Decided to go old school today. I have prepared three envelopes to send to other people. Now I must find a local post office. Let’s look at a map …
Hey, I found the post office. It’s downtown, in an old house. Many businesses around here are in retrofits. In this case, the post office is sharing an old house with a salon and a little garden center gift shop. I guess I’ll stop by there on Friday.
Tomorrow, of course, will be a full day of classes. Today was a fair amount of class prep. There’s not much fun better than practicing a lecture quietly to yourself, to test your slides. There was also an hour-long Zoom seminar. It was the sort that was of course well-intentioned, but could have been summed up in a single sentence.
But at least there was a good handout. A thoughtful How To sort of thing. Could be useful stuff, under the right conditions.
If anyone would like a copy, I can mail it to you. Or we could do a long Zoom call.
We went for a bike ride today, enjoying the first bit of sun we’ve seen since last Friday. We did see a little sunshine this morning. And I think 10 or 11 photos made it down on Sunday, but that’s about the only thing we’ve seen in the sky not shaped like a rain cloud. Until today.
We did the usual loop, which is a pleasant little 21 mile loop. My lovely bride said her legs were dead. I said I need to ride more, because twice a week doesn’t do me any favors. This was about 17 miles into our ride.
We’d just chatted our way through the first three or four miles, and then spent about 10 miles dropping one another. It takes me miles to catch up to her. But, right after that photograph, I got away again, and pedaled furiously, thinking “If I can make it to that T-intersection, she’ll catch me on the next little hill before the colonial-era house” … but I stayed away.
She was chasing me when I found this barn.
At some point, earlier, I managed a shadow selfie.
Some days it is hard to stay on her wheel. It’s always more difficult to get back to the garage door opener before she does. Somehow, all of that led to us meeting another of our new neighbors today, our fourth, setting a new record.
Time now for the ninth installment of We Learn Wednesdays, where I ride my bike to find all of the county’s local historical markers. Seeing things by bike is the ideal way to do it. Learn new roads, see new things. Counting today’s discoveries I have now visited 19 of the 115 markers found in the Historical Marker Database.
The two markers we’ll learn about have to do with churches, and they’re only about 100 yards apart. First, we’ll visit the Old Pittsgrove Presbyterian Church.
Today, the Pittsgrove Presbyterian congregation maintains both its original church, built in 1767, and its current church built in 1867, plus two historic cemeteries. This is the second church.
And the keystone above the door. I think the incongruity of the dates has to do with Civil War-related delays. But that’s just a guess.
The congregation was officially organized in 1741 by the Presbytery of Philadelphia. The original church building was constructed of cedar logs. The land came from a man who is buried in the cemetery out back. I saw his marker. Originally, it had two large stoves and plain wooden benches. In 1767, the log church was taken down and this brick church was built in its place. It’s older than the country.
And so it has earned itself one of these, National Register plaques, just for sticking around. But there’s more to it than just standing.
There are dozens of stories out back. This is a relatively new headstone for Col. Cornelius Nieukirk.
commanded his Company of forty men at Billingsport, under Lieut. Col Josiah Hillman, July and August 1777, and probably saw General Washington when he visited the fortification, August 1, of that year.
I bet he regaled people with that story a lot. A lot of soldiers probably did.
Nieukirk served off-and-on in the local militia, until he finally stepped away in 1794.
Without doubt he saw later service. His military sword, worn during the Revolution, and that of his great grandson James P. Nieukirk of the Civil War, have been presented to the Salem County Historical Society.
His grandson, incidentally, survived the Civil War, having fought in some particularly bloody battles, and was in a POW camp for about half a year. He’s buried elsewhere, having died in 1916. Buring here, you can find the resting place of two dozen other Revolutionary War figures. Two died during the war. One, Jerediah DuBois, would rise to the rank of general during the War of 1812. (He was a drummer boy during the Revolution.) You can also find a Col. William Shute who was, in his younger days, a lieutenant in the French and Indian War. Jacob DuBois, the captain of a company of minutemen organized in 1775 is also buried here.
Now, the DuBois name is well represented. And their descendants lived up to it. One of them was a prominent 20th century man, Josiah DuBois. He died in 1983.
(A) prosecutor at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and a leader in efforts to rescue Jews during World War II, died of cancer Monday at Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury, N.J. He was 70 years old and lived in Pitman, N.J.
He spent recent years running a private law practice and lecturing on the Holocaust.
In 1947, Mr. DuBois was appointed deputy chief counsel for the prosecution of war crimes at Nuremberg.
The American Jewish Committee credited him with saving the lives of thousands of Jews during the war. He’s buried about 20 miles away.
One of the more prominent markers where we are visiting, however, belongs to a long-serving minister. For 46 years he tended this flock. His papers are held at Princeton.
I don’t know what you call them, but there are two or three of these floating headstones. From a great distance they’d look like picnic tables or something, but then you get close and you can tell, this is marking the spot where an Isaac Harris is buried.
Two men named Isaac Harris were buried here. A father and son. Both doctors. Both served during the Revolution.
And you can’t see it in this wider shot of the quite little cemetery, because I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but just off the frame there’s something of a message board, and behind the glass there’s a notice that coincides with the last time they fired the cannon we learned about last week.
The message reads:
The members who founded this church were seeking freedom of worship, and were willing to sacrifice whatever the need be. They were members of the Committee of Correspondence and the Committee of Observation as early as 1774. They were in all probability influenced by John Witherspoon, a prominent Presbyterian minister and the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. They participated in organizing the first company of Minute Men from Salem County. They served with distinction throughout the Revolutionary War as well as the War of 1812.
They founded a community, founded a church, and then helped create a country.
Also behind that cemetery, you’ll see the 1970s re-creation of the “Log College”, a building used as a school to train young men for the ministry. Here’s a peak inside one of the windows. There are just four of those bench-desk combinations.
And here’s one final look at the old church itself.
Picture that little church in this still-quiet bit of countryside, a community that today preserves more total acres of farmland and actively farms more acreage than anywhere else in the state, and think of this from way back when:
The immigrants who established this congregation came from Europe and were of the Dutch Reformed tradition. Their call to worship was by one of three methods – the sounding of the horn, a drum roll, or the blowing of the conch shell. When they arrived at what is now Newkirk Street in New York about 1644, they had the conch shell with them. … This treasured relic is still used today as the Call to Worship at the occasional worship services at the Old Church.
There’s a great deal more to discover, right there, I’m sure. But we’ll have more places to visit on the next installment of We Learn Wednesdays. Miss some of the markers? You can see them all right here.
