Just about the time the troops reached the Phillips farm, Mrs. Sarah, wife of David, mentioned above, had finished a baking of bread; this she took out and gave to the hungry soldiers with pretty much everything else in the house that was eatable. It has been handed down in the Phillips family, as elsewhere, that the soldiers when they halted stood with their feet in their caps to protect them from the snow—those poor naked feet which had been cut and torn by the sharp crust of the snow until they marked the white highway with a trail of blood. The old grandmother many times told the tale to the family gathered about the warm hearth of the old farm house on wintry nights, and the boy John never forgot it.
THE PEROU TRACT.
A rather interesting tangle over the northern end of the Phillips tract has taken much patience to unravel. This concerned a small slice of land now largely occupied by Phillips Park and Elwood avenue.
About 1825 Benajah Perou purchased a certain parcel of land from John Morris Keen, of which the above was part. Perou was a seafaring man and, in the spring of 1828, sailed for New Orleans, and nothing was afterward heard from him. Being unmarried his heirs were his six brothers and sisters, and in 1845 this property was divided amongst them, each receiving a long narrow strip, 66 feet wide, fronting on the “road from Newark to Belleville Paint Works”, and running back into the sunset.
Daniel Perou received as his share the northernmost strip, known as lot No. 6. He was living back in the country and, in 1849, died intestate and unmarried; thus his 66 foot strip fell to the five remaining brothers and sisters, or their heirs, none of whom appear to have paid any attention to the property. In the meantime said brothers and sisters had been getting married and having children, and these children had insisted on growing up and doing likewise, until generations arose who knew not that they were interested in the property.
Naomi Perou, one of the sisters of Benajah, married Morris Phillips, and in due time became the mother of John M. Phillips, who was one of the last of the line to be born in the old farm house. And as time went on and John M. prospered he began to buy up the interests of others in the adjoining property until he owned all of the Perou tract, or thought he did. But by the time an attempt was made to definitely fix the title to lot No. 6 there were found to be more than three hundred shares into which this lot must be divided, each one amounting to something less than three inches in width, and extending from Lincoln avenue to Mount Prospect.
The hunt necessitated to clear this title led all over the country. One heir was traced as far as New Orleans, and lost; another vanished in the Civil War; another moved to Mystic, Conn., and could not be traced to his final end, and so it went. One was found in Kansas and another in Western New York.
It cost more to perfect the title than the land was worth, and when it was perfected the lot—or all that was left of it—was given to the city for a park, a memorial to the late John Morris Phillips.
THE ANTHONY WAYNE CAMP GROUND.
It is family tradition among most of those whose ancestors resided here during the Revolution that Gen. Anthony Wayne camped along the old Back road, but so far as can be ascertained the books are silent on the subject. The New York Historical Society can find nothing in its archives, and if the New Jersey Historical Society has anything bearing on this point it does not know it.