NAP- Neighborhood Alliance of Pawtucket

Pidge Tavern

Check out the discussion and talk section for 2009

Yes, it used to be here and note some details in the talk section...very historic and rebuilt and knocked down for the Tire store on Pidge & North Main St.
George Washington would not recognize it as the tire store area...but March 2010 we may have some speakers at the OakHill meeting on the unique background and picture history too

It is believed that Sayles Tavern (also known as Pidge House or Pidge Tavern) was built in 1641 and was located on the Pawtucket Road (now North Main Street) on the current Providence/Pawtucket line. According to History of Providence County, Rhode Island, edited by Richard M. Bayles (1891), "One John Foster was the possible owner, and after him came John Morey and Philip Esten (1769) and Jeremiah Sayles. From the latter the estate passed to his daughter, who was the wife of Ira Pidge, from whom the tavern seems to have derived its permanent name, although it is also known as the Jeremiah Sayles Tavern. James S. Pidge, a son, inherited it and conducted it. The tavern is particularly famed as having been the headquarters of Lafayette in Sayles' time, being situated hard by the 'French camping grounds'." A marker at the corner of Summit Avenue and Brewster Street, which can still be seen today, marks the location of these grounds.

Sayles Tavern is mentioned, in a letter from Joseph Curwin to Simon Orne, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft, as a landmark on the way from Salem, Massachusetts, to Providence.

Pidge House was demolished in the late 1960s. When he was a boy, according to vcrail.com, Pidge descendant Charles Clegg's "family moved to Providence, RI, to Pidge House located on North Main Street. The structure contained many false walls and secret passageways that Charles spent his idle time exploring. In the late 1960s Chuck was appalled when an unsentimental Uncle had the house razed to accommodate his expanding business. When learning of this affront to his beloved childhood home, Chuck declared the act, 'a damn shame!'"