I don’t know how I found this info, but one day I did.
The Founding Fathers knew how to party.
The City Tavern in Philly was open back then and still is today.
There is a famous bar tab that surfaced from those days at that bar.
Several websites tell close versions of the same tale. Here’s one:
“As an example of Party Time During the Colonial Period. The year was 1787. The banquet was in honor of General George Washington [and the signers of the Constitution who had just finished that job after being nailed into their final meeting hall for a hot summer]. The place was Philadelphia’s City Tavern. It was a wild party — political types and men dressed in wigs. In total, 55 revelers were there. And this is what they drank: Fifty-four bottles of Madeira; 60 bottles of claret; 8 bottles of old stock; 22 bottles of porter; 8 bottles of hard cider; 12 bottles of beer; and 7 large bowls of punch.” Another site adds: “the 16 musicians played their way through 7 more bowls of punch, 5 Madeira and 16 bottles of claret.”
Here’s a tale from another site:
“Our Founding Fathers also had the taste for the grape and the hop. When Thomas Jefferson was summoned to Annapolis in 1783 to arrange lodging for Gen. George Washington [and] to find a party site for more than 200 dignitaries. Mann’s Tavern was a well-known watering hole, and Jefferson was careful to select good wine for the 13 toasts the general would eventually receive.
“The wine must have been pretty good. The bar tab was $644. No American president has taken as much interest in wine as Thomas Jefferson. Though many presidents, such as Richard Nixon, developed a discriminating taste for wine, only Jefferson made it an educational endeavor. Traveling extensively through Europe, he discovered wines whose labels are still known to collectors today.”
I note that $644 is equal to $15K today by the CPI, but it’s equal to $250K in unskilled wages. That is, back then $650 was perhaps a lifetime’s income for an unskilled worker.
Here are a couple of the websites (the ones I quote) where I found this info:
www.dui.com/dui-library/studies/research/american
