Dan Bernier ~ Bringing History to Life

DAN BERNIER—BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE

Cora and Charlie Hoag were two of the longest running residents ever in the Deserted Village of Feltville, living there, in House #1 at the top of the road for 44 years. During that time, they did many things: Charlie was a mounted patrolman for the Union County Park Police (another former resident remembered how dashing he had seemed to her child self) and later gave twice yearly tours at the Village. Cora and Charlie raised four children in the Village, and later directed an environmental education center that hosted school groups and others.

Over those more than 40 years, Cora claimed to have seen the ghost of David Felt, wearing a tall black hat, a number of times. I once met a visitor to the Village who told me that a floating hat had shown up in a Polaroid photo of one of the school groups, and Cora identified it as David Felt’s hat.

The Polaroid and Cora are gone, but David Felt regularly shows up, in person, not a ghost at all. Technically, it is Dan Bernier, who with his family now lives in the house that Charlie and Cora shared, channeling David Felt. But if when you see him and you ask him, David Felt knows nothing of a modern-day person named Dan.

David Felt is still wearing the same hat that Cora saw, and he’s inviting you to come find history coming alive in a Village that has so much of it.

Who is Dan Bernier, and how did he come to make history come alive in the Deserted Village of Feltville?

I first met Dan Bernier several decades ago, soon after I had gotten my grandmother and mother to take me back to the Village I remembered so vividly from my visits there with my grandfather during my childhood. He was enthusiastic when I proposed writing a book of Village history, since the old one, by James Hawley, was out of print. He supported my research from the start—partly because he shared my passion for the Village, and had, himself, been coming there since he was a child.

Those visits started about 1970 or 1971, when Dan’s family discovered the tours that Charlie Hoag was conducting at the Village. Tours always started at Trailside Museum, then Charlie would lead a cavalcade of cars to Glenside Avenue, where participants would park and walk into the Village for a lengthy tour, which always ended up in the cemetery. The Bernier family took to attending the tours whenever they were given. It began to spark an interest in history for Dan.

It was another chapter of county history that fanned that spark. Dan fondly remembers taking a high school summer course on the history of the City of Elizabeth. The instructor took the students out to various neighborhoods, all having their own special identities, explaining their ethnic or other origins in detail, and introducing the students to such culinary parts of each neighborhood as the Italian Ice shack and Dietrich’s Bakery. The course was about two weeks long, and by the end of it, Dan was hooked on history. When he had to plan the service project which is the largest component of qualifying for the rank of Eagle in Boy Scouts, after a proposed river cleanup didn’t pan out, he started plans for a three-mile history trail in the Deserted Village. He had taken to making frequent visits to the Village—even hiking the ten miles from Elizabeth there, then hiking a route that he had developed through the Village, then hiking back (including one day on a snow day, with a friend). Dan sent a letter to the Union County Park Commission, met with the Maintenance Director for Watchung Reservation, and got the go-ahead. With the help of other Scouts and some adults, Dan cleared trails, built a bridge on one trail, and prepared trail markers and a trail brochure. Not everything went as planned, but much of the material Dan created became parts of future materials for the Village.

In college, Dan pursued a degree in the Archaeology specialty of Anthropology at Seton Hall University, and interviewed all of the then-residents at Feltville for a cultural anthropology class. Dan followed his degree at Seton Hall with a graduate program at New York University, driving an ambulance for three years to help finance his education, but leaving the program for a real job when he got married.

That first “real job” was as naturalist at Trailside Nature and Science Center in Watchung Reservation, the park which includes the Deserted Village. Here, he drew on his great familiarity with the Watchung Reservation, including the Village, gained through his many walks there and his Boy Scout project, to teach environmental education programs. In his third year at Trailside, he became the Museum Curator, planning and carrying out exhibits for the museum in the center, and still doing some environmental educational programs at Trailside. He secured a grant—$250—from the New Jersey Historical Commission, and created a wall-mounted historic timeline, and display boxes of plexiglass with artifacts. He also began doing the tours of the Deserted Village that Charlie Hoag had previously led, changing the format so that he started the tours with an old-school slide show at Trailside, then doing the same kind of caravan of participants over to the Village. He continued to end the tours in the cemetery.

During this time, Trailside’s Director, Holly Hoffman, suggested candlelight tours of the Village, using candles in tin cans—an idea she had seen at another historic site. One of the early candlelight tours happened close to Halloween, with the participants saying they liked the tour, but suggesting it could have had more spooky elements.

David Felt was born—or reborn. Dan and other park employees created the Haunted Hayrides, where participants go on a hayride through the village, with David Felt narrating history at each stop. Dan made sure that all the spooky elements they added were historically based, but arranged to have characters from the Village pop out of doors unexpectedly or dead twelve year old girls put their hands up from under the porch where they were reported to have been buried. History was coming to life!

The event has grown every year, until now, more than 100 people help create the theatrical elements needed each year, with 75 to 80 people, more than half of whom are volunteers, working the 12 or 13 spooky stops each of the three nights. Like all the tours before it, the Haunted Hayride ends—appropriately—at the cemetery, where over the years participants have met John Willcocks, or the young factory workers who drowned in the lake and are buried in the cemetery.

Dan has been David Felt from the start, with a period-accurate costume, and more stories that he tells every year. He is also David Felt for Four Centuries in a Weekend, an annual event which also takes place in October, and where David Felt has armchair sessions, and leads tours through the Village.

Being David Felt, however, is part of a huge balancing act that includes serving as Director, Division of Park Environmental Services, a job that requires Dan to plan or supervise all wildlife programs of the County, habitat restorations, invasive plants removal, trail maintenance, as well as some historical and environmental programs; administer several volunteer programs and public programs and projects at the historic Deserted Village of Feltville; supervise the crew that provides horticultural maintenance of the County parks; and to provide stewardship of the County’s parkland holdings, in all 36 County parks.

In 1992, Dan and his family discovered that Charlie Hoag had died, and arranged to begin renting House #1. So, in addition to his formal job title, he has served since moving in—on Halloween 1992—as resident caretaker for the Village. As caretaker he chases out the people who come into the Deserted Village after hours, checks on all the buildings (finding evidence of vandalism all too frequently), removes litter and fallen branches, shovels snow, and takes care of a host of other things as they arise. Since Masker’s Barn has been opened as a venue for weddings and other events, he has also taken on what amounts to a part time job, conducting tours for prospective renters, setting up, closing up and cleaning up, and all the little things that have made this such a popular place to hold an event.

Charlie Hoag was known as the “Mayor” of the Village, and was part of a community that thrived there, becoming part of the history of the Village and its many incarnations and colorful people. Dan woke up one day recently, in his 31st year of being at the Village, realizing he was part of the Village history now himself—and not just by channeling David Felt, as he does in the welcome video that accompanies this post. As much as anyone, he channels the entire Village.