RVA Legends — Goddin’s Tavern

AKA, Baker’s Tavern
821 Brook Avenue
Built, cira 1791
Demolished, 1912

The most interesting building ever located on Brook Avenue was Baker’s Tavern, better known as Goddin’s Tavern, built by Martin Baker in the late eighteenth century. Since the Swan and the St. Claire had been altered and only insurance policies record the appearance of the Eagle, Mr. Lancaster’s excellent photograph gives us our best idea of the primitive inns of early Richmond. Behind this building was another; both were of brick. In the courtyard was a spring of delicious water, shaded by large sycamores.

(VHS) Plan of the City of Richmond, Micah Bates, 1835

Mordecai gives a lively if brief account of the life there when it was the first stopping point in town of the early drovers. Baker died in 1821. His sons had all moved away from Richmond, and in 1835 they divided the twenty-five acres that had surrounded the tavern into lots, and sold the tavern itself with a two-hundred-foot frontage to Captain John Goddin, who ran it for two decades.

February 2015

During the ’sixties it belonged to a Roman Catholic order, and was run as the hospital of St. Francis de Sales during the Civil War. Here Mrs. Patterson Allan, northern daughter-in-law of John Allan, was imprisoned when she was accused of traffic with the enemy. In 1883 Thomas F. Hannigan bought the old tavern and for a decade ran it as a saloon. [ORN]

The original location is unrecognizable today, vanished amidst the transformation of Brook Avenue into Brook Road, and now covered by the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike.

Sources

• [ORN]. Old Richmond Neighborhoods. Mary Wingfield Scott.
• (Virginia Historical Society). Map of the City of Richmond. Micah Bates. 1835.

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