I was down in New Jersey for a celebration of life event for a cherished member of my husband’s family over the weekend, and as the region where he grew up, Monmouth County in the central part of the state, is a veritable crossroads of the American Revolution, I took advantage of a free and beautiful afternoon to see a recreation of the 1778 Battle of Monmouth on its preserved battlefield. It was a large gathering of Patriots of different-colored coats and Redcoats, who also featured variant regimental uniforms. And there were also Revolutionary medical officers, chaplains, cooks and assorted camp followers. Everyone was very dedicated to their tasks at hand, and so I was inspired to look around the county for more Revolutionary places, including the Englishtown Inn which served as General Washington’s headquarters as well as the site of the retreating General Lee’s court-martial two days after the battle and the beautiful Old Tennent Presbyterian Church which became a shrine to the battle dead. In contrast to the battlefield, all was very quiet at the Church, which is surrounded by a graveyard with the marked graves of Revolutionary veterans, including two young men from Massachusetts and a British Lt. Colonel buried far from home.
The Battle of Monmouth’s most famous (composite) heroine, Molly Pitcher, was everywhere of course, including my sister-in-law’s house when I got home late in the afternoon—at the center of a battle watercolor in one of my favorite aesthetics, “mid-century colonial”! She (my sister-in-law, not Molly Pitcher) wasn’t really sure of how she came to possess this scene or its artist, so if you have any clues about the latter, let me know. I really like this depiction, and compared to the works of Currier & Ives and their successors, it is very measured Molly: generally she is depicted as the central figure.
Currier & Ives, “The Heroine of Monmouth,” 1876, Museum of the American Revolution.
The weekend ended on a poignant note when other sisters-in-law took me to see the County’s 9/11 Memorial in Atlantic Highlands, atop Mount Mitchill with the surviving and new towers of New York City in the distance. An eagle clutching a beam from one of the fallen towers, with the names of all the (147) victims from the towns of Monmouth County inscribed below, it manages to merge the national and the local very effectively, just like the Revolutionary memorials to the south.
