SUDBURY, Mass. -- Almost every little town in New England seems to have an olde inne where Paul Revere changed horses or Abigail Adams left her spectacles. But Longfellow's Wayside Inn near Sudbury about 20 miles west of Boston is the genuine article.

It's said to be America's oldest operating inn, but ``operating'' is the key word. Aside from a 36-year hiatus at the end of the 19th century, the Wayside has offered ``food and lodging for man and beast'' since 1716, when David and Hebzibah Howe opened their two-room house to travelers on the old Boston Post Road.

The inn, just off what is now state Highway 20, occupies a stately red-frame building by a rush-fringed pond, brook and meadow full of purple clover. The ground floor has a taproom, shop and warren of dining rooms with low wood-beamed ceilings, spindle-back chairs, glass-globed candles and pictures of George Washington. Ten handsomely decorated guest rooms line an upstairs hall.

After innkeeper David Howe died in 1759. his son Ezekiel enlarged the hostelry, then known as Howe's Tavern. He led a company of militiamen to neighboring Concord on April 19, 1775, the day the shot heard 'round the world was fired, to paraphrase The Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Four generations of the family ran the inn until Lyman Howe died in 1861, and it became a sort of boarding house. It received a famous visitor the next year: poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The old place captured his imagination, inspiring his 1863 book, Tales of a Wayside Inn.

In 1923, when a later innkeeper was forced to sell, Henry Ford toured the property, fell in love with it and bought it all. The inn's menu today is a page out of a Colonial cookbook, featuring lobster pie, Boston scrod, Wellfleet oysters and Indian pudding. Sated over a big dinner, I climbed the stairs to my room with hardwood floors and a canopy bed. I looked up at the wood slats that supported the canopy. Tucked underneath one I saw a folded envelope, which I dislodged and opened. Inside, I found a gold Andrew Jackson presidential $1 coin and handwritten instructions that said, ``Please leave for someone else to find.''

Rooms start at $104; 978-443- 1776 or /www.wayside.org

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