Visiting the Governor's house in Perth Amboy

A few years ago, we were absolutely blown away by the history we found nestled among the old industrial grittiness of Perth Amboy. Once the capital of East Jersey, the city is home to the oldest public building still in use, the state's oldest Episcopal parish, what was arguably once the oldest corporation in America, and the vestiges of a once-busy port. We barely scratched the surface on our visit and vowed to return sometime to see more.

The opportunity came with the arrest of a governor. Well, the reenactment of an arrest -- of William Franklin, the last Royal Governor of New Jersey. As befits his title, Franklin was a Loyalist allied with the government of Great Britain during the time of the American Revolution. His home, known as the Proprietary House, survives, representing the only royal governor's home still standing on its original grounds.

I'd seen photos of the house's exterior, but I was still taken aback when we pulled up. This was a massive pile of bricks in a residential neighborhood, a real survivor. How could it have been there all these years without being more widely known?

The inside, what we could see of it, was just as impressive. We walked in to find a spacious center hall flanked by two parlors, one of which was decorated as a stately dining room. One of the basement rooms was interpreted as the kitchen, complete with massive hearth, while a barrel-vaulted storage room was set for a future event. Upper floors were off limits, but a view up the center of the staircase sent the imagination reeling. How many rooms are up there, and how many stories could be told in them?

No doubt, the awe we felt was exactly what its architect intended for the home of a provincial leader. Construction on the first portion of the house began in 1761, funded by the Proprietors of East Jersey as the official residence for the Royal Governor. The design, while somewhat severe on the outside, was grand: constructed of brick imported from England, its two stories, plus an attic and full basement made it one of the largest houses in the 13 colonies. Four chimneys served its many fireplaces.

Franklin was appointed governor in 1763 but didn't move into the Perth Amboy mansion until 1774; he'd lived at his Burlington estate until funding issues for the home could be worked out. While he sometimes gets a bad rap due to his loyalist leanings, Franklin enjoyed moderate popularity in the early years of his tenure, developing a welfare program of sorts to help farmers during lean years, and running lotteries to fund bridges and roads. After the start of the Revolutionary War, he supported a reconciliation with Great Britain, a stand that eventually led to his arrest on June 17, 1776. While his wife Elizabeth remained at the Proprietary House until escaping to New York in 1777, Franklin was imprisoned in Connecticut. Neither ever returned to the Perth Amboy house.

Wow, that's a lot of stairs!

Reportedly the house was used by both the American and British forces at various points during the Revolution; what's known for sure is that it suffered a near-devastating fire. A merchant and real estate investor named John Rattoon bought the property in the 1790s, repaired the damage and sold it to New York hotelier Richard Woodhull in 1808. Renaming it Brighton House, Woodhull envisioned two new wings for the house, which, with its location on a bluff above Raritan Bay, became what was arguably one of New Jersey's first seaside resorts. However, he only managed to get one wing built before the War of 1812 prompted an economic downturn. By 1817, he'd sold the property to Matthias Bruen, one of the wealthiest men in America, who made it his family estate.

Following his death in 1846, Bruen's heirs made the property a hotel once again, later donating it to the Presbyterian Church as a retirement home after another financial downturn in the 1880s. Ultimately, the Proprietary House became a rooming house known as the Westminster, the spacious land surrounding it sold as separate lots, and Kearny Avenue run through what had been its front yard. Conditions deteriorated in the early 20th century, but local historians raised hopes that the building would eventually be restored to tell the story of Franklin and the turbulent Revolutionary years.

Today, the Proprietary House is owned by the State of New Jersey and managed by the local Proprietary House Association, which is responsible for raising the funds to restore and interpret the ground floor and first floor of the building. A separate organization is managing the restoration of the 1809 wing and the upper floors of the main structure as offices, reflecting the realities of historic preservation today. While the dream of any historian would be to restore a building to its original condition, the economic realities of managing such a large structure usually point to finding tenants. And buildings nearly always fare better when they're occupied.

Walking around the house, I could understand why the Proprietary House Association folks are proud of the building and eager to tell the story of Franklin and his arrest. The Revolution was more complicated in New Jersey than most people realize, and Franklin seemed to be doing the best he could in what quickly became a no-win situation for him and his family. While he supported reconciliation with Great Britain, his own Assembly pushed for independence, a force too powerful for him to deny. It's a story not often told, and fortunately the Proprietary House still stands to help tell it.

Happy birthday, Thomas Edison: a man of his own making

Today's the 168th birthday of Thomas Edison, one of our favorite personalities here at Hidden New Jersey. We've done a lot of reporting about hidden Edisonia around the state, from his mines in Ogdensburg, the cement factory in Stewartsville, the electric railroad and tattoo pen in Menlo Park, and the site of an old lightbulb factory in Harrison, among others.

Prolific as Edison was in developing new technologies, though, one of his greatest creations was his own public persona. As reporters and the public became more fascinated with his life and career, he told his own life history with zest and verve, firmly placing himself in the continuum of American history. In fact, according to a 1909 biography published with his blessing, his great-grandfather, also named Thomas, was a New York banker and patriot who proudly signed his name to Continental currency during the American Revolution.

Anyone who researches their family history runs into stories like this. The farther back you go, and the longer you wait to interview your older relatives, you discover your great-granduncle three times removed sold penny nails to Abraham Lincoln, at least according to your third cousin Mary's grandmother.

Thing is, Edison's story isn't true. His family history in America does, in fact, venture back to 1730, when the toddler John Edeson arrived in Elizabeth from Holland. Thirty-five years later, he married into one of the community's most prominent families, the Ogdens and settled with his wife in current-day Caldwell. And in the lowest days of the Revolution, as the British forced Washington's retreat across New Jersey in December 1776, John reportedly provided intelligence to the Redcoats. His loyalty to the crown cost him more than a year of his own independence, as he was captured and held in Morristown by patriot forces for 13 months.

Now persona non-grata in New Jersey, the Edesons moved first to British-held Staten Island and eventually to Digby, Nova Scotia with thousands of other exiled loyalists. It was there that Thomas Edison's grandfather and father were born, before the family moved to Ontario and then, eventually back to the U.S. and the inventor's birthplace in Ohio.

Funny thing is, there seems to be a bit of a karmic conspiracy working on Edison's behalf when it comes to finding his Digby roots very easily. A few years ago, Ivan and I found ourselves in the small community on a birding trip and tried to find the Edison family plot reported to be in one of the local cemeteries. Despite guidance from a map done by the local historical society, we weren't able to find it. Perhaps the Edison graves were among those whose stones were obscured by the wear of age, or maybe we just looked in the wrong place, but I wondered if the Old Man was perhaps playing one of his pranks from the Great Beyond.

Loyal to a fault: finding conflict in Hunterdon

In New Jersey, as in the other 12 original states, there are plenty of places and things that use the word patriot in their names. Businesses, sports teams, streets, grammar schools -- I'll bet you can easily come up with something in your town that evokes the spirit of the Revolutionary War.

Loyalist, well, that's a different story. Go to Canada and you'll find a ton of places, businesses and other entities named to memorialize the folks who stayed true to the Crown during the war (for example, the Loyalist Humane Society offers adoptable cats fit for a queen). In New Jersey, where the battle for independence was also a civil war, it's virtually, if not totally impossible to find evidence of those who didn't at least remain neutral, let alone join the patriot cause, and for good reason. Revolutionaries made life exceedingly hard for many with sympathies for the British cause, seizing their property, jailing many and even resorting to tarring and feathering as a device of humiliation. Some loyalists escaped to British-held New York until the end of the war, while others fled north to the Canadian provinces or to England. When you don't stick around, your descendants don't get much of a chance to tell your story.

We've roamed thousands of miles around the state without running into a place that labels itself as a loyalist hot spot. Now we've found one, awaiting restoration next to a new middle school on the outskirts of Clinton. It was home to a family whose men not only sided with the British, but actively fought their neighbors to maintain the status quo.

The heavy-timbered wattle-and-daub Vought House was built in 1759 by Christoffel (Stoffel) Vought on a 258 acre farmstead in what was then Lebanon Township. Of German heritage, the family ancestors were part of the exodus from the Palatinate to the New World, traveling first to New York and then to western New Jersey. By the early 1770s, Stoffel had married, established a strong reputation in his community and had transferred ownership of his land and home to his son John.

As the Revolution started in 1775, New Jersey's population was substantially loyalist or ambivalent about the idea of independence from Great Britain. It wasn't until the winter of 1776-77 that the state's residents' sympathies began to turn, prompted by the looting, pillaging and physical attacks of British and Hessian troops on civilians. The Voughts, however, started making their mark months earlier, when John reportedly convinced several local men to refuse to serve in the local militia.

While the Continental Congress was debating independence 60 miles away in Philadelphia in June 1776, the British were preparing to invade New York City, perhaps a sign to the Voughts that their opportunity had come. Not content to simply affirm his loyalty to Great Britain, John turned violent, leading a band of loyalists in a raid of militia Captain Thomas Jones' tavern, violently setting on the officer, threatening his young family and looting the bar. By the time John Witherspoon and the rest of the New Jersey delegation were signing the Declaration of Independence, both John and Stoffel Vought were in the Hunterdon County jail. In fact, it's quite possible they were there when the Declaration was read on the nearby courthouse steps.

Their time behind bars, however, was brief, and six months later, as the British pursued the Continental troops across New Jersey, the Voughts saw another opportunity. As some of their fellow New Jerseyans were actively declaring allegiance to the crown in hopes of keeping their property and avoiding personal injury at the hands of the invading troops, John and Stoffel gathered allies and headed east toward New Brunswick to enlist with the New Jersey Volunteers loyalist troops.

This was the start of the Voughts' active attempts to quell the fight for liberty, which ultimately cost them their property, including the house and farmland auctioned in the spring of 1779. John Vought eventually rose to the rank of captain in the Volunteers, an honor that did him and his family little good once the war was over and the British left the newly-formed United States. Finding themselves homeless at the close of the war and their Lebanon Township neighbors unwelcoming to their potential return, they settled in Nova Scotia, where much rockier and less arable land made farming difficult. They finally returned to the U.S. in 1792, taking up residence on land they'd long held in New York State.

After being confiscated from the Voughts and sold, the farmstead stayed largely agricultural well into the twentieth century. The house was last occupied by a renter in 2003, until the Clinton Board of Education acquired the property for the construction of a new school. The impending construction attracted the attention of historians and landed the property on Preservation New Jersey's 2010 list of the state's 10 most endangered historic sites, based in part on its role in 18th century events and unique decorative ceiling plaster, including an intriguing serpent design.

Fortunately, concerned residents created the non-profit 1759 Vought House organization to purchase the house with an eye toward restoration and interpretation to tell New Jersey's complex Loyalist story. The timeline appears long, as with most grassroots preservation projects, but the group has already held several events, including public participation archaeology digs to broaden interest in the effort. I'm personally waiting for a chance to get inside and see the plasterwork, including the serpent featured on the sign advertising the cause in front of the house.