Ida's old stagecoach tavern had a ballroom upstairs

Before cars, the way west out of Monroe ran on plank roads — boards laid over the mud so a stagecoach didn’t sink to its axles — and you paid a toll to use them. In 1856 a German immigrant named Peter Seitz built a house along the North Custer plank toll road and ran it as a tavern. Travelers bouncing through on the stage could get a bed, a meal, and a drink, and the place quickly became a gathering spot for the farmers settling the land around what’s now Ida.

The detail that sticks is the upstairs. The second floor was a ballroom. Out here in the open country between Monroe and the towns to the west, Seitz’s tavern was where people came to dance — weddings, holidays, plain Saturday nights with a fiddle going while the stage horses rested in the yard. The building did double duty as a kind of community hall; the talks that led to founding St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in 1860 got going under its roof.

The inn ran until around 1900, when the stagecoach era it served had pretty well ended, and in 1899 someone turned it back into an ordinary single-family house. It still stands on North Custer Road, west of Ida Maybee Road, with a state historical marker out front to explain why a plain farmhouse once had a dance floor on its top story.

The township around it organized in 1837, named for a local civic figure, Ida M. Taylor. But the tavern is older than the village in spirit — a relic of the muddy, plank-road decades when a roadhouse with a ballroom was the closest thing a stretch of farm country had to a town.