Adams Family Correspondence, volume 15
15. October 1803.
I presume you had not left Bristol two hours before we arrived
there— Your advice to us to stop at the Fox-Chace, we could not follow— For we should
not have known how to get forward— Neither can we go into the City, because, if we did
they would exclude us from Baltimore.— We are now at Dover’s—The Rising Sun—Close by the
Bridge—1 We shall stop here to-morrow,
and proceed on 303 Monday— We hope you will be well enough to come out
and see us tomorrow— But I write you now more particularly, to request you would engage
of Hardy, an EASY
Carriage and four horses to take us on to Baltimore—2 He must come out and take us up here, early on
Monday morning— Make the bargain as favourable to us as you can.— We must have a private
Carriage; for my wife cannot possibly travel night and day as we must do if we were to
take the Stage— And we must have four horses for we have much baggage, and are four,
besides the two children.
Do come out and see us to-morrow if you possibly can— And let us know what bargain you have made for us with Hardy.
Your’s affectionately
RC (Adams
Papers); addressed: “Thomas B. Adams Esqr / N:
113. Walnut Street. / Philadelphia.”; internal address: “Thomas B. Adams Esqr.”; endorsed: “John Q Adams Esqr: / 15 Oct. 1803 / 16th: Recd:.”
TBA’s letter has not been found, but
JQA wrote his brother from Elizabethtown, N.J., on 13 Oct. (Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History, New York) to alert him that they were delayed
in their travels. The Adamses did not venture into Philadelphia because Baltimore
officials subjected anyone arriving from Philadelphia or New York to a fifteen-day
quarantine. Skirting Philadelphia brought the Adamses into the vicinity of the Fox
Chase Inn, near the intersection of the Old York and Germantown Roads.
JQA and his family instead stayed at John Dover’s Rising Sun Inn in the
Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia, just across the Frankford Creek from
Frankford, Penn. (vol. 10:451;
Boston Gazetteer, 24 Sept.; Providence Gazette, 24 Sept.; Philadelphia Aurora
General Advertiser, 17 Sept.; D/JQA/27, 15 Oct., APM Reel 30; Townsend Ward, “The Germantown
Road and Its Associations,”
PMHB
, 5:16–18 [1881]; W. A. Newman Dorland, “The
Second Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry,”
PMHB
, 45:285–286 [1921]; 52:380 [1928];
Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, 17 June).
Joseph Hardy leased horses and carriages in Philadelphia from a
livery stable associated with his Market Street inn (Jasper Yeates, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania, 4 vols., Phila., 1817–1819, 2:347;
Philadelphia Directory
, 1803,
p. 111, Shaw-Shoemaker, No. 4858;
Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser, 12 Oct.
1804).