MTM: The Sun Inn at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

While I was in Bethlehem with family for the amazing Musikfest (deserving of its own post), I stopped into the main streets' historic Sun Inn. A group of Moravian missionaries founded the community of Bethlehem in 1741. The Moravians were a Protestant church formed in the 14th century in what is now the Czech Republic. Sometimes also called the Bohemian Brethren, they established a thriving economy of skilled craftspeople, attracting customers from Philadelphia, and known, therefore, to the people who would become critical to the movement for American Independence. The Sun Inn was built for these well-heeled visitors in 1758, and was one of the finest of its day.

The Gast-stube or "gathering place" was the room where guests relaxed and waited for the stage coaches. There are high back chairs in front of the fireplace which reproduce the original Lafayette chair (now in a museum) where General Marquis de Lafayette ate the inn's special rice cakes and recovered from a leg wound received in the Continental Army's 1777 nearby defeat at the Battle of Brandywine.

Not a walk-in closet, this is a walk-in fireplace. Clothing would occasionally catch on fire as cooks pulled hot coals from one fire to create other, smaller fires, each with their own trivets and pans cooking away. The original kitchen also had a butcher area in the back, and the Moravians designed a pumping system with hollowed logs to provide fresh, spring water to the community. This was one of the first such equipped inns in the country, and perhaps strangely, during the year of this modernizing in 1762, they were also adding shutters to the windows to protect from Indian attacks.

I liked the interesting design of this banister leading upstairs. Now blocked off, there were originally suites, each with two bedrooms and a sitting room. Not even Williamsburg had such generous accommodations. However, for more budget-conscious guests, there was the third floor option. Four large rooms each held four beds, and each bed slept four people, for a potential total of 56 people laid out upstairs, all sleeping head-to-foot.

The Sun Inn was twice the size of the Continental Hospital, so there's an impressive list of Revolutionary War guests recuperating and strategizing, including General George Washington and other military leaders, as well as Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and seven other signers of the Declaration of Independence.

When the Sun Inn brags that "Washington slept here", for once, it's no shinola.

UPDATE: It's like some kind of mental block. I always forget to put the master My Town Monday link at first. Go read more!