Ancestry and a Book Review

Reading the Sunday New York Times Book Review, I came across this book ANCESTER TROUBLE, by Maud Newton. In the review they give this quote by Nanette Vonnegut, the daughter of Kurt Vonnegut "At the root of a lot of Art is an injury that needs addressing." I think that is certainly true and it made me think of the root of my search for ancestry: My mother's mysteriously missing parentage. For most of my early childhod, Grandmom and Grandpop Lyons were just that, my Grandparents. It wasn't until later, I am not even sure when, that it was revealed to me that Grandmom Lyons was actually my mother's Aunt and that she had addopted my mother and her sister Sally from the Camden Friendless Children's Home. I am not kidding, that was the name of the orphanage, which I have no doubt sent a shiver of outrage through my Grandmom Lyons every time she saw it on the front of the building where her nieces were being cared for until she wasold enough and married and could adopt them.

Probably this personal history emerged during my early teaching years when there was a passion for Oral History and teachers were given workshops on it. It may be that the trend was inspired by the Foxfire Books in which a teacher in George got his somewhat disaffected students to gather folk tales, recipes, and craft lore from the mountain neighbors around them. The Foxfire Books were instant best sellers and started a resurgence of interest in history and in particular local hisstory and family history.

But my questions never succeeded in gathering any relevant information and got brushed off and deflected. It was clear my Grandmother did not want to talk about my mother's parents, and my mother, herself, showed little serious interest in the past although she did offer some observations about the wome who ran the "Camden Friendless Children's Home." She told me they were nice young women who worked there, kind and polite and well educated. I am assuming they were young ladie from the middle class doing a kind of Charity work. My mother said the food was good and she didn't remember being unhappy there but she did remember one terrifying night when men came in through a window and kidnapped a child. She also recounted how her Grandfather often visited her with a bag of candy which she would eat until she got a stomach ache. She also remembered he was drunk.

Sometimes when I pestered my Grandmother for more information, she made up implausible and ridiculous lies and totally fictional names which put me off the track in my search. Some of her stories were that my mother's parents were killed in an automobile crash, that my mother's father was the son of a wealthy beer manufacturing family.

I don't know why this mystery should have engaged me as it did for all the years, no one else seemed to care, but I couldn't shake it off. I had to know who my mother's parents were and what happened to them.

It was the inspiration for my joining ancestry.com and my subsequent sporadic researches over the many decades. I discovered that my mother had another sister who was alive up until the early years of the 2000's and that she lived in the mid-west. Her name was Betty. My mother's other sister, Sally, lived in the same town we moved to in New Jersey, Maple Shade. She lived until recently and I was able to contact her. She and my mother had been estranged for most of my life. They had fallen out over several insulting and hurtful incidents. My mother, who I can vouch for as the most generous, kind hearted and helpful soul I have ever known, was always helping her sister who was always in one kind of trouble or another - divorce, emotional meltdowns, and I was too young to really understand what was wrong with her, but she couldn't cope. My mother often took care of Sally's two sons, one of whom eventually committed suicide. His name was Richy, but we called him Pip and he was named after his father Richard Scarpetti, who had been a window dresser in Philadelphia back in the days when the big stores had beautifully and imaginatively decorated window displays. He died early in his sons lives. Aunt Sally re-married, but by then the sisters weren't talking anymore. Sally's married name was Stulpenis. There was something about a loaned and not returned christening gown, but I know there must have been more.

Anyway, Sally was apparently the last one to see her father alive, and he lived into the 1970's. My mother's and her sister's father was named Goldy. He was the son of Quaker farmers in South Jersey, but apparently the ghost of rumor whisptered that he had a drinking problem. The girls mother died of pneumonia/tuberculosis following the Spanish Flu Epidemic after World War I. Her mother's name was Sarah Goldy. She was in her mid-twenties when she died. I have a couple of photographs of her and I wonder who will care when I am gone. These ancestors in their paper ghost form live with me, many of the on the bookshelves in my bedroom. They are people to me and I wanted their stories.

Now the question is, do I buy the book the review of which inspired all this thinking? I am trying to stop buying books on impulse, but this sounds like a good one.

I will let you know what I decide - right now, it is time for lunch.

Happy Trains! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Walt Whitman Art and Poetry Center, Camden City, NJ

Sadly, I haven't visited the Whitman Center since I was a student back in the early 80's at Rutgers the State University in Camden. Actually I had a show there of paper sculpture during that time and I remember how beautiful that building was with a gorgeous mosaic in front that was created during the WPA in the 1930's. Anyhow I was just visiting Hoag Levins' HistoricCamdenCounty.com web site looking for a post from 2005 about the old cemeteries of Camden and I ran across this:

The second-floor gallery of the 1918 is hung with paintings, illustrations, fabric works, constructions and artifacts that cover a broad arc of African-American history and lore. They will remain on display through Oct. 3 and may be visited between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. from Tuesday through Friday. Admission is free. The exhibit is sponsored by the Walt Whitman Arts Center, the William Still Underground Railroad Foundation and the Camden County Historical Society.

Hoag Levins is a brilliant researcher/writer and I always enjoy his writings on Camden History. In fact, the cemetery piece I referred to in the beginning of this post was so intriguing that I went to find most of the cemeteries he wrote about! There are so many stories buried in this often forgotten paces and Hoag has helped to bring them back into the light!

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Shenandoah Heritage by Carolyn and Jack Reeder

Monday, April 25, 2022

I am just finishing a book loaned to me yesterday from a Friend at the Woodbury Friends Meeting. I have been attending there since the first Sunday in January, but I was an attender at Philadelphia friends for several years when I lived there in the 1980's. Anyhow, two Friends had just returned from a vacation in Shenandoah and one, Etain Preston, had brought this book to share with us and to discus: Shenandoah Heritage - The Story of the People Before the Park.

As may be the case with many older people, one thing can set off a string of memories which we have by the trunkload. So anyhow, reading this book, I was reminded of the Foxfire series which came out in 1972 and was a sensation. So many young people were trying to get back to some older more rural, peaceful, and simple way of living that it struck a chord in their fantasies. I bought the set and when my parents retired to a mountain in West Virginia, I gave them to my father.

Of course, it wasn't all singin' on the porch and making corn husk dolls back in those days. We have tendency to either fantasize or vilify rural life when in fact, it was much like life anywhere else but with different acessories. Needless to say, along with the distilling of Moonshine, there cam a significant amount of drunkeness, violence, domestic abuse and child abuse. Just like in any small town or big city, there would have been the hardworking and clean living residents who took care of the animals and kept up the property, and the ne-er do wells who beat the kids and neglected the animals and let the fields go to bracken. Certainly then, as now, however, it was the craftspeople who made a mark and who were of most interest to me and in fact I have hanging in my kitchen the most beautiful woven whisk broom from an Appalachian demonstration of handcraft tht I saw in West Virginia on a visit to the folks in Maysville unincorporated I also have a handmade basket. And once every year I swould stop at the Honeymooners Souvenir Shop to buy my daughter a new pair of Cherokee moccasins. The Honeymooner Souvenir Shop is now, hilariously bearing the sign "Honeymooners Gun Shop."

So the Foxfire books came back to me and then I remembered a presentation my daughter gave on Death Songs at halloween in Philadelphia at the Mutter Museum one year. It was stellar! She had slides and songs and one Appalachian folk ballad that I remember was "She walks these hills in a long black veil, she visits my grave when the night winds wail, nobody knows, nobody sees but me" It is a song about a love triangle and love triangles were one of the many causes of murder in the chapter in the Shenandoah Heritage book I am reading. This chapter is about crime and vigilante justice and the shooting that attended drinking and jealous rages both deserved and imagined. As it said in the book, someone got shot and buried and that was that.

My brother lives in my parents house on the mountain but things are much different now than they were even in 1984 when my parents moved to West Virginia, and a world away from 1937 when my father, at age 16, worked on Skyline Drive with the CCC.

I reminded the people at Meeting Discussion group that New Jersey has rich resources of its own from the CCC days and you can see good displays as close at Parvin State Park and Bass River State Park.

Hope this has stirred some memories for you - by the way, my father was a big fan of caverns too and one of the ones near where he lived in West Virginia had a cave where moonshiners were said to have run a distillery. The caverns there were called Smoke Hole Caverns and visiting there was so reminiscent of the caverns we visited in the 1950's when my father bought his first stationwagon and the family hit the open road!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Re-Enactor's at Whitall April 23, 2022

Paul Ferrante and sons demonstrate uiforms and accoutrement of Revolutionary era soldiers: Hessians, British and American.

Revolutionary War Soldier Re-enactors at Red Bank

What a fabulous presentation Paul Ferrante and two young men gave at Red Bank Battlefield on Saturday April 23rd at 1:00. Paul F. is a natural speaker, and he has collected a treasure trove of gear to show and explain to those of us who are interested in the Revolutionary War. One man was dressed as a Hessian, one as a Continental Soldier and one as a British Infantryman. Paul explained the details of the clothing and how they showed the rank and the job of the soldier wearing them. He also showed all the accoutrement a soldier would have to carry marching from assignment to assigment. He was equipped with all the tools of the trade, the weaponry and the tools needed to keep the weapons in working order. The audience of about 50 visitors and 8 volunteers was kept spellbound by the bounty of materials and the stories and information attached to them as Paul showed and demonstrated them. We finally got to see 'grapeshot' and other kinds of ammuniation as well.

One of the great privileges, I think, of being a volunteer at a historic site like the James and Ann Whitall House is the opportunity to meet and learn from the many trained, educated and self-educated, impassioned people who volunteer along with you. Any day that you are volunteering, you can learn so much from the other volunteers - each has his or her own area of expertise, his or her own passion, whether it is the battle on the water, or the gardening, or the history of the battles, or the details of the combatants, and so on, you are bound to learn new things and have a new field of interest opened for you.

Paul and his assistants are all Re-enactors, but I confess, I didn't take a pen and note pad with me, so I didn't take notes and can't remember their regiment, but they have promised to return and I will try to keep you posted so you can enjoy the presentation as well. Also, I am not on facebook, but if you are you can find more information about The James and Ann Whitall House and Red Bank there.

If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you know that I have a great interest in the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Two members of my Meeting have recently returned from a vacation in Shenandoah and they visited many historic sites including Appomatox Court House since one of the two is a Civil War Re-Enactor. But they also took the scenic SkyLine Drive and I have written many times about how my father when he was 16 joined the CCC and helped build the Skyline Drive. It was in the days, as he reminded me, before big machinery, and everything was done by hand, picks, shovels, axes, wheelbarrows, sweat and tears. It was one of the best times of his life. That was why he retired to West Virginia, so he could return to the mountains that enchanted him as a city boy in the CCC. One of the two Meeting Friends who had been on vacation in Shenandoah loaned me a book, 'Shenandoah Heritage, The Story of the People Before the Park' by Carolyn and Jack Reeder which I have been reading all afternoon. It is the story of the mountain people displaced by the park, many if not most of whom had been on their homesteads for generations. It reminded me of a series of books I had boght and read back in the 1970's called The Foxfire Books, about mountain craft and survival tools. I gave it to my father when he moved to West Virginia. That was a great set of books and a unique literary project and success.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann (remember, don't bother with comments function on this site, it is polluted by spam and bots - use my e-mail if you want to talk, thanks! wrightj45@yahoo.com)

Enjoy an Old-Fashioned Tea in the Whitall House Museum!

Enjoy an Old-Fashioned Tea in the Whitall House Museum! Sandwiches, Dessert, and of course, Tea will be served. "George Washington" will be visiting and chatting with our guests. After Tea, take a walk through the Gardens of the Whitall House and enjoy the lovely Red Bank Battlefield Park. Three seatings for tea are available on May 15, 2022. Space is limited, and reservations are required! Sponsored by the Gloucester Co. Certified Gardeners, Office of Land Preservation, and the Dept. of Parks and Rec. For more information and reservations, call 856-224-8045.

There was a very pretty decorative flyer with this announcewment but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to copy and paste it, so all I could offer was the bare information. If you are a Mom treating yourself and a friend or sister - voila! If you are a son or daughter looking for something nice to do with Mom Voila! If you are a couple of friends who have had mothers and would like to celebrate your memories, let me repeat myself VOILA! Here you are!

My daughter will be away at a wedding so I am thinking I may round up a friend and try this myself!

Happy EARTH DAY this weekend! and I am sure I will be in touch again before Mother's day but this message was time sensitive as you must register before May 1st.

Jo Ann

Earth Day and Spring 2022

A quote from Smithsonian Magazine, "Recognizing that their quality of life even survival depended on the same healthy environments, that non human species required, 20 million Americans nationwide participated in clean-up and tree planting and protest marches on the first Earth Day April 22, 1970." The article was about how people almost eradicated the Bald Eagle by shooting it in false assumption that it preyed upon small animals such as calves, lambs and so on. The Bald Eagle eats mainly fish.

As Earth Day once again approaches, I have been reading many books on trees and the environment including: FINDING THE MOTHER TREE, Simard, HOPE, Jane Goodall, LEGACY OF LUNA, Hill. The last mentioned book brings me to the subject of what one person can do. No doubt you have run across the plethora of articles out just now about plastic particles in -WELL EVERYTHING!!! The most recent shock was scientists finding it in our bloodstreams and wondering what kind of effects that can have on us.

This May many stores including my own ShopRite, will be banning single use plastic bags. I am so glad. If you read the articles about the plastic particulates, you will find that in landfills the bags break down into smaller and smaller pieces until they become non-biodegradeable particulates that then enter our water, our oceans, our food chain, and our bodies. So, here is one thing we can all do and that many European nations ahve already done. We can all carry re-usable shopping bags. I have quite a number by now as before the pandemic I had gone entirely to re-usable bags and then the pandemic struck and when we weren't so sure how it was spread, we all went back to single use bags, but now we know it is aerosole so we can get out our canvas, or oil cloth bags and stop using the plastics again. If like me, you re-used your plastic bags - I used them for cat litter scoopings - there are alternatives. A friend introduced me to biodegradeable bags that she bought by the case, so she gave me a bunch to try out. I just ordered them from amazon, both for my cat litter and the little rolled up dog scooping bags that I fit into a carrier on my dog leash.

Something else that I have been thinking about a lot is food waste. I don't have much food waste because I live alone and don't cook much. When I eat out, I take a glass bowl that can go in the microwave, to use for take-home left-overs. It has a spill proof lid and I have two dozen of them becaue I make soup once every two weeks and put them in the freezer, then take out one bowl at a time to microwave. The bowls are freezer and microwave safe and I bought them at Shop-Rite some years ago. They last forever and you can get replacement lids (the lids don't last forever) via amazon.

Lately, I have been recycling my clothes through a collection for the homeless run by a local man and a neighbor of his. They became involved through Cathedral Kitchen in Camden. So now when I change out my seasonal wardrobe, I take clothes that don't fit anymore to them for the homeless.

I am reminded of a wonderful Appalachian folk saying

USE IT UP

WEAR IT OUT

MAKE IT DO

DO WITHOUT.

I think I should paint that onto a plaque to hang in my house somewhere. We all have too much and I speak for myself. Another thing we can all do is buy less! Personally my drawers are stuffed to the limit with clothes. It is on my 'to do' list to go through them one drawer at a time, maybe one drawer a day, and gather up those things I don't use and give them to someone who can use them. I have already begun to limit my buying new things via strategies such as, when I stop in to Walmart - as infrequently as possible is one strategy - I do not walk through the women's department. I go straight to where the product is that I am buying and straight to check out. No browsing. My plaid shirts are a perfect example of overbuying by browsing. I love plaid and everytime I went to Walmart, I would pass the women's department and see beautiful plaids, perhaps a different color than I could remember having, so I would buy it. One day, going through a drawer, I discovered I had about two dozen plaid shirts that I NEVER wore! They just didn't fit into the lifestyle I have now which is t-shirts and sweat suits and gym outfits. Don't browse and don't buy!

Also, we can plant things to help our animal and insect friends such as milkweed for the butterflies and Rose of Sharon which I heartily recommend because it is hearty and will spread itself nicely into a pretty blooming border and which is good for the bees! I'm sure you are aware of the decline in the bees and how that will affect and is affecting all our tree and fruit crops that rely on pollinators.

Last but not least - be a little creative and step outside the box - do you really need a golf type lawn? BORING!! Already I have neighbors both in my town and in a neighboring town who have stopped being servants of convention and have rockscaped front yards with flowering plants, and total wildflower front yards, beautiful and interesting to look at. Personally, I have a woodland yard with hollies, various evergreen shrubs and trees (root ball Christmas trees from years past) and the original dozen or more deciduous trees. Just minutes ago, I was listening to the myriad bird songs from my small front porch. Please, please, don't poison the daisies! They are friendly, healthful to animals and to us, and pretty. They are much prettier than that desert of dull green that so many seem funeled into creating, you might as well have artifical plastic turf.

Well, that's enough to think about for today. Maybe you want to live on Mars, but I like this planet and just as I would like to keep my body alive and healthy as long as possible, I would like to do all I can to keep my home planet alive and healthy as long as possible.

One last obseration. I have thought about this for many years, ever since I joined the scheduled age related routine doctor visits. Why is it that the medical answer to health and fitness seemes entirely to be based on expensive testing for disease rather than on promoting health through fitness, diet, and exercise? They could be putting people on gym routines and diet plans not just stenting their clogged arteries, but they don't even seem to be aware or to care if they are aware of the connection between diet and exercise and heart health. I know, I am not naive, it isn't really about health but about business and profit and health doesn't generate profit, disease does. Show your rebel self by stepping outside the fast food, lawn service, video game corral - Get outside, go for a walk, adopt a helathy new habit each day and feel better!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann (oh yes - and plant a tree! We planted a seedling from the Salem Oak at our Woodbury Meeting a couple of weeks ago for Earth Day - what a great feeling!)

Ben Franklin and War

Today, I will walk the dog then put on my costume to do volunteer tour guiding at the James and Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield, National Park along the Delaware River. Coincidentally, this week on Monday and Tuesday, pbs showed the Ken Burns Documentary on Ben Franklin, so the Revolutionary War is much on my mind.

Needless to say the horror in Ukraine is with all of us everyday and each time I view the Judy Woodruff pbs News Hour, I end up crying over the suffering of the people in the Ukraine, most recently when a missile was shot at and struck hundreds of refugees, mostly women and children (Oh the children!) trying to flee from the violence. If you have raised a child, or remember being a child, or have children as relatives, you cannot help but have heartbreak at the thought of those frightened and vulnerable little beings getting killed and injured so an insane madman can push forward his criminal scheme to take over someone else's country. Over and over I ask myself why, in this time of history, we don't have more ways to stop insane men from inflicting such pain and destruction on others. There should be some way he could be arrested the same way we arrest a criminal head of a mob family, or the fraudulent head of a company. Our international body must somehow be made stronger to stop these kinds of eruptions in humanity.

Today, get to James and Ann Whitall House I will shadow one of the tour guides giving tours of the house. I am shadowing because I am returning to tour duty after a ten year hiatus that I took after my father died and some of my own health issues arose - a ruptured disk in my spine and knee problems. Anyhow, watching the Ben Franklin documentary helped to get me back into the atmosphere of those times of struggle and suffering. War!

I must say, I do respect and enjoy the Ken Burns style of documentary, the slow build up of detail and commentary into a rich body of biographical material to make some one or some event come to life. Ben Franklin really was such a magnificent and varied human being - so many gifts: diplomacy, scientific inquiry, writing, keeping and building a business, a civic service (the postal service). And he seemed to have a gift for enjoyment as well. And all from a poor uneducated escaped indentured boy. He didn't have a gift for husbandry or fatherhood though, Maybe that was asking too much. Anyhow, he was a great knight for our republic and we owe him honor and remembrance.

By the way, I have come home after my day at the Whitall House during Spring Festival and it was glorious! We had 700 people and what patient, polite, interested and delighful visitors. The families all brought lots of kids (good for the future) and the kids behaved remarkably well! All the people seemed so happy and grateful for all we had to share. It was a wonderful experience for me. I hope it was for them as well. It was free, sunny, a beautiful landscape and altogether and excellent outing for everyone.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Spring Festival Saturday, April 9, 2022 at Whitall House

Tomorrow, Saturday April 9 there will be a Spring Festival at the James and Ann Whitall House. There will be all kinds of demonstrations and activities and the weather looks good after 11. the festival is noon until 4:00, so you should find partly sunny weather! I will be there in the house in costume as I have returned as a docent to the Red Bank Battlefield this year! Hope you can make it. I am looking forward to it! My suggestion would be to wear a mask though as numbers are going up with Covid!

Hope to see you! Jo Ann

Emotional Memory

Driving home from the Brooklawn ShopRite today on Kings Highway, I passed a house with an enclosed porch addition and it brought back such a strong childhood emotional memory of my family, as it was then, Dad, Mom and my brother Joe, driving from Philadelphia into New Jersey and down one of the Pikes, White Horse or Black Horse, I am not sure which, to Ocean City. We were going to visit my Grandmother Mabel Wright who lived there, for many years on 6th and Asbury Avenue and later on 1lth and Bay. As we drove through, what was to my city child's eyes, and in fact, in those days THE COUNTRY, I gazed at the small, tidy bungaows with their aprons of green lawn and their lawn ornaments of bird baths, or white wrought iron lawn furniture around shade trees and I felt so much joy and longing. We lived in a hard surface world of brick and concrete and asphalt with the ever present stench of the Publicker's whiskey Mash factory just below our neighborhood and the settling black gritty air of the vines of crowded highway encircling us.

New Jersey was a world of soft surfaces and the fragrance of cut grass and honeysuckle, the organic contours of tree lines behind the houses, and in the yards, patches of daffodils and forsythia in Spring, and roses and flowering trees in summer. What a world. It sent my young heart into a reverie. Today that feeling returned to me unbidden and unexpected. Afterwards, I thought it must be another of those functions of aging that I have heard about. We all know about hearing loss and diminishing eyesight, bad joints adn backs, and fading memory, but when they mention childhood memories suddenly floating to the fore, they don't mention the emotional memories. Actually, I don't think I ever thought of emotional memory before either, that is a memory that is pure feeling, rather than a short video clip of some event, or a picture memory of something you have seen. The memory produced today was pure feeling, a kind of glow in the heart and a dreamy return to another world which was my childhood.

It wasn't a sad childhood or in any way a deprived one, but there are things that I think of and have thought of throughout my life that I wish had been different. Recently I read a Friends Journal Essay about welcoming visitors from different classes. It fit with a book I read a year ago, CASTE, by I. Wilkerson. We have definite classes in our society and they have such different kinds of experiences for children growing up. A working class, urban child of my generation had some benefits modern children and children from higher socio/demographic classes may not have had. I had a non-working mother, for example. My mother was there every day, making breakfast, cooking dinner, at home after school and every weekend every day. A particular benefit of my childhood was that my mother was devoted to her vocation of home-making. She loved the home and she loved being a mother. She strove to provide us with so many things other children in our class and on our block didn't have. As I mentioned before, she collected green stamps and bought us Children's Encyclopedia. She bought me Children's Classics in Literatre for every holiday. My mother was different from the other mothers in our neighborhood. They all cleaned and clooked but my mother respected literature and she wanted to KNOW. We had magazines, National Geographic, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, House and Garden, FAmily Circle. My motheer was also creative and I often remember the things she made for us such as the baby cradle she made from an Oatmeal box for me. For her provision of these resources to my young mind I will be forever grateful. They made me who I am.

A day came when we, too, moved into a house in The Country, and we had a barbecue pit in the yard and a rock garden and grew vegetables and my father built a playhouse for the younger kids who had come along after we moved. And for that move to the Country, I will always be grateful as well. Maybe it's just me but I don't think that children should grow up in only hard surfaces. I think children need trees and plants and soft ground and good fragrances and seasons that don't go only from puddles to grimy snow and back. They need colored leaves and spring blooms and summer vegetables and white snow that lays a loving and soft blanket on rounded and curving contours other than parked cars. I am so thankful that I had that and that I was able to provide it for my daughter.

Some of the things that I wish had been different are the violence I was exposed to as an urban and working class child, and the alcoholism, and the horrible school I went to - all the insensitivity that children of the working class and in particular the urban working class are subjected to. There were places were gentleness and kindness and patience could be found, at the Grandmother's houses, and at church and Sunday School. I am sorry for children who don't have these sanctuaries in their lives.

Happy Trails, through the forest, the neighborhood, or MEMORY. Jo Ann

Spring Festival at Red Bank Battlefield April 9th, 2022

April 9, 2022 Time: 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM Location: Red Bank Battlefield Park Address: 100 Hessian Avenue National Park, NJ 08063 Contact: 856-307-6451 Cost: Free Spring Festival Saturday, April 9, 2022 Step back in time for a day of history and family fun at the annual Red Bank Battlefield Spring Festival on Sunday, April 9 from noon until 4 p.m. The event is free for all to attend. Colonial demonstrations include labor saving inventions, candle making, military life, magic shows at 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. and much more

Just received the ntoification above and hoping you will find it an event you want to share! I will be there working as a volunteer, so stop by and say HI!

JO Ann