In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte and his invading French army were defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in present-day Belgium. Half a world away, in celebration, a Belgian immigrant and tavern owner renamed her establishment the Waterloo Inn.
More than two centuries later, the structure is gone. But the Waterloo name lingers near the Howard County crossroads where the bustling way station that served George Washington and Thomas Jefferson once stood. The old Waterloo Inn has lent its name to an elementary school, a fire station, a police barracks, a park and a pizza joint, several of which are located along Waterloo Road, near Jessup.
The inn dates to 1771 when one Thomas Spurrier opened a tavern for travelers at what is now the intersection of U.S. 1 and Route 175. A roadside sign, near the Holiday Inn, marks the spot.
“It was a stagecoach inn, a two-story building with dormer windows, a place to get a bite to eat and maybe stay the night,” said Grover Hinds, 80, a local historian in Ellicott City. At its peak, the tavern could stable 80 horses, who fed on oats from the owner’s farm. Washington is said to have stayed there on two dozen occasions, including the somber night of July 18, 1795, when the nation’s first president wrote in his diary: “Dined and lodged at Spurrier’s, where my sick horse died.”
When Spurrier himself passed away, surrounding acreage were bought at auction in 1811 for $20,000 by Rosie Stier Calvert, a Belgian emigre who’d fled the tumult in her homeland. Four years later, in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, she dubbed the place the Waterloo Inn and established a post office there.
“It was typical for an area to be named after a post office,” Hinds said. When the inn closed in the 1830s — as the B&O Railroad replaced the stagecoach as a means of travel — the post office moved to nearby Savage.
“By 1840, there was nothing left named Waterloo,” Hinds said. “But it has stayed in peoples’ minds. There are still vestiges of the name, for sure.”
