7. Breakfasted at Cheyns’s. Dind at Rogers’s & lodged at Stevensons this side Susqueha[nna].
cheyns’s: probably the tavern located about 13 miles east of Baltimore at the head of Bird River, a tributary of the Gunpowder River. It was operated for a number of years by a series of different keepers, and at one time was called the Red Lion Tavern.
John Rodgers (c.1726–1791), a Scot who came to America about 1760, opened a tavern at Susquehanna Lower Ferry, Harford County, Md., in 1774. About 1778 he moved across the river to Perryville, in Cecil County, where he ran a tavern and the ferry for several years. Rodgers was captain of a troop of Maryland militia during the Revolution and a member of the Harford County committee of correspondence. Since he was always referred to in later years as Colonel Rodgers, he probably was promoted to the higher rank sometime during the Revolution (
, 16–19).William Stephenson, a Scottish emigrant, and his wife, Rachel Barnes Stephenson, kept a hotel or tavern during the Revolution at Perryville, in Cecil County, Md., directly across the Susquehanna River from Rodgers’s establishment at Susquehanna Lower Ferry (
, 374). A traveler in 1777 called Stephenson’s and Rodgers’s the two best public houses between Philadelphia and Edenton, N.C. ( , 53).