Early American Travelers Shared Beds With Strangers and Paid in Whiskey — and That Was Completely Normal
Nobody Had a Reservation
Picture yourself traveling through colonial America in, say, 1760. You've been on horseback for eight hours, the road is mostly mud, and the nearest town is still a few miles off. When you finally arrive at a tavern — which might also be someone's home, the local courthouse, and the only place in the county to get a drink — you don't check in. You don't hand over a credit card. You walk in, announce yourself, and hope there's room.
If there was room, "room" might mean something you wouldn't recognize as such today. Early American taverns routinely packed multiple travelers into a single bed. Not a room — a bed. Sharing a sleeping space with a complete stranger wasn't considered strange or uncomfortable. It was just how it worked. You were grateful for the mattress.
This was the American hospitality system before the hospitality industry existed, and it was weirder, more resourceful, and more socially complex than almost anything we've built to replace it.
The Tavern as the Center of Everything
The colonial American tavern — also called an ordinary, an inn, or a public house depending on the region — was doing a lot of heavy lifting in early American society. It was a place to eat and sleep, yes, but it was also a post office, a courthouse, a polling location, a newspaper reading room, and frequently the site of whatever passed for local government on a given day.
George Washington slept in a lot of them. So did John Adams, who wrote extensively in his diary about the variable quality of tavern beds, meals, and company. Thomas Jefferson kept careful records of his travel expenses, including tavern bills that list items like rum, cider, and horse feed as line items alongside lodging.
The food at these establishments was whatever the host family happened to be cooking, served to everyone at a communal table at a fixed hour. You didn't order from a menu. You sat down, ate what appeared, and paid a set price — or, in rural areas and frontier communities, paid in barter. Whiskey was a legitimate form of currency in parts of early America. So was tobacco, grain, or labor.
The Unwritten Rules
For all its apparent chaos, early American tavern culture ran on a surprisingly coherent set of social norms. Hosts were legally obligated in many colonies to provide lodging to travelers — refusing a guest could result in a fine. This wasn't hospitality by choice so much as hospitality by civic duty, which created an interesting dynamic where the host might resent you but was legally required to give you a bed anyway.
Travelers, in turn, were expected to behave. Complaints about the food or accommodations were considered poor form. You ate what you got, shared what you had, and left in the morning without making a scene. The communal nature of the experience created a kind of enforced social equality — a wealthy merchant and a traveling laborer might end up in the same bed, eating the same stew, with no particular social machinery to separate them.
There were also elaborate customs around who got what. The best room — if there was more than one — went to the highest-status guest, which was determined through a combination of obvious wealth, introductions, and the host's personal judgment. Getting the good room was a social achievement. Getting stuck in the barn, which was also a legitimate lodging option, was a signal of where you stood.
The Transition Nobody Really Noticed
The modern American hotel didn't arrive all at once. It evolved slowly through the early 1800s as cities grew, commerce expanded, and the idea of a traveler having their own private room — with a door that locked — began to seem not just desirable but expected. The City Hotel in New York, opened in 1794, is often cited as one of the first purpose-built hotels in the country. The Tremont House in Boston, opened in 1829, introduced private rooms with locks and indoor plumbing, and was considered so revolutionary that people traveled specifically to see it.
Within a few decades, the shared-bed tavern system was largely gone, replaced by the industry we recognize today. But it had served its purpose — moving people across a young, road-poor, infrastructure-light country for more than 150 years through a combination of legal obligation, social custom, and the basic human willingness to make do.
Why It's Worth Thinking About
There's something genuinely clarifying about looking back at how Americans traveled before the modern hospitality apparatus existed. The shared beds and barter payments weren't signs of a primitive system — they were practical solutions to real logistical problems, held together by social norms that everyone understood even if nobody wrote them down.
Next time you're checking into a hotel room, sliding your key card, and pulling back the covers on a bed that is definitively yours alone, it's worth remembering that the whole arrangement is a fairly recent invention. And that somewhere in early America, two strangers were sharing a mattress and calling it a perfectly reasonable Tuesday.