HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
From Henry Charlton Beck’s 1939 "The Jersey Midlands," the local story of the Underground Railroad’s conductor, Enoch Middleton of North Crosswicks, and his youngest son Rudolph, who served in the Civil War.
Old Enoch lost sixty-five thousand dollars, it was estimated, in a few years after leaving Philadelphia, through endorsing papers for friends and relatives. He never "lost" anything because of the slaves he helped except in considerable sums he gave them from time to time. "They would come to us ragged, starving, without a cent," Rudolph said, "and I have seen Father give them five dollars before starting them on their journey, as well as a suit of clothes. Some special Providence seemed to protect him in his breaking of the laws."
Rudolph Middleton had his own story and he liked to tell it in his last years. " I must tell you about my enlistment," he used to say, "because it shows what manner of man my father was. There were nine of us young fellows who ran away to Bordentown and enlisted because we were afraid our fathers would refuse to consent if we asked them." They were all good soldiers, Rudolph remembered, in days when he was the last of the nine on earth. "We were assigned to the Twelfth New Jersey Volunteers, Company B. We were all under age and I was just eighteen. In two days we were ordered to Woodbury to join our regiment.
As they were about to leave for battle, Rudolph got leave and seized upon the twenty-four hours to return to Crosswicks and bid his parents good-bye. "I was two hours in the parlour saying good-bye to Mother," the old soldier recalled that day of his youth. "I was the youngest and it was pretty hard for her, I guess. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I don’t dare bid Father good-bye. I enlisted without his consent and I’m afraid he’ll cuff me.’ ‘Son,’ said she, go and bid thy father good-bye.’"
Rudolph found his father setting out cabbages. "I can see him now as though it were but yesterday," he said, when he had returned to spend many years in the old village. "I was in soldier clothes and, trembling all over, I marched up and said, ‘Father, I have enlisted without asking thee.’ He lifted himself up without saying a word, as straight as a ramrod. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘thee ran off and enlisted without a word to me about it!’"
There were tears in Enoch’s eyes. He took his son by the hand. "Rudloph," he said, "I want to give thee fair warning. Don’t thee ever come back home shot in the back!"
"That was the kind of man my father was," said Rudolph, an old man, recalling the incident to his friends. "His religious principles made him a man of peace. Just the same, if I was to be shot, it must be with my face to the enemy. I often thought of that in the next three years. My regiment was in thirty battles and I was in twenty-eight of them. At the battle of Cold Harbor our corps was forced to retreat before a superior force and with bullets singing around me I remember thinking, ‘If I should get shot in the back, I wouldn’t dare go home!’ Several other times the same thought came to mebut I wasn’t shot. I might have been, at Chancellorsville or Gettysburg, but I missed them. I was sick in a Washington hospital."
The records of all these things were found in the old Middleton house, where slaves were once quartered in the attic when the barn was full. Edwin Alexander Newbold lived there when we hurried to Crosswicks one sultry June Sunday, in response to Miss Rogers’ invitation. Mr. Newbold’s wife was Clara Middleton, daughter of Joseph. Miss Rogers had arranged a picnic, with various members of the family ready for an excursion to a shady corner, the site of an old schoolhouse. "You must meet Uncle Edwin," she said, "even if he won’t come along on the picnic. Just listen in and you’ll hear some interesting things."Since Mr. Newbold won’t mind being called "Uncle Edwin" and since it sounds so much friendlier, that’s what he’ll be. As we talked to him his daughter was producing forgotten samplers and books from far corners of the famous old house. One sampler, unframed, was signed Phoebe Ann Chapman. Another, bearing the name of Phebe Willits, gave her birth date as September 10, 1797, and carried out, with the conventional alphabetical and numerical design, the rhyme beginning, "Jesus, permit thy gracious Name to stand…"
Suddenly someone was talking of the old spring [known as Brainerd’s Spring, after David who preached to the Indians there], crystal clear, which once celebrated old Crosswicks. It was surrounded by a wooden barrier on which was painted the inscription, "Free For All." Travel wasn’t hurried in earlier days and little dust whirled up from such vehicles as went by. Not that Crosswicks was intending to fight the encroachment of modern times, for almost at the beginning of the automobile age three intrepid motorists emerged, Dr. Charles L. Dye, Jack Braislin and Edgar Brick, dusters, goggles, and all. Uncle Edwin remembered the spring, however, when it not only appeased the thirst of the casual passer-by but also inspired a sermon by a parson [Brainerd?], who at once changed the topic of another he had previously prepared.
"But there’s only a drain there now," he said sadly. "The platform’s gone. The spring was all smashed up during the World War [I] when soldiers from Camp Dix put up their tents in a near-by field. I raised harry about it and the officers said they would fix things back the way they were, but they never did." The "Free-For-All" spring of old Crosswicks is lost forever, victim of a wartime fee-for all.
Even Uncle Edwin called Scrabbletown "Scrappletown" as he cast doubts on the repeated explanation that Pointville once was Scrabbletown and that the name once was Scrambletown because of a scrambling of the roads there. Then, suddenly, he rattled off a great many names which, if they were ever on maps, disappeared quickly with few to remember them.
"There was Comical Corner, near Pemberton," he said. "And there was Fiddler’s Green, on the road from Pemberton to VincetownI used to go there with Father to cut wood. There were only a few shacks and the Piney children ran barefoot in the snow. There was another place we used to call Sheep Pen, on the road from the shore to Forsythe’s Bog. Then there was Froggie’s, and Duke’s Park, too."
I was apparent that a love of the pine country was heart-deep in Uncle Edwin, for as he talked his eyes grew dreamy as if he had been carried far away to where the warm air was pungent and the scent of the cedar water mingled with it to instill a feeling that nothing temporal really mattered very much.
Historically Speaking is a regular column presented by John Fabiano, president of the Allentown-Upper Freehold Historical Society. For information about the historical society, send e-mail to [email protected].