Rodgers Tavern

The low stone building on the Perryville shore of the Susquehanna has been standing since seventeen fifty, though the ferry next to it goes back to sixteen ninety-five. For more than a century this was one of the most trafficked stops on the post road between Philadelphia and the southern colonies, and the guest list reads like a Revolutionary-era who's who. George Washington is recorded as stopping here about thirty times in his diaries.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Marquis de Lafayette, and General Rochambeau all passed through. Colonel John Rodgers, who ran the tavern and the ferry during the Revolution, raised the Fifth Company of the Maryland Militia here. When railroads replaced ferries in the eighteen eighties, the road quieted and the tavern was left behind, which is part of why it survives.