From the ancestry.com forum: "The picture that emerges from all this makes some sense. Cushing had served on the 30th and 31st, retreating with the others when it became necessary. Abell packed up and fled on the 31st. Moseley Abell, who was born on February 24, 1781, had moved from Bennington, VT to Buffalo in 1811 where he had kept an inn at the corner of Main and Seneca Streets. The British burned the building along with many others on December 31, 1813. Abell left, probably in a large sleigh, with his wife and three young daughters as well as any of their household goods that they could carry. Some families fled east and south toward Batavia, but Abell and others chose to go west. They crossed the Cattaraugus Creek, and, Mrs. Avery said, stopped along with other refugee families at a tavern in Silver Creek. Ordinarily, in most travelers’ accounts, stopping at an inn or tavern in that vicinity usually meant Mack’s tavern near the mouth of the creek where he had also taken over the ferry that made crossing a little less dangerous. However, because Mrs. Avery, in repeating this anecdote, which had obviously been passed down through the family, specified Silver Creek, the location was probably John Howard’s tavern that was meant. From other contemporary accounts, we can be fairly sure that the Abells took at least one day or perhaps two to reach Silver Creek, so he and his family and the other refugees would be huddled together at the inn probably on January 2nd, 1814. The Abells went on the next day, finally reaching Mayville, and that might have been the end of it. However, Moseley Abell’s father, Thomas, with another son named Thomas G. Abell, came to Fredonia from Vermont in 1814 and in May the father bought Hezekiah Barker’s inn on today’s Park Place. By the fall of 1814 he had replaced it with a larger framed building. Early in October the elder Thomas Abell died, and the property was taken over by his sons, Thomas and Moseley W. Abell. Probably because of that, Moseley and his family moved to Fredonia in early 1815."