Seven Stars: the tavern with the leaky roof

A name from a bad roof

In his 1889 travel guide, Kobbé describes carriage rides south from Lakewood past the old Seven Stars tavern. He says it stood on a stage route between Barnegat Bay villages and Freehold, and explains its name with a guest who counted stars through an opening above his bed. The same passage gives the nearby Alligator tavern a different, shipwreck-related name story. Read Kobbé’s guide, p. 86.

A transcription of Kobbé’s February 21, 1891 newspaper sketch repeats the roof account and calls the earlier tavern dilapidated and gone. The newspaper image has not been inspected; its author line is transcribed as “Gustav Korre,” apparently at odds with the identical passage in Kobbé’s signed book. These are two tellings by the same writer, not independent proof of how the name began.

A name still on the road in 1939

The Federal Writers’ Project’s 1939 drive down U.S. 9 identifies a remodeled inn known as Seven Stars Tavern on the west side of the road, about 40.9 miles into its tour. It calls the earlier tavern a stagecoach station and repeats the star-counting explanation. The guide establishes that a namesake roadside building was described in 1939; it does not prove the remodeled inn was the same fabric as Kobbé’s supposedly vanished tavern. Read the 1939 guide, p. 556.

The USGS New Jersey gazetteer still lists Seven Stars as a Lakewood Township populated place at 40°03′26″N, 74°13′13″W. That is the basis for the map circle. Neither guide supplies a parcel or a surviving tavern identification. Ocean County’s Seven Stars is also distinct from the historic Seven Stars Tavern near Woodstown in Salem County.

Exploring the place

Use the map to orient yourself to the former Lakewood–Toms River road landscape, not to identify a particular house as the inn. Historic road alignments and building ownership would need to be checked before making a precise claim. This marker points to a named community, not a doorway or permission to enter private property.