Not That Kind of Bar

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010

The history of Chester County is framed by the work of Quakers and colored by the blood of revolutionaries. The history of the Chester County Courthouse is intertwined inexorably with the pungent odor of whiskey and ale.

If you don’t believe me, take some time in your busy scheduled the next time there is a trial in the courtroom on Judge Thomas G. Gavin and listen to his “jury-selection lecture” on the events that brought the courthouse to West Chester, or more correctly, Turks Head, as the village was known in the days when the United States of American was nothing more than a babe in swaddling clothes.

I had the chance to attend said lecture last week. Leave it to a judge to tell you things you didn ‘t know about as easily as rattling off a mandatory sentence for a DUI.

The connection between alcohol and jurisprudence in Chester County apparently began when Chester County spread itself all the way to the Delaware River. Those who settled in the village of Chester, or Upland as it was then known, being enterprising businesspeople, mostly Swedes, decided that it would be a good idea to put a tavern near where so many people disembarked. And once that building went up, the idea came that a proper use of the second floor would be a courtroom. So the first county courthouse got its start above where a newly arrived Brit could get a taste of home.

It is here that we get into some “nothing new under the sun” territory. A bunch of folks, led by Revolutionary War hero Col. John Hannum, decided they did not want have to travel all the way to Chester to do their court business, and wrangled a bill in the Legislature to build a new courthouse in Turks Head, where Hannum conveniently had a lot of land foe sale.

When the folks in Upland found out what the “Removalists,” as Hannum’s band was called, had done, they were incensed. Itching for a fight, as the folks in Delaware County are to this day, they loaded up a cannon and some muskets and went west to Turks Head to confront the Removalists in a decidedly non-Quaker way. According to a history of the time, they also loaded a casket of whiskey on the wagons so they could have something to do in between volleys with the Removalists. They encountered the other side at the site of the Turks Head Tavern – at what is now High and Market -- for what promised to be an epic confrontation.

So hear ye, hear ye, Chester County Peace Movement and American Sheepdog types. Your Saturday morning shout-fests at Market and High streets? Been there, done that.

The two sides mended their ways without bloodshed, however, and later Hannum was able to get a courthouse constructed across the street from the tavern, where the Historic Courthouse sits today. Hannum went a step further, however, b building an inn on a plot of land next to the court, an putting a second-floor passage way from that building to his, to make it easier for judges and lawyers to take a break from their wrangling and quench their thirst. The phrase “sober as a judge” apparently was meant as an ironic expression in those days.

Those with less spirit, so to speak, however, did away with that arrangement, and by the time that the 1846 courthouse was built, you had to walk outside to get a quaff in West Chester if you were being sued by our neighbor for horse thievery, or whatever they sued people for back in those days.

The connection between barrooms and the bar in the county died off for 100 years or so until n enterprising attorney named Fred Cadmus saw a chance to accessorize his fledgling County Lawyer restaurant and bar at Church and Market streets by taking possession of the oaken bench from Courtroom Three when it was being remodeled for use as the county law library. He put the ornately crafted bench in a room in his bar and subbed it an auxiliary courtroom. It got a lot of use, I understand.

The restaurant went under, but the bench was saved, and now Judge Edward Griffith gets to prop himself behind it as h listens to the argument over whether current or former insane killers should be loosed on the citizens of Norristown.

At least that’s the story I thought Gavin told. I could be wrong. I was thirsty.