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A side of history with your turkey
GateHouse News Service
Fri Nov 02, 2007, 04:19 PM EDT
Sudbury -
The special scents of Thanksgiving can take you back to your childhood if you let them, prompting memories of the turkey’s aroma as your aunt or grandmother carefully removed it from the oven. But what if you could be transported back 250 years, to a time when the aide of Native Americans was fresh, and the bounty of food came from the land on which you live.
No, you don’t need a time machine…just regular transportation to Sudbury, where the Longfellow Wayside Inn offers an atmosphere rich in colonial history, and hearty meals to match.
“Thanksgiving is our absolute biggest holiday,” said Guy LeBlanc, the museum services coordinator for the Inn. “We do more business on this day than any other day of the year; some people have been coming for 50 years.”
The Wayside Inn offers 1,100 seats that day. Each year, on a Monday late in October, the Inn’s phone lines open at 7 a.m. for Thanksgiving reservations. Generally, LeBlanc said, they are sold out in one hour. This year, that day was Oct. 22.
“We’re incredibly reasonably priced,” LeBlanc said.
Thanksgiving meals are around $29.95.
It’s an amazing day at the Inn, LeBlanc said. People have high expectations of a traditional New England Thanksgiving atmosphere, and that’s what the Inn provides. From turkey to cornbread stuffing to a grist mill bread basket made from flour produced on site, the cooking is just like (or better than) home.
Because, LeBlanc said, some people call the Inn for holiday reservations on the all-important October morning and never get through, the Inn is considering a lottery system for reservations to make things more fair.
Eight out of the Inn’s 10 lodging rooms are in the $130 to $145 range. Two of the rooms still have exposed posts and beams and offer an even more colonial atmosphere; these rooms cost around $160. Rooms offer a full breakfast, a treat not offered to those not staying at the Inn.
The Inn is only closed two days a year — Fourth of July and Christmas — for the staff to spend time with their own families, LeBlanc said.
Rich in history
LeBlanc is the resident expert on the extensive history of the Inn and the property on which it sits.
It all started in the 17th century, he said, when a man named David Howe was given the 120-acre property along the old Boston Post Road in Sudbury for a wedding gift. He built a two-room house on the property, later expanding it to four bedrooms. According to LeBlanc, that was actually big enough for not only Howe, his wife, and their seven children, but for guests as well. The Howes opened an inn, the “house of entertainment” on this spot in 1716.
“It was like staying with a family, not like a hotel,” LeBlanc said. “The Inn was 20 miles east of Boston, 20 miles west of Worcester — it was a perfect stopping point.”
The Inn thrived thanks to the busy coach traffic and was passed down from father to son to son. Adam Lyman, however, had increasing problems with the Inn. With the local railway system rapidly developing, business was down. And LeBlanc said when Lyman died the business was $6,500 in debt — a very large amount of money by the standards of the 1800s. The family auctioned off the furniture to pay it, after several years of transition and another owner or two, and in 1923, then-owner Edward Rivers Lemon sold the Inn to automobile mogul Henry Ford bought it in 1923.
LeBlanc said Ford saw something in the Inn and he created a small community around it. He moved the local, one-room Redstone School to the grounds in 1925; built the Grist Mill in 1929 and the Martha-Mary Chapel in 1940; and acquired some 3,000 acres around the Inn. He also developed a trade school for boys which operated from 1928 to 1947. Many people believe he intended to build the “village site” he eventually created in his home in Dearborn, Michigan, in Sudbury. He stopped just short of that goal, but Ford did create the non-profit status the Inn operates under today. Ford was the last private owner of the Inn, and since he still lived in Michigan and only visited Sudbury a few times a year, LeBlanc said there was a room at the Inn reserved just for him.
“He was quite a VIP,” LeBlanc said. “When people heard he was coming, people scrambled here. He was a very famous man back then. So there was a draw for solitude, but also because this was a very famous man.”
LeBlanc said one reason for Ford’s interest in the Inn was his desire to provide work for local people beyond the harvest economy.
“When Ford bought it, he was really thinking of a living history museum — it was around the same time as other developing museums like Colonial Williamsburg,” LeBlanc said. “This is considered the first living history museum in the United States. It is important because of its history of colonial inn keeping, but also its literary heritage.”
A people’s poet
Of course, the full name of the Inn — Longfellow Wayside Inn” — begs a history lesson of its own. During the time Lyman Howe operated the Inn, local poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited and, like Ford, was smitten. He translated his love for the Inn into a book of poems called, “Tales of a Wayside Inn.” It was published in 1863, one year after his October 1862 visit.
“Back then, people were ravenous for Longfellow,” LeBlanc said. “He was a popular poet, a commoner’s poet.”
LeBlanc said the landlord in Longfellow’s famous poem “The Landlord’s Tale” was, in fact, Lyman Howe. In 1897, Lemon renamed the Inn the Longfellow Wayside Inn, even though, LeBlanc pointed out, what Longfellow visited wasn’t an Inn — it was a boardinghouse.
LeBlanc says the Inn hasn’t changed much since Ford’s time. It burned down in the mid-1950s, but that was actually an opportunity to restore it. When Lemon bought the Inn in the late 1890s, he made the building more Victorian. After the fire in the 50s, though, the Victorian embellishments were stripped, and the Colonial personality of Longfellow’s time was restored.
“So it hasn’t changed much at all,” LeBlanc said. “It still has creaky floors, post and beam ceilings. There are still 10 rooms available for guests.”
But most of the Inn’s business now is in the restaurant, LeBlanc said. And Thanksgiving is when it booms the loudest.
LeBlanc, who has worked at the Inn since 1993, said he never tires of appreciating how special the place is.
“In the winter, I leave here at night, and it is incredibly theatrical,” he said. “You really can’t imagine the feeling — it’s like a well-cared-for Hollywood set, but you don’t have to watch it on T.V. That never wears off.”
And while Thanksgiving is perhaps the day when the food, history and atmosphere is most celebrated, LeBlanc emphasizes that unique experience is available daily at the Wayside Inn.
“Turkey is something we always serve,” LeBlanc said. “And that experience is available here 363 days of the year — you can get that feeling almost every day.”
Visit The Longfellow Wayside Inn on line at www.wayside.org. Natalie Goodale can be reached at mothertown@cnc.com.
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