3 bars checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim, the oldest bar in Pennsylvania is the King George II Inn at Bristol on the Delaware, which the Pennsylvania press dates to Samuel Clift's ferry house of 1681. Clift's land grant and ferry are documented; the 1681 is the press's date and not the inn's, which prints no year, inn use is recorded from 1705, and the present building followed a fire in 1735. The best-documented continuous trade in the state belongs instead to McGillin's Olde Ale House in Philadelphia, which has every liquor licence since 1871 framed on its walls.
Pennsylvania's old taverns sit on roads, and the roads explain them. The King George II Inn stands at the foot of Bristol's Radcliffe Street where a ferry crossed the Delaware from 1681, the first practical route between Philadelphia and the Jerseys. The Jean Bonnet Tavern stands west of Bedford at the fork where the Forbes and Burd roads diverged, on the way over the Alleghenies, which is why farmers gathered there to raise a liberty pole during the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. McGillin's is the urban version of the same logic: a narrow alley off a busy street behind Philadelphia's City Hall, opened in 1860, the year Lincoln was elected. Between them the three cover the history of American drinking from ferry crossing to city bar. What none of them has is an unbroken record from its claimed founding: the Bristol restaurant closed in 2010–11, and Jean Bonnet's documented inn use begins when Bonnet bought the stone building in 1779, seventeen years after it was put up.
The King George II Inn took its royal name in 1765 and overlooks the Delaware where the ferry ran; Revolutionary-era officers are said to have lodged there, and the inn’s own history credits it as General Cadwalader’s headquarters. The Jean Bonnet Tavern is the better building of the two, a fieldstone house of about 1762 at a genuine fork in the road, with goats and a herb garden outside and a documented eighteenth-century licensee inside. Both are the kind of place where the road, not the town, made the business.
McGillin’s is the state’s strongest case for continuity and its least ancient building. Tucked into Drury Street near City Hall, hung with salvaged department-store signs and every licence it has ever held, it is a Victorian tavern that simply never stopped. That combination — modest age, unbroken trade, documents on the wall — grades better on this site than a colonial date with a gap in the middle. The national picture is at the oldest bars in the USA, the argument about the national title is in what is the oldest bar in America, and our rules are on the methodology page.
Coastlines: Natural Earth · Pub locations ©OpenStreetMap contributorsNatural Earth · ©OpenStreetMap contributors
OpenFreeMap · © OpenMapTiles · Data © OpenStreetMap contributors
Map tiles unavailable — showing the outline map.
Bristol, Pennsylvania
The 1681 belongs to the Pennsylvania press, not to the inn. The Pennsylvania Independent, on 25 July 2024, has the house opening as the Ferry House in 1681 under Samuel Clift, who ran the ferry between Bristol and New Jersey, and quotes a state tourism official who says it is the oldest bar in Pennsylvania. The inn's own pages claim America's oldest inn and tavern and print no year. Wikipedia records inn use from
Bedford, Pennsylvania
The stone building is dated about 1762 in its National Register listing, built by the Indian trader Robert Callender, who sold it in 1779 to Jean Bonnet and his wife; documented inn use begins there, and the Pennsylvania marker has Bonnet and his heirs keeping it from 1779 to 1815. A meeting of Whiskey Rebellion men here in 1794 is recorded. So the 1762 belongs to the walls and 1779 to the trade. The house is a
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Opened in 1860 by William 'Pa' McGillin as the Bell in Hand, per Wikipedia and the bar; its framed liquor licences on the wall run from 1871, and no 1860 primary record has been read. Both registers have now been searched, and neither holds the house. Within two hundred metres of 1310 Drury Street the National Register of Historic Places lists seven buildings — the Land Title Building on Chestnut Street, the
The photographs above are other people's work, used under an open licence, or in the public domain. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits.
