John Gadsby

John Gadsby (1766 – 15 May 1844) was an English tavernkeeper in Alexandria, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

Early life and migration to Alexandria Born in 1766 in England, John Gadsby's earliest known record in the United States is in 1795. He traveled with his wife, Margaret Smelt, and his two daughters, Ann Sophia and Margaret Sarah, to Alexandria, Virginia, then a major shipping port.

His first establishment was at the Union Tavern and Coffee House in Alexandria, a subscription coffee house that catered to business men in the middle and upper classes.

City Hotel

On October 6, 1796, Gadsby leased the City Hotel from John Wise, now the site of Gadsby's Tavern Museum in Alexandria. The tavern quickly became the center for community events, from the George Washington birthnight ball to dancing assemblies to meetings of local clubs, particularly the Alexandria Jockey Club of which Gadsby was a benefactor. He made money renting his carriages and investing in a stagecoach line.

When he renegotiated his lease, Gadsby's property and possessions totaled $22,441. His most valuable "possessions" were the enslaved African-Americans who comprised the majority of his staff.

By 1805, Gadsby's first wife Margaret had died, and he married Peggy McLaughlin of Georgetown. He then quickly married off his daughters. First, Margaret Sarah Gadsby was married to Charles Thomas Chapman in 1807, and the couple had a son, John Gadsby Chapman, by 1808. In July of that year Ann Sophia Gadsby married Augustine Newton.

Though at that point Gadsby still had eight years remaining on his lease with John Wise, he abruptly sold it and moved to Baltimore, possibly for economic opportunity.

Indian Queen Hotel The Indian Queen Hotel, at Hanover and Baltimore Streets, was a sizeable tavern that showed off new mechanical innovations, including a steam kitchen, stew stove, patent oven, and smoke jacks to move a large coffee roaster and mechanical spits. In addition to his tavern's position as a stagecoach station on four lines, this hostelry par excellence brought Gadsby both a fortune and an excellent reputation in Baltimore. Guest Samuel Breck wrote:

On May 10, 1808, Gadsby and Peggy had a son, William. But on February 12, 1812, Peggy died, and a short 11 months later, Gadsby married Providence "Provey" (Norris) Langworthy, twenty years his junior. The Norris family was prominent in Baltimore and attended numerous events at the Indian Queen Hotel. The patriarch of the family, Provey's father Benjamin Bradford Norris, was significant in town for being a signer of the Bush Declaration. The couple had three children in Baltimore: Virginia (1813), Augusta (1816), and Julia (1818). They also had a son, Charles, who died as a young child.

Of the many notable guests Gadsby welcomed before, during, and after the Battle of Baltimore, Francis Scott Key would become the most significant. Key finished his song the "Defence of Fort McHenry," now better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner," at the Indian Queen on September 16, 1814.

During the Panic of 1819, Gadsby sold his lease and left Baltimore nearly penniless. The reasons behind his financial downfall are unsure.

Gadsby looked toward Washington Hall Hotel in Philadelphia, the next stop on his stagecoach line to the north, for his next venture. He was in negotiations to take over the hotel, but its loss by fire rendered his plans moot. Instead he looked to the next stagecoach stop to the south: Franklin Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Franklin Hotel In 1824, Gadsby bought up the Franklin Hotel, which had a reputation for hosting the most distinguished men in the nation as they visited Washington. Quickly, the Franklin Hotel became known as Gadsby's Hotel.

By 1826, Gadsby's Hotel boasted a billiard room and an extensive coach house as well as parlors, private suites, and rooms for dozens of men. Not all visitors were impressed, however; Lukas Vischer, a Swiss traveler, chronicled the following:

Since the carriage ride from the Franklin to the Capitol took forty minutes, and contained several stores under the same roof: a bank, a stage office, a wine store, and a lottery office. Two years after the grand opening – the February 22, 1827, George Washington Birthnight Ball at which President John Quincy Adams and most of his administration was present – the hotel was still under construction.

By all accounts, the hotel could accommodate several hundred people.

Jonathan Elliot praised Gadsby's individualism and perseverance as a businessman as his personal charm:

quote|Mr. Gadsby, who superintends indefatigably and courteously, possesses ample experience and peculiar skill in his profession. His spirit of enterprise, liberal system, and moderate charges, and the various conveniences and attractions which are combined in his Hotel, form very strong claims upon the patronage of travelers, and deserve to be widely made known through the press.

Retirement to Decatur House Gadsby retired in September 1836 at the age of 70, leaving the business to his son William. He bought Decatur House, one of the largest residences in DC that had a history of grand entertaining, for $12,000 at auction on October 24, 1836.

Ten slaves moved with the Gadsbys from the National Hotel to Decatur House. Two families of slaves, the Kings and the Williams, lived in the two-story structure added to the property by the Gadsbys, one of the few extant examples of urban slave quarters. In addition, an enslaved African American named Rosa Marks lived there even through emancipation, and is now buried in the family vault. Occupants of the house included John and Provey, unmarried daughter Julia, married daughter Augusta (with her husband and children), and a young cousin, Mary Augusta Bruff. In 1845, Julia married well to John Conover Ten Eyck who went on to serve as a US Senator from New Jersey.

Two sources describe Gadsby as a slave trader who had a private jail where he housed the enslaved prior to transport for resale in the lower South. Sarah E. Vedder wrote of the jail in her 1909 memoirs of a long life in the District: "This brings us to the crab apple and hawthorne hedge I have mentioned before; also to the jail, or ell, where Gadsby kept his negroes until they were sold to Georgia. It was a long, one-story brick, with windows barred with iron, and sometimes at night you could hear their howls and cries. The Gadsbys lived on the corner of H and Eighteenth streets, and kept a very large hotel on Pennsylvania avenue, near Four and a half street. It was the first-class hotel in the city. Their dwelling, on the corner, was a large, square, brick, with balconies of iron at the windows above and below."

Gadsby died on May 15, 1844, at the age of 78 and was buried in Congressional Cemetery.

His wife, Provey, died in 1858, operating Decatur House as a boarding house before her death.