Concerning the 250th Anniversary of Our Nation

Happy Independence Day No. 250! 

I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now.

My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. 

In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here as best I could. Not as spry as I used to be with keyboard gymnastics, but here you go. What I wrote back in 2017…

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March 24, 2017

Epistle to the Millennials

  

Back in 1978 I was 25 and in objective terms an utter failure. A dropout, a month shy of graduation, from the Cornell Graduate Business School. I had become suddenly afraid that I would become a CPA. And just as suddenly unemployable.

Inherited a job in my hometown from my sister, editor-in-chief of a Bicentennial publication called The Way It Used to Be, sponsored by the Salem County Historical Society.

Her tenure was almost exclusively about women. Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Mine was different: What the hell am I doing here?

But in my usual way, I got lucky. She was editor during the 1776 celebrations, which were national, flag waving, and generic. Why she tried to drill down into ‘issues’ that concerned her, namely women. When I took over, we were on the cusp of Salem County’s REAL participation in the Revolution, a local militia defense against a multi-pronged British offensive on a key barrier to the agricultural resources of South Jersey.

it was called the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge. It happened. Big names were involved. Mad Anthony Wayne. John Graves Simcoe, colonel of the Queen’s Rangers. I was handed a manuscript by an elderly Woodstown dentist-historian who had written a pamphlet called “When War Came to Salem.” Review it or something was my instruction.

So I did. In the Salem newspaper, Today’s Sunbeam.

Then I got called into a meeting with the publisher of the Sunbeam and a man named Stony Harris. The publisher, an eminence grise named Thomas Bowen, who couldn’t have cared less about the daily content of his daily paper, said, “Stony thinks we might be able to do a Reenactment. What do you think?”

I knew OF Stony Harris. He was a legend. The founder of Cowtown Rodeo, the local cattleman who prided himself on traveling to cattle rancher conventions in Texas for the express purpose of reminding them that his family’s cattle brand was older than any in Texas. He wore a cool ivory cowboy hat and a string tie. His eyes were miss-nothing blue. He looked at me, friendly, casual, penetrating. “What do you think, son? Tom thinks we can do it.”

Everything after that was kind of a blur. I made a plan, an impossibly ambitious one. At every turn when resources were needed, Stony provided them. I was a general, arranging for Continental and British troops, instructing county works department employees on signs demarking the course of the skirmish in three locations, writing everything from the sign copy to the promos for the event, and when it came time to prepare for the key event, the axing of the bridge over Alloways Creek in Quinton, Stony Harris had the bridge made in a single day. I got to watch like Napoleon on his log at Waterloo. Except disaster never came.

It all came off without a hitch.

And I can prove it happened.

I guess we didn’t hit the right date. My first promo under my own byline for the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge was published on September 11, 1978. Go figure.

Provenance: Published on 9/11(!) in 1978.

It was a five part series in Tom Bowen’s paper.

Part Five was this:

 Defiance.

The still missing middle parts of the series covered these topics:

Bridge.

Heroes.

Bacon. [See Below the Fold…]

Don’t be fooled. The claimed conquest of Alloways Creek by the Brits was a phantom victory. While the Salem militia held up the Queen’s Rangers, Mad Anthony Wayne scooped out all the hay, food, and cattle in Cumberland and Atlantic counties. Which was a lot. [Enough to feed the troops at Valley Forge.] Hallelujah.

Oh you millennials. Probably no way you get the lessons of this experience. I was a lackadaisical snob in my home of homes, where I had one grandmother in the D.A.R. and one in the Colonial Dames. Meant nothing to me till I got drafted into a re-experiencing of an authentic historical event. And had to work and organize and decide and see and hear and smell it. Command decisions about when to move, responsible for sweat and gunfire and axe blows and genuine yelling, even in reenactment. Call it Project Management 101.

What you’ll probably never learn. Real responsibility is actually fun. I actually found green buckskins for the Queen’s Rangers. Try it. You’ll like it.

P.S. The Brits were thieves too. They stole a grandfather clock from Benjamin Holme in the 1778 raid, which was eventually recovered and is now on display at the Salem Historical Society.

 

The Holme House and Clock

 

 Wouldn’t mention it, but I’m a Cohansey boy, meaning a Greenwich boy. 

The Cohansey River was always more my line than the Lower Alloways Creek…

I lived at one time for seven years in the Benjamin Reeve house on Ye Greate Street. [where I wrote Shuteye Town 1999]…

The house is unnaturally tall because Reeve was also a maker of grandfather clocks. We Greenwichers were as instrumental to the times as the Salemites were, if you catch my drift… See, Snowflakes…

 

…It’s in the blood, dude. My grandfather also made grandfather clocks. Want to talk about White Privilege, do you? Some things are earned, come hell or high water, both of which we still have in the lands Below the Turnpike… When the grandfather clock chimes twelve, you’re done. But time, the river of history, and our places in it are never done.

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Below the Fold…

Two points about this ancient history that are recently more relevant today than they were when I wrote the post above almost ten years ago.

The skirmish is famous not just because of the assistance it rendered Mad Anthony Wayne and the troops at Valley Forge. The commander of the Queens Rangers was also a celebrated figure on the enemy side, meaning Canada. They still love, revere, and honor him:

The rest of his heroic exploits are described here.

In New Jersey, however, he remains infamous for his role in the Hancock House Massacre the night before the Quinton’s Bridge engagement:

I asked Google’s AI Assistant for the Internet version of what the man did in Salem County.

He also lost the famous skirmish because of one indomitable farmer…

It’s good not to forget that Canada has never really left the British Commonwealth, on a day when half-educated twits like Tucker Carlson are peddling the lie that Canada has been our closest historical ally. Not true. They still resent us and pose as our superiors to make themselves feel less like losers.

The other story from the Bicentennial that strikes me as newly relevant in a personal way also pertains to the Hancock Massacre, which has a surprising connection to the Deep State our American-hating Dems love more than sanity itself. As part of my research for the Reenactment in 1978, I visited the Hancock House Museum I hadn’t seen since a school field trip when I was a boy. Back then, the highlight of the tour was a visit to the attic space where the Quaker victims were bayoneted without mercy. You could still see the black bloodstains in the unfinished plank floor. 

This time, I was told the attic was off limits. Why? Not part of the tour anymore. I insisted, then wheedled. The reason for the change was dead obvious, the attic was filled with large commercial-grade Carrier air conditioning units. Any bloodstains had been drilled away or covered over by the machinery and its supports. Historical vandalism on a grand scale committed with taxpayer money by the State of  New Jersey. I wrote an article about it for the Sunbeam, having tried and failed to reach somebody in Trenton who could explain to me how such an atrocity could have occurred, who was responsible, and how citizens could seek redress or repair of the damage. It made the front page, and I thought maybe some professional journalist would take an interest and pursue the story. Didn’t happen. Nothing happened. The way government bureaucracies win. That may have been when I began losing interest in the idea of involving myself more seriously in the journalism biz. But it’s also part of the reason I have never lost interest in the writing biz. The record researchers will investigate has to be put there by the ones who care and are still paying attention.

Have a great day, everyone.