Use to restore a documented Black whiskey-adjacent entrepreneur without claiming that Renfro distilled unless separate evidence establishes it.
Taverns functioned as lodging, trade, mail, news, food, horse-care, and liquor nodes; the source carefully distinguishes liquor retail from proof of distillation.
Davidson County licensed Robert Renfro, then an enslaved Black man, to sell liquor and food in 1794. He was emancipated by legislative act in 1801 and later operated a boarding house and the Cross-keys Tavern, documenting enterprise and institutional participation despite slavery and incomplete personal records.
PDF sheet 69; displayed ebook page 54
PDF sheet 65; displayed ebook page 49
Robert Renfro and early tavern enterprise
Fresh text comparison2026-09-28: PDF sheets65–69; extracted on-screen ebook labels49–54. Physical PDF-sheet locator is canonical. Full457-sheet visual layout survey completed; contact sheets are not fine-detail proof. Capture lacks endnotes, bibliography and index; this verifies representation of a secondary source, not its primary evidence.
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