The old hotel—­now a very unsavory tenement-house—­was built by John Tavers, innkeeper, in 1770, who planted in front of the door a tall post, from which swung the sign of the Earl of Halifax.  Stavers had previously kept an inn of the same name on Queen, now State Street.

It is a square three-story building, shabby and dejected, giving no hint of the really important historical associations that cluster about it.  At the time of its erection it was no doubt considered a rather grand structure, for buildings of three stories were rare in Portsmouth.  Even in 1798, of the six hundred and twenty-six dwelling houses of which the town boasted, eighty-six were of one story, five hundred and twenty-four were of two stories, and only sixteen of three stories.  The Stavers inn has the regulation gambrel roof, but is lacking in those wood ornaments which are usually seen over the doors and windows of the more prominent houses of that epoch.  It was, however, the hotel of the period.

That same worn doorstep upon which Mr. O’Shaughnessy now stretches himself of a summer afternoon, with a short clay pipe stuck between his lips, and his hat crushed down on his brows, revolving the sad vicissitude of things—­that same doorstep has been pressed by the feet of generals and marquises and grave dignitaries upon whom depended the destiny of the States—­officers in gold lace and scarlet cloth, and high-heeled belles in patch, powder, and paduasoy.  At this door the Flying Stage Coach, which crept from Boston, once a week set down its load of passengers—­and distinguished passengers they often were.  Most of the chief celebrities of the land, before and after the secession of the colonies, were the guests of Master Stavers, at the sign of the Earl of Halifax.

While the storm was brewing between the colonies and the mother country, it was in a back room of the tavern that the adherents of the crown met to discuss matters.  The landlord himself was a amateur loyalist, and when the full cloud was on the eve of breaking he had an early intimation of the coming tornado.  The Sons of Liberty had long watched with sullen eyes the secret sessions of the Tories in Master Stavers’s tavern, and one morning the patriots quietly began cutting down the post which supported the obnoxious emblem.  Mr. Stavers, who seems not to have been belligerent himself, but the cause of belligerence in others, sent out his black slave with orders to stop proceedings.  The negro, who was armed with an axe, struck but a single blow and disappeared.  This blow fell upon the head of Mark Noble; it did not kill him, but left him an insane man till the day of his death, forty years afterward.  A furious mob at once collected, and made an attack on the tavern, bursting in the doors and shattering every pane of glass in the windows.  It was only through the intervention of Captain John Langdon, a warm and popular patriot, that the hotel was saved from destruction.