, the Ford Foundation, or the National Trust. With no endowment for ongoing maintenance, The Wayside Inn Historic Site is now a self-sustaining campus of nine historic buildings on over 100 acres. 

The Wayside Inn, Sudbury, MA, visited in late 2021

The nine historic structures on the property that are currently maintained by The Wayside Inn Foundation include: 

• Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, original parts which date back to 1707 as the Howe family home
• Grist Mill, built in 1929 by Henry Ford as an operating mill
• Martha-Mary Chapel, built in 1940 by Ford, named after his mother and mother-in-law
• Redstone Schoolhouse, built in 1798 and relocated from Sterling, MA
• Old Barn, built in the early 1800s by the Howe family
• Ice House, dating from the 1930s and built by Ford to store harvested ice
• Cider Mill, built by Henry Ford in 1930 to hold a cider press for apple processing
• Gate House (or Coach House) built in 1913 by Edward Lemon from reclaimed Colonial-era timbers for storing stagecoaches
• Cold Storage (root) Cellar, an underground facility built by Ford for produce processing and storage

Several rooms within the inn are set up as displays that show accommodations and furnishings provided to travelers years earlier. 

Our road trip included a two-night stay in one of the inn's 10 guest room. The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner.

Tavern and dining rooms at The Wayside Inn

Our road trip and inn stay were both enjoyable experiences. One thing worth noting is that there was no Internet service in the rooms and also no TV. That said, we would not hesitate to revisit at a future time.

Henry Ford spent most of his life making headlines, good, bad, never indifferent. He introduced the assembly line invented to create the Model T automobile. His management style has been termed dictatorial as Ford was involved in most major decisions at the company and is rumored to have monitored employee activities outside of work. He is credited for having converted a former costly luxury item into an affordable form of transportation for many middle-class Americans. The term, Fordism, defined as the mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers, has been widely associated with his name. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet of his time. Many of his works helped shape the American character and its legacy, like the poems Paul Revere's Ride and The Song of Hiawatha. Many of his poems were mainstays of primary and secondary school curricula and long remembered by those who studied them. He was a member of the 19th-century American poets associated with New England known as the Fireside Poets (also called the schoolroom or household poets). Others in the group included William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, the first American poets whose popularity rivaled that of British poets at home and abroad.

Author's Note: Whenever popular/infamous individuals are featured in a post, it does not mean that their attitudes, actions, values are accepted/agreed on by myself (or others). It's because they are part of a history in a post. At times, this inclusion can trigger definite reactions, positive or negative, from readers which is accepted and understood by myself. This blog doesn't use comment moderation and all view are invited and read. Only those deemed abusive or offensive will be removed. Spam comments are deleted always. 

Thanks to all who commented on my recent Friday Funnies post to let me know WHY cherry pickers/lift trucks were usually left in the upright position—to prevent theft.