When stagecoaches carried the mail along Maine’s post roads, there were numerous way stations and taverns where fresh horses could be hitched up for the next leg of the journey. There, passengers could find some welcome rest and refreshment.

In one of my columns a few years ago, I recounted stories of Tom Longley, a young stagecoach driver from Greene. In “History of Androscoggin County, Maine,” published in 1891, Longley was described as “the beau ideal of a dashing driver, courteous and obliging, tall and commanding in experience,” and, it continues, “he had a wonderful memory, and it is said that in the many errands entrusted to him he never made a memorandum and never forgot the smallest detail.”

Furthermore, that old history reveals, “He was a marvelous storyteller and the aroma of his narrations yet lingers in the atmosphere of places along his route.”

Littlefield’s Tavern in Danville was one of the places where Longley would regale travelers with his colorful tales. The tavern was well-known throughout the state, and a Lewiston Saturday Journal story printed Nov. 18, 1893, painted an exceptional picture of that establishment. It was written by Holman Day, Auburn’s famous poet, novelist and pioneering filmmaker.

Day’s written images are vivid and evocative of a bygone era.

He said, “the bare mention of the name (Littlefield’s Tavern) would have told the whole story; would have called up a big house with lots of yard for elbow room, a long string of outbuildings and a stable with rows of stalls and gnawed provender boxes.” He described a weary traveler arriving “as his horses’ hoofs rattled upon the bridge that spanned the Little Androscoggin, or as he topped the gentle hill to the north.”

Day wrote, “Littlefield’s tavern was one of the most famous of the old-time roadhouses of Maine and once was Auburn’s ornament. To the old travelers, the name suggested as much as does, the Falmouth, the Quincy or the Astor to the modern drummer.”

It was a visit with J.B. Emerton, owner of the building in 1893, in which Day heard about the former tavern’s heyday. It was here that the two Farmington stages, the Augusta stages and the Buckfield stages met, exchanged passengers and mails and “passengers stretched their legs under Squire Littlefield’s tables.”

The squire “was such a man as you read about in the old books and see in the old pictures,” Day said. “He weighed over three hundred pounds, and when he met the guest at his gates and shook him by the hand, the guest wasn’t apt to feel misgivings regarding the coming meal. Would you?”

The kitchen was in a brick addition that extended south. It was 35 feet long and paved with brick.

“In the towering brick oven were baked the beans and brown-bread and roasted the juicy meats and the turkeys that braced the guests for another humpity-bumpity siege on the stagecoach.”

In his visit with Day, Emerton showed where the tavern’s bar had been located. It was a maple plank three-and-a-half inches thick and fashioned triangularly to fit into a corner of the large room.

In the room directly over the bulkhead, all the mails were changed as the stages waited. The post office at the tavern was called “Auburn” at that time. What is now the city of Auburn was called “Goff’s Corner,” Day explained.

And speaking of that bulkhead, Emerton told Day, “I’ve seen rum enough rolled down through that cellar way to float you from here to Portland.”

Squire Littlefield lived there until his death about 1880.

Day called Littlefield’s “a monument to the breezy, yet tedious days of stage-coaching.”

The locomotive came into Auburn and Lewiston in 1850, and Day said, “Littlefield’s awoke one morning to find the bustle, the blithe banquets and the business gone forever.”

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by email at [email protected].