The Danville Political Club, a debating society which existed between 1786 and 1790, frequently held its meetings at the tavern. Many members of this society went on to become prominent political leaders at the state and national levels. Eleven of the Club's thirty members would participate in at least one of the ten constitutional conventions that helped separate Kentucky from Virginia. Among the members were Kentucky's first Secretary of State (and future U.S. Senator from Louisiana), James Brown; its third governor, Christopher Greenup; chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, George Muter; federal judges Harry Innes, William McClung, and Samuel McDowell; Congressmen Willis Green, Stephen Ormsby, Thomas Speed, David Walker, and Matthew Walton; U.S. Senator John Brown; and Thomas Todd, a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The existence of the club was lost to history until Speed's grandson, Thomas Speed II, discovered extensive minutes of its meetings that his grandfather, the club secretary, had taken and stored in a desk drawer. The younger Speed later published these minutes with his own commentary about the club, in which he opined that "Full and complete biographies of some of the members would present a history of Kentucky from the beginning of its settlement past the first quarter of the ensuing century." One of the few extant references to the Club outside Speed's meeting minutes is an entry in the journal of a U.S. Army paymaster named Major Beatty; while staying overnight at Grayson's Tavern, Beatty recorded that he and his companions were "very much disturbed by a Political Club which met in the next house where we slept and kept us awake till 12 or 1 o'clock."