On Monday, October 6, 1834, Charles Shipman and his two teenage daughters, Joanna and Betsey, left Athens, Ohio, for Philadelphia. Charles went there twice a year to buy goods for his general store. They traveled in their two-horse carriage and would not return until November 15, by which time they had been through the mountains, traveled by steamship, visited Washington and Baltimore, and met with President Andrew Jackson.
Their usual plan was to get up early, travel for a while and then stop for breakfast and dinner at an inn or tavern. Their main meal was mid-day dinner. They ate “supper” wherever they were staying for the night. They stayed at inns, hotels, and for their longest stay, in Philadelphia, at a boarding house where their meals were supplied.
The meals in taverns and inns in small towns were surely humble. Joanna kept a record of their travels, more of a log of times and distances than a diary of subjective impressions and descriptive details. It’s disappointing that she was not inclined to record much about what they ate on their travels, but there are some interesting bits.
On their fourth day of travel they stopped in Morristown OH for breakfast at 9 a.m. Joanna writes: “Found some tomato preserves on the table, at first thought they were very good, but after tasting again concluded to the contrary.” On Joanna’s initial recommendation, Betsey ate some of the preserves but later told her sister that they made her feel sick.
That evening they arrived in Wheeling – now in West Virginia, but then Virginia – and stayed in a “very good country tavern” where Joanna reported she “Ate too much supper, and that with rainy weather and miserable roads makes me feel a little homesick.”
In the journal it becomes clear that the sisters were prone to feeling homesick and anxious – about traveling through the mountains, staying in cities, meeting people, and being on steamboats. Joanna found Smithfield VA, and then Petersburg VA where they stayed overnight, depressing: “Have had the horrors all day.” Seeing a fire from their window in Philadelphia, Joanna recorded that she and Betsey were “frightened out of our wits.”
Did anything thrill the sisters on what was probably their first trip outside Ohio? Joanna certainly shows no excitement about meeting “Old Hickory,” the President, and simply records that after shaking hands, and “looking at him as long as we cared to, we left his August presence and went into the yard.”
Joanna writes with a restrained tone, yet it’s clear she has a sense of humor. The Shipmans met with various people along the way. After one of them, a man who “ogled his eyes” when he looked at the sisters, told them he planned a future visit to Ohio, Joanna writes, “So now look sharp, Miss Betsey.”
On the way to Fredericktown MD, they stayed overnight at an inn. Joanna recorded her simple breakfast the next morning as “a piece of bread, strong [i.e, rancid] butter, peach sauce and a cup of milk.”
At that point they were about to reach that part of their trip that took them to larger cities. But I feel certain that they had no interest in exploring urban dining as itemized on the 1834 bill of fare of the Adelphi Coffee House in Philadelphia [shown above]. It gives a good idea of choice dishes of that time, but since the coffee house was also a drinking place it would have been forbidden territory for this family. Charles Shipman was a dedicated temperance follower who refused to handle alcohol in his store.
Upon reaching Baltimore the next evening, they had trouble finding a hotel that was not full, but on the third try discovered a new place called Page’s that had just opened. Joanna described it as “the most splendid house my little eyes ever beheld.” They had a private parlor and meals brought to their room. But despite these positive aspects, she wrote “It nearly frightens us out of our wits to go all through [the hotel]. Betsey says she never thought she was raised in the woods to be scared at an owl, but she has found tonight that she was.”
Their 11-day stay in Philadelphia included some strange-sounding entertainments. At the Hall of Independence they viewed dogs powering cloth making, and an automaton that wrote. The next day they went to Washington Hall where they saw speaking and dancing puppets and “the exhibition of the burning of Moscow.”
Their father offered Joanna and Betsey a trip to New York City, but they turned it down, preferring to head for home.
Leaving Philadelphia they returned to Washington, beginning their journey homeward. They stayed in a large hotel, Brown’s Indian Queen Inn, but did not record anything about it. Traveling through Virginia they stopped at Warm Springs, where they were weighed so they could see how much they gained at dinner. Charles (119½), Betsey (109), and Joanna, (118½) each added from 1 to 1½ pounds to their slight frames. They stayed overnight in the springs region, eating “a real country breakfast” the next morning. Then, for dinner at White Sulphur Springs, they “were treated to some fresh pork fried, some fresh beef fried, some light bread and some milk, rather tough this, as I look at it,” recorded Joanna.
Only two days from home, they stopped at Wilson’s Hotel in Charleston for dinner. She reported “the way dinner was served was a ‘touch above the vulgar.’” I would not think that was a resounding compliment.
Joanna was more than thrilled to get back home to her mother and brother.
© Jan Whitaker, 2023
I always find it difficult to judge menus from the 19th century because our eating habits, food preferences, and food resources have changed considerably since then. It is difficult to decide whether any given menu is fine, average, or poor. The following menu was designed by a hotel steward (stewards were in charge of expenses) for a banquet in 1893. Almost certainly wines would have been served with the seven courses (which are Soup, Fish, Roast, Punch, Entree, Dessert, and Coffee).
They are so clever and, yes, so corny in a circus-y way that revolving restaurants seem like they must be a product of American ingenuity – but they aren’t. The restaurant in Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair Space Needle was not the first. Nor was it the second, third, or fourth. According to Chad Randl in A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot, the first revolving tower with a restaurant opened in 1959 in Dortmund, Germany. Sometime in 1961 came spinning restaurants in Frankfurt, Cairo, and Honolulu (pictured), in about that order.
The revolving building itself actually came earlier and was rather simple technologically. In 1898 a leading attraction in Yarmouth, a seaside resort in England, was a rotating observation tower on the beach. Decades later designer Norman Bel Geddes proposed a restaurant set atop a rotating column for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 (pictured). Unlike his, though, the design used by most restaurants features an interior ring that rotates while the building remains stationary.
Despite being fairly easy to engineer and not really all that new, in the 1960s revolving buildings became symbols of progress. Often set atop communications towers, they were intended to help defray costs of tower construction and operation. Today, whether in towers or on hotel roofs (where they look like flying saucers that have landed), they continue to represent modernity in developing countries around the world. While North America has largely stopped building them or has shut down forever their little 1-HP motors, still they spin on in Kuala Lumpur, P’yongyang, and countless other places.
For diners gazing from on high – whether upon the Pyramids, distant mountains, or, more often, streets clogged with traffic – revolving restaurants are pleasant. Who doesn’t enjoy the feeling of god-like detachment while sipping a martini and surveying a cityscape? Yet, on the whole revolving restaurants are geared more to “peak” dining occasions than to the consumption of haute cuisine. Their forgettable yet expensive food has tended not to win them steady local trade. Plus, tackiness such as found in Florida hotels with Polynesian restaurants twirling in the sky, or “Certificates of Orbit” such as once were given out at Butlin’s Revolving Restaurant in London’s post office tower (detail pictured), have branded them cheesy tourist traps in many people’s minds.
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Restaurant-ing through history 