CHAPTER I
OLD MONMOUTH
Old Monmouth is an expression dear to the heart of every native-born Jerseyman. The occasional visitor seeking health among its whispering pines, or relaxation in the sultry summer days along its shore, where the roll of the breakers and the boundless sweep of the ocean combine to form one of the most sublime marine views on all the Atlantic seaboard, may admire the fertile farmlands and prosperous villages as much as the man to the manor born, but he never speaks of "Old" Monmouth.
Nor will he fully understand what the purebred Jerseyman means when he uses the term, for to the stranger the word will smack of length of days, and of the venerable position which Monmouth holds among the counties of the State.
Monmouth is old, it is true, and was among the first of the portions of New Jersey to be settled by the Woapsiel Lennape, the name which the Indians first gave to the white people from across the sea, or by the Schwonnack,—"the salt people,"—as the Delawares afterwards called them. But the true Jerseyman is not thinking alone of the age of Monmouth when he uses the word "Old." To him it is a term of affection also, used it may be as schoolboys or college mates use it when they address one another as "old fellow," though but a few years may have passed over their heads.
The new-comer or the stranger may speak of Fair Monmouth, and think he is giving all the honor due to the beautiful region, but his failure to use the proper adjective will at once betray his foreign birth and his ignorance of the position which the county holds in the affections of all true Jerseymen.
Still, Monmouth is old in the sense in which the summer visitor uses the word. Here and there in the county an antiquated house is standing to-day, which if it were endowed with the power of speech could tell of stirring sights it had seen more than a century ago. Redcoats, fleeing from the wrath of the angry Washington and his Jersey Blues, marched swiftly past on their way to the Highlands and the refuge of New York. Fierce contests between neighbors, who had taken opposite sides in the struggle of the colonies for freedom from the yoke of the mother country, or step-mother country, as some not inappropriately termed her in these days, occurred in the presence of these ancient dwelling-places, and sometimes within their very walls. Many, too, would be the stories of the deeds of tories, and refugees, and pine robbers contending with stanch and sturdy whigs. Up the many winding streams, boat-loads of sailors made their way from the gunboat or privateer anchored off the shore, to burn the salt works of the hardy pioneers, or lay waste their lands as they searched for plunder or for forage.
The forked trees along the shore, in whose branches the lookouts were concealed as they swept the ocean for miles watching for the appearance of the hostile boat, were standing until recent years. In their last days broken, it is true, and almost destroyed by the winter storms and their weight of long years, still they stood as the few remaining tokens of that century when our fathers contended for "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor." At last the pathos and weakness of old age prevailed, and to-day there remains scarcely a vestige of those ancient landmarks.
Perhaps if the boys and girls of New Jersey had been as mindful of those old trees as the Cambridge lads and lassies have been of the spreading elm beneath whose branches the noble-hearted Washington assumed the command of the little American army, some of them might still be standing; but as it is, the most of them have crumbled and fallen and disappeared as completely as have the men who sought the shelter of their branches in the trying times of '78.
So, too, for many years stood the famous tree from whose limbs the noble patriot, Captain Huddy, was hanged,—as dastardly a deed as was committed by either side in that struggle which tried the souls of our fathers. But the trees are gone, and only a few quaint houses and venerable landmarks and heirlooms remain of those things which witnessed the contests, and deeds high or base, of that far-away time.