Taverns here though served many purposes such as courtrooms, religious meetings, trading posts, inns, post offices, and convenience stores. These institutions were influential in the development of new settlements, serving as gathering spaces for the community. Taverns, along with inns, at first were mostly known as ordinaries, which were constructed throughout most of New England. Taverns in the colonies closely followed the ordinaries of the mother country. In 1900, the city of Boston, with about 200,000 adult men, counted 227,000 daily saloon customers. Probably half of the American men avoided saloons and so the average consumption for actual patrons was about half-a- gallon of beer per day, six days a week. They served mostly beer bottles were available, but most drinkers went to the taverns. ![]() Twice the density could be found in working class neighborhoods. By 1900, the 26 million American men over age 18 patronized 215,000 licensed taverns and probably 50,000 unlicensed (illegal) ones, or one per 100 men. The sheer volume of hard liquor consumption fell off, but the brewing of beer increased, and men developed customs and traditions based on how to behave at the tavern. Benjamin Franklin printed a " Drinker's Dictionary" in his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, listing some 228 slang terms used for drunkenness in Philadelphia. That total does not include the beer or hard cider, which colonists routinely drank in addition to rum, the most consumed distilled beverage available in British America. In 1770, per capita consumption was 3.7 gallons of distilled spirits per year, rising to 5.2 gallons in 1830 or approximately 1.8 one-ounce shots a day for every adult white man. ![]() As the supply of distilled spirits, especially rum, increased, and their price dropped, they became the drink of choice throughout the colonies. Colonial Americans drank a variety of distilled spirits. Taverns in North America date back to colonial America. The Vera Cruz Tavern in Vera Cruz, Pennsylvania
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