Veblen House: Gleanings on Herrontown Woods from the Princeton Recollector

One important window into the past of Herrontown Woods and surrounding lands along the eastern Princeton ridge is through a monthly journal called the Princeton Recollector, founded by architectural historian and preservationist Elric Endersby in 1975. The stories about earlier times in Princeton collected therein are accessible through the Papers of Princeton, an online archive. As reported in TapInto Princeton, Elric died earlier this month at the age of 79. One way to honor his legacy is to highlight relevant stories his publication so fortunately preserved. But first, a little background about Elric and his Princeton Recollector.

Elric described the Recollector's mission in the first issue, May, 1975:

“In a town which so rapidly develops, it is only by passing along these memories from one generation to another that we may understand how we have come to be as we are. Through these pages we hope to affirm the dialogue between older and younger fellow Princetonians, so that together we may preserve our perspective on the elusive qualities which make Princeton a singular place despite the teasing changes of time.”

And who do we have to thank for preserving and digitizing the Recollector so that we would all have access? Back in 2014, Elric wrote to me that the

"Princeton History Project turned over all of our materials to the Historical Society about 10 years ago. In the meantime a family by the name of Fuchs in the Brookstone area computerized The Recollector."

Here's a wonderful quote from a profile of Elric in the July 27, 2005 Town Topics:

"No satisfaction has been quite like the work with oral history and 'The Recollector' and spending my twenties and early thirties with people who were in their eighties. I talked with 50 to 60 people in Princeton who lived here when Woodrow Wilson was in town. The whole point for me was to gain perspective. I called it 'Periscopic Princeton.' Through their eyes, I could have been a spy in Princeton in 1900."

This legacy of historical accounts, one among several legacies Elric left us, shows the difference one person can make in the world.

Doing a keyword search of the Recollector for "herrontown" yielded seven articles that paint a picture of life up Herrontown way long ago. For instance, there were items that locals gathered from the Princeton ridge lands that are not gathered today, among them being farm crops. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the ridge was farmed by small-holder farmers. The Friends of Herrontown Woods honors that heritage by growing food in May's Garden on the Veblen House grounds. We also fought successfully to save the one remaining farmhouse from that era. The structure, known now as the Veblen Cottage, has since been deemed eligible to be listed in the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places.

In addition to food crops, boulders were quarried, abundant chestnuts harvested and eagerly consumed by schoolchildren, and a wild evergreen called ground pine was collected for Christmas decorations. Wildflowers teamed and drinking water sprang from the ground. An article entitled "Mount Lucas School Reunion Rekindles Old Friendships, Revives Memories" documents the memories of those who attended the schoolhouse on Mount Lucas that closed in 1920. Evidence of the small quarries remains, but the majestic chestnut trees succumbed to imported chestnut blight, and the ground pine was likely consumed by the expanding deer population.

Here are some quotes from that article about farming up along the very rocky Princeton ridge:

"This was all fields when we lived up here. We used to haul out these rocks every year when we plowed."
"Farmer boys worked all the time. There was no time for recreation or sports."
"Most people went through the eighth grade and that was it. The boys started school in November. Farm work came first."

About local quarries:

As a boy I had a team of mules that hauled stone from the quarries to the crusher when they built Route 206 with convict labor. They had a convict labor camp up toward Rocky Hill. I have a watch chain the convicts made from horse hair. They wrapped the hair around sticks and made links with it."

About reaping natural bounty:

"We used to get the water from a large spring with a large beech tree beside it with all sorts of initials. It was always called The Beech Tree Washington was supposed to have camped under it."
"At lunchtime I used to go up in the Big Woods and pick wild flowers. I got lost once, all afternoon. How I finally found out where I was, was I heard a cowbell."
"We used to gather chestnuts in the fall. There was a large chestnut tree in the corner of the Mount Lucas schoolyard. We'd eat them in school. There were many chestnuts along this road. We'd boil or roast them at night and eat them with salt."
"We'd all bring our five-pound sugar bags and every recess we'd hit the woods and fill the bags with chestnuts. And you'd go home and bury them in sand in the cellar. And around Christmas time you had roasted chestnuts, and roasted apples with it."

From a 1979 edition came another story in the Recollector relevant to Herrontown Woods, an article entitled "Margerums Shared Family Christmas." The reference to coal probably makes the era pre-1940s.

"Dad and some of the older boys would go up to Grandpop Margerum’s wood lot in Herrontown to cut down a cedar tree. They would also gather some kind of an evergreen vine that grew there. I do not know what that vine was it was not standing pine but a trailing evergreen vine with lacy, fan-shaped leaves. [Ground pine.] They would gather two large burlap bags full. After they came home Dad would cut some switches from the privet hedge and tie them into rings so that in the evening all the family could work to make wreaths. The younger children pulled the leaves from the vines and placed them in piles on the table. The older ones gathered little bunches of these leaves and tied them around the privet rings. We must have made a dozen wreaths each year. We put one on the front door and one in each of the windows on the first floor. We never trimmed our tree ahead of time because Santa Claus always did that. The day before Christmas we would set it up in a corner of the living room sometimes it would be propped up in a bucket of coal and sometimes Dad would make a wooden stand for it."

And then there's Jac Weller's article in the Recollector about farming the rocky lands along the ridge, entitled Farming Small in Herringtown. Though it makes claims about "Herringtown" that we have been unable to substantiate, we are grateful for the information it provides about the lives of small-holder farmers, such as those who built and lived in what we now call the Veblen Cottage. That article will be explored in a separate post.