We managed to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday in a way that accommodated the reality of Joan’s current residence in assisting living facilities at Stonebridge in Montgomery township with a major feast at Richard’s beautiful old colonial mansion in Kingwood township in Hunterdon County. This beautiful property is far from what you are likely to think of if your concept of the state is constructed around turnpike exit numbers. The surprising truth is that New Jersey, though it ranks at the top of the list of states for population density, has an extensive amount of sparsely populated rural land and even some heavily wooded forest land. It is of personal interest to me that the county seat of Hunterdon County, Flemington, was founded by an early settler, Samuel Fleming (mid-eighteenth century) whose surname I share. I think of Samuel as a rather old-fashioned name; certainly my own long deceased grandfather Samuel Fleming now seems to me to have been from another world rather than merely from another generation. One of the oldest buildings in Flemington still exalts in the rather pretentious name of “Fleming’s Castle,” though it is hardly more than a rather modest frame house that in its present configuration may disguise even more humble origins.
Flemington, N. J., did have one moment of national, perhaps even international fame. It came in 1935, when its courthouse was the venue for “the trial of the century”. True enough, in our country trials of the century usually come around at least once a decade, but this one was special because it addressed the “crime of the century”. A German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was convicted of having kidnapped and then murdered the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was perhaps the most universally admired hero in America. In May of 1927 he had performed the astonishing feat of having made the first ever solo flight across the Atlantic, leaving from Long Island in New York and arriving in Paris about thirty-five hours later. Lindbergh was handsome, courageous, articulate, and highly photogenic. There was in historical retrospect a downside: he was a voluble philo-germanic antisemite at the time Hitler appeared on the international scene. Hauptmann’s trial, which was held in the courthouse in Flemington, focused international attention on the place for more than a month.
One of the automobile routes from Princeton to Kingwood takes you through the small village of Rosemont. Only somewhat confusingly, there is also a place of that name nearer to Princeton, and for all I know there could be a dozen other New Jersey Rosemonts and half a hundred in the country. Rosemont today seems to consist of perhaps a dozen houses spread out along the right angle of a turn in the inland road between Stockton and Frenchtown. I say “today” because stretched along the margin of that road is a quite extensive cemetery, fenced in with well laid stone and carefully tended, that testifies to what must have been a much more substantial local population in years gone by. But of course like destination weddings, destination interments are not uncommon. The considerable extent of still cleared fields in this part of Hunterdon County suggests that the whole area has long been under cultivation. So although New Jersey is our most densely populated state, parts of it are considerably less populated now than in previous decades. Even between the large cities of New York and Philadelphia there are stretches of countryside that suggest in the comparative sparseness of their rural contours the “wide open spaces” usually thought of in relation to the West. It took me many years of residence in the state to discover and enjoy this pleasing feature.
There are two Katies in our immediate family, one daughter and one daughter-in-law. They are textually distinguished by a small difference in orthography, but orthography doesn’t help with oral homophones, and so for clarity we refer to the daughter-in-law, Richard’s wife, by her fuller name, Katie Dixon. This is the same means used in the old ballad to distinguish among an abundance of ladies named Mary: There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton, and Mary Carmichael and me. In any event Katie Dixon, among her other virtues and talents, which are many, has become the historian of her Kingwood property, tracing its ownership at least as far back as the Revolutionary period, when one of its occupants was a proto-American French Huguenot named Lequere. And if George Washington didn’t sleep in her house, it can only have been due to insomnia. That’s the vibe the place gives off. Furthermore, I have a couple of times seen actual native wild turkeys around those parts. So, a Thanksgiving feast in Kingwood seems about as “historical” as it can get.
The name “Kingwood” itself incidentally reveals a typical colonial attitude. I recently viewed the latest Ken Burns documentary series, “The American Revolution.” It reminded me of the extent to which colonial populations have been doggedly loyal to the mother country up to the point that they abruptly cease to be. Many of the place names in the original American colonies are homages to British royalty. The town in which I have now spent most of my life, Princeton, is one of a chain of villages which included a Queenston and a Kingston.
Though timber is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the American East Coast today, its forests were formidable. There is still much evidence on both sides of the Delaware River of what must have seemed in colonial times the utter vastness of its forested lands. Though Pennsylvania (literally William “Penn’s forest’) now refers to lands west of the river, the man at one point owned thousands of square miles of what is now New Jersey, including the spot on which I am writing this essay. Hardly a mile east of my house, where US 1 meets one of the three east-west arteries into our town, and now buried in the mess that Route 1 has becomes, lie the scattered remnants of the one-time village of Penn’s Neck. An old Baptist church now overwhelmed by the super-highway still boldly evangelizes via billboard. One recent and memorable message: “Despite Inflation, Death Still Wages of Sin”. Some verities are indeed eternal. An old cemetery, walled in probably sometime in the nineteenth century but almost certainly of earlier founding date, is now just an extension of Princeton’s sport fields. But William Penn once owned it all!
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