Grandpa Casts a Spell

GRANDPA CASTS A SPELL

My grandfather, Edwin A. Baldwin, was asked by Union County to write a history of the tiny Deserted Village of Feltville, part of one of their largest parks, the Watchung Reservation. It would replace the previous soft cover pamphlet history written by Dr. Arthur Johnson, County Superintendent of Schools, Union County, NJ. As they had with Dr. Johnson’s pamphlet, the Union County Park Commission would print and sell the new booklet.

Grandpa Baldwin, living in nearby Summit, had retired from the U.S. Treasury Department after many years of service, the last 25 of which were in the Intelligence Unit, pursuing such criminals as Waxie Gordon and Dutch Schultz, and the Reinfeld Syndicate, a group of bootleggers. We grandkids had been told that he retired when he was about to be promoted to a “desk job” (said with a sneer). Even before his actual retirement, Grandpa had been doing meticulous genealogical and historical research, with his specialty being revolutionary war battles, soldiers, and other participants in the war, Molly Pitcher. In January of 1950, months before his retirement, he sent a long and detailed letter to the Reverend Henry Charlton Beck, setting out all the mistakes Reverend Beck had made in a recent article and talk about the Deserted Village of Feltville, and, in doing so, showing detailed knowledge of the history of the village. After critiquing both the Reverend’s article—and the Johnson book, on which it had been based—he finishes his letter:

I hope you find this information to be of some value to you. Incidentally, I enjoyed your talk very much the other night.

Grandpa never wrote the book. Instead, he arranged for his friend, James B. Hawley, to write it, while Grandpa did a detailed census overview for the book, published by the County in 1964.

But this was not the end of Grandpa’s association with the village. By at least 1968, Grandpa was conducting tours at the village. I have a stack of the tour guides he was handing out to visitors in that year. Before that, in September 1965, my three oldest siblings and I were featured, along with my Grandfather, in photos accompanying a long article on the village in the Elizabeth Daily Journal, written by another local historian (and long time author for that newspaper), Jean Rae Turner. While my grandfather is not given credit for information in the article (probably at his request, so he would not be subjected to the same kind of “corrections” he had leveled at Reverend Beck), I can see his fingerprints all over it. A second source, Anna Molloy Walsh, is named, and is someone whom Grandpa and his friend James Hawley had both interviewed leading up to the publication of the Hawley book—but she had actually lived at the Village, and thus was not likely to be given “corrections.”

In that article, there is a reference—in print—to the “Indian Spring” at the Village—something I really only noticed as I prepared this piece for Feltville Features. I had thought that Grandpa might have made that name up to lure me to the Village. What could be more compelling to a girl who had dreamed of becoming an Indian when she grew up, than an Indian Spring in a Deserted Village? What could be more magical than a grandfather who had the power to see those historic Indians stopping there for water, and to tell us what he saw?

Then Grandpa performed an even greater act of magic than finding the Indian Spring. It seemed that simply by looking into a barren, weedy hillside in the Deserted Village, marked only with one old brown gravestone, he divined that soldiers had been buried there, soldiers who had fought patriotically in the Revolutionary War. He told the government, and on the basis of his telling alone, the government provided new gravestones for the forgotten soldiers. To my young imagination, it seemed Grandpa had something like x-ray vision to discern those soldiers.

But Grandpa’s protestations about how none of his grandchildren were properly interested in the history he had worked so hard on—not solely at the Village, but surely there as well—were decidedly true of all of us. I went on to become a civil rights and environmental attorney. I forgot about the village. My grandfather died in a Veteran’s Hospital. I did try to cheer him up, wearing a Christmas Elf costume. He was not amused. I probably should have tried Molly Pitcher.

It was only after I had a new budding career as a freelance author and mother of two young children that I asked my own mother, to take me back to the Indian Spring in the Deserted Village, while we were on a visit to my widowed grandmother in Summit,. My mother couldn’t remember how to get there, but my grandmother guided my mother and me down an unmarked road in the Watchung Reservation through the Deserted Village, and then to the exact spot to start our walk to the Indian Spring. Grandma stayed in the car while we blundered on until we found it, just as it had been in my childhood. There was the brick arch above the mouth of the spring, and the surrounding quiet pool, a bit more run down, and choked with algae and weeds.

Grandma then got us up to the Trailside Museum, in a different part of the Watchung Reservation, and I asked to buy the book about the Village, only to be told that it was out of print (and the museum was holding on to its last copy). My mother, a long time English teacher, who had already edited some of my article drafts before publication, and, perhaps going on faith based on my being Edwin A. Baldwin’s granddaughter, suggested I write a new book, incorporating all the “new” material she assumed would be in my grandfather’s papers. When I called Daniel Bernier, then Park Planner for the Watchung Reservation, as the museum’s personnel had suggested, he was enthusiastic about the idea. Hawley’s book was not only out of print, but had never provided answers to a set of historical mysteries Bernier had been collecting: had Phebe Badgley Willcocks and her son, John Willcocks, truly died on the same day in 1776, and how had that come to pass? Had there been a mansion for David Felt, the man who founded the Village at the site in 1845, or were people just describing one of the larger cottages in the Village? Was it Diego Rivera who had painted mural on the walls of one of the cottages, as told in the tales passed down by former residents or were the murals done by someone else?

I started with the confidence that somewhere in my grandfather’s papers I would find the answers to these mysteries and to my own burning issues—the puzzle of how he had discerned the Indians at the spring and the identities of those soldiers with unmarked graves.

I have never learned why Grandpa called it the “Indian Spring,” although I noticed that the Jean Rae Turner article mentions artifacts found that suggested it was a Lenape stopping point, so clearly, there is more digging to be done. It took a lot of searching to find the magic that led to the three soldiers’ gravestones, but it proved to be more interesting than x-ray vision—Grandpa had stumbled on information about the burial of one soldier when he was reading a sort of diary left by someone on a nearbu farm. That diary consisted of tiny notes penned into the almost non-existent margins of almanacs for those years. Another of the “soldiers” was not listed in the standard military reference materials, but Grandpa found a record of his service as a military lawyer during the Revolutionary War. The only thing Grandpa did not have for the lawyer was a definitive record of his burial at the Village graveyard. That he had to surmise, since there was no record of burial elsewhere. And the third soldier actually had a stone still at the village graveyard, so all it took was putting his military record together with his burying place.

For other mysteries—those raised by Dan Bernier, and those which kept multiplying, the more I researched things—my grandfather’s papers did not always provide the answers. It was a response to a press release that the County put out concerning my research that led us to the artist—Roberto de la Selva, and not Diego Rivera. Matt Tomaso, Feltville Archaeologist, claims he was channeling his “inner Priscilla” when he found the stones at the corner of David Felt’s mansion, proving the mansion’s existence, conclusively.

But, often, I have not been able to so neatly find the details I craved. For instance, so far, there is no definitive answer on whether Phebe Badgley Willcocks and her son John actually died on the same day. I’m going with my grandfather on that one—he concluded they died on the same date based on contemporaneous church records.

And more unsettling than any quibble over these details is the way the people who were intimately connected to the village, people I have come to love, have been lost to history. Warren Ackerman, who turned the village into a resort, was relatively famous in his own day, but history has passed him down as merely ordinary, and much of his record, including his work at the village, has passed into nothing. The many women have left even fewer traces of their influences or histories.

In the end, I have come to the conclusion that history is never satisfying to the living. We want to know too much. We argue with each other thinking there is a truth that is capable of being found, but in the end are limited by the fragmentary record that remains and our own best guesses.But for me, even in the face of unsolved mysteries, researching the Deserted Village of Feltville has been enormously satisfying. I have learned the history that I was never taught in school, that goes far beyond presidents and wars. I have been shown connections—between people and historic trends and individually, to each other, to a place, to beliefs and inspirations. Feltville illuminates such historic themes as the impacts of colonialism on the land and peoples, how war took lives, or how lives were saved, how women saw themselves and acted within everyday life. There are many more themes to explore, and Feltville Features will give me the opportunity to take you, the reader, through posts organized alternately by historic period, by theme, and sometimes by whim—haven’t you always wondered about corsets and chamberpots?

A wonderful side benefit of my research is constantly meeting other people with a similar passion for this place both frozen in time and constantly evolving. This website can allow me to have guest posts to describe findings and musings and the questions we all still have.

This website is, in the end, a tale of personal journey, and, hopefully, an inspiration to you to fall in love with someplace—it doesn’t have to be the Deserted Village of Feltville—and to delve into its history, and let it teach you and ensnare you.