The year was 1912. William Howard Taft was president, and New Mexico and Arizona became the 47th and 48th states. The British steamer Titanic sank in the North Atlantic. There was no federal income tax. And in September of that year, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the Borough of Dublin was born. If the group of freeholders who petitioned the courts for incorporation as a borough were to return today, they would probably recognize very little of the Dublin they once knew.But that's getting ahead of the story, because although the history of Dublin Borough goes back just 75 years, the makings of the town took root many, many years before. As early as 1681 speculators (we might call them developers today) held land in the area and were in the business of selling off small lots of as few as two acres each along Swamp Road (Dublin Pike). This practice eventually led to the development of a village that would become the largest of several such villages in Bedminster Township.

Even back then the settlers, many of them of Scotch-Irish descent, seemed to have their priorities in order. In the early 1760s, the first log tavern was erected at the village's main crossroads by Robert Robinson on the site of the present Dublin Inn. Robinson was a farmer whose 75 acres represented one of the larger farms in the vicinity. He later served as a captain in the Bedminster Militia that fought in the American Revolution. A lot of people believe that Robinson's tavern figured prominently in the naming of Dublin. The story has it that after Robinson built his tavern, a second tavern was erected next to the first by a competitor. Later, the two establishments came under single ownership and the two buildings were joined, making a "double inn." Thus, the village gradually came to be called Double Inn and then Dublin - or so the tale is told. However, more than one historian dismisses the "double inn" legend as pure fiction. In "Place Names in Bucks County, Pennsylvania," author George MacReynolds says records show that "the village was never called Double Inn" and that even the existence of the so-called double tavern was merely the product of someone's vivid imagination. Pauline Cassel, in her "History of Bedminster, Bucks County, Pennsylvania", calls the double inn story a myth, noting that the only thing double about Robinson's tavern was a double wall between the inn and the house.