Over the Fourth of July we flew up to Newark to spend a week with Red's father and his wife K.. We had seen them in February for our de facto annual trip to Sedona. It was nice to see them again, in a new setting, this time in their home, which is a house within a new-construction adult community in Somerset County, in otherwise pleasant rural areas. They had recently moved up from North Carolina to be near K.'s daughter and grandchildren.
Having spent a lot of time in New Jersey, it was not surprising to me to find it fairly rural out there, although with constant interruptions by civilization. But for Red it was a new experience, and it was pleasant to play introductory tour guide after having been the outsider years ago.
We spent a day in Princeton, which I hadn't visited since my birthday 2003. At the famous Labyrinth Bookstore, I went downstairs into the quiet used section and picked up a couple treasures, including The Early Forges and Furnaces in New Jersey. I absolutely the colonial history of this area, and have a mini-collection of books on early New Jersey industry, in the water-powered mill era. Among other things I learned from the book was the phenomenon of bog iron.
The day after the Fourth, we went down into Philadelphia. Red had never been to Philadelphia and got an eyeful of what real industrial decay looks like (and she's from Ohio). To me there is a beauty in both living industrial areas (such as ports and refineries) and also in their decay and abandonment.
In Philadelphia we visited the Museum of the American Revolution, which was a first time for me It was very pleasant experience. Among other things, they did a magnificent job at balancing the need to pay homage to the principles of the Revolution, while also discussing how it was all terrible, racist, and genocidal at the same time.
The curators of the museum have their hands full with this task, I could tell. One advantage they have is that the Oneida Tribe helped finance the museum in order to tell their story, which includes their pride at having been on the American side against the British, and thereby laying the claim as the most loyally American group of Indians throughout time since the founding of the Republic. There's a very stirring "Oneida Room" where one listens to debate among the sachems of the Iroquois on this issue.
My favorite part of the main walk through was the dynamic map of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton (which were actually part of the same extended battle. It was the kind of map where you pressed buttons and followed troop movements on the wall by different colored lights. I had gotten a little ahead our group in the exhibit, so by the time the rest showed up I had gone through the sequence of days several times until I understood the flow. The main takeaway is that Washington's victory at Trenton on Christmas Eve 1776 was not so surprising, since it was a sneak attack (across the Delaware River).
But that victory only brought down the attention of the main British force in central New Jersey, which then prepared a counterattack. The Americans had been so successful at Trenton, they barely knew what to do, and for a day or so, there was great confusion among the Americans about whether to stay on the New Jersey side of the river, or retreat back into Pennsylvania.
Washington was exposed, however, and there was no choice but to follow through. At first it looked terrible for the Americans. They tried to hold Trenton, but were driven out, and were hunkering down outside of town on the far side of a creek, saved only by nightfall's arrival. The British expected in the morning that they could finish the Americans off for good.
It is at this moment that the Revolution was perhaps in its most perilous state. A successful counterattack by the British could have meant the end of the entire war, only six months after the Declaration of Independence.
Washington then did something extraordinary. In the middle of night, he abandoned his position outside Trenton and pulled his forces back and sent them swiftly up into central New Jersey, to attack the main British reserves behind their lines. They met at Princeton. Washington's surprise triumph allowed his army to escape into the New Jersey highlands to wait out the winter. The Revolution was saved.
I had worked up a version of everything I just wrote by the time Red, her dad, and his wife arrived at the map and was able to give them a thirty-second narration with the colored lights. One drives right through the battlefield literally south of Princeton, and on the way down, Red's father had remarked off-handedly that he didn't know if the site was of any importance. Now we had all come up to speed on it (I had actually been to the battlefield before, so it was to my own discredit not to already have been aware of all this significance).
At the museum was a phenomenal temporary exhibit on the history of 13-star flags. I wanted to buy a Betty Ross flag at the gift shop, since it is now declared as politically incorrect and racist by the media, but everything bearing it was sold out (we could have gone to the nearby Betsy Ross House). We walked around a bit, had a cheesesteaks and local ice cream, and got back into our air conditioned car to avoid the heat.
I like Philadelphia. A lot of Trumps in the extended family here, and also on my mother's side. Feels like home in a weird way.
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