Arcadia Books!!

Just yesterday, when I was picking up a prescription at Walgreens, I noticed a new display kiosk with dozens of title in the Arcadia books series, for our area, Camden County! I bought three because I very much enjoy these books and must have about 50 by now! This time I bought Cooper River, Delaware River, and Women i World War II, all favorite topics of mine.

I only got to read one so far, which I read while I waited outside the veterinarian's office today. My youngest cat, Patsy Cline, was sick for 3 days and so I had to take her to the best veterinarian EVER! Dr. Ed. Sheehen in the Fairview section of Camden, just off the Black Horse Pike. He is the kindest and most talented doctor, and his staff are ANGELS! I have been going to him for decades after trying a good many others and finding them less than satisfactory. Anyhow, I enjoyed the Cooper River book so much, I asked the tech to give my copy to Dr. Sheehen to say thank you to him for all his wonderful medical assistance over the years. He lives in Collingswood and I thought he would find the Cooper River book interesting, I know I did!

Three of the details I found particularly interesting were in relation to the Cooper family and their ferries, in particular the one at Pyne Point which I have visited and photographed. The information on Elizabeth Haddon and her nephew John Hopkins (of historic Hopkins House which I visited many times when I lived near Cooper River and when it was an Art Gallery) and the bits on Joshua Saddler, the environmentalist and freed man who saved Saddler's Woods, one of the only pockets of original old growth forest left in South Jersey which is under stewardship and conservation by a group of dedicated volunteers. I was happy to take their workshop before the pandemic, a tour of the woods the sighting of the oldest trees, and a great workshop ahere we dissected an owl's pellet and found a shrew's skeleton! If they ever advertise again - TAKE THE TOUR!! I think I found the ad in the Audubon Community Education Booklet, but you might also want to check their website.

You can find the Arcadia books at any bookstore. I bought several at Barnes and Noble at the Rt. 70 shopping Center, and as I said this kiosk was at Walgreens on the Black Horse Pike and Kings Highway. Great reading.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Thoughts on Historic CONTEXT Whitall House, Red Bank Battlefield, National Park, NJ

I think, often with a site like the James and Anne Whitall House, Red Bank Battlefield, National Park,NJ, it is easy to get narrowly confined within the borders of the main even the Battle that took place on October 22, 1777. Although the drama and the import of that event is the center of the location, there is so much more to learn about the people and the world surrounding that event. James and Ann Whitall were Quakers from a large, successful and old time clan of Quakers in the South Jersey area. Ann was related to the Cooper family, founders of Camden, and by the way if you haven't visited Pomona Hall at the Camden County Historical Society, you should!

Anyhow my point for this blog entry is simply that when you have exhausted the details of the Battle of Red Bank, it might be time to dig wider rather than deeper, and explore the history of the Quakers in South Jersey, shipping trade on the Delaware Rive (James Whitall was heavily invested in it), indentured servitude in Colonial New Jersey, the Whitall family employed several indentured servants, one of whom, Margaret Heaney, ran away and James Whitall put out a warrant for her capture.

In general the Quaker community was opposed to slavery but the attitudes of the Quakers is an interesting area to delve into as well. For exampe, one of the Coopers, Marmaduke Cooper, refused to free his enslaved workers edespite much attempt at persuasion by his Quaker meeting, and he neded up being cast out.

The local community wouuld also be an interesting subject to explore, the Woodbury connection, for example, one of Ann's male relatives (her brother?) had a home in Woodbury near the Meeting House, which wa confiscated by the British and used as a headquarters util their retreat. His house is beside the Goucester County Historical Society Museum and Library, another plae worth a visit. Houseed in the Library, behind the Museum, is the framed family tree upon which Ann Whitall appears. <[?> Needless to say, (or is it?) the presence of Native Americans, the indigenous inhabitants before Europeans came and staked a claim on the land, is also a worthy area for exploration. Some artifacts are on display in the new glass cases at the Whitall HOuse.

I just visited last Sunday became I am going to return as a volunteer beginning this week on Saturday or Sunday and I was amazed at how things have changed at Whitall House. I was a volunteer there for many years beginning in the Megan Giordano period. She was a remarkable young woman who died far far too young of Lupus. She was devoted to the Whitall House and the period of the Battle and she was both brilliant and knowledgeable. She was also remarkably inventive in ways to inspire and broaden the knowledge of volunteers. She brought us speakers on Colonial dress and fabrics, spinning and weaving, bee keeping, medicines, maternity, and at the time of her passing, she had been working on a cooperative venture with the town of Woodbury to explore, deepen, and emphasize the connections between the town and the Battlefield.

All that aside, if you haven't been there recently, there couldn't be a more inviting time to stop by. The park is green and flourishing, the house is open for tours (you can explore on your own or have a tour) Thursday through Sunday. There is such a rich variety of historic places to visit in our neck of the woods!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Mother's Day thoughts and Book Suggestions May 8, 2021

Although I am a mother, of a daughter who is now 37 and fully independent, when I think of Mother's Day, my mind ofte goes to my female ancestors, beginning with my own mother and stretching back through the grandmother's I knew, the great-grandmother I knew, and the ones I never met.

Also, I often look back on those women I feel are my spiritual, political, literary mothers, the Mothers of the Movements for Suffrage and Abolition, the Mother's of Literature who wrote the great books, and those who worked in universities and academic settings to bring these women back to us. There was a feminist press that used to find and reprint out of print works by women writers, was it Virago Press? I just looked it up and YES it was and furthermore there is now an e-book about the history of Virago Press.

I had a lost and forgotten female ancestor, my mother's biological mother. My mother was adopted raised by her aunt Lavinia, after Lavinia's sister, Sarah died at the age of 25, leaving three little toddler daughter's behind. The three little girls were placed by their father in The Camden Friendless Children's Shelter. This episode in the family history was entirely buried and never spoken about. Many years into my adulthood, and my retirment, when I took up family history, I tried to find out as much as I could about this lost grandmother whose name was never spoken. I am not sure what she did to be so completely erased, but also, people in those days didn't do much reminiscing, as I recall.

My quest for our fore-mothers was begun long before my search for my biological grandmother. My search for my literary female ancestors began in my college days, when these writers, too, were lost and forgotten and never spoken of. By the time I took my second degree this time in Art, feminists had worked their way up the ranks of academnia and were making archaeological inroads in excavating these lost 'mothers.' I was fortunate enough to have had Wendy Slatkin for my teaher. She had written a supremely meaningful book on Women Artists and she was both a passionate and brilliant teacher and an exellent scholar and writer.

Today, the day before 2021 Mother's Days, I have been catchng up on the Sunday New York Times Book Review and I read a review of a book which I am going to buy from amazon as soon as I finish this blog post: THE AGITATORS, Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights, by Dorothy Wickenden

One of the details that struck a chord in reading the review of this book was that Harriet Tubman, one of the three women profiled, was illiterate, could neither read nor write. She was a monumentlly heroic feigure, as by now, you reader, and most of America knows thanks to the film HARRIET, as well as fairly dedicated revisionist history since the 1970's. A book I had bought but have not read yet about Frederick Douglas adn the women who supported, abetted, and loved him, spoke of his first wife, also a previously enslaved woman, who was illiterate. Both Harriet and Douglas's wife were mocked by contemporaries for their 'plantation dialect' and their illiteracy. This breaks my heart. And it reminds me of the long and arduous journey for women's educational equality that our fore-mothers made.

A few nights ago, I watched a documentary about one of my lifelong favorite male writers, Charles Dickens, and I was struck again by his ill treatment of his first wife, Catherine who bore ten children and was then abandoned by Dickens, forced to leave her home and children which were then taken over by a younger sister. What choice did she have? She would have gone to the "work house" "alms house' or been out on the streets if she didn't accept the obominable option forced on her by Charles Dickens who blamed her for all of the children he had to support, willfully oblivious to the part he played in their conception. Catherine had no occupation and no skills with which to support herself. She was at his mercy, and there was precious little of it.

One of the things for which I am most grateful has been the opportunity for me to get an education, develope a marketable skill, teaching (a stronghold of women's rights and employment throughout the past two hundred years) and thereby to escape poverty, desperation, and a deprived old age, thanks to our union and my pension.

Thank you, Mom, for all the books you bought me and read to me and thank you Lavinia Lyons for raising my mother when your sister died, and thank you to all my teahersin 2021.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com