The oldest bar in America is the White Horse Tavern / the '76 House / McSorley's

The claim

Ask the question in America and you will get five confident answers, all of them from establishments that really are old and all of them measuring something slightly different. Newport says 1673. Tappan, New York, appears on “oldest bar in every state” lists as 1668. Sudbury, Massachusetts says 1716. Lower Manhattan says 1762 at Fraunces Tavern and 1854 at McSorley’s.

American colonial records are, in some ways, better than English medieval ones for this purpose: tavern licences were granted by name, in named towns, in recorded years. The problem is not a shortage of documents. It is that almost none of these buildings has traded as a bar without a break, and each contender picks the test it wins.

What the records show

Newport: the oldest building

The White Horse Tavern is a clapboard house with a gambrel roof on a quiet corner of Newport, and its claim to be the oldest tavern building in the United States is widely accepted. The house was put up in 1652 by Francis Brindley, on land he got from his brother-in-law William Coddington. William Mayes bought it in 1673 and enlarged it into a tavern, and the licence is on record for 1687. The name White Horse arrives with a later owner, Jonathan Nichols, in 1730.

What it cannot claim is unbroken business. The building did service as a meeting place for the Rhode Island General Assembly, as a courthouse and as a city hall, and by the twentieth century it had declined into a boarding house. The Preservation Society of Newport County restored it from 1952, funded by the Van Bueren family, and it went on the National Register of Historic Places on 23 February 1972. So: the oldest tavern building, rescued and returned to use, rather than a bar that never shut.

Sudbury: the oldest licence still trading

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn stands on the old Boston Post Road in a house of 1686, and David Howe was granted an innkeeper’s licence there in 1716. That is a dated, named, checkable licence, which is why we grade it A where Newport grades B.

Its interruptions are equally well documented, and the inn does not hide them. Lyman Howe died without children in 1861 and the inn closed; Edward Lemon reopened it in 1897, a gap of 36 years. Henry Ford bought it in 1923 and the surrounding land in 1924. In December 1955 fire gutted the building; it was rebuilt with a Ford Foundation grant and reopened on 7 June 1958. Longfellow, who visited in 1862 and published Tales of a Wayside Inn in 1863, described “a rambling, tumble-down building, two hundred years old” — which is roughly what it is again today, in reconstructed form. It is run by a non-profit foundation.

Tappan and Manhattan

The ’76 House in Tappan carries the earliest date of all in the listicles: 1668. The deeds do not support it. Casparus Mabie bought the lot from Cornelis Myers in 1753 and built the stone house the following year, and Orange County’s supervisors are recorded meeting “at the House of Casparus Maybe, in Orange Town October the 5th Anno Domine 1756”. Historians have also set aside the local claim that the Orangetown Resolutions were signed here. The house’s own website is more modest than the lists that quote it, describing a 300-year-old structure — which is accurate. Its real distinction is 1780, when Major John André, caught carrying Benedict Arnold’s plans, was held here for several days before his execution nearby. There is an older licence in the same village, incidentally: Antie Myers was licensed to sell drink from her house in 1705.

Fraunces Tavern has the best-documented single event in American bar history. Samuel Fraunces opened the Queen’s Head in the 1719 brick house at Pearl and Broad in 1762, and George Washington took leave of his officers in the Long Room on 4 December 1783. But the building spent long stretches in other trades and was heavily reconstructed in 1904–07, so “continuously a tavern since 1762” is not a claim the fabric or the occupancy will carry.

McSorley’s is the most-loved and the most thoroughly checked. The 1854 date rests on a document in John McSorley’s own hand, written in 1904 and now at the Museum of the City of New York. Christopher Gray, writing his Streetscapes column in the New York Times in 1995, found that city records show the building was put up no earlier than 1858, that the lot was vacant in 1860–61, and that John McSorley first appears in city directories in 1862. The 2012 historic-district designation report dates the present five-storey building to about 1865. McSorley’s is widely called New York’s oldest Irish saloon, and its sawdust, ale-only bar and 1970 court-ordered admission of women are all real history. It is not from 1854.

So which is the oldest bar in America?

Choose your test and the answer follows:

• Oldest tavern building: the White Horse Tavern, Newport — a house of 1652, a tavern from 1673.
• Oldest tavern licence attached to a business still trading: Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, Sudbury — 1716.
• Oldest documented licence on the site of a working bar: Newport again, 1687.
• Longest unbroken trade: none of the colonial contenders can show it, and most can disprove it about themselves. On that test the winner is much younger: McSorley’s, trading since about 1862 and through Prohibition on near beer.

That last point is the honest headline. Wars, fires, temperance, Prohibition and plain bad business closed almost every colonial tavern at least once, and the bar with the longest continuous run is not the one with the oldest date. Our methodology explains why we grade a documented licence above a repeated founding year, and why we publish the claim and the record side by side. The rest of the field is on our page for the oldest bars in the USA, with more for New York and Massachusetts, and there is a walking route through the city’s survivors in the New York oldest bars trail.

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