Freneau Woods is quite possibly New Jersey ’s Walden

Time was when the printed page, pamphlet or newspaper comprised the ultimate communication. The spoken word, speeches, plays, oratory and song, were not easy to promulgate.   The written word was the major source of information, advice and entertainment to a readership   which   was, generally more literate and receptive than today. By the light of the candle, people clamored for a wide variety of writing styles, and forms.

    Over 200 years ago the first newspaper appeared in Monmouth County . A   modest undertaking from the originator’s home in Mount Pleasant , a village on the crest of a hill which is now the border between Matawan and Marlboro.    Aside from the miscellany of everyday life, politics, and international news it included some of the fictional essays and poetry which had already made it’s editor-publisher famous. Years later this author’s work would be compared with that of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe by one of his biographers, and cited by another a having set the stage for Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman

   Philip Morin Freneau was raised in the community   which now bears his name . The family plantation or farm extended into what is now Aberdeen and Marlboro and amply provided for a way of life that left time for other pursuits. Philip was tutored nearby by Reverend   William Tennant   and then entered Princeton . There in the company of classmates James Madison and Aaron Burr he flourished academically and with another aspiring writer authored an epic poem The Rising Glory of America to be read for their graduation.

   Freneau attempted careers in the ministry and teaching but found himself unsuited. In a 1772 letter to James Madison he wrote “ I have printed a poem in New York called the American Village containing 450 lines. “   It was the first indication as to the breadth of his genius and an important poem even today. As a young man at the beginning of the American Revolution Freneau was deeply inspired. Utilizing satire and some invective he skewers the British and encourages the Americans in an outpouring of poetry during 1775….. Among his first victims , Lord Dunmore the last Royal Governor of Virginia, and William Tyron the last royal Governor of New York .

            From pirates sent out by command of the King

            To murder and plunder but never to swing..

            From the valiant Dunmore with his crew of banditti,

            Who plunder Virginians at Williamsburg city……

            From Tyron the mighty who flies from our city

            And swelled with importance disdains the committee;

            ( But since he is pleased to proclaim us his foes,

            What the devil care we where the devil he goes )

                                    from    A Political Litany   by Philip Freneau 1775

    With Washington about to set siege to Boston in July 1775, Freneau writes a hypothetical confession for General Gage, the last royal governor of Massachusetts ,

Destruction waits my call ! Some demon say

                Why does destruction linger on her way !

            Charlestown is burnt, and Warren is deceased –

            Heavens ! Shall we never be from war released?

   Freneau then answers in his own words, noting afterward that Georgia at the time had not joined the union.

            Yes, That’s the point! Let those who will say No;

            If George and North decree – it must be so

            Doubts, black as night, disturb my loved repose –

            Men that were once my friends have turned my foes…

            And that when all their utmost strength unite,

            When twelve dominions swear to arm and fight

            When the same spirit darts from every eye,

            One fixed resolve to gain their point or die

            As for myself – true – I was born to fight

            As George commands let him be wrong or right.

                                    from General Gage’s Soliloquy – Philip Freneau 1775

   As the theatre of battle moved to New Jersey in 1778, Freneau enslisted in the milita and although seeing no serious action, left with the rank as sergeant.   His poems, published by or for him in small pamphlets, and magazines, distributed among the troops who would sing the verses for cheer and encouragement. Already he had achieved a degree of fame and was informally being referred to as the “ Poet of the American Revolution “ but officially that title only was bestowed on him later. At the conclusion of the war he writes American Independent.

                 “ tis done ! And Britain for her madness sighs

            Take warning, tyrants, and henceforth be wise

            If o”er mankind man gives you regal sway

            Take not the rights of human kind away

  With   the war over and American independence secured, Freneau turned his attention to themes of nature   that had earlier inspired his imagination. One of   most epic of these poems is the American Village referred to in his 1775 letter to Madison , but revised afterward.

            Where yonder stream divides the fertile plain,

            Made fertile by the labours of the swain;

            And   hills and woods high tow’ring o’er the rest,

            Behold a village with fair plenty blest:

            Each year tall harvests crown the happy field;

            Each year the meads their stores of fragrance yield,

            And ev’ry joy and ev’ry bliss is there,

            And healthful labour crowns the flowing year.

  Such poetry was at once lyrical in depicting his surroundings as Wordworth would celebrate the commonplace, and semi- autobiographical as Freneau was known to use his surroundings as points of departure into other themes and conversely express his personal encounters with nature by glorifying them with elegant words and metaphors. The first case occurs in a fictional poem which begins;

            My morning of life is beclouded with care!

            I will go to Passaick, I say and I swear-

            To the falls of Passaick , that elegant scene,

            Where all is so pretty and all is so green –

from the Expedition of Timothy Taurus, Astrologer

An example of the second case occurs in a poem entitled “ Stanzas Written On The Hills of Neversink near Sandy Hook, 1790 “ …but is mainly devoted to his experiences and adventures sailing at sea and the carefree life before his marriage.

   In yet another example, Freneau employs a fictional figure to serve as his spokesman.   In his Jersey Chronicle   newspaper of July 4, 1795, appears a serial   “ Tomo Cheeki The Creek Indian containing Certain Indian Notions and Refelctions …

         .”when I am at leisure from attending on the big war captains and men of great council, I frequently walk into the fields over the cultivated farms and through the little forests that lay beyond the two rivers……What most of all disgusts me in these excursions is that men seem too much to have strayed from the grand simplicity of Nature in what they call their rural improvements and all is changed from what it was when the ancient red men trod the gloomy path of wilderness….”

       One can imagine Freneau leaving his home somewhere near what is now Poet Drive and Route 79, heading northward to what was called the Minnisink Trail, the historic route of Indians from the Interior of New Jersey to the shore, crossing waterways at their lowest point. Later this trail becomes known as the road to the Mill and is now named for the last two proprietors – Jacob Wilson and Henry Henninger..We know, however, that this was originally the William Robinson Mill Tract from a deed Freneau issued in 1832. An advertisement for the sale of the property six years later fully describes the surroundings.

“ A Farm, Mill and Distillery For Sale 120 Acres… about 50 cleared land of which a good portion is tillable … and Meadow ground, and the remainder woodland…. also A Grist Mill…. About 30 apple trees, a young Peach orchard…

                                                                        William Robinson, February 15, 1838

     Later deeds describe the idyllic surroundings most of which together with portions of the Mill’s foundation, and artifacts remain today, amongst the nature which has reclaimed much of the site. One of the originally deeds for the property reads

“ at the edge of the Old Mill Pond where the floodgates formerly were to the middle of Baker’s Brook..”

  Another conveyance further to the east describes it’s boundaries thus:

“ to the head of a gully and brook… at a Chestnut tree…down along the line of   Birch Swamp Gully …up said brook to the beginning…

Finally as this terrain approaches Warne’s Bridge now called route 516, at the extent of what was the navigable water of Matawan Creek; a deed   to a Captain Chapman in 1863 reads;

          “ All that ..meadowland… at a point in Matawan brook…following the water course… to the   middle of the new bridge to Browntown…thence up the old brook along its several courses to where water now runs…”

    Having been fascinated by the sea it’s tributaries and waterways, Freneau ..incorporated such   references to it in other poems. He .now writes an individual piece describing seasonal flows, wetlands and tidal waters in the poem The Brook of The Valley …

                                All pacific as you seem:

                        Such a gay elysian stream;

                        Were you always thus at rest

                        How the valley would be blest……..

                          Tell me, where your water go,

                        Purling as they downward flow?

                        Stagnant, now and now a fall ?

                        To the gulph that swallows all.

                        Muddy now, and limpid next,

                        Now with icy shackles vext –

                        What a likeness here we find !

                        What a picture of mankind !

   Is the similarity between these lines of poetry and the deed descriptions prior, simply a coincidence ?   Perhaps . But we do know the extent of the Freneau plantation perported to be 1,000 acres would extend from Gravelly Brook to Matawan Creek if it was approximately square in area, as were most of the grants to early settlers.   Moreover, Matawan Creek before Lake Lefferts had direct access to the Bay and thus had seasonal and tidal flows. Even Freneau had published weekly highwater times in his Jersey Chronicle .   Thus, it would be highly likely, Freneau, a keen observer   and recorder of the nature around him, knew these woods and appreciated their unique attributes.

       Scarcely 15 years after the death of Philip Freneau, another major figure of American literature removed himself to the woods for study and contemplation. He did not have the good fortune of roaming the environs of the family farm or plantation during his youth, and so decided to spend the better part of two years of adult life in a small cabin of his own making amongst nature. When Henry David Thoreau emerged, the place-prose account of his experiences, Walden, or a Life in the Woods “ would be therafter considered a classic of American literature. The similarity with   Freneau’s Woods, no less picturesque or diverse in terms of it’s flora and fauna, is striking.   A scenic body of water, wetlands, uplands, and even a mill, all existing within the close proximity to the life long home of the author who elaborated, poeticized and philosophized on the nature around him. Although still shrouded by the lack of   understanding about this place, this man and his work, Freneau Woods is quite possibly New Jersey ’s Walden.

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