Jean Bonnet Tavern
Pennsylvania
Just off the Lincoln Highway sits the Jean Bonnet Tavern, built around seventeen sixty-two at the fork where Forbes Road meets the road south to Maryland. Robert Callender, a British Army commissary and later a scout for George Washington, put up the stone building as an inn for soldiers and traders heading toward Fort Duquesne. Jean Bonnet, a French immigrant, bought it in seventeen seventy-nine and gave it his name.
The tavern hosted Whiskey Rebellion meetings in seventeen ninety-four, when western Pennsylvania farmers gathered here to rage against the federal excise on spirits. Stagecoaches pulled in for two more centuries. Today it still operates as a tavern and inn, making it one of the oldest continuously used tavern buildings in Pennsylvania.
