Greycourt Inn
page 3
The wedding-feast at the Cromline cabin absorbed the talk for weeks for the entire settlement; a slab table, made like a bench, without a spread of any kind, was loaded down with refreshments. These were of a plain but substantial sort. There was the toothsome and tender venison done up in pot-roasts and tempting steaks; there was the succulent and juicy wild-turkey, hot and steaming, and served up in a dish of its own gravy; there was the rich and tempting corn, grown in the natural meadows on the “drowned lands,” and made into pone, which served in lieu of wedding-cake, while metheglin was the principal beverage that washed them down. The plates on which the repast was served varied in size and pattern, some being of pewter, but more of wood; their knives were mainly butcher knives, while their forks were sharpened sticks. A dance closed the festivities, and all made merry to the sound of the fiddle. All the hunters and frontiersmen for miles around were required to make up the party. The men in deerskin breeches and rakish coon-skin caps, and the backwoods belles in garb scarcely less primitive, showed to good advantage as jigs, four-hand reels and double-shuffles were executed in true frontier style-for your sedate and spiritless modern cotillion was to them a thing unknown. The old log house still stands, almost within sound of the stir and bustle of Goshen, where this couple first set up housekeeping, and their numerous descendants to-day are among the most prosperous and influential of the valley. The annual gathering of the Bull family is now a firmly established institution.
The Cromline log mansion, after this event, speedily acquired a celebrity in border parlance. It was located on the route leading from New Windsor to New Jersey; its owner, with an eye to the main chance, entertained travelers between those points, and it soon grew to a popular inn, and a place of resort for all classes. As was meet for all inns of standing and pretension, it was in due time graced with a sign, in front. This was of an oval shape, painted and decorated on either side, and suspended by hinges from a cross-piece on the top of a pole some twenty feet high that stood apart from the building. On one side of this sign, out of customary deference to the King-for this was before the Revolution-was painted the arms of royalty; on the other, in gaudy colors, was represented a goose, because of the proximity of Goose Pond swamp. That old house was privileged to behold many a jovial revel, of a different sort from the wedding-feast of Mr. and Mrs. William Bull. During the wild days of Indian warfare many a redskin passed beneath the sign of the Old Goose for his drink of fire-water. And during the trying times of the Revolutionary struggle, it was the resort of Whigs, Tories, Cowboys, and marauders of every sort, who needed the stimulus of brandy to nerve them to their work. That house stood for 116 years; when decay and the march of improvement consigned it, notwithstanding all its associations, to the doom of demolition.
During the War of Independence, the sign with its opprobrious English coat-of-arms*, came to be the butt of endless jokes and gibes. But the landlord did not choose to abate the nuisance. The painting finally became weather-beaten; the gaudy colors faded; the coat-of-arms turned to an uncertain grey, and was derisively dubbed “Grey Coat.” This was gradually metamorphosed into “Greycourt' + a name which the locality still retains.
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*A crown-stone had been obtained from England at a great outlay for the "old jail" at Goshen. But such was the feeling against everything that savored of Great Britain that Gabriel Wisner, with the approval of the people, demolished the offending crown-stone with a hammer.
Gabriel Wisner, with the approval of the people, demolished the offending crown-stone with a hammer.+It may interest the reader to trace the transition from primitive "Duck Cedar" into classic "Tuxedo."
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