by Phil Egan

George Durand arrived in Sarnia in 1833, driving a team of oxen with a wagon laden containing goods to provision “The Rapids’” first store. He was here before Captain Richard Vidal and the great influx of English and Scottish settlers.

A report in 1834 reveals that this early manifestation of what would later become Sarnia consisted of five log shanty houses, George Durand’s store, and a tavern run by a Mr. Allen.

Two years later, in 1836, a meeting was held chaired by Captain Vidal which changed the name of the community from The Rapids to Port Sarnia. Settlers were now coming to the area, and records show that there were now 44 taxpayers in the village, which consisted of nine frame houses, four log houses, two brick dwellings, three stores….and two taverns.

It is easy to look at these descriptions and come to the conclusion that the number of taverns seems woefully out of proportion to the size of the community. To do so, however, would be to lack an understanding of the crucial role that taverns played in the early settlement of Ontario. In fact, in Margaret McBurney and Mary Byers’ entertaining 1987 book,Tavern in the Town: Early Inns and Taverns of Ontario, they explain that the colonial government actually paid innkeepers to establish inns in some areas, such as along the road from Guelph to Goderich.

Usually a large frame structure, the early inn and tavern was more than just a place to drink. Settlers needed time to secure a plot of land, and to find lumber to construct their own shelters. The village tavern offered reasonable accommodation and affordable food at the common table until this had been accomplished.

Early travellers who journeyed the hazardous early 19th century roads of Upper Canada found the inns and taverns essential for rest and rejuvenation, and the taverns became intrinsically linked to the stage coach, ferry and steamship routes in the days before railroads ushered in the building of larger hotels.

The tavern was the village gathering place, and often the best place to get caught up with the news of the day. It was usually travellers and stage drivers who brought the news and who spread it from village inn to village inn.

Most importantly, the taverns functioned as a community meeting place in the days before a village or town was large enough to start thinking about building its own town hall. They were the venue for public meetings, political debates, sales of Crown lands, elections, and occasionally court sessions and even Sunday church services.

Allen’s and Crampton’s Taverns were the two earliest in Sarnia Another that became famous was the NNI, a name born when the sign INN was mistakenly hung upside down.

Describing the formative period of early government in Lambton County’s 100 Years: 1849-1949, Victor Lauriston sums up the critical role of the tavern with these words:

“To a degree posterity does not and cannot realize, our municipal government was tavern-born and tavern-bred.”