What is archaeological is not necessarily ancient. I learned that years ago on our
farmstead in the Arkansas Ozarks.
That area of the country was still essentially wilderness at the time of
the Civil War, and wasn’t effectively divided into quarter sections (160 acres)
until about the time of the First World War. But in the Twenties and early Thirties certain counties of
northern Arkansas and southern Missouri had significant rural populations
living on hardscrabble forty- or eighty-acre plots. The cost of such land was generally fifty cents an
acre. Practically all of these
subsistence farms were wiped out in the Depression. All that was left in the Fifties were traces, barely
discernible, of old wagon paths, perhaps the ghost of a cabin foundation, and
an old galvanized bucket or two.
One would stumble upon such places lost in the deep woods. The galvanized bucket, used to haul
water from a more or less distant spring, had been built to resist rust. So here were archaeological sites not a
quarter-century old. The vehemence
with which an uncontested forest reasserts itself is awesome. I could easily understand how great
temples could be lost for centuries in the jungles of the Yucatan.
The
sizeable tracts of cultivated and wooded land owned by Princeton University are
ever shrinking as the institution expands inexorably to the south. Wild areas in which I used to knock
about with my young children have now been enclosed by chain-link fences to
protect manicured soccer fields and a vast solar farm. But this Ivy League institution still dedicates
at least a quarter section of land to agricultural use, the cultivation of feed
corn and soybeans, undoubtedly exploiting some tax boondoggle dreamed up with
other beneficiaries in mind by the Iowa congressional delegation. Amid these acres is an old cemetery,
enclosed within a square of stone wall.
For many years it was a de facto
poison ivy farm and so derelict that the gravestones were mostly covered in
roots, vines, and tree sprouts. When
I first chanced upon it about forty years ago, it was barely visible. Under three successive Princeton
administrations I lobbied to have this burial ground reclaimed and tended; but
most administrators didn’t even know it existed, and the matter was neither
curricular nor linked to an obvious fund-raising possibility. My eccentric pleas fell on deaf ears.
I
had not been in those remote parts for at least five years, but in my
berry-gathering mania (reported last week) I was there a few days ago. To my delight, I discovered that the
burial ground has recently been cleaned out and spruced up. The only serious vegetation still there
is entirely fitting: a sacred grove of three handsome oaks. As many headstones as could be rescued
have been cleared and re-erected.
I
congratulated the Director of Buildings and Grounds on a work of beautification
that was also an act of piety. Now
I needed some serious historical information, and I knew where to turn: to
Wanda Gunning, a fellow parishioner, a civic leader, and the dean of local
historians. She knew the place
well, identifying it as “the Schenck-Covenhoven Burial Grounds”, and gave me the
crucial bibliographical reference.*
Schenck Corner
The
Schencks and the Covenhovens were two prominent related Dutch colonial families
who in the early part of the eighteenth century moved from their farms on Long
Island to central Jersey, where they had bought from the heirs of William Penn
a modest tract of 6500 acres. Owning
all of Pennsylvania was apparently insufficient for Penn. He had diversified.
(The nearby swath of land along Route 1, the original and mainly
unpleasant superhighway that disfigures our landscape for 2369 miles from the
Canadian border to Key West, is still called “Penn’s Neck”.) The cemetery was established at a point
where the two family properties came together. The first known burial was in 1746, the last as recent as
1941. The grounds were enclosed by
a handsome stone wall in 1876.
Throughout our country proud citizens marked the national Centenary with
similar restoration projects.
"She stood in tears amid the alien corn…"
In
general the Dutch Reformed pioneers of New York and New Jersey seem to have
paid special heed to the injunction of Genesis 1:28: Be fruitful and multiply. Both the Schencks and the Covenhovens (also spelled
Couvenhoven, Kovenhowen, etc.) were very numerous, and their names are widely
spread upon the annals of New Jersey colonial history. Both Schencks and Covenhovens
distinguished themselves in the War of Independence. One of the many John Covenhovens was a colorful patriot
partisan. He fought with the
“regulars” under Washington at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, but spent
most of the war engaged in the entrepreneurial (and often nasty) guerrilla
activities that typified the conflict between revolutionaries and loyalists
along the Jersey seabord. He was
one of the drafters of the long memorandum sent to Washington detailing the
Tory lynching of Joshua Huddy, the captured American officer who had been in
charge of defending the blockhouse at Tom’s River. Legend has it that as Covenhoven was actually being married
to Mercy Kelsey in February, 1778, Hessian troops searching for him invaded the
church and disrupted the ceremony.
The swashbuckling ranger escaped via a window, and was able to reclaim
his startled bride only several hours later when the soldiers had moved on. Whether according to Calvinist theology
they were validly married I cannot say, but they escaped successfully across
the Delaware into Pennsylvania, where they increased and multiplied with the
best of them.
*The Genealogical
Magazine of New Jersey, 57 (1982): 22-25.
