A group that a decade ago helped save from demolition what’s believed to be the city’s oldest commercial building — the Revolutionary War-era Old Stone Tavern in the West End — is quietly still at it and now has a plan for someone to buy it and reopen it to once again serve food and strong drink.

The nonprofit Old Stone Tavern Friends Trust will release that plan, drafted by a Carnegie Mellon University-trained architect, at its annual meeting at 1 p.m. Saturday at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s West End Branch. And the meeting is to include another dramatic reveal. 

The inn still stands at 434 Greentree Road, which, when it opened in 1782 or even earlier, was on a trail that became the Washington Pike that connected young Pittsburgh to the National Road across the young nation. The inn was a toll house that also offered sustenance, lodging, supplies and entertainment to travelers, many of them now famous or infamous figures such as John Neville, John Ormsby and John Woods, a spy during the Whiskey Rebellion.

The group knows this because Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has an original ledger from the inn that details, in looping script on leathery paper, transactions with these and many other characters. With a grant and money from the group, the library last year had the ledger restored and digitized. The library’s services administrator, Jennifer Pickle-Styran, is bringing the original to the meeting for a rare public appearance. (You also now can page through the digital version by searching “Old Stone Tavern” at https://historicpittsburgh.org.) 

The friends group’s Norene Beatty for decades lived near the tavern, which was continuously open until 2007. She spent years studying the ledger and has identified in it 109 veterans of American Revolution, 89 partisans in the Whiskey Rebellion and 16 veterans of the War of 1812. She said, “The ledger is like a Rosetta stone of the frontier” that really brings to life the history of the vacant inn, which still has its original hearths and beams.

The inn still is owned by a masonry business that will only sell it to a buyer that will buy adjacent buildings, too. She said the architect’s plan lays out how the complex could be transformed into a restaurant with a basement speakeasy (like it used to have) and perhaps a brewery and distillery out back, plus a Colonial garden.  

“So maybe people who want to have a Colonial wedding could,” she said. “You could wet your whistle in the 20th century and have dinner in the 18th century — sort of a time machine.”

The years are taking a toll not just on the inn, but also on its advocates such Mrs. Beatty, as she’s about to turn 83. That’s why the group is publicizing this report now instead of waiting for city officials. “We decided that we can’t wait,” she said. “Time is against us.”

For more, visit http://postfriendstrust.org. 

Bob Batz Jr.: bbatz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1930 and on Twitter @bobbatzjr.

First Published: May 2, 2019, 10:47 p.m.