What happened
Tun Tavern stood where Tun Alley met King Street, later Water Street, among the Delaware wharves; a tun is a cask of beer. Accounts of its building differ — 1685 or 1686 under Samuel Carpenter in some, 1693 under Joshua Carpenter in others — and the National Museum of the Marine Corps calls it the first brew house in Philadelphia, built by Joshua Carpenter in 1685. By the 1740s Thomas and Margaret Mullan had hung Peggy Mullan's Red Hot Beef Steak Club on the name. St John's Lodge No 1 met there from 1732 and the St Andrew's Society was founded there in 1747. Marines date their Corps to 10 November 1775 and toast the Tun as the room where the first recruits signed. Brigadier General Edwin Simmons, once the Corps' director of history, argued the likelier place was the Conestoga Waggon, the tavern Samuel Nicholas kept; the museum's own account divides it, putting officer business at the Conestoga and enlisted recruiting at the Tun. Fire took the building in 1781.
What is there now
Roadway. Interstate 95 was driven over the site in the 1970s, south of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and a historical marker was set on Front Street nearby in 2005. A Tun Tavern themed restaurant trades at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, and the Tun Legacy Foundation holds permits to build a reproduction on South 2nd Street in Old City — a new building a few hundred yards from the old one, not a survival of it.
Location recorded from Wikipedia.
Sources
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