Here are a couple of pictures of a house on Mottice Rd. outside of Waynesburg that -- maybe -- are of the building that housed Peter Mottice's tavern in the early 1800s. The photos belong to a woman who grew up there in the 1950s. Both photos were taken around that time and show her family in front of the house.
Why do we think it may have been the tavern? The age is right -- around 1810. The location is right -- 2 miles north of Waynesburg on the road where local history says the tavern was located. Other than that, we are guessing. The Stark County Library has a map of the location of the original Peter Mottice property, and some time I'll try to find the property and search for evidence. According to Stark County historian E.T. Heald, the tavern was "on [Peter's] farm which later became the property of J. Creighton Rogers."
In the meantime, here is what she says about the house: "We were very poor when I was a child living out there. My father was disabled and a lot older than my mother. Who ever owned the property at that time, (I always believed it was Spikers of what is now Spiker & Foster Funeral Home in Canton, OH) allowed us to live there for free in exchange for my father keeping an eye on things. There was some concern of people coming in and cutting all the locust trees for fence posts.
"My father died in that house on May 30, 1960. My mother and I moved out the next day. A few months later the house was torched and all that remained for a number of years was the sandstone block walls. Then they were finally carted off as well.
"It was sandstone with what I would now call stucco on the outside but most of it had fallen off. I remember that the walls were very thick, probably 1 1/2 ft thick. The house was built on a hill side so that the view in the pictures shows the front door on the upper level. But if you went downstairs the backdoor opened into the back yard. "The upstairs consisted of a living room and 2 bedrooms. The bottom floor consisted of a large kitchen and beside the kitchen was a cellar with a dirt floor (possibly a wine and food storage cellar) on the same floor. There was no electricity and no indoor plumbing. We had wood stoves, a pot bellied on the top floor and a wood cookstove on the lower level.
"My Mom carried water from a spring that came out of the hill behind the house. We had an outhouse. There was an attic. I do remember hearing that the house was 150 years back then before 1960 and I believe it sat on either 60 acres or 160 acres. Looking back on it now, I can see that it was possibly more suited for an inn or tavern than it would originally have been as a house."
