"Christie's Tavern"

Front inscription

Christopher Coleman, native of Va., was granted several hundred acres of land in this area in the 1760s. He and his wife Mary established a home and inn near this site, where they resided with their children and several enslaved people. In 1780, Loyalist soldiers traveling through the S.C. Backcountry during the American Revolution spent an evening at the Colemans’ inn.

Reverse inscription

A Loyalist surgeon noted in his diary that Mary Coleman was “a very warm Tory” and that the family had faced harassment for supporting the British cause. Tradition holds that the Colemans’ inn was the inspiration for “Christie’s Tavern,” a location in John P. Kennedy’s popular 1835 novel, Horse-Shoe Robinson: A Tale of the Tory Ascendancy. The house no longer stands.