Fraunces Tavern

Fraunces Tavern is the room where the war ended — the Pearl Street tavern where Washington said goodbye to his officers on December 4, 1783, nine days after the last British troops left American soil. Tallmadge's memoir is the only firsthand account: Washington's voice broke, he embraced each man, and 'the passions of human nature were never more tenderly agitated.' Then he walked to the ferry and went to resign his commission.

The tavern earned the farewell — Samuel Fraunces, the Black West Indian proprietor, had been the Patriots' man since before the war: the Sons of Liberty met in his rooms, the Asia fired a cannonball through his roof in '75, and in 1783 the Birch Commission met there to certify the Black Loyalists who'd earned freedom — the Book of Negroes records compiled in the same building where Washington was celebrating. The Long Room's bill for Washington's 1776 banquet survives: 78 bottles of Madeira, 30 of port, and sixteen shillings for broken glasses.

The building survived the city — it was the young republic's first office building, housing Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury while the government was in New York; Hamilton and Burr dined together there a week before the duel. When it was threatened with demolition in 1900, it became one of the first buildings saved by the preservation movement — the tavern that's a museum now, the Long Room where the war ended still the room it happened in.

Fraunces Tavern is the archive's farewell file — the 1783 goodbye in the Long Room, the Birch Commission's Book of Negroes, the first federal offices, and the building the preservationists saved before there was a preservation law.