The Value of History - Morristown, NJ

The second day of Patrick's visit - the first full day he spent in New Jersey - we decided to waste no time in starting our exploration of New Jersey's participation in the National Parks System. New Jersey only has four sites that are part of the NPS - five if you count the Statue of Liberty (which is considered in New York) - and two of them straddle state lines, so we had some looking around to do.

First on the lineup was Morristown National Historical Park, which I've visited a hundred times before but have never really appreciated as a part of the NPS. My town, Chatham, is right next to Morristown, so as kids we always went on field trips to the area - especially to Jockey Hollow, which is the area where Washington's troops spent their most horrid winter during the American Revolution. We visited the park on Sunday, June 13, which was a slightly cool and overcast day in the morning, but turned into a day of torrential downpour as time went on. But that's later.



My mom had a map from the site lying around the house, so we were able to find the various parts of the park relatively easily among the local Colonial-era roads of Morristown. Before heading to the main visitors' center, we checked out Fort Nonsense. The legend says that Washington had his troops build the fort on a hill overlooking Morristown simply to keep them occupied, but later historical investigation suggests that Washington, who was a pretty adept leader (to put it lightly), would not have wasted his troops' time with a useless endeavor. In truth, the fort on the hill was to be used just in case the British invaded Morristown and the Continental Army had to retreat from Jockey Hollow, but since the British never got to Morristown, it never had to be used. Now it is simply a scenic hill overlooking the town through lush trees.

It was starting to drizzle by the time we left Fort Nonsense, so we drove down to Jockey Hollow, the main area of the historical park. At the visitors' center, there was a to-scale re-creation of a soldiers' hut; all of the original huts have long since been destroyed, whether by development or by weather (and actually, when the park reconstructed some huts in a field in the 1960s, the workers actually constructed the new huts right over the old ones, virtually obliterating any archaeological value - oops), so a few recreations can be found here and there around the park.

Often times, Valley Forge in Virginia is considered the quintessential case study of a hard winter. Nearly 2,000 men died at Valley Forge, compared with about 100 at Jockey Hollow, even though Jockey Hollow was a considerably more vicious winter, with record cold and snow. The difference was that the army learned from its mistakes at Valley Forge; the encampment of 2,000-someodd huts at Valley Forge was very poorly designed, and, especially in spring, disease ran rampant due to virtually no sanitation and little regard for health concerns. Once the men got to Jockey Hollow, they knew how to better control disease - and while they were very poorly supplied, often wore little more than rags, and occasionally resorted to boiling and eating their shoe leather for lack of food, the death toll was considerably lower in Morristown.

There are a number of trails around the park, but since it was raining pretty hard by the time we drove around to the Wick Farm, we decided to pass on the walking. The Wick family gave over most of their home to the officers of the Continental Army, and the house still stands on the eastern side of the park. Once we got inside the house, we met a park ranger in the front room, in period dress, who told us that they were having a special program that day - and that another ranger was in the other room, portraying an officer from June 1780.

Patrick and I hung out for a few minutes and, after a bit, some other visitors showed up at the Wick house, and we all wandered into the other room - where, sure enough, a ranger was dressed in period costume and greeted us with impeccable manners befitting of an officer. He gave a brief introduction of what he was up to, telling us that the Wick family was out at church but we were welcome to have a look around the house - and when he finished his introduction, I don't think any of us visitors really knew what to do. We hadn't expected to walk in on a historical program, so, while the ranger in the front room had told us what was going on and had even handed us a sheet of paper with prompt questions, we were a little befuddled.

But that didn't trip the ranger up any. "It's as quiet as a church in here!" he scoffed, and opened his book again.

Not to be made fun of by an 18th-century'er, one of the other people in the room asked how the mens' morale was. That was just the prod that the ranger needed. He launched into vivid description of how the men were recovering after the hard winter, how he was sure they weren't fond of the rain on this particular day, how the other officers were holding up... And as he went on, he said things that sparked our interest even more, and someone else would ask another question, and it snowballed from there.

Someone in the group asked if there had been many deserters after the cold winter, and he said no - to which I found myself asking what the punishment of a deserting soldier was, if he was caught. That sent the ranger into a flurry of stories, complete with dates and locations, of various trials, hangings and apprehensions across the colonies of soldiers who had ditched the service.

Pretty soon, it was easy to forget that we were talking to someone who was alive just like we were - his knowledge of the time period and a seemingly endless cache of stories, anecdotes, facts, figures and statistics about the late 1700s was so remarkable, it seemed like he had transported through time to talk to us. I have always been impressed by the knowledge I have encountered in both rangers and volunteers at national parks, but I think this guy will go down in history as the best one I've seen. Combined with the faint smell of wood smoke in the house, the fat raindrops splattering on the windowsill behind the officer and the creaky floorboards of the dim house, I remembered not only why history is so fantastic, but why we, as Americans, are so lucky as to have the NPS to preserve these sites and, as in the case of Morristown, to hook up historians with the public so we can learn even more about our heritage.

(Can you tell I was more than a little impressed?)

One last cool moment with the "officer" was when someone, in reference to the disease rampant at Valley Forge, said, "Isn't it true that they used to think diseases were carried by bad air, in the form of smells?"

"Yes, well, that's true," the officer replied. We giggled, because we remembered that we'd been warned in the front room that the officer didn't know anything past June 13, 1780 - and how easily and frankly he stayed in character was pretty funny. He proceeded to go on about the "science" of bad smells and how diseases are indeed carried in the air, acting like we were quite stupid for not understanding the simple concept.

After talking to the officer for a while (and after he bade farewell to some British visitors by saying, "And of course I really shouldn't have told you any of this"), we went back to the front room of the house and spoke for a while with the (21st century) ranger there. She told us a bit about her experience as a NPS employee, which Pat and I think sounds like pure heaven, and talked about what it takes to become a NPS ranger. She said that having a college degree helps (check), and being willing to move around a lot also helps (check) - and, as we found out later talking to someone at Thomas Edison National Historic Site (which I will write about later), volunteering at a park always helps your chances of getting a job at that park - and then you can use employment at that park to get you elsewhere in the NPS system.

When we left the Wick house, it was still raining pretty good, so we drove around the park a bit before heading off to Washington's Headquarters, which, in New Jersey, is the Ford Mansion. The mansion itself is closed, however, from October 2009 to "Spring 2010" (so much for that), for installation of a sprinkler system, so we visited the small museum right next to the mansion, got our coveted NPS passport stamp there, and raced back to the car in the pouring rain to head home for dinner.