Bradley Tavern (1782)

At the corner of West Morris Road and Bantam Road (4 West Morris Road), in the Bantam section of Litchfield, is a house that was once operated as a tavern. Leaming Bradley had acquired the property where the house stands in 1782. It is uncertain if the building was already standing at that time, or was erected sometime after. Leaming’s son Aaron inherited the property in 1787 and by 1797 he running a tavern and store in partnership with his son-in-law, Capt. Henry Wadsworth. Bradley & Wadsworth also had other business interests, including a forge, blacksmith’s shop, paper mill, grist mill, sawmill and distillery. In the 1820s, they also owned the house at 1062 Bantam Road. For several decades the area around the tavern was known as Bradleyville. An incident at their tavern in 1810 is said to have in part inspired Litchfield’s Congregational minister, Rev. Lyman Beecher, to write his influential “Six Sermons on Intemperance.” As described in The History of the Town of Litchfield, Connecticut 1720-1920 (1920)

A temperate man himself, Lyman Beecher had never been an advocate of total abstinence. “Two leading members of his own church”, says Miss Esther H. Thompson, Waterbury American, February 22, 1906, “Capt. Wadsworth and Deacon Bradley, kept a tavern and a grocery store in Bantam, where fermented and distilled liquors flowed freely as was then the universal custom in such places. Unseemly carousals were common, in one of which there was a battle wherein salted codflsh figured as weapon, adding thereby no dignity to the church, and deeply grieving the wife of Capt. Wadsworth, who was the sister of Deacon Bradley. She was a woman of superior intellect, deep piety, and early became a believer in total abstinence. It is said that her influence was potent in arousing Dr. Beecher to see and to preach against the evil of intemperance.

Aaron Bradley was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a deacon of the Congregational Church and served terms as town selectman and in the state assembly. In 1830, he sold the property to another son-in-law, William Coe, who expanded the mercantile business in partnership with his brother-in-law under the name Kilborn & Coe (the company continued until 1883). In the 1850s, the tavern was known as William Coe’s Hotel.