B-cups and pigeon vests: Maidenform in Bayonne

Research often makes an interesting story even more fascinating. Case in point: pigeon bras.

Pigeon bras? You certainly knew that birds have breasts (so to speak) but so much so that they need support? Well... not really.

It all starts with a bit of reading I was doing for Women's History Month, where I stumbled on the story of Ida Cohen Rosenthal. A Russian immigrant who arrived in Hoboken in 1904, Ida soon married, bought a Singer sewing machine and went into business for herself as a dressmaker. Within 15 years, she and her husband William were operating a factory with 20 workers, but their time in Hoboken would be cut short due to snow. It wasn't that the white stuff was preventing their workers from getting to the shop, or curtailing their deliveries. What infuriated the Rosenthals was the fact they had to manage it. City statutes required property owners to clear snow from the public sidewalks in front of their buildings, and the couple apparently didn't want to be responsible for that task, sizable though their shop might be. Rather than hiring people to shovel their walk, they moved across the river, decamping to Washington Heights.

Their business prospering, the Rosenthals partnered with a friend, Enid Bisset, in a new Manhattan dressmaking venture, Enid Frocks. It was the 1920s, and the flapper look was in style, with its waifish, boylike appearance. To fit into the vogue fashion, women would bind their bosoms with plain strips of cloth to approximate a flat chest, despite their natural dimensions. Ida and Enid went one step beyond and created a bandeau that hooked in the back and cupped a woman's natural curves. Their dresses appealed to the more womanly customer, who didn't like the restrictive feeling of the fashion of the day. Including a brassiere with the purchase of an Enid Frocks dress, Ida and Enid apparently didn't initially recognize the bonanza they had created. Their customers would have to show them.

And, indeed, they did: after buying an Enid Frocks dress and accompanying bra, women would return to buy more undergarments, which the women accommodatingly sold them for a dollar apiece. Ida created the brand name "Maiden Form" to differentiate the womanly bras from the boyish look of the flapper fashion, and the undergarment business took off, despite warnings from her brothers, who told her to stick with dresses. In fact, it was the bra, not the dress, that kept the company afloat after the stock market crash of 1929, when competing dressmakers went out of business. Already, the success of the business had led the Rosenthals back to New Jersey when Maiden Form outgrew its New York factory. According to some sources, it eventually became one of the largest employers in Bayonne, doing well throughout the Great Depression.

Which leads us to... pigeon bras. Maiden Form, like virtually every manufacturer in the United States, had to fight tooth and nail to get raw materials during World War II. If it wasn't needed for the war effort, it wasn't going to get to the factory. Ida, in her own spunky style, convinced government officials that her business was absolutely essential. Wouldn't women serving in the WACs and WAVES face fatigue without the right support from a Maiden Form bra? (Ironically, Jane Russell would famously support this concept for another manufacturer in commercials for the 18 hour bra.) Parts of the business also converted to parachute making, while yet another group at the Bayonne factory turned out pigeon vests. Sewn from bra fabric and attached to a paratrooper's gear, the vests enclosed a carrier pigeon, which the paratrooper would release with a message once he'd landed in enemy territory. Soldiers being who they are, the vests quickly became known as bras.

The challenge of wartime shortages overcome, Ida brought her company into the late 40s and 50s with a series of innovative advertising campaigns that kept Maiden Form in the vanguard of women's undergarments. William had already made substantial contributions to design, including standardized cup sizes to ensure women could find a reliable fit, time after time. By 1960, the company's name had evolved to Maidenform, its founder still active in the business at an age when most folks would have retired. The business had expanded into Europe and Latin America, its manufacturing moving to southern states and Puerto Rico. Ida continued to work until suffering a stroke at the age of 80, leaving Maidenform in the capable hands of her daughter.

Today, Maidenform is part of Hanes Brands and retains offices in Iselin, its former Bayonne factory now converted into chic apartments. You have to wonder how many people know the unique way the small city supported the troops in World War II... or, for that matter, millions of American women. I do know that the next time I drive down Avenue E, I'll give a small salute and a knowing grin to the pigeons hanging out in front of the brick building at number 154.

A cool drink of water: stumbling onto Molly Pitcher's spring

If you grew up in New Jersey, or driven on the Turnpike for that matter, you've heard of Molly Pitcher. Young history buffs first learn of her as a hero of the Battle of Monmouth during the American Revolution, bravely staying on the field of battle as cannons roared around her. Fought in the area outside Freehold on June 28, 1778, the conflict was one of the largest of the entire war and certainly the biggest in New Jersey. As we learned from a recent visit, the day's weather put a woman with a pitcher in a good position to become a legend.

Molly's feats vary, depending on which account of the day you hear. One story has her repeatedly bringing water to her husband and his fellow soldiers on the oppressively hot, humid summer day, keeping the Pennsylvania artillerymen hydrated as many troops on both the American and British sides succumbed to heat stroke. Another version has her taking the place of her injured husband in a gun crew of the 4th Continental Artillery Regiment. She may also have been fetching water for the cannons themselves. Their barrels needed to be swabbed after firing to clear errant sparks and spilled gunpowder, a task especially important during what was to be the most extensive use of artillery in the entire Revolutionary War.

Molly herself is commonly assumed to be a woman named Mary Ludwig Hays, whose husband was part of a large gun crew. She was among the many women who accompanied the troops, cooking, repairing clothes and caring for injured and sick soldiers. Given the hectic nature of battle, it's entirely possible that she stepped in to help when a gunner was injured or suffering from the heat.

We weren't thinking much about tracking Molly down when we set out to explore the battlefield's trails and interpretive markers. Portions of the battlefield are still used as farms and orchards the way they were back in 1778, leaving an impressive viewshed for you to consider from the back side of the visitor center. Miles of hiking trails, roads and field edges offer places to get some perspective on the battle.

The weather was a bit raw on the day we visited, so we decided to check out the park's almost 3000 acres by car. A few roads traverse the area to make it easier to explore, but there are still plenty of wooded sections and farm fields to help you envision what Washington and his troops came upon when they marched into the area. There aren't a lot of interpretive markers along the roads, but the park map showed one not far from a small parking area just off Wemrock Road, near a rusting railroad overpass.

The gravel lot was only large enough to accommodate a couple of cars, but we were the only ones there. Looking around for the interpretive sign, I saw something unexpected: a stone flanked with small faded and aged American flags. The side closest to the car clearly said "MOLLY PITCHER," with some additional printing below it. A closer examination revealed the word "SPRING" painted closer to the bottom of the stone. On the other side was more printing; though chipped by age, it manages to still say "THIS MARKER PLACED BY ALEXANDER JAS___ AND _____M D. PERRINE."

Several steps away, a bramble-covered area was divided by a series of wooden planks across a small running stream. Its source was obscured by vegetation, but it seemed we might have stumbled upon the spring where Mary fetched the water that sustained several American troops during the heat of battle.

I'm always a little wary of unofficial markers, but this one got me curious, especially given its condition. While the stone has seen better days and the state apparently hasn't seen fit to replace it, the presence of the flags, however weathered, led me to believe that someone's been paying at least cursory attention to it.

Turns out it's been there for more than 75 years. According to the Red Bank Daily Register of July 6, 1966, the stone and an interpretive sign were placed there by William D. Perrine and Alexander Jasco, Sr. in 1938, well before the state purchased the land for a park. The sign, now missing but said to be well-maintained 50 years ago, noted "From this spring, Molly Pitcher (Mary Ludwig Hays) carried water to her husband and thirsty soldiers."

What's more, there's another well or spring somewhere on the battlefield that's also claimed by some to be Mary's water source. Neither is marked on the official park map, but I suspect that if we'd wandered a bit more, we'd have found it eventually.

Before we left for the day, we agreed to return to the Monmouth Battlefield once the weather gets warmer. The fields and woods may just be a nice stopover for migrating birds in the spring, and the trails look promising for both good exercise and a ground-level experience on one of New Jersey's great contributions to American independence.

We may even try it on one of the challenging humid days we seem to get in droves in late June and early July. Considering the ordeal our ancestors went through to ward off the British and Hessians that day in 1778, the least we can do is leave the relative luxury of air conditioning to get a deeper understanding of what happened there.

Somerville's Arabella Griffith Barlow: fighting a different battle during the Civil War

Mention the impact of women in Civil War-era medicine, and most people will bring up the name Clara Barton, but others also bravely toiled to heal injured and ailing soldiers in the field. Our resident Civil War scholar Ivan relates the story of a remarkable New Jerseyan who dedicated the last years of her life to save Union soldiers.

The American Civil War evokes many iconic images, from the wise Abraham Lincoln to the heroic soldiers to the freed slaves left to negotiate a different place in American society. However, few people, even many Civil War scholars, spend much time contemplating the profound accomplishments and sacrifices of those who gave their time and effort to tending to the sick and wounded soldiers of the conflict. Indeed many more soldiers died of disease than due to battlefield wounds. For Union soldiers the ratio was about 2 to 1 and for the Confederates the ratio of those who died of disease vs. wounds was even higher. Why did this happen? Certainly the medical profession’s knowledge of germs was in its infancy. The Union Civil War Surgeon General William Hammond considered the conflict to have occurred “at the end of the medical Middle Ages.” If that was not bad enough, many soldiers entered the army fresh off the farm where they had little to no exposure to the deadly diseases of the day such as measles, smallpox and malaria.

Into this deadly atmosphere entered Somerville native Arabella Griffith Barlow. At the relatively-advanced age of 37, she had married Francis Channing Barlow just a day before he left for war in April of 1861. What added to the unusual nature of the nuptials was the fact that Arabella was ten years older than her new husband. She was considered quite an item in pre-war New York City, having come from a prominent Somerville family and was educated by a relative, Miss Eliza Wallace of Burlington City. Arabella was described by fellow New Jerseyan George Templeton Strong, a founder of the United States Sanitary Commission, as “certainly the most brilliant, cultivated, easy, graceful, effective talker of womankind.”

Despite her place in New Jersey society of the day, Arabella was looked upon as a very capable and determined woman. In fact, she once said, “Women rule everything and can get anything.” Such an attitude well served her husband, then a colonel, when he was wounded at the battle of Antietam in September of 1862. Having joined the Sanitary Commission earlier that year, Arabella immediately went to Francis’ side to nurse him back to health. Promoted to brigadier general two days after the battle, he figured prominently in the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg where he was again wounded. Once again, Arabella cared for her husband in Baltimore and then in Somerville until he was able to resume active service in the field.

Where many might have returned home after their loved ones had recovered, Arabella continued to serve in the Sanitary Commission, bringing praise from medical professionals. An army doctor’s report included this account of her dedication: “Her exhausting work at Fredericksburg, where the largest powers of administration were displayed, left but a small measure of vitality with which to encounter the severe exposure of the poisoned swamps of the Pamunkey, and the malarious districts of City Point. Here, in the open field, she toiled…under the scorching sun, with no shelter from the pouring rains, and with no thought but for those who were suffering and dying all around her.”

Indeed, she worked so hard that she succumbed to exhaustion and fainted at her post. Only then did she realize that she had contracted the typhoid fever that eventually claimed her life on July 27, 1864. Francis was understandably distraught over the news of his wife’s death but managed to endure. He was promoted to Major General in the final days of the war and was present for the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.

Arabella now lies at rest in Old Somerville Cemetery, honored by a plaque that only hints at the strength of this remarkable woman.

Hessians in the Ice Box: the hidden history of one of Newark's oldest homes

People sometimes tend to forget that New Jersey's largest cities are among our oldest. Take, for example, Newark. Gleaming new buildings are being constructed along Broad Street downtown, but if you look carefully around the city, you'll also see sandstone structures that were built before the American Revolution. One of the oldest, if not the oldest, stands precariously between an Episcopal church and an overpass for Interstate 280.

Built around 1710, the Plume house is remarkable for more than its age. Originally, I stopped by to track down its 19th century acclaim as the birthplace of an new technology that spurred the development of the entertainment industry. Then I discovered that it has the distinction of playing a small but telling role in the American Revolution. Today, we'll focus on that part of its history.

The land on which the sandstone house sits was deeded to early Newarker Samuel Plum in 1673 as part of the original partition of the region. A large farm with orchards, it was then well outside the heart of Newark, which was far smaller than it is today.

Annetje Van Wagenen Plume came to live at the house after her marriage to Samuel's grandson, Isaac Plume, in the mid 1700s. Together with Isaac's children and their mutual offspring, the pair kept the farm going until 1776, when Isaac joined the patriot cause as part of the Essex County Militia.

Ann and the children were on their own during the winter of 1777, when Hessian troops made their way to Newark after the Battle of Long Island. Located on the northern edge of town, the Plume farm and homestead was an easy and quick target. Hungry from the march, the enemy troops pushed their way into the house, demanding food for themselves and their horses.

Washington's troops had already retreated westward, leaving the area undefended and the Hessians emboldened. Figuring they'd encounter little resistance, they rummaged about the house, but when they started chopping her furniture for firewood in the main room, Ann had had enough. According to legend, her demands that they stop were countered by an officer's threat that he'd shoot her unless she shut up and left them alone. Angered, she let loose what was then a raunchy phrase for what might have been termed a proper woman: "Ram's horn if I die for it." The officer laughed in surprise and relented, telling his troops to move out to the yard.

Ann's frustration grew the longer the Hessians stayed on her property. A few days after the wood chopping incident, she saw a chance for revenge. Noticing one of the soldiers venturing into the ice house for some fresh milk, she quickly shut the door behind him and barricaded it. Muffled by the thick walls of the ice house, the soldier's protests and cries for help went unanswered by his comrades, who left in haste the next day when rumor spread that Continental soldiers were on the way. As the story goes, she turned the milk thief over to the Jersey Blues a few hours later, receiving his metal helmet as a reward.

Even without her daring during the Revolution, Ann was a remarkable woman for her time, having inherited substantial land holdings from her father. All of the properties became Isaac's at their marriage due to estate laws of the time, but she regained them all after his death in 1799. As a property-owning widow, she was entitled to vote before the right was taken away from women in New Jersey in 1807. By the time of her death in 1816, she was worth more than $100,000, a significant sum for the day regardless of one's gender.

As for the house, there's much more to be said, both of further history and of an uncertain future. Stay tuned for more...

I call shotgun! The ultimate cross country trip with Alice Huyler Ramsey.

We may have found New Jersey's first legitimate road tripper, and she was a woman with moxie.

Hackensack-born Alice Huyler Ramsey was probably among the first people to get her driver's license in New Jersey, and an unlikely motorist for the early 1900s. She'd dropped out of Vassar College to marry a considerably older attorney, John R. Ramsey, and was the mother of a two year old boy. According to most accounts, her husband encouraged her to learn to drive after the horse pulling her carriage was spooked by a passing car. It's quite possible she would have come up with the idea on her own: her father had supported her childhood interest in machinery, and as events would prove, she was up for a good challenge.

Alice Huyler Ramsey and her Maxwell.
Note the New Jersey plates.

Alice took to driving like a fish to water. After two lessons, she'd mastered the automobile and was on the road, logging thousands of miles tooling around Bergen County. She was so enthusiastic about driving, in fact, that she entered a 200-mile endurance drive to Montauk, Long Island. After the contest, she was approached by the Maxwell-Briscoe automobile company, which saw promotional opportunities in the 22 year old. How many customers could they attract if they could prove that anyone -- 'even a woman' - could drive cross country in a Maxwell car?

Alice was game. After receiving permission from her husband, she left from Maxwell's New York City dealership on June 9, 1909, with the slogan "From Hell Gate to the Golden Gate." She was accompanied by her two older sisters-in-law and a younger female friend, none of whom could drive (apparently road trippers hadn't yet enacted the longstanding rule of always having a relief driver). Heading north into New York State first to make some promotional stops for Maxwell, they then drove west along Lake Erie and then westward, roughly along the combined paths of Interstates 90 and 80.

To appreciate the magnitude of the challenge, consider what we take for granted when we drive our interstates long distances, and take all of it away. There were no regularly-spaced service stations. Finding a good meal was a chancy venture that might be miles off the beaten path. Lodging was catch-as-catch-can in the days before Holiday Inns and other chain hotels; the concept of the motel or motor lodge was still years from being conceived.

And then there were the roads. No maps were available for cross country navigation. East of the Mississippi River, the group used a series of Blue Books, which offered turn-by turn directions that were often unreliable because landmarks were missing or had been changed. The rest of the way, the roads were much less developed, so the travelers stayed close to the telegraph lines that linked towns and cities.

Of the 3600 miles they drove, just over 150 were paved, which led to a lot of ruts, potholes and mud to be negotiated. The Maxwell's tires were treadless and slim by comparison to today's, and even with tire chains, the Ramsey group often found themselves needing to be towed or pulled out by beasts of burden lent by generous farmers. One would wonder if Alice's local driving -- possibly through the Meadowlands -- had prepared her for the muck and mire she would have to conquer on the dirt roads in the Midwest and West.

On the best roads, the group hit speeds up to 42 miles an hour in the open cockpit car and could travel nearly 200 miles in a day. At the worst, they logged only four miles after a long day navigating the muck and mire. They'd often have to ford bridgeless rivers, sleeping alongside a riverbank at least once in the hopes that the water level would have decreased by the time morning came.

Driving a car in the early 1900s also meant knowing what to do when problems came up -- motorists had to carefully monitor gasoline and handle whatever repairs were needed during frequent breakdowns. Alice skillfully handled the malfunctions herself; it took something as serious as a broken axle for her to seek help.

Alice and her group were among the first to get a sense of the majesty of the United States by car. They observed Indians in Nebraska hunting jackrabbits with bow and arrow. They got bedbugs in Wyoming, where they also ran into a posse looking for a murderer. Alice also brought a little of the East Coast west, playing a few impromptu numbers on the piano at a lunchtime restaurant stop in Iowa. And like many travelers yet to come, she enjoyed the reactions Westerners had to her New Jersey license plates. The Maxwell company's publicity brought out curiosity seekers that would meet them along the way

Fifty-nine days after leaving Manhattan, Alice and her crew arrived in San Francisco to a grand celebration. After all that driving, they stayed only three days, taking the train back to New Jersey. Who could blame them? They'd already seen so much, had so many novel experiences. Could San Francisco, as beautiful as it is, even compare?

Nine months after finishing her trek, Alice gave birth to a daughter, but that didn't stop her from having adventures. Over the course of her life, she drove across the country 50 times, the last being in 1975, at the age of 89. The American Automobile Association named her the Woman Motorist of the Century in 1960. She also attempted to drive the six passes of the Swiss Alps but only made it through five, after stopping because her doctor was concerned about her pacemaker.

Alice lived in Hackensack until 1933, when she moved to Ridgewood after her husband's death. She spent the last 30 years of her life in California, where she died in 1983, and is buried in Hackensack. I can't help but wonder why the Turnpike Authority never named a service area after her. After all the miles she put on the odometer, and all the blown tires and steaming radiators she fixed, she deserves memorializing in the domain of pavement, oil and wrenches.

French, botany and a debate on socialism: Just another week at Miss Dana's School for Young Ladies

Today it's the site of a wine store, but back in the day, 163 South Street in Morristown hosted one of the nation's most progressive educational institutions for young women. No historical markers commemorate the site, but Miss Dana's School for Young Ladies deserves note as an incubator for independent thought for women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I wish I could say I discovered Miss Dana's totally on my own, but getting there was more like a scavenger hunt than a field trip. Our friend Joe Bilby, co-author of 350 Years of New Jersey History, From Stuyvesant to Sandy, mentioned Dorothy Parker's birthday as one of the historical nuggets he regularly posts on the National Guard Militia Museum of New Jersey Facebook page. Research on the Algonquin Round Table wit led to Miss Dana, but more on that connection later.

As we learned when we stumbled on the site of the Bordentown Female College, women's education in 19th century America generally took one of two routes. Some of the institutes, seminaries or colleges founded exclusively for girls focused on the type of higher education that we're familiar with today. Others were basically finishing schools that prepared daughters of wealthy parents for their entry into polite society, teaching manners, literature and the culinary arts so they could have a decent conversation with their future husbands and neighbors.

Despite the impression you might get from its innocent-sounding name, Miss Dana's School was a serious educational institution. The property on South Street was originally home to the more studious-sounding Morris Female Institute but became Miss Dana's when Elizabeth Dana leased it in 1877 after leaving her English and French Boarding School in Dobbs Ferry, NY. What happened to the Female Institute isn't clear, but if the scathing assessment provided by Rutgers Professor G.W. Atherton is any indication, it didn't live up to its scholarly name. (Either that, or Atherton made a hobby of exposing self-professed educators who consistently employed bad grammar and paltry vocabulary.)

Miss Dana's proved popular with prominent families, both in New Jersey and around the country. Classes were small, limited to 15 girls taught in seminar style to assure personal attention. Students learned the classics -- Greek, Latin, literature, history and the Bible -- in addition to mathematics and hard sciences like chemistry and physics. Botany, psychology, studio art, music, logic and other electives were also available to round out the students' education. Noted scholars visited the school to lecture on current events and politics; in fact, Reverend William Griffis, one of the first Americans to travel extensively to Japan, came to the school to share his impressions of the East. (You might recall we "met" Rev. Griffis through our research on the Japanese graves in New Brunswick's Willow Grove Cemetery.)

Parents could send their daughters to Miss Dana's with the assurance that if the girls took to their studies, they'd be assured a path to further success at one of the nation's top women's colleges. Graduating from her school meant an automatic acceptance to Vassar College, with no other entrance requirements necessary.

Unlike her predecessors at the Morris Female Institute, Miss Dana had a penchant for excellence that transcended the classroom. As one indication, in 1893 the school became the first in the state to hire a resident nurse. Marietta Burtis Squire was at the top of her field; at other points in her career she was the first president of the State Board of Examiners for Nurses and Superintendent of the Orange Memorial Hospital.

Elizabeth Dana died in April 1908, having prepared a few hundred women for higher education and productive lives. The school closed four years later, but her legacy lives on. Just after her death, students and alumnae endowed a reading prize in her name at Vassar, which the college continues to award to the student who undertakes and completes the best independent reading project over their summer break.

So what's the connection to Dorothy Parker, poet, author and satirist? Born in Long Branch as Dorothy Rothschild, she lived with her family in Manhattan but boarded at Miss Dana's after a stint at a Catholic school in the city. (She joked that she was encouraged to leave after characterizing the immaculate conception as "spontaneous combustion.") She graduated in 1911 as part of the school's last class. Her biographer, Arthur F. Kinney, suggests that the education Parker got in the Morristown school may have influenced her worldview and political interests. As he notes, the weekly current events discussions during her senior year "focused on such themes as exploitation in the slums, reports of muckrakers, and the growth of the Socialist party." The final issue of the school paper before her graduation included articles on child labor in American sweatshops and U.S. expansion in the Pacific region.

One has to wonder how many other girls' schools in that day were encouraging that kind of discussion. While finishing schools taught young women how to conduct a pleasant conversation, Miss Dana encouraged her students to think for themselves. She was well ahead of her time.

The woman on the wall: Captain Eleanor Alexander and New Jersey's Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Of the 1563 fallen service members commemorated on the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Holmdel, only one is a woman: Captain Eleanor Grace Alexander. Every name on that wall has a compelling story, but viewing a female name, and learning about her, make a special impact on those who visit the memorial with no expectation of seeing a woman honored for her sacrifice in a war decades ago.

Captain Alexander's name on the
New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Affectionately described by family members as "a tough broad," the Queens-born Alexander moved to River Vale with her mother after graduating with a nursing degree from D'Youville College. Six years later, she'd achieved a measure of success as a cosmetic surgery operating room supervisor and was engaged to be married, yet felt compelled to enlist in the Army Nurse Corps. Friends suggested that she could offer her services in a safer environment by serving in the Peace Corps instead, but she was resolute in her desire to take the military route. In fact, she approached all of the services to see if they'd send her to Vietnam but only the Army would guarantee it. As her sister in law Suzanne Alexander later told the New York Times, "She told me she was going to do this before she had any obligations. She insisted on going over there for six months. She had to do this."

She enlisted in May 1967, leaving behind her hope chest and wedding dress, and bringing a great deal of enthusiasm for the challenge ahead. Assigned to the 85th Evacuation Hospital at Qui Nhon, Vietnam, she was part of the team responsible for stabilizing seriously wounded patients, whether they be American, allied or enemy. A colleague recalled that "Rocky," as Alexander became known, was "top notch... never got rattled... even managed to look well groomed" in the chaos of field hospital work.

Captain Alexander's D'Youville College yearbook photo, class of 61.
A nursing scholarship was established there in her name.

Five months into her enlistment, Alexander grabbed opportunity from coincidence, a decision that one could say cost her her life. As fighting intensified at the Battle of Dak To 60 miles away, the 85th was to send an emergency medical team to nearby Pleiku to treat the wounded. Another nurse was part of the team but couldn't be located in time, so Alexander took her colleague's gear and ran to join the departing group. She and the team worked grueling 14 hour shifts, an exhausting yet exhilarating regimen for the enthusiastic nurse. "The troops around Pleiku are getting hit quite hard," she wrote to her mother in mid November. "For the past three days, I've been running on about four hours sleep. Funny thing is, I love it."

After six weeks, the team was returning to the 85th when their plane encountered rain and low clouds that would prevent their landing at Qui Nhon. They were diverted to another airstrip with better landing conditions but crashed into a mountainside while attempting to get there. Alexander, the other 21 passengers and four crew members were all killed in the accident. She was 27 years old and was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star.

Accounts of Captain Alexander from those who served with her say much of her commitment and poise; it seems that many of the enlisted men at the hospital were enthralled by her beauty. Most touching is a letter written to Alexander in 1991 by the Army nurse whose place she seized for the Pleiku assignment. "How did you keep it together? You know, the guys really leaned on you," she wrote. "You and I triaged, organized, drove the men and prayed... I really admired your strength and envied it." The same nurse acknowledges that had events been a little different, she, herself, might have perished in the crash, and Alexander survived. She tells of the complex mix of guilt and sorrow she continued to feel, decades later, and her struggles to make a positive impact on the world in Alexander's memory.

We often think of the sacrifices men made, and the fact that but for a twist of fate, an injury that prevents a deployment, a roll call missed, one soldier survives while the one who took his place dies or is injured. Until very recently, with women being further integrated into combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of us didn't consider that the beneficiaries or victims of fate could be female.

Last September, the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated a new monument for Captain Alexander, ensuring that more visitors will learn about her dedication and sacrifice. She's a true example of the power of commitment and the unstoppable desire of some to make a positive impact on those around her.

A truly Revolutionary doctor: Warren County's Peggy Warne

World War II brought us Rosie the Riveter, the fictional female defense worker who represented hundreds of thousands of real women who took jobs in industry to replace men who were called to war. "Rosies" around the country not only relieved a critical labor shortage, they proved that women were capable of taking on what had been considered "men's" work.

While Rosie is a lasting icon of the mid 20th century, there's no similar character to represent the women who ably filled the labor gap during earlier conflicts. Sure, Mary Ludwig Hays became known as Molly Pitcher when she took up the cannon in place of her injured husband at the Battle of Monmouth, but what of the women who didn't serve in combat? For the most part, one has to dig into history books, study roadside markers or scour graveyards to find them.

Warren County's Peggy Warne is a classic example.

A member of one of New Jersey's oldest families, Margrietje Vliet was born sometime between 1746 and 1751 in Six Mile Run (now part of Franklin Township), Somerset County. The Vliet family had already been in the New World for nearly a century by then, having emigrated from Holland to Flatbush, Long Island when the territory was still in the hands of the Dutch.

In her mid twenties, Peggy married Joseph Warne, grandson of one of the original proprietors of East Jersey (for a quick primer on the proprietors, check out this story. Suffice to say, the Warnes had lived in New Jersey for quite some time.). Joseph's father George gave the young couple 130 acres of farmland in what was then Mansfield-Woodhouse, Sussex County, now Broadway, Warren County.

The Warnes had a total of nine children -- six daughters and three sons -- but Peggy still had time to serve as midwife for the community. At the time, helping mothers through childbirth was the exclusive domain of women; doctors didn't handle pregnancies or deliveries, and few physicians lived in the sparsely-populated area, anyway.

When colonists began rebelling against British rule, both the Vliet and Warne families took up the cause. Peggy's father served as a captain under General William "Scotch Willie" Maxwell during the Revolution, while five of her brothers served in various ranks of the New Jersey Militia. While it's not clear whether Joseph Warnes fought in the war, three of his brothers did, leaving little doubt that he supported the patriot cause one way or another.

Peggy couldn't take up arms with so many children at home, but she could do the next best thing. Expanding her existing medical practice, she assumed the role of country doctor, caring for neighbors with ailments well beyond her usual obstetrical duties. According to Hunterdon County historian James Snell, "she not only practiced in her own neighborhood, but kept a horse ready night and day and rode into the surrounding country, through Warren and Hunterdon Counties, undeterred by rain, hail or drifting snow." Some accounts even credit her with tending to soldiers injured in battle, perhaps after they'd returned home.

Whether she did or didn't handle combat wounds, Peggy Warne definitely was an able replacement for doctors who'd left their local practices to join the Continental Army or New Jersey Militia. She's credited as being the first physician at the community now known as Broadway, and she continued her obstetrical practice well into the 1800s. The Phillipsburg chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution is named in her honor.

I spy a patriot: the art and espionage of Patience Lovell Wright

Keep your eyes open in the remarkable colonial community of Bordentown, and you'll find the intersection of art and patriotism. Standing directly across the street from the home of composer, poet, satirist and statesman Francis Hopkinson is the former dwelling of America's first native-born sculptor, Patience Lovell Wright. Justifiably admired for her artwork, she's also rumored to have been a spy during the Revolutionary War.

Like Hopkinson, Wright wasn't born in New Jersey, but the then-colony was important to her formative years. A few years after her 1725 birth in Oyster Bay, Long Island, her family settled near the Delaware River in a community that would later be named Bordentown. Strict Quakers, her parents adhered to a rather hard-core lifestyle, demanding that Patience and her sister Rachel wear white in public and conform to a strict vegetarian diet. Nonetheless, the girls found an outlet for their creativity by molding forms from clay they made from flour and water.

Patience is said to have been a headstrong young woman, leaving her parents' home at the age of 16 to live in Philadelphia. Several years later, she married the much older Joseph Wright and returned to Bordentown. Though she later observed that her husband had "nothing but age and money to recommend himself," the couple had four children; a fifth was born not long after Joseph's death in 1769.

Left with the family house but no other allowances from Joseph's estate to support her children, Patience turned to the craft that brought her so much pleasure as a child: sculpting. The fashionable medium of the day was wax, and with the endorsement of her neighbor Hopkinson, she soon became well known for her extraordinarily accurate, life-sized renditions of human subjects.

She and Rachel opened waxworks in New York and Philadelphia, and Patience in particular drew attention for her particularly earthy work practices. One could say that she set the standard early for the quirkier American artists to come. Given the properties of wax, the medium had to be kept warm to be pliable, an especially important detail for Patience's lifelike renditions. She'd cradle the large blocks of wax under a cloth in her lap, engaging in frank conversation with her subjects as they sat for her. When she finished sculpting a bust, she'd unveil it dramatically, as if she were giving birth to it.

Following a fire at her New York studio, Wright left the colonies for London in 1771 at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane Mecom. The Franklin connection was her entre to the upper classes of English society, who were fascinated by her talent and her plain-spoken, egalitarian ways, as much as they were taken by the flattery she lavished on them. It's said that King George III and his wife Charlotte even allowed her to address them by name rather than honorific. She knew how to work her audience.

All the while, revolutionary sentiment was growing in the colonies, and Wright was an ardent supporter, even going as far as reprimanding the king for refusing to granting independence. She quickly recognized that the warm relationships she'd cultivated with members of Parliament gave her access to information her fellow patriots would find useful. Using sculpted heads and busts as cover, she sent several messages to Franklin, detailing her conjecture on which influential British leaders might be persuaded to take up the patriot cause.

Wright's candor and relentlessness seem to have backfired on her after the events of Lexington and Concord in 1775. While her egalitarian manner of relating to her patrons might have been endearing to nobles and the king in the past, her strident refusal to stop talking about the Revolution made her persona non grata in society. Left without her pipeline of sources, she became less useful as a spy, even as she reportedly pleaded with Franklin to support a British rebellion against the crown.

It's not clear how she made a living during the first years of the Revolution, but a move to Paris in 1780 was largely unsuccessful. Returning to England two years later, she continued beseeching her former patrons in America for opportunities to sculpt the Founding Fathers. Some sources say that only George Washington responded favorably, but Wright died before they could arrange a sitting.

Interestingly, the only work of Patience Lovell Wright's that survives is of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, a supporter of American independence. And despite her reported desire to be buried in her beloved United States, she rests somewhere in London. Rachel had pleaded with both Congress and her sister's former supporters in America for funding to bring her remains back; her requests went unanswered.

The right to vote, and beyond: the legacy of Florence Eagleton

If you're a follower of New Jersey politics, you've no doubt heard of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Located on the Douglass College campus at Wood Lawn, the Institute conducts research on the state's political climate and serves as the University's educational arm on public policy. Countless numbers of state policy makers, journalists and elected officials have benefited from the Institute's programming and resources, whether in undergraduate or graduate-level classes, or seminars targeted to segments of the public.

I've always wondered who it was named for and why it happens to be headquartered on the campus of Rutgers' women's college. As I found from my research, both the setting and the focus of the Institute makes perfect sense once you learn its origin.

The name and the heritage traces to a classic New Jersey Woman With Moxie who wasn't content to simply live the life of a member of late 19th-early 20th century Newark aristocracy. Rather than simply settle for luncheons and charity events, she became one of the state's leading advocates for women's rights in a time when change was neither guaranteed nor completely supported within her social stratus.

Florence Peshine Eagleton was born in 1870 to parents whose families traced back to the earliest days of Newark's founding. Following her education at one of the city's exclusive finishing schools, her parents arranged her marriage to Henry Riggs, who at more than twice her age was already widowed and the father of a 20 year old son. According to Lives of New Jersey Women, their marriage, though without passion, resulted in one son, and they divorced as friends several years later. Though Riggs thought well enough of Florence to name her a beneficiary in his will after their separation, her own family disapproved of the divorce and considered her to be a fallen woman, in the parlance of the day.

Her second marriage was far more successful. At the age of 43, she married Newark neurosurgeon Wells Phillips Eagleton, a far better match, both in age and mutual affection. They were an accomplished pair: he as a well-regarded and often-published physician and she as a philanthropist and advocate for social change.

Florence had come of age during a time when the fight for women's suffrage and access to family planning were coming to a fever pitch. Already having helped found the New Jersey Birth Control League, she dove headfirst into the movement to ratify the 19th Amendment. As leader of the state's Women's Political Union and vice president of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association (WSA), she drove a hugely successful petition drive in Newark, prompting the state legislature to vote to make New Jersey the 29th state to ratify the amendment. That achieved, Eagleton became the first president of the Newark League of Women Voters, the successor to the WSA which is dedicated to educating voters about public policy issues. Under her leadership, the LWV conducted a series of "citizenship schools" to help women make better educated decisions at the polling place.

The leap to the Eagleton Institute, then, becomes easy to understand, but why the Rutgers connection?

An advocate of women's education, Eagleton was an early board member of the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass College) and later became one of the first women to serve as a trustee at Rutgers University. She no doubt became intimately familiar with the school and saw a fertile field in which her life's work could continue well beyond her death.

In her will, she bequested $1 million for the establishment of the Wells Phillips Eagleton and Florence Peshine Eagleton Foundation, directing that the funds go toward "the advancement of learning in the field of practical political affairs and government [so] that a knowledge of the meaning of democracy may be increased through the education of young women and men in democratic government." Further, she wrote, "It is my settled conviction that the cultivation of civic responsibility and leadership among the American people in the field of practical political affairs is of vital and increasing importance to our state and nation ... I make this gift especially for the development of and education for responsible leadership in civic and governmental affairs and the solution of their political problems."

Florence Eagleton died in 1956 and the Institute was organized not long after. Now the home of the Center for American Women in Politics, it continues her efforts to build and enhance women's influence on the public policy stage, even as it broadens its scope to study immigration, the role of the governor in American states and a host of other issues. Perhaps Florence is little known today, but more importantly, her mission continues.

In Fort Lee, naturally: groundbreaking filmmaker Alice Guy Blache

Quick! Who was the first woman film producer?

Back in April we learned about Fort Lee's hidden but critically important contributions to the development of the motion picture industry. It shouldn't be a surprise that the world's first female film producer - indeed the first to own a studio - lived and worked right here in New Jersey. In fact, she'll be inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in October.

Her name is Alice Guy Blache, and though she only spent about 20 years of her long life in the United States, her impact on American cinema was both profound and lasting. Her boosters in Fort Lee call her a "reel Jersey girl."

Born in France in 1873, Guy entered the early filmmaking industry as a secretary for Leon Gaumont, an inventor who initially was in the business of manufacturing and selling motion picture equipment. To demonstrate his products, Gaumont opened a studio in Paris, producing brief films that were later shown in penny arcades. At the time, that's basically what movies were: "shorts" of a minute or less that showed slices of life like street scenes or athletic feats.

The 23 year old Guy saw other possibilities and reportedly asked Gaumont if she could use the equipment for a project. Starting with La Fee aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy), she was soon turning out movies with scripted plots, becoming the first producer to capitalize on filmmaking technology to tell a story. Using new Gaumont technologies in 1905 and 1906, she even experimented with adding sound to her productions.

Guy married cameraman and coworker Herbert Blache, and the pair came to the United States in 1907 to promote their employer's talking film system. The producing bug, however, still stirred inside her. Finding no opportunity to continue directing films for Gaumont in the U.S., she and Herbert formed Solax, their own production company, in 1910. Working first out of Gaumont's Flushing studio, Guy soon found the facilities inadequate for her purposes. It was clearly time to move, and what better place than Fort Lee, the established film capital of the world? Since Herbert couldn't get out of his contract with Gaumont, the couple agreed that he'd stay at his job while Alice managed the construction and operation of the Fort Lee studio.

The couple purchased land on Lemoine Avenue in 1911 and a year later celebrated the completion of a $100,000 state-of-the-art studio. Designed for maximum efficiency and productivity, the brick and steel structure was four stories tall, with a film studio large enough to accommodate five stage settings at a time. Glass roof panels let natural sunlight in for more intimate outdoor scenes, while a large outdoor lot was landscaped for larger group settings.

At the studio, Guy wrote, directed and produced over 700 films, often giving camera operators and technicians step by step instructions on how to achieve the effects she sought. To calm the nerves of stage-trained actors during their early experiences before a motion picture camera, she reminded them to "be natural," even posting a sign with those words above the studio stage.

Guy herself attracted industry attention for her achievements. One trade publication described her as "the presiding genius of the Solax Company... a remarkable personality, combining a true artistic temperament with executive ability and business acumen." Today, film scholars credit her with being the first to use film to address topics including immigration, relationships and homosexuality.

While her impact was profound, Guy was effectively out of the film business by the early 1920s. Illness kept her from working for several years after 1918, during which the Solax studios were rented to other production companies. She and Herbert divorced in 1922, diminshing her influence in an industry which was becoming increasingly more and more bureaucratic and focused on commercial success.

The studios themselves were making the transition from the East Coast to the sunnier, more temperate climes of Southern California, but Guy chose to return to France with her two children to cast her fortunes there. Still recovering from the devastation of World War I, her native country was anything but a fertile environment in which to rebuild a film career, and Guy settled for a career novelizing film scripts and delivering lectures. Long overlooked for her achievements, it wasn't until 1953 that she received official French recognition with the Legion of Honor. Even her former employer, Leon Gaument, neglected to mention her contributions to his business in his own memoirs.

Alice Guy returned to New Jersey in 1964 to be closer to her children, who'd returned to the United States in adulthood. Nearly 95 years old at her death in 1968, she's buried at Maryrest Cemetery in Mahwah. Thanks to the Fort Lee Film Commission, her gravestone now credits her as a film pioneer. The Solax studio building is long gone, with an A&P supermarket now standing in its place, but an informative historic marker invites shoppers to consider the history that was made where they now shop for produce and canned goods.

From enslavement to business mogul: Elizabeth Sutliff Dulfer

I love it when a Hidden New Jersey story reveals another, equally as obscure story about an accomplished individual who's somehow evaded widespread notice. Such is the case with accomplished 19th century businesswoman Elizabeth Dickerson Sutliff Dulfer.

You might remember her name from our story about the clay trade that once prospered along the Hackensack River. She was the first person to capitalize on the wide-scale commercial value of the local clay, purchasing 87 acres of land in Little Ferry for the purpose of mining and selling the substance. It's remarkable for a woman of that time to have the resources and ability to acquire land without a man's help, but it's an even more fascinating story when you consider her origins.

Elizabeth Dickerson was born into slavery in 1790, in New Barbadoes, current-day Hackensack. She worked in servitude for William and Polly Campbell at their home along the banks of the Hackensack River until achieving manumission in 1822. It's not known whether she paid for her freedom or whether it was granted for past service, but either way, she was free to enjoy the same rights as any woman who'd never been enslaved.

Census records indicate that following her release, she may have lived and worked as a seamstress in New York City, marrying a Jamaican immigrant named Alexander Sutler. Regardless of her profession, she must have managed her income wisely, for she started acquiring land on her return to New Jersey in 1847. She spent more than $1300 to purchase the Little Ferry property not far from her childhood home, aggregating tracts from several sellers. You've got to believe she had a goal in mind, as it took time, serious persistence and a strategy to negotiate the number of transactions she had to make to acquire the land.

Once she had the property together, the real work began. Mining clay was a tough, labor-intensive business in the mid 1800s, and she hired several employees to help her. As we saw in the case of the Mehrhofs, Dulfer counted on ships to transport her product to customers in the larger cities of New Jersey and beyond. Some accounts say that her business was one of the largest clay providers in the country; she was likely among the wealthiest landowners in Bergen County, too. That said, she still had to deal with the prevailing attitudes of the time: the 1850 census listed her husband as owner and farmer of the property, even though she herself held legal title to the land.

Following Alexander's death in 1855, Elizabeth remarried, this time to a Dutch immigrant 33 years her junior. John Dulfer joined his wife's business, and together they also tended the 50 acres designated to agriculture. Records show that the farm was successful as well, yielding potatoes, hay, butter and produce that Elizabeth sold at market in Hoboken and elsewhere.

Elizabeth's business and financial acumen served her well in her advancing age, when she capitalized on the potential of her considerable holdings. Selling the clay beds in 1867 for more than ten times what she'd paid for them 20 years earlier, she became a financier. Between 1864 and 1870, she invested more than $16,000 in Bergen County real estate and high-interest bearing mortgages.

Elizabeth died in 1880 at the age of 90. Buried in what's now known as Gethsemane Cemetery in Little Ferry, she seems to have fallen largely into obscurity, much like the clay industry in which she excelled. It's truly a shame: in her time, she defied the odds against women and African Americans to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in New Jersey.

Star power on Lake Hopatcong: the inimitable Lotta Crabtree

Nestled among the more modest vacation bungalows along Lake Hoptacong are the remaining grand summer cottages of millionaires and captains of industry. Among them is Attol Tryst, the 18-room Queen Anne/Swiss chalet style lakefront estate of one of the 19th century's most popular American entertainers, Lotta Crabtree.

Born Charlotte Mignon Crabtree in New York in 1847, Lotta took a somewhat serendipitous path toward stardom, influenced, in part, by her parents' separate ambitions. Her English immigrant father John left for California in 1851, hoping to strike it rich in the gold rush. Lotta and her mother Mary Ann arrived a year later, as planned, only to find that John was not waiting for them in the appointed place. Deciding to make the best of the situation, mother and child soon befriended a group of entertainers, which led to Lotta enrolling in dance lessons.

John caught up with his family in 1853, having not struck gold but flush with another means of making a living. He'd realized that possibly the next best thing to mining a claim was to rent lodging to those who were still trying to. Mother and daughter joined him at a rooming house in Grass Valley, California where he set up business. Coincidentally, one of their neighbors was the famous actress and courtesan Lola Montez, who saw the talent within young Lotta and allowed the young girl to dress up in her costumes. Though Montez clearly loved Lotta and apparently saw her as a protege, the Crabtrees left Grass Valley for another boarding house 40 miles away. Some contend that the actress wanted to take the child on the road with her, and moving away was the best way to discourage her.

Regardless of the reason for the move, Montez's admiration of Lotta must have made a big impression on Mary Ann, because the youngster was soon enrolled in more dancing and singing lessons. Lotta made her professional debut at a local tavern, then took the show to mining camps in the area.

Not long after, the Crabtrees moved to San Francisco, where Lotta performed between tours of Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley. By the age of 12, she was a highly-in-demand performer in the city, and her mother/manager saw a sterling opportunity. Mary Ann booked Lotta on an extensive tour, with performances in Chicago, Boston, New York and several other locations along the way. By the time she was 17, Lotta was taking on stage roles in plays including Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Nell. 

Mary Ann made sure that Lotta's talents were well rewarded. In the days when they were touring mining camps, she insisted on being paid in gold, and Lotta often kept watches the miners tossed on stage in admiration. When the gold got too heavy to travel with, the pair began investing in real estate, bonds and race horses.

Coming into her own as an adult, Lotta took on more vaudeville and comic roles and was described as “mischievous, unpredictable, impulsive, rattlebrained, teasing, piquant, rollicking, cheerful and devilish.” While child actors are well known for engaging in questionable behavior in adulthood, though, the worst thing Lotta seems to have picked up was an affinity for cigars. Mary Ann continued to exert strong influence, managing Lotta's professional affairs and discouraging the many interested men who attempted to court her. In a strategy that predates the machinations of movie studio publicists, the mother/manager believed that a marriage would ruin the public's ability to believe Lotta's portrayal of youngsters. (You'd think the cigars would have been an issue, too, but apparently not.)

There seems to be a fair amount of conjecture on Lotta's love life. Surely, her busy touring and performance schedule left her little time to develop long-term relationships, but she's said to have had several affairs.

One man, nonetheless, played an influential role in bringing her to New Jersey. Sometime in the 1880s, the Crabtrees' New York neighbor, Robert Dunlap, told Mary Ann about Breslin Park, a new resort community being built along Lake Hopatcong for the city's elite. Seeing the area as a wonderful summer retreat from the steamy city when the theaters were closed, she bought a choice lakefront lot as a surprise for her daughter. They moved into their custom-built home in 1886, reversing the letters of Lotta's first name to create the cottage's unusual name. (As an aside, one of their neighbors was the Woodbury patent medicine mogul G.G. Green.)

Lotta spent more than 20 summers as the lake's most famous resident, sailing, painting and entertaining friends. Some say that the eccentric, decidedly single entertainer found it dull, living amid her wealthy and married neighbors, but her mother enjoyed hobnobbing with millionaires. After suffering an accident in 1891, Lotta retired from the stage and subsequently left New York to spend her winters in Boston. From what I've been able to determine, she continued to summer at the lake until her mother's death in 1905. She sold Attol Tryst in 1909 and died in 1922, arguably the wealthiest woman in entertainment.

While Lotta Crabtree is no longer a household name, the entertainer continues to make an impact through her considerable wealth. Her estate, valued in the neighborhood of $5 million, was allotted to several trusts to fund, among others, care for injured World War I veterans and their families, hospital care for the poor, animal welfare, and theatrical performers in need. Interestingly, she also established a fund to provide loans to graduates of the University of Massachusetts who planned to enter the agriculture field. While UMass historians haven't been able to find any link between the actress and the school, there's a rumor she might have been romantically involved with a faculty member. In any case, her generosity lives on through the fund and a womens' dormitory named in her honor in 1953.

Defying gravity and convention: aviator Marjorie Gray

The 1997 Douglass College Alumnae Directory lists Marjorie Gray, class of 1933, as a retired technical editor for Grumman Aerospace Corporation. Nothing in the listing refers to her pioneering achievements as one of America's vanguard of women pilots, except for the designation "LTC." Those three letters stand for "lieutenant colonel," Gray's rank when she retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1972.

Born in New York in 1912, Gray was raised in Cliffside Park. A few years after graduating from the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass College of Rutgers University), she flew her first solo flight at Nelson Airport in Franklin Lakes. It was a start of a lifelong love of aviation that saw her gain a commercial license and fly 19 types of military aircraft.

Gray was a social worker and air traffic control trainee when famed aviator Jackie Cochran invited her to join the first class of Womens Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Started in 1942 to relieve the shortage of eligible male pilots not already serving in the military, the WASPs were civilian pilots recruited to transport military aircraft to their points of embarkation during World War II. Participants had to be between the ages of 21 and 35, hold a commercial license and 200-horsepower engine rating, a minimum 500 hours flying time, and cross-country flying experience. Many WASPs had more experience and were more skilled pilots than many of their male counterparts in the Army Air Corps.

Stationed at Newcastle Air Force Base in Delaware, Gray logged over 750 hours flying B-24s, B-25s, B-26s, DC-3s and other aircraft. Though I haven't been able to track down any additional information on her service, it's possible that she served as a flight instructor for the Air Corps, as many of her colleagues were.

Her wartime service alone would be enough to make Gray a notable name in aviation history, but after the WASPs were disbanded in 1944, she continued making aviation history. She returned to New Jersey and became one of the first women in the country to operate a fixed-base operation, or airport services business. Based at Teterboro Airport from 1946 to 1950, Marjorie M. Gray Aero Service offered flying lessons, piloted charter flights and assessed new aviators for licensure as a pilot examiner. No doubt, her customers could rely on her versatility: besides her commercial license, she had earned ratings for seaplane, multiengine and instrument flying.

Gray later joined the Air Force Reserve and worked as a writer and editor for Grumman, Curtis Aviation and Flying Magazine. She was active in the aviation community through leadership positions in the Ninety-Nines, the organization founded by 99 licensed women pilots in 1929 for the mutual support and advancement of aviation. The Womens' International Association of Aeronautics awarded her the Lady Drummond-Hay trophy in 1956 for her many achievements and contributions to the field.

Describing her years in aviation as "the best time in my life," Gray accumulated more than 3000 hours in the skies. She died in 2008, at the age of 95.

I discovered Gray's story at Teterboro's Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey, into which she was inducted in 1992. Hers is one of many fascinating stories of people with a Garden State connection who've made air and space history locally and worldwide. We'll be returning to some more of those people -- and the Hall of Fame's museum exhibits -- in future Hidden New Jersey stories.

Elizabeth White: berry good for the Pinelands

Blueberries and cranberries may be the perfect foods for New Jersey explorers. Known for their deep colors and vibrant flavors, both berries are lauded as containing several chemical compounds that have been credited with blocking cancer and extending life. Factor in that they taste great and are among the state's largest cash crops, and, well, you'd be crazy not to like them.

You might recall we visited the historic Whitesbog Village cranberry farm a few weeks ago in the futile search for tundra swans. That we were going to end up in the cranberry bogs was a foregone conclusion. What we didn't realize was that we were going to the birthplace of the cultivated blueberry, developed by Elizabeth White.

When Elizabeth was born in 1871, the White family was already prominent in Pinelands farming. Her grandfather, Barclay White, had been the first in New Jersey to plant cranberry bushes for commercial harvest, where others had been harvesting from wild plants. Young Elizabeth often accompanied her father on his trips to the family farm, starting a lifelong devotion to agriculture. It's supposed that blueberries were her favorites and that she often searched out wild bushes of them at the edges of the cranberry bogs.

Though she studied at Drexel University during the winters, she spent the harvests on the farm, supervising the cranberry pickers who came to know her as "Miss Lizzie." She inherited the 3000 acre plantation when her father died, and her self-propelled education in horticulture drove her to keep abreast of developments in various crops. When she read that U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Frederick Coville was researching blueberry cultivation, she invited him to come to Whitesbog to further his work. She and her father had often discussed the commercial possibilities of blueberries, but they knew that to find a market, they'd have to find a way to grow berries that were uniform in all qualities.

Elizabeth White's instructions
to blueberry plant finders.

Drawing on the relationships she'd built with her neighbors over the years, Elizabeth asked Pinelands residents where she could find the best wild blueberries -- or huckleberries -- in the region. Specifically, she asked about flavor, texture, size, resistance to disease and cold, and how quickly each variety ripened, providing very specific instructions for harvesting plant specimens. She and Coville then propagated and cross fertilized the various specimens to develop the optimal highbush blueberry, releasing their first harvest to market in 1916.

By 1986, New Jersey ranked second in the country for annual blueberry production, but even more importantly, many of the berries grown throughout the U.S. and Canada are products of plants whose roots, so to speak, began in Whitesbog. Elizabeth was honored by the New Jersey Department of Agriculture for her achievement, becoming the first woman to be presented a citation by the department.

Elizabeth's horticultural and agricultural achievements are widely known in the industry, but she's not as well recognized for her advocacy of migrant workers and her Pinelands neighbors. When the National Child Labor Committee published a highly critical pamphlet in 1916 about the working conditions in on cranberry farms, she swung into action to refute the organization's claims. Her close relationships with many of the families who worked at Whitesbog gave her a compelling point of view, which she communicated widely at speaking engagements and through letters to newspapers across the country. After a four year campaign, the NCLC retracted its claims and acknowledged Elizabeth's role in setting the record straight.

Interestingly, Miss Lizzie is also linked with another, more controversial Elizabeth: researcher Elizabeth Kite of the Vineland Training School. You might be familiar with Kite's work on behalf of Dr. Henry Goddard, whose studies of families in the Pinelands erroneously attributed intelligence to heredity. (While Goddard later refuted his own work, it was appropriated by proponents of eugenics to rationalize their own dangerous beliefs.) Kite's own study was perceived to infer that the residents of the Pinelands were inbred and thus unintelligent, lending to the then-commonly held belief about this little-understood region of the state. Miss Lizzie again used her prodigious communications skills to defend Kite's work and advocate for the creation of a training school for the region's people. “I am a ‘piney’ myself," she said. "That I am not generally so classed is simply because of the degree of success my forebears have achieved in their struggle for existence in the New Jersey pines.”

Miss Lizzie died in 1954, having extended her work to the propagation of holly and other Pinelands plants as the founder of Holly Haven, Inc. Whitesbog, as we mentioned after our visit, is now being preserved and interpreted by the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, and Suningive, her home, is occasionally open for tours. Given her love of the Pinelands and her family farm, I wouldn't be surprised if her spirit dwells there still.

Entrepreneurial pluck: Dr. Rose Faughnan and Passaic Private Hospital

Long-time readers might remember our article on Dr. Rose Faughnan, the Ellis Island physician who was, herself, a classic example of the American immigrant success story. The daughter of Irish immigrants who came to the United States during the Potato Famine, she wasn't the only child in her family to achieve professional success. Among her siblings were a doctor, a lawyer and a teacher, demonstrating how quickly a family could rise to high achievement here.

A few weeks after we published the story, a Faughnan family member contacted me to share additional information on her remarkable aunt, whom the family calls Dr. Rose. It turns out that after leaving Ellis Island, she took a somewhat entrepreneurial approach to practicing medicine.

Courtesy Rose F. Stuart

It wasn't easy for women doctors to find jobs in the early 20th century, and many found civil service work in institutions like the Public Health Service or city or state governments. Even there they might find bias against them, both institutional and from colleagues. At the time, women were not eligible to take the exam to earn a commission from the PHS, so they were effectively restricted from hospital duty. Instead, they would be relegated to doing the initial exams on immigrants, determining which ones needed further examination before being allowed to enter the country. These ‘six second exams’ were necessary and important but less desirable as a work assignment, given the rigor of seeing as many as a few thousand people a day for a cursory look.

As I found from later research, Dr. Rose had been deemed "feministic" by one of her Ellis Island supervisors, likely because she wanted more challenging work. She resigned from the PHS in 1922 and continued her studies at the New York Lying-In Hospital, now the obstetrics and gynecology department of Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Like many strong-minded people before and since, Dr. Rose apparently decided to create her own career path, rather than relying on another employer. After leaving the Lying-In, she started a private hospital in Harrison but was soon persuaded by several patients to move her practice to Passaic. The community’s needs were acute: while the population was growing, only two general hospitals were available to serve residents there.

Dr. Rose bought a large house on High Street in Passaic and renovated it for use as a 12-bed hospital. Originally taking the overflow from Passaic General and St. Mary’s Hospitals, the facility was open to all physicians, with nurses on duty 24 hours a day. Eventually, as Passaic Beth Israel opened and the other hospitals expanded, Passaic Private focused more on maternity and chronic cases. A 1940 advertisement in the Passaic Medical Society Journal described the facility as “Ideal facilities for the care of invalids, chronic and convalescent cases, medical or surgical. Home cooking. Private, semi-private and ward cases. No contagious or tubercular cases accepted. Under State License.”

I haven’t been able to trace the fate of Passaic Private past that 1940 advertisement, though the Passaic city historian confirmed that the building itself was still there as recently as ten years ago. Dr. Rose died in 1947, with no mention of the hospital in her obituary in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I went to check out the property and found an empty, grassy lot. The only evidence of the building’s past existence is a stub of walkway that might have led to the front door.

It seems that the legacy of Dr. Rose’s work in Passaic is invisible to those who don’t know her story, but it’s no doubt evident in the lives she improved through her care, and the descendants of those she treated.

Elizabeth Haddon: a 21st century woman in colonial New Jersey

"There were reports of crossbills and redpolls at Elizabeth Haddon School in Haddonfield." Little did Ivan know that that innocent sentence would bring up a history lesson about a truly kick-butt woman in New Jersey history.

You might be familiar with Haddonfield (we visited last year to see the Hadrosaurus), the delightfully historic looking community in Camden County, but Elizabeth Haddon, maybe not so much.

Born in England in 1680, Elizabeth came to West Jersey at the tender age of 20. Depending on the source, she was either propelled there by her own desire to make a life in the New World, or was sent there by her father, who'd bought 500 acres of land by Cooper's Creek for reasons unknown. She was the older of two daughters, with no brothers, so if her father was inclined to send a family member to watch over his property, Elizabeth would have been his choice.

In either case, her determination served her well. Within a year, Elizabeth had started a community on the land and erected a house for herself. Comparatively well off, she entertained other Quakers who passed through on their way to Friends meetings in other parts of the region. One of these was a missionary named John Estaugh, whom she'd met several years earlier in England. It seems that she'd taken a liking to Estaugh, and he to her, enough that some have suspected he was a factor in her willingness to make such an adventurous move.

Being a man of the cloth, Estaugh lacked the financial resources the Haddons possessed, and some have surmised that he was cautious in his courting as a result. Elizabeth, however, refused to stand on tradition and proposed marriage, which he accepted. They were married in the fall of 1702, less than two years after she'd arrived.

Together, they managed the Haddon property, which grew over time through Elizabeth's father's continued purchases. He gave the newlyweds the deed to an acre of land for the construction of a Quaker meetinghouse that drew more settlers and assured the community's success. The Estaughs built later built a handsome brick house but had no children of their own, instead adopting her sister's son, Ebenezer Hopkins, to inherit their estate. Elizabeth died at the age of 82, outliving her husband by 20 years.

The town is named for Elizabeth's father (since he was the legal owner, it was Haddon's field), even though she was the driving force in its settlement. Given that the school is named in her honor, I have no doubt that the children of the community become quite aware that today's women aren't the first to make a broad and lasting impact on the world.

As for the birds, well, the crossbills and redpolls were no-shows, but we got something just as good. Perched in a backyard tree high above the rooflines was a handsome adult Cooper's hawk. He might have been the reason behind the dearth of other birds, or maybe not, but if we couldn't find the chase birds, he was a good consolation prize. Birding completed for this location, it was time to see if the Indian King Tavern was open.