John Adams, Samuel Adams, and George Washington all passed through the front door of the Square House on the old Boston Post Road.
While this cedar-shingled landmark is framed as a textbook Revolutionary War respite, beneath its lore lies a politically fractured community that endured brutal, localized civil unrest.
Opened around 1760, the site achieved colonial prominence by 1770 as “Haviland’s of Rye,” run by physician and town supervisor Dr. Ebenezer Haviland and his wife, Tamar. The physical layout still preserves that era’s atmosphere.
According to Pamela McGuire, co-chair of the Revolutionary Rye 250 Committee and a volunteer for the Rye Historical Society, “the way the Square House is set up now, you come in the front door and to the left is the tavern room with small tables.” There, patrons read papers and quenched their thirst.
“They drank beer in lieu of drinking contaminated water,” McGuire noted. “Beer was definitely the drink of choice.”
As locals and guests gathered, the conversations soon reflected a deeply polarized community. In 1773, Rye was a “small agrarian community of 2,400 people, the vast majority of whom fiercely favored the British Crown and the status quo,” said Lear Beyer, who serves on both the Rye Historical Society board and the Revolutionary Rye 250 Committee. Historical testimonies say there were “not more than eight to ten Whigs [patriots] to one hundred and twenty Tories.”
Traditional accounts often highlight the meeting of Aug. 10, 1774, to illustrate this defiance. McGuire noted that it was on that August night that five local delegates — Dr. Ebenezer Haviland, John Thomas, Robert Bloomer, James Horton Jr., and Zeno Carpenter — gathered to draft resolutions declaring alarm over British taxation and the closing of Boston Harbor. Those declarations, McGuire added, were not a local anomaly, but rather part of a coordinated effort by those looking to limit British control across the region.
“The resolutions are virtually identical to the ones that were being adopted all up and down the East Coast by other communities,” she said. McGuire called the meeting a “pretty revolutionary act” because it provided a structured undercurrent of dissent for the town’s Whig minority.
The bitter internal division of the town was mirrored directly within the committee itself. While Haviland, Thomas, and Bloomer operated as patriots, the remaining two delegates, Horton and Carpenter, ultimately sided with the loyalist cause. According to Beyer, that wartime alignment resulted in the state confiscating the two loyalists’ estates after the war.
Once the armed conflict began, Dr. Haviland deployed as a Continental Army surgeon in August 1775. During the Revolution, Rye plunged into years of lawlessness. The region became a wasteland, terrorized by “roving bands of violent gangs” who plundered local farms, forcing families, including Tamar and her children, to flee to Connecticut as refugees, McGuire said. Nearby loyalist institutions like Rye’s Anglican Grace Church, were burned to the ground, yet the Square House survived in part because of Tamar’s eventual defiance.
Dr. Haviland did not survive to see the end of the war, dying on June 28, 1781. Now a widow, Tamar returned to find the Square House occupied by her loyalist uncle. At the time, the legal doctrine of “coverture” placed married women in a position of “almost total dependency,” historian Marylynn Salmon noted in “The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830.” An exception, however, granted widows the status of “women alone” (femes soles), restoring their right to act as executors.
Using her prominent family’s clout and her legal status, Tamar successfully filed court papers to reclaim the business. Her subsequent management was so impressive that President Washington specifically wrote in his diary of his 1789 stay at “the tavern of a Mrs. Haviland… who keeps a very neat and decent Inn.”
When nominating the building for the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s, the Rye Historical Society bypassed the names of the male founders, choosing instead a title immortalized by its most famous guests: “Widow Haviland’s Tavern.”
Responding to a request for clarification from the National Park Service on Feb. 4, 1974, a state research assistant noted that because the building’s original origins were uncertain, the society put forward Tamar’s name as the one “most commonly associated with the structure due to references in Washington’s and Adams’ journals during a period when the site prospered as an inn.” That official recognition permanently anchored Tamar Haviland’s legacy to the physical framework of American history.
McGuire said “the heart of the community was literally ripped out” by the conflict. Even as the surrounding social fabric tore apart, the physical structure on the Boston Post Road refused to fall.
The endurance of the Square House stands as a dual testament to the Revolutionary icons who forged ahead amid profound uncertainty and the extraordinary resilience of Tamar Haviland, a mother and patriot, navigating the violent inception of a republic, 250 years ago.
