Fort Hunter Park - Part 2

As I promised in Part 1, here's the tavern house, seen from the front.  It was built around 1800 for Archibald McAllister, who at the time owned the land which is now Fort Hunter Park.  It was used to accommodate overnight travelers, as a community center for local farmers, and to sell McAllister's brandies and whiskies.  The detached structure on the right was a smokehouse for meats.  Between it and the main portion of the tavern house is a former kitchen that includes a single chimney.

As seen in this photo from its back yard, part of the tavern house was built with stone.  You can see how the former kitchen, now toward the left, was attached to the rest of the tavern house.  A large tree hides the space between the former kitchen and the smokehouse.

In the back yard of the tavern house is the spring house, which was used to cool milk from the farm's dairy, and may have housed a distillery.  Part of the centennial barn, as seen in Part 1, is in the background on the left.

Everything shown so far here and in Part 1 is on the east side of Front Street, which runs along the Susquehanna River through the modern community of Fort Hunter.  On the street's west side, closer to the river, is the mansion where McAllister and later owners lived.  The mansion started out as a "cabin" built in 1786.  McAllister added the front part, seen in the next photo, in 1814.  Later owner Daniel Dick Boas added a wooden section onto the back in 1870.  The house is believed to have been built at least partially over a blockhouse in the original Fort Hunter.

Behind the mansion are this former dairy, in which butter was produced, and an adjacent bell.

Also behind the mansion is a former ice house, built into the side of a hill near Fishing Creek, just upstream from where it empties into the Susquehanna.  You can see a bit of Front Street to the right.

Finally, this memorial to the property's most recent private owner Margaret Wister Meigs is located in front of the mansion and faces it.

This concludes my visit to Fort Hunter Park.  For more on Margaret Wister Meigs, go to ScholarSphere.  For more on the mansion, go to Are We There Yet?