At a Crossroads: The King of Prussia Inn, 1719–2000

Before dawn on August 20, 2000, a crowd gathered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. At about 9 a.m., self-propelled jacks roared and the old stone King of Prussia Inn began, inches at a time, to move. Traveling only a few feet an hour, it crept up Route 202, over a braced culvert and onto Gulph Road — where workers soaped the jack tires so they would slide along the curb as the building turned — and on to a new site about half a mile away. The move took three days.

It was only the latest of many changes the inn had lived through.

A farm, then a tavern

The story begins in 1719, when William Rees Sr. bought 150 acres from his father, while Pennsylvania was still a British colony. Like most Pennsylvanians of the time the Reeses farmed, and their house was probably a small, two-room, story-and-a-half frame building.

His son William Rees Jr. had little interest in farming. He rented out the land and in 1769 opened a tavern, adding a large stone wing to the farmhouse. He ran it himself for only three years and died in 1776, leaving his family deep in debt. By 1770 the place was known as “the Sign of Charles Frederick Augustus, King of Prussia.” How it got the name is uncertain: stories credit Frederick the Great for helping Britain against France in the Seven Years’ War, or for supporting Washington in the Revolution, or suggest the sign was meant to draw German soldiers.

The King of Prussia area in an 1871 atlas. The inn stood where Route 202 (running across the map) crosses Gulph Road.

Legends of the Revolution

After the British captured Philadelphia in September 1777, the Continental Army spent the winter at Valley Forge, very close by, and local tradition holds that Washington and his officers ate and slept at the inn, that British officers and Loyalist spies stayed there, and that Washington led Masonic meetings in it. No document confirms any of this. The known links are humbler: the inn’s wartime manager, James Berry, was a militia officer, and William Jr.’s son Griffith Rees served as a private and was wounded in a skirmish near Darby in October 1777. A 1777 “spy map” thought to have been drawn for the British marks the inn as “Berry’s.”

A community’s center

Two years after the Revolution officially ended in 1783, the debt-ridden Reeses sold the inn and farm to John Elliot Sr., who replaced the old wooden house with a two-and-a-half-story stone addition. John and Sophia Elliot ran the inn and farm for 35 years, the peak of its life as a social center: a place of entertainment, an informal town hall and a collection point for U.S. taxes. Under their son it became the King of Prussia Hotel by the 1860s — probably a nod to the temperance movement, since “hotel” distanced it from its drinking past.

James and Madeline Hoy, who bought it after the younger Elliot died in 1868, mechanized the farm and possibly added the two-story front veranda. Madeline ran the hotel for 20 years after James died in 1886. In 1920 Anna Heist bought it and, riding America’s new love of the automobile and interest in its colonial past, made it a modest tourist attraction.

What the ground revealed

Between 1991 and 2000, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation archeologists excavated around the inn:

• Rees and Elliot years (about 1775–1860). Surprisingly few tavern items — pipe fragments or drinking mugs — turned up; most finds were household teacups, plates, bowls and jars. The Elliots used cheap wares every day and saved costly Chinese porcelain and English printed wares for special occasions, increasingly favoring blue transfer-printed china. Animal bones show beef stews alongside prime rib, beef loin, mutton and lamb.
• Hoy years (1880–1910 deposits). Nearly 900 artifacts, with far more glass bottles as glass became cheap and disposable — but oddly old ceramics, perhaps heirlooms used to give an “old-fashioned” air as the 1876 Centennial sparked a colonial revival.
• Heist years (1920–1952). More than 3,000 artifacts, including liquor bottles likely discarded after Prohibition and a collection of old-fashioned blue-and-white china, much of it Japanese porcelain — props for a homespun “colonial” atmosphere that blended the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into one timeless past.

Saved by moving

In 1952 the state bought the property to widen Route 202 for the growing Philadelphia suburbs; the automobile that had saved the inn now threatened it. It sat empty and decaying for nearly 50 years. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, it had to be considered when new road improvements were planned in the early 1990s, and after studies and public meetings the state and the Federal Highway Administration decided to investigate the site and then move the building.

The King of Prussia Chamber of Commerce at Valley Forge led a campaign to find a new site and pay for restoration, and agreed to care for the inn. The Federal Highway Administration covered 80% of the $1.6 million move. Engineers braced the 580-ton stone building with lumber, steel plates and cables, slid giant steel beams beneath it and set it on computer-controlled, rubber-tired jacks. Today the Chamber of Commerce occupies the inn at its new home.

Moving a building is a last resort. The best and cheapest way to preserve a historic building is to leave it where it stands, with its setting — which later laws and highway planning aim to do.

Sources

Based on "At a Crossroads: The King of Prussia Inn," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson, National Park Service, written by Becky Knapp and adapted from Richard M. Affleck, “At the Sign of the King of Prussia,” Byways to the Past (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, 2002); rewritten in hubnx’s own words.