A Friends' cottage, a pub and the biggest shopping mall in America

It was Kathy Jordan, the striking redhead who probably did not achieve her full potential on the tennis court, whose potted biography introduced me to the township of King Of Prussia in Pennsylvania. It was where she went to school. This bit of trivia stuck in the back of the mind (was she brought up in a boozer?) until a recent argument about the German connections of the state revived it.

The resultant research was quite timely, since sometime this year the 300th anniversary of the King will be celebrated. Remarkably, it began life as a cottage, built by Welsh Quakers. (Perhaps the national museum of Wales has information about the roots of the Rees family, but that is for another day.) They clearly did not disapprove of alcoholic refreshment because it was eventually converted to a tavern.  This is what wikipedia has to say:

The original inn was constructed as a cottage in 1719 by the Welsh Quakers William and Janet Rees, founders of nearby Reesville. The cottage was converted to an inn in 1769 and was important in colonial times as it was approximately a day's travel by horse from Philadelphia. A number of settlers heading from there for Ohio would sleep at the inn for their first night on the road. In 1774 the Rees family hired James Barry (or Jimmy Berry) to run the inn, which henceforth became known as "Berry's Tavern". General George Washington first visited the tavern on Thanksgiving Day in 1777 while the Continental Army was encamped at Whitemarsh; a few weeks later Washington and the army bivouacked at nearby Valley Forge.

A map created by William Parker, a Tory sympathizer of the Kingdom of Great Britain, listed the inn as "Berry's" in 1777,^[but a local petition in 1786 identified it as the "King of Prussia". It was possibly renamed to entice German soldiers fighting in the American Revolution (including Prussians) to remain in this area; colonial generals such as Johann de Kalb and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben had many Prussians as officers. At some point a wooden signboard of the inn depicted King Frederick the Great of Prussia. The inn was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on December 23, 1975.

Since then, the township which grew up around the tavern has gone on to host the largest shopping mall in the United States, and  the headquarters of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Region I.

Footnote 1: there is a King Of Prussia hotel in Fowey, reputably so-called from the nickname of a local smuggler;

Footnote 2: Valley Forge is the name of the spacecraft in perennial Christmas favourite, Silent Running;

Footnote 3: Kathy Jordan will be sixty on 3rd December this year. I send her best wishes in advance.