Colts Neck Inn

The Colts Neck Inn is a steakhouse located on County Route 537 in what is now Colts Neck Township, New Jersey. Established as the Colts Neck Tavern in 1717, the inn became known as the Colts Neck Hotel before becoming a restaurant. A separate Colts Neck Inn Hotel was incorporated in 1997.

The Colts Neck Inn claims on its commercial sign that it was established as a tavern about 1717, but documentation of the inn's actual founding date is unavailable. The tavern was a stopover for stagecoaches and messengers traveling the post road between Freehold and Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

Levi Hart (?-1775), of England, settled in the village of Colts Neck, then part of Freehold Township, New Jersey, in about 1735 and set himself up as the tavern keeper. His place became known as Hart's Tavern. (His Jewish heritage led the British to mark Colts Neck on their Battle of Monmouth map as Jewstown.) After Levi died in 1775, his widow, Catherine (Applegate) Hart, owned the tavern. She remarried in 1778 to Joshua Huddy, who became involved in local activities against Loyalists during the first years of the American Revolution. He was often in court as a defendant and at one point the Monmouth County sheriff had to intervene in a dispute in which Huddy allegedly attempted to wrest ownership of the tavern from his wife and put her and the children on the street. (Note: By September 1780, Huddy was living in a Colts Neck house that would later belong to Thomas G Haight, the father of US Congressman and New Jersey Assemblyman Charles Haight, of Freehold. This is where Colonel Tye and his band of Loyalists attempted to capture and kill Huddy.) Jacob Hart took over for his mother and ran the tavern until 1817.

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