Travels of a 1790 Beer Stein
In August 2022, the Egremont Archives was truly excited to receive a donation to our collection from John and Helenka Frost by way of Indian Wells, California. This item is an unassuming beer stein stan standing six inches high is made of clear glass with floral etching and a has a pewter lid with a date stamp of 1790. Where it gets exciting to us is that the original owner of this stein was Francis Hare.
Francis Hare was born in Ireland in 1746 and moved to Egremont as a young man. Around 1780, when he married Mary Karner, Francis was deeded land by her father Nickolas and built the Francis Hare Tavern. A few years after it opened, the tavern played a small part in Shays’ Rebellion. The last battle between the rebels and local militia lead by Col. John Ashley took place in Sheffield just South of Egremont and the wounded were taken up the road to the tavern. In 1801, the 12th Massachusetts Turnpike was constructed nearby and the building was moved about 100’ and expanded into a stagecoach stop. Francis continued to operate the tavern – no doubt using the very beer stein - until his death when the building passed into the possession of his son Levi Hare. Levi later sold it to 1819 to William and Jerome Hollenbeck. The building continued to operate as a tavern and later a summer hotel for the next 120 years eventually known as the Egremont Inn which sadly was destroyed by fire in 2009.
But back to the story of the beer stein. Levi Hare not only inherited the tavern upon Francis’s death, but also the stein. Levi Hare married Rhoda Curtis and had five children, one of which was named Levi. As a young man Levi often visited Stockbridge, and there he met and married Henrietta Maria Hunt. The following is from and email we received from John Frost relaying the rest of the stein’s travels:
“Levi, Henrietta, and their children (accompanied by the beer stein) set out for California in the late 1850’s. Following a couple of years in Dixon, Illinois, they established themselves in San Jose, California. One of their sons opened a bookstore there, married Julia Harrington, who had come to California from Cooperstown, and their son, Lou G. Hare is my grandfather. He led a very eventful life, working on construction of the trans-Canada railroad, dynamiting cliffs at Kamloops Lake with the Chinese and going off on a gold-rush, running a saloon while doing so and defriending a couple of wild Chinook women and learning their language. This was while he was a teen-ager. Later he became the first county surveyor of Monterey County, California. He lived around the corner from the Steinbeck’s, and our family has been intertwined with theirs for three generations. Lou Hare’s diaries are at Yale’s Beinecke Library. He passed the beer stein down to my mother, who died at one hundred years of age in 2000, and it was passed to me.”
After almost 250 years of adventure, the stein has returned home to Egremont. We look forward to delving more into the history of the Hare family in Egremont and the origins of the stein - where was it made and purchased? We are excited to find out more!