Tag Archives: Coryell’s Ferry

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Workshops and Sanctuaries

“Buona sera, good evening,” he said what seemed to me a trace of a Swedish accent, “My name is Helge. It’s a manly name, a Viking name.” In fact, it is a holy name, related as it is to the German heilige, as in Heilige Geist (“Holy Ghost”). Thus, while the Vikings no doubt used this word as a perfectly “manly” name, it has connotatiVilla of San Micheleons, as does many a name, well beyond even the immediate context of a Viking village, let alone the cocktail reception for a musical recital at the Villa San Michele on Capri, where I first met Helge Antoni.
There he was with his lovely wife, Marisa, and the three of us along with a number of other interlocutors who dropped in and out of our conversation chatted in multiple languages—German, English, French, mostly Italian—about music, art, literature and the intoxication that Anacapri provided through its breathtaking vistas and villas, soul-charming alleys and ambulatories witape-on-the-roadh various twists and turns. Indeed, virtually no one drives in Anacapri, unless one has a very small vehicle such as a scooter or a “bee” (in Italian, ape, entirely unrelated, of course, to its false English cognate “ape”).

As I walked home from that evening’s lovely concert it dawned on me that I had met a world-class and quite famous musician, and in Marisa, his athletic wife, quite a fine Pilates expert. Little did I know, however, that I would enjoy much more than a mere conversation, that our friendship would blossom, that Helge would become like a brother to me. That such a circumstance could possibly arise was soon enough apparent to me from his and Marisa’s warm invitation to join them for drinks the following evening at the nearby mountain villa where they were staying.

And so it came to pass, in our evolving friendship, Helge, en route to a concert a year later, would come to visit me in the States, on which occasion I was reminded afresh of something I already knew but had, I suppose, forgotten or had at least not brought to the front of my mind for quite some time. Yet I had known it well, as I had so many other important things, already when I was a child.

That thing that I had known was the idea of a sanctuary. I am thinking in this case of the small workshop of my grandfather, Harry Jakes. It was anything but fancy, more or less just a workbench in the basement of my grandparents’ home on Rutter Avenue in Kingston, Pennsylvania. My mother, Elaine Jakes, lived with her parents for three years or so after her divorce and during those years my grandparents in many ways played the role of Wilkes Uparents for me while my mother finished her college education at Wilkes College (now Wilkes University). There Elaine, having enrolled for a second time after a scandalous dismissal which you may already know from The Curious Autobiography, studied English literature and history and was a makeup artist for the Cue ‘n’ Curtain theater troupe. Had she not had a young child, she might have been an actor in that troupe, but that, I think, is the stuff of another blog.

Photo by Brian Smithson.
Photo by Brian Smithson.

To return to my grandfather’s workshop: it was a magical place, truly glorious, where the sound of his old electric drill provided Scipionic music of the spheres. There it was a privilege to enter and to spend time simply listening to and watching the master craftsman at work. Of course, he was not a real “master.” He was merely a man then nigh unto his retirement years who was handy around the house. If it were broken, chances are Harry could have fixed it. If something needed a slight adjustment, he would use his creative powers to adjust it. If a unique dohicky had to be designed for a specific purpose, Harry would invent it. He was one of those rare people who could look at something broken and envision it in a fully repaired state—a mystical healer of humdrum objects. Owing to that particular trait, I, my cousins, and anyone who might enter that house on Rutter Avenue, which had once been the house of the family’s childless matriarch Aunt Jemima, all marveled at him.

Harry found in his workshop, it seemed to me, a kind of sanctuary, for it provided him with a respite from, almost a kind of therapy for, the worries of this world for him to work with his hands repairing things. Perhaps it was the metaphor of healing, after all, that offered him a powerful solace. But I also think that there was something about the attitude that was required to enter the place, that workshop that provided sanctuary a word that implies both that the place is a safe place and holy. The word itself, though it means “holy” comes to mean a place of refuge, a place of asylum, just as Helge means holy but becomes, to use Helge’s words, “a manly name, a Viking name.”

As I grew up and especially after my grandfather’s death I had to find other workshops, other sanctuaries. One of these I had stumbled upon before his passing, for as a teenager in New Hope I would often frequent the office of a local writer, John Pfeiffer, who wrote anthropological treatises for the popular market. He did a good deal of research for each of his books, and allowed me to visit him to pick his brain about writing and about the possibility of having a career as a writer.

Photo by Wally Gobetz.
Logan Inn. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

Carl Lutz’ workshop was the kitchen of the Logan Inn, the original inn of New Hope (the borough once called Wells Ferry) which, in the early eighteenth century, the town’s founder John Wells owned and operated even before New Hope was called Coryell’s Ferry, which it was after it was called Wells Ferry; all this is the stuff of another, in fact a previous blog. For Carl, who would later become the mayor of New Hope, the busy kitchen of the Logan Inn provided him with a kind of refuge from the business of running the Inn and, eventually, the whole town.

I should mention two other places that served as (and three other mentors who ensured) workshops and sanctuaries for me. One of these was Professor Phil Lockhart of Dickinson College, another Tom Corey, pastor of one of Philadelphia’s truly urban churches; the third, Mrs. Zinaida Sprowles, self-described peripatetic pedagogue, who bore workshop and sanctuary within, demonstrating that such a place need neither longitude nor latitude. Each of these provided refuge away from the stresses of life, and with them one did not merely learn what it meant to be an apprentice in an art, such as writing or cooking, but in life. With them I found myself often puzzling about bigger questions regarding meaning and significance, about what words meant, not merely how to craft them. Each of them showed how to read and, based on what was read, offered insights about what to write. In their sanctuaries where I pondered how to function as a human being, how to walk, indeed to see, in this dark world and wide, and how not to allow that one talent, which is death hide, to stay lodged, useless. But I wax poetic. Suffice it to say that in those sanctuaries I pondered the questions that would give me pause, that would compel me to understand that to be a proper human being requires participating in humanity’s pain and, eventually, would place a pen in my hand for that very purpose.

Helge Antoni, pianist
Helge Antoni, pianist

“Have them sit down,” Helge said, as he bestrode the piano in the college chapel, spacious enough for the master class that he offered to the assortment of musically trained college students assembled there. I watched and listened as they played in this makeshift workshop, a sanctuary in more than one sense, for Helge had lived up to his name, creating a sanctuary, whose walls were forged from notes and whose roof was made of wafting chords, supported by occasional applause and masterful instructions to a true master’s students in a master class. There I experienced sanctuary again, in a workshop that was no workshop, for it normally was a place of faith—not works, lest anyone should boast. And I realized again, as I sat there watching the love he had for those students and their warm responses to his gentle admonitions and corrections, that here learning could happen afresh, in a sanctuary. I remembered the teachers of my sanctuaries, from Harry to John to Carl to Zinaida to Phil to Tom, and back again to Capri, where I had met Helge.

“Heavenly,” the appropriately named master thundered after one of the students had played her piece, “just heavenly …” adding, after a decorous pause, “Wasn’t that glorious?”

“Indeed,” I thought, “it was.” But I was thinking of something much larger than the fine piece that the student had played. I was thinking of sanctuary and the sound of an old electric drill when I replied, “Truly, Helge, it was.”

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Ghost of New Hope

New Hope, Pennsylvania, was our home for the better part of our life. I say our, but I really mean that of Elaine Jakes, for I, her son, resided there but during my childhood. Still, most of my formative years were lived there, and it is a town with a particular, even peculiar name that sanguinely points beyond itself to a better place, a vision of a better future. Though one might find a different account on the Internet, I, as a lad, heard on more than one occasion a story that the town is haunted by the ghost of the great patriot John Coryell, who in the second half of the eighteenth century had owned the ferry that provided crossing of the Delaware River.

Coryell's Ferry in cement
Perhaps the ghost story is true.

Washington’s troops often found refuge in Coryell’s Ferry, a town that had only some ten years or so before the founding of the United States, changed its name from the previous designation, Wells Ferry. Even that name seems to be second in the sequence of names, as it had hitherto been known, it seems, as “Robert Heath’s (tract of) land,” which Heath had received from William Penn himself. Indeed, the name Coryell’s Ferry obtained for a mere twenty years—though some sources say twice that—but not just any twenty (or even forty) years. During a lustrum or so of those years, one far from minor event known as the Revolutionary War took place, during which the town, by then called Coryell’s Ferry, saw a number of American troops crossing to and from Lambertville (then also called Coryell’s Ferry) en route to New Jersey and New York. The name Coryell’s Ferry abode until the Pennsylvania-side settlement was renamed “New Hope,” a name derived from a mill built afresh on Ingham Creek by an important young investor.

Benjamin Parry
Benjamin Parry

That investor was none other than Benjamin Parry, who poured his life into the community, and whose descendants have remained in the area for many generations, holding as family property the “Parry Mansion” until 1966, when it was converted into the town’s historical museum that it remains today, located on the borough’s principal “cardo” (N/S street) directly across from Farley’s Bookshop. That corner of Ferry and Main is still the town’s intellectual and cultural center, as Farley’s Bookshop represents the continuance of learning, reading, wit, and culture, while the Parry Mansion

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Parry Mansion (now a museum). Photo by Wally Gobetz.

serves as the guardian of the town’s rich and unique history, which includes figures such as Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton (admittedly not the best of friends), along with James Monroe (during the Revolutionary War a mere lieutenant but later American president). In the course of that war, Lieutenant Monroe had, at a certain point, stayed at Thompson-Neeley Farmhouse at Washington’s Crossing, a mere stone’s throw south of Coryell’s Ferry. Add to all this that a Revolutionary War canon, placed on a street island just in front of the Perry Mansion, serves as a fitting symbol of the American resistance and, ultimately, victory.

The canon. Courtesy of David Hanauer at http://www.davidhanauer.com/buckscounty/newhope/
The canon. Courtesy of David Hanauer

Yet the precise reason for the change of the town’s name, I suppose, is at least slightly shrouded in mystery, mystery that likely gave birth to the undoubtedly spurious story—a ghost story, after all—I heard in my childhood about John Coryell, whose son George, was the last living pallbearer of George Washington, passing away in 1850. Roy Ziegler records that John was a “colorful” figure (Ziegler, p. 10). However colorful the historical John Coryell was, the tale of his ghost is equally colorful, at least in the account that Elaine relayed every All Hallow’s Eve: Coryell, she would say with an eerie storytelling pitch in her voice, had taken to drink (her storytelling emphasis not my own) and had become the scandal of both towns that bore the name Coryell’s Ferry, i.e. New Hope, and across the Delaware River, the town that would later be called Lambertville. Add to this unsavory detail that Coryell gambled as well and generally behaved like a bad fraternity boy, even though fraternities other than Phi Beta Kappa had not yet quite been invented.* He managed the inn (and tavern) that his noble father Emanuel, a French Huguenot, had owned and that John inherited at an early age, as Emanuel had died young, in 1748, leaving a brood of several children behind. It was said that John, after an appropriate period of mourning for his too-early-deceased father and, perhaps, as a strange expression of his grief for him, would dance on that tavern’s tables whenever he wanted to, especially when he was inebriated. In such a state, he would sometimes hook ropes, borrowed from his ferry business, over the roof beams of the tavern and swing from them as if a daring young man on a flying trapeze. And this, so Elaine’s story went, was something that happened quite often, so often in fact that business at the tavern thrived, as many a patron simply came to be entertained by this forerunner of the Blue Man Group, as much as they did to eat or drink.

To support his alleged gambling habit, he increased the number of his acrobatic shows from Friday and Saturday nights only to four days a week and, when not hung over, he would often rise early to practice. This went on for many years, in fact, beginning as early as 1750, shortly after his father’s death. During that time, John raised a family, drank a bit too much, and kept on gambling (though, Elaine averred, only “lightly”), but nevertheless vigorously and firmly supported General Washington during and after the Revolutionary War, helping the American cause in whatever way he could—from feeding and (as a prototype of the USO) acrobatically entertaining the troops, gratis of course, to smuggling weapons and spies via his ferry barges. During the war, in fact, Coryell’s Ferry played a vital role in assisting the Americans but denying the British passage over the Delaware.

The end of this noble, patriotically speaking, but, in terms of vices, perhaps somewhat indecorous life came when John Coryell’s swinging practice simply got the better of him in 1799. When privately rehearsing for a Houdini-like trick (an anachronism merely for effect) involving extricating his left hand and foot from being bound together when swinging on the rope with his right arm only, John Coryell managed to get so entangled that he hung himself. The suggestion of suicide swiftly ensued; but such an act his son George (named after the first president) and all John’s friends, particularly those fervent for the American cause, firmly denied.

So much did the mere rumor, however, vex John Coryell’s mostly noble (though beset-with-a-few-vices) soul that, unlike his son, who rests in peace in a grave alongside that of Sam Holcombe, one of Washington’s spies, he knows no rest, and to this day haunts the landing of Ferry Street,

View of Ferry Street. Courtesy of David Hanauer. http://www.davidhanauer.com/buckscounty/newhope/
View of Ferry St. Courtesy of David Hanauer

and sometimes, too, can be heard moaning even across the river in the environs of what is now the Lambertville Station Restaurant and Inn, which was, when Elaine told the story, an old-fashioned railway station. All this in spite of the fact that everyone, especially General Washington, no doubt rightly insisted on death by acrobatic error. Washington’s avowal notwithstanding, it is said that one can, at the ferry docks, still ascertain his ghost howling in the most disquieting fashion, “Where is my rope, my rope? I want to swing, to swing again!”

So the story was told, and to it was added the rumor of a curse, a most improbable one, that his untimely (if probably accidental) death brought upon the city a greater ignominy and shame than mere gambling and drink had brought upon Coryell himself during his lifetime. And, that if the redundant (and thus confusing) names of both towns were not changed from Coryell’s Ferry, the curse would obtain, one of blight, drought, gnats, mosquitoes, and general lack of prosperity. And that’s the real reason that Benjamin Parry called the city New Hope—not simply because of the rebuilding of “New Hope Mills” on Ingham Creek. Unfortunately the requisite change of the name did not ward off gnats or mosquitoes.

FarleysBookshop.jpg
Farley’s Bookshop

Such a ghost story was the one I heard as a boy. Yet what has all this to do with the lofty opening of this particular installation of the blog? That bit, the bit about “hope” being something that looks beyond itself, I shall have to come back to next week. Suffice it to say, that in the coming weeks—specifically on Memorial Day from 1 to 4 p.m. at Farley’s Bookshop, right across the street from the Parry Mansion and just around the corner from the very ferry launch that Coryell’s shade is still said by some to frequent, there will be a launch not of a barque but rather of a book: The Curious Autobiography of Elaine Jakes, whose historical details are at least as true as the story of the change of the name of Coryell’s Ferry to New Hope, Pennsylvania. I hope to see you there where I will be signing copies of the book, and in the meantime, beware of ghosts in need of rope, even noble and patriotic ghosts!

*Please note that I have no evidence that John Coryell was anything less than a patriot; this is a mere ghost story, and I certainly have no desire to misrepresent this man’s undoubtedly noble character.

Further Reading:

Hannah Coryell Anderson, “General Washington at Coryell’s Ferry,” (Lambertville, NJ: Hunterdon Historical Society Reprint, 1969 [originally published 1928]). http://catalog.lambertvillelibrary.org/texts/American/coryell/coryell.pdf

Roy Ziegler, The Parrys of Philadelphia and New Hope: A Quaker Family’s Lasting Impact on Two Historic Towns (2011).

Ingham Coryell, Emanuel Coryell of Lambertville, New Jersey and His Descendants. Philadelphia, 1943.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/george-coryell-george-washingtons-last-living-pallbearer-dies.html

http://www.newhopepa.com/History/Coryells_Ferry/coryell_hist_1.htm