Spurrier's Tavern: Washington's Crossroads Rest Stop

The road between Baltimore and Washington has always mattered. In seventeen seventy-one, at the point where the main routes linking Baltimore, Washington, and Annapolis crossed near what is now Jessup, Maryland, a man named William Spurrier opened a tavern. He had no way of knowing it would become one of the most important waypoints on the Eastern Seaboard for the next sixty years.

Spurrier's Tavern sat on a large farm where the Philadelphia-to-Georgetown post road met connecting routes to Annapolis. During the Revolutionary War it was a busy stop for travelers and soldiers. George Washington stopped here regularly on his travels between Mount Vernon and Philadelphia, and the tavern became a recognized address on the colonial road network.

As the new republic took shape and traffic between the capital cities intensified, the tavern transformed into the region's premier horse-changing station for southbound stagecoaches leaving Baltimore. By eighteen eleven, the stable could board eighty horses at a time, a figure that speaks to the volume of coach traffic rattling down the road toward Washington.

After the Napoleonic Wars ended in eighteen fifteen, a Belgian-born owner named Rosalie Stiers Calvert, wife of the owner of the nearby Riversdale estate, renamed the tavern Waterloo in honor of Napoleon's defeat. It was one of the more cosmopolitan gestures in the colonial Maryland landscape.

The end came from two directions at once. Fire damaged the building in eighteen thirty-five, and at almost exactly the same moment, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened its line through the region, draining passengers from the road coaches entirely. No coach trade, no need for the tavern. The building did not survive, but the surrounding area still carries the Spurrier name today, a small echo of the crossroads inn that once fed Washington his supper.