Mayer Building (1 Centre Square)

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(Photos by Richard F. Hope)

Mayer Building (1 Centre Square)

Low, 1-story building in “Art Deco” style, showing a “Mayer” logo on the corner near the roof, with 4-story building to the South with similar façade material. Now includes:

1 Centre Square, recentllyMerchants National Bank[1] (original site of Michael Hart’s store and Drinkhouse Corner)

5 Centre Square, The Standard (night club, once the Tindall Family Residence)

240 Northampton St., Drinky’s(once the “Warren Building”)

FormerlyJacob Mayer on the Square. The name “Mayer” can still be seen at the top of the cut-off corner of the present building, which was erected in 1935.[2]

The Old Stone Store

Thecorner site acquired by Jacob “Jakey” Mayer wasoccupied at that time by a very old stone house that had considerable historical significance. The propertyhad been designated Original Town Lot Nos.88 and 89 by William Parsons when Easton was founded in 1752.[3] In 1755 (three years later), it was in the possession of Andrew McFarlin, who owed “a little over” £250 to a Trenton, NJ merchant named Samuel Henry. Henry had the Sheriff (Nicholas Scull, Jr.) seize the property and sell it to pay the debt.

The purchaser was Lewis Gordon, Northampton County’s first resident lawyer, on 16 September1755.[4] Gordon was a Scottish immigrant.[5] A Gordon family tradition holds that Gordon (a native of Scotland) had been “out with the Pretender in the ‘Forty-Five’” – that is, he had joined the forces of “Bonnie Prince Charlie” Stuart in his unsuccessful rebellion against English King George II in 1745, which was crushed at the Battle of Culloden, after which the rebel clans and much of the Highlands were brutalized by a subsequent British Army occupation.[6] Historian A.D. Chidsey, Jr. rejects this tradition, because Gordon secured warrants for three land tracts in Pennsylvania dated 1 Nov. 1745, and those documents referred to him as a merchant from Philadelphia, indicating that he was already in America at the time of the Bonnie Prince’s rising.[7]

In Philadelphia, Gordon became a clerk to Richard Peters (the Secretary of the Governor’s Council in Philadelphia). Peters was instrumental in securing William Parsons’s appointment as Prothonotary of Northampton County,when Parsons founded Easton for the Penns in 1752.[8] (The Prothonotary, as the principal administrative official to the English-speaking court system in a German-speaking county, was the “most considerable personage” in the new town.[9]) Peters then sent Lewis Gordon, his clerk, to Easton “as a check on Parsons”,[10] and to be Parsons’s expected successor as Prothonotary.[11] Not surprisingly (given this relationship), “[c]onsiderable friction existed” between Gordon and Parsons.[12]

Two years after Easton was founded, the French and Indian War began. The next year – 1755, the same year he purchased the Centre Square house – Gordon accompanied the party of some 50 men who failed to save the settlement of Gnadenhütten from Indian massacre, and succeeded only in recovering their bodies. Either the Indian dangers, or his disgust with Parsons, caused Lewis Gordon to move to Bordentown by 1 April 1756.[13] He also continued his legal practice back in Easton, and attended the Easton Indian Conferences (although not in an official capacity).[14] When Parsons died in 1757, the Governor initially appointed his friend Charles Swaine as Prothonotary, but after Swaine’s departure Gordon received the Prothonotary appointment in 1759.[15] The following year (1760), Gordon obeyed orders to make a fact-finding trip in disguise among the settlers from Connecticut who were moving into the upper Delaware Valley. His report served as the basis for Pennsylvania’s petition to the King and Council,[16] an early event that presaged the Pennamite Wars that would flare intermittently in the region for the next decades.[17]

Lewis Gordon moved back to Easton in the early 1760s.[18] He became a County Justice in 1764.[19] In 1769, he went to the Wyoming Valley to arrest Connecticut settlers, in the ongoing Pennamite dispute. His principal, Thomas Penn, later complained about his hourly charges over the matter.[20] In addition to his lucrative government office and law practice, Gordon also was able to lease the profitable Easton ferry over the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. He became one of the wealthiest men in the County.[21] In 1773, he purchased Meiner’s “pretentious” house on Northampton Street.[22] At that time, Gordon leased the Centre Square property to John Murphy, a clockmaker[23] -- who in 1777 became the first signer of the oath of allegiance to the new Revolutionary government in Northampton County (administered by Robert Levers).[24] Murphy left Easton for Allentown in 1779, and became known there as the maker of valuable grandfather clocks.[25]

Lewis Gordon had a checkered career in the 1770s, first as Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety and Observation that virtually governed Northampton County early in the War, and then as a suspected Tory after he resigned from the Committee in 1776 and delayed taking the oath of allegiance to an independent Pennsylvania.[26] Gordon sold his rights to the Centre Square property to Michael Hart in 1778. Beginning in 1779 (when Murphy’s lease ran out), the stone house became Hart’s business and residence.[27] Hart also obtained an official title to the land from the Penn Family.[28] The property became popularly identified in Easton as “Michael Hart’s”, even long after Hart’s death.[29]

Michael Hart was an Indian trader, store keeper, and grist mill owner, who came to Easton in 1773 and earned enough of a living to keep a wife and 15 children, and to acquire a slave and some silverplate.[30] He originally came to rustic Easton to trade with the surrounding Indians for furs.[31] In speech, he stammered, but was sensitive about it. According to a traditional story, a country woman who came to his store and innocently asked if Hart was the “stuttering Jew” was angrily pursued from the store, and escaped “his wrath . . . only by concealing herself in a neighbor’s store till the storm was passed”.[32] Michael Hart succeeded to the role of principal Easton merchant at the end of the Revolutionary War with the decline of the fortunes of Meyer Hart – an original Easton settler and principal town merchant, who was also Jewish, although no relation to Michael Hart.[33] During the Revolution, “Meyer Hart’s and Michael Hart’s were the only stores of any account [in Easton], whose stock of goods, collectively, amounted, according to the valuation, to about $1,500; the three other shops were very trifling ones in comparison, and their united stock was not $500.”[34] Michael Hart had surpassed Meyer Hart as Easton’s largest merchant by the end of the Revolution.[35] After the Revolution, Michael Hart achieved additional prosperity by selling supplies to the flood of settlers from New England headed West to the Ohio country.[36] The Easton ferry was one of the main routes for large numbers of these immigrants.[37] Hart’s affinity with pioneers apparently extended as well to the Connecticut (“Yankee”) settlers in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, who were imprisoned in Easton in the 1780s as part of the “Pennamite Wars” controversy. Hart supplemented the prisoners’ supposedly bread-and-water diet with a gift of “solid food every Friday afternoon.”[38] He also had some political sway – it was his sponsorship that promoted Easton’s ordinance preventing pigs and horses from running through the Square.[39]

As with many houses at the time, Hart’s residence was on the second floor of his Centre Square house, while his general store was at street level.[40] Michael Hart “kept a kosher table”, acting as his own kosher meat slaughterer (shohet).[41] On 21 December 1778, he hosted General George Washington at a luncheon during Hanukkah in 1778, at his home on this site in Centre Square. Amid Hart’s explanations of the kosher food, the General mentioned an encounter with a Jewish soldier in his army the previous Christmas Night who, while lighting a menorah he kept in his knapsack, inspired the General with his optimism and his prayers for victory. Michael Hart’s family kept as mementos some silver coins presented by the General to the three young Hart boys, and the chair that the General had used at luncheon.[42]

• During the Revolutionary War, Easton’s permanent population may have been 10% Jewish, and thus was probably “more densely settled by Jews, in proportion to its total population, than any other American community . . .” at the time.[43] Five of the seven stores in Easton had Jewish owners in 1780.[44]

A glimpse at Michael Hart’s private life is given by a deposition takenby Robert Levers on November 6, 1780from Hart’sBlack slave, “Phillis”. It seems that Hart’s housekeeper, Mrs. Brills, had discovered that Phillis was pregnant, and reported the matter to her mistress, Mrs. Hart. Upon being questioned privately, Phillis had told Mrs. Hart that the baby was Michael Hart’s, who had been having “carnal knowledge of her body” for about three years behind Mrs. Hart’s back. Phillis confirmed this to Robert Levers. Mrs. Hart apparently brought the matter to Levers’s attention; it is not known what (if anything) came of it.[45] We do know that Michael Hart did register his slave “Phyllis” in 1780 under the state’s law of that year designed to gradually phase out slavery. She was 18 years old at the time -- one of a total of only 11 slaves in Easton registered in that year.[46] Hart is said to have called his slave “fillies”[47] – it is not known whether this is an intentional pun on her name indicating Hart’s view of her condition, or just simply one of the spelling variations common at the time. Hart’s wife at the time, Leah (Marks) Hart, died a few years later on 4 July 1786 (at age 32).[48] Hart evidently had a preference for young women. He had apparently married his first wife in 1773, when he was age 35 and she was 19.[49] As noted above, Phillis was about 15-18 years old during their 3-year affair in the late 1870s. After Leah Hart’s death in 1786, Michael Hart married again, this timeto 18-year-old Esther Cohen in February of the following year.[50] The Marriage Settlement required Michael Hart to place £ 400 for her use, and in 1798 he recorded a lien against his properties to secure this obligation.[51]

By the first decade of the 19th Century, Michael Hart’s warehouse “stored country produce, lumber, and hops which he bartered for almost anything a man or woman might wish: stockings, buttons, knives, hats, playing cards, iron pots, pepper, and whiskey – in hundreds of gallons.”[52] Nevertheless, in 1805 Michael Hart was forced to assign ownership of his Centre Square property to two Philadelphia merchants for the benefit of certain of his creditors[53] – although his sons Naphtali and Jacob purchased the land back again in 1811.[54] They sold the bulk of this Centre Square property to prominent businessmen Jacob Arndt and John Herster for $8,200 early in 1812;[55] later in that year, they sold off the remaining “small frame Tenement” on the eastern strip (next to what later came to be called Sitgreaves Street)to realize $2,000.[56] By that time, Michael Hart had retired from active control of the business; he moved to Belvidere, New Jersey in 1812 or ’13, and died there on 23 March 1813.[57] After his death, his three grown-up sons suffered business reverses, and his widow had insufficient cash in his estate to support his remaining minor children in “anything approaching to our elegant style of living”. His widow was forced to take in borders at her Philadelphia home to support herself and the remaining minor children. Hart had a total of fifteen children – three with Leah and a dozen with Esther – but only 9 survived their father, and at least the oldest three boys were adults by that time.[58]

• A tantalizing view of the relationship between bond servants and Michael Hart’s oldest son, Naphtali, in 1818 is provided by an advertisement in the Easton newspaper, offering a reward for the return of a runaway 17-year-old “bound servant girl”. However, the reward he offered was only one cent, and no expenses were to be paid,[59] thus presumably discouraging any effective pursuit.

The John Herster Interests

A. The Mattes Parcel at the corner. At the time they agreed to purchase the property in 1812, John Herster and Jacob Arndt had an agreement to resell the stone building at the corner of Centre Square and land fronting on the Square itself to Philip H. Mattes.[60] Unfortunately, Jacob Arndt died before any formal conveyance was made – although he did make provision for it in his will. An Act of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania was required to complete the transaction, which was finally documented in 1817. The sale price of $6266.67 was apportioned to designate $1066.67 as payment to cover the old lien for Michael Hart’s Marriage Settlement.[61]

Philip Mattes was the son of John Caspar Mattes.[62] The elder Mattes had immigrated from Germany to become the organist at the German Reformed Church, and teacher in the school buildings behind the church, from approximately 1783 until his death in 1809.[63] Philip Mattes (1785 - 1870)[64] was originally licensed as a Lutheran minister in 1807.[65] However, his career then took a more commercial turn, probably resulting from his marriage in 1809 to merchant John Herster’s niece, Catharine.[66] Due undoubtedly to his church education (and schoolmaster father), Mattes was considered a scrivener by trade in the commercial world.[67] In 1812, when John Herster and his partner purchased Michael Hart’s prime property at the SW corner of Centre Square and Northampton Street in 1812, Herster agreed to make the Hart store and residence at the corner available to Philip Mattes. That deal was formally implemented in 1817,[68] although Mattes had probably occupied the premises in fact at about the time the agreement was made. Mattes was appointed the sixth U.S. postmaster in Easton by President Madison in 1813, and he continued to hold that office for 15 years, during the terms of Presidents Monroe and John Quincy Adams. He located the post office in the eastern portion of his Centre Square building, facing Northampton Street. In 1827, he became the Cashier of the Easton branch of the Bank of Pennsylvania. He was also (at various times) the actuary of the Dime Savings Bank, and the Register of Northampton County.[69]

The Heckman Parcel. The remainder of the Centre Square property was sold for $5,325 to George Herster[70] (John Herster’s son[71]), presumably as a means of “cashing out” Jacob Arndt’s heirs. George sold half of the land facing Centre Square, just next to Philip Mattes’s corner house, to Easton industrialist Samuel Sitgreaves in 1816;[72] in 1829, Sitgreaves’s estate sold it to Jefferson K. Heckman.[73] Heckman held the property until he died,[74] and was acknowledged as a friend by his neighbor, John Herster.[75]

The Two Herster Parcels. John Herster himself reacquired the rest of the Centre Square property back from his son George.[76] Thisnow included two parcels:

• A parcel on Centre Square,[77] next to Heckman’s. John Herster had his own residence on this parcel at the time of his death.[78] Herster’s Homestead was ultimately given to his granddaughter (George Herster’s daughter), Eliza (Elizabeth) Herster, the wife of John Tindall.[79] Mary Maxwell’s 1835 water color of Centre Square reproduced below, there appeared to be a 2-1/2 story double brick house on this property, with three window bays on each side. This double house would appear to correspond to the residences of Jefferson Heckman (next to the old Michael Hart store) and John Herster.
• A parcel on Northampton Street to the West of Philip Mattes’s corner house.[80] The year after John Herster died, his estate sold this parcel to his grandson (George Herster’s son), John J. Herster. At that time, this Northampton Street parcel included a “two Story Brick Dwelling House and Kitchen”, and part of a “privy” that straddled this land and the other lot on Centre Square, which was “divided by the said John Herster to Eliza Tindall”.[81] The Northampton Street property later became the Warren Building (see below).

Schematic of Properties

(Irregular interior property boundaries omitted)

Sitgreaves / Alley (later / Sitgreaves St.)
Black’s Emporium
North-ampton / John J. Herster(later, the Warren Building)
Street / Philip Mattes (later Samuel Drinkhouse) / Jefferson Heckman / John Herster (later becoming Tindall House) / Adam Lehn
Centre / Square

Drinkhouse Corner

In 1840, Philip Mattes sold Michael Hart’s store to Samuel Drinkhouse.[82] Drinkhouse was born in Reading, PA. in 1804,[83] and was apprenticed to a hatter at age 13.[84] In 1823[85] at age 18, he left Reading with $800 to go to New York City, but stopped in Easton overnight and decided to stay. He quickly joined a local military organization that went to Philadelphia in 1824 to welcome General Lafayette on his visit to the U.S., and proudly told of that visit for the rest of his life.[86] Upon his arrival in Easton, young Drinkhouse invested his $800 in a “hat factory”[87] – becoming a partner in Charles Hinkle’s hat business.[88] “[A]s a manufacturer of hats [he] acquired a fortune”,[89]selling them “for the Philadelphia trade”, but he later concentrated on local retail selling[90] and remaining a fixture in the hat business throughout nearly all of the remainder of the Century. The corner Centre Square location was numbered 76 Northampton Street before 1874, under the street numbering scheme in effect at the time.[91] It came to be called “Drinkhouse corner”.[92] The Drinkhouse hat store’s address was assigned as 250 Northampton Street with the inauguration of the modern street numbering scheme in 1874[93] – his store had a 72’ frontage on Northampton Street, and only 26’ on Centre Square.[94] When he died in 1904, Mr. Drinkhouse was Easton’s oldest citizen, at 99 years old.[95] Before his death, beginning in 1898, Drinkhouse leased the Centre Square building tolawyer Abraham B. Howell[96] and to Jacob Mayer.[97]