James Ritty’s Pony House Saloon

We recently looked at James Ritty’s invention of the cash register, before John Patterson took the enterprise to greater heights with NCR.

But Ritty also has another interesting story that connects to a present-day business. His original occupation was a saloonkeeper and he was operating the Empire Saloon at 10 S Main. St. when he started experimenting with what would become the cash register on the building’s second floor.

In 1882 he opened a new bar at 123 S. Jefferson St, which came to be known as the Pony House. Ritty’s aspirations for the new saloon were much grander than his previous establishments.

For one, he hired wood carvers from the Barney and Smith Car Works, a major Dayton rail car manufacturer that would later be decimated by the 1913 flood, to craft a bar out of 5,400 pounds of Honduras mahogany. Ornate details on the 30-foot long bar included several carved animals including an owl. The saloon was also “built so that the left and right sections looked like the interior of a passenger railcar, featuring giant mirrors set back about a foot with curved, hand-tooled leather covered elements at the top and curved bezel mirror-encrusted sections on each side.”

The Pony House was said to have welcomed some infamous guests over the years, among them Buffalo Bill Cody, John Dillinger, and boxer Jack Dempsey.

After leaving the bar business in 1895, Ritty finished out the rest of his years at his apartment in the Dayton Arcade. Despite John H. Patterson’s massive success with his original invention, the two remained on friendly terms. Ritty is buried with his wife Susan at Woodland Cemetery.

Ritty’s beautiful bar was in jeopardy when the building that had housed the Pony House was set to be demolished in 1967. The whole block was cleared out for the construction of the Crowne Plaza Hotel and Dave Hall Plaza. But fortunately the bar was saved, thanks to a painstaking effort by William Eicher of United Moving & Storage. Eicher took photographs of the bar, removed it, and then stored it so it could later be completely reassembled. And fortunately it was, with its new home becoming Jay’s Seafood restaurant in the Oregon District where you can still marvel at it today while enjoying a fine whiskey like those purveyed by Ritty many years ago.

For more about Ritty’s invention of the cash register and Patterson’s work turning it into big business with NCR, take a look at my book Lost Dayton, Ohio.

Photo courtesy of Dayton Metro Library