What happened
The Jameson Tavern stands on Main Street in Freeport, a white clapboard house finished in 1779, and it is known as the birthplace of Maine. The story is that in 1820 the commissioners of Massachusetts and Maine met upstairs, in the north-eastern corner of the second floor, and signed the papers that separated the two states. It is on the sign, and it is the reason anyone outside Freeport has heard of the building. The Freeport Historical Society has looked and found no record that the commissioners ever met in the town at all, which leaves a genuinely eighteenth-century house carrying a nineteenth-century story nobody can produce. The tavern traded for 245 years and closed in November 2024, its owner citing the cost of staff and rent and saying he would take the name inland to Windham. What is unusual is what happened next: the building did not go dark.
What is there now
Still serving, under other names. A beer and wine shop took the former dining room in 2023, a Mexican restaurant occupies part of the main building, and in 2025 the King’s Head, a sister of the Portland pub, opened in the old tavern space. The house of 1779 is a pub again; the business that ran it for 245 years is not.
Sources
- pressherald.com
- Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
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