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BY TOM HESTER SR.
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Historian Marc Mappen wants New Jerseyans to to be proud of their state and aware of it's little known and sometimes offbeat history – the good, the bad and the ugly.
And for those people who are unfortunate enough to live elsewhere, he wants them to know "There's More To New Jersey Than The Sopranos.''
That is the name of his new, lively and very readable book from Rutgers University Press, which provides 40 chapters of, "Gee, I didn't know that" history.
Mappen, a respected New Jersey historian and director of the state Historical Commission, recounts, among many things, how Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey signer of the Declaration of Independence, designed the U.S. flag and not that headline-hunter Betsy Ross, and how New Jersey Congressman John Beatty stayed home with cold in 1784 when he could have been the deciding vote in Thomas Jefferson's effort to eliminate slavery in the original 13 states.
"My purpose in this book is to explore some of the aspects of New Jersey that are largely unknown to those outside the state as well as New Jerseyans themselves,'' Mappen said. "That's not to say the book is meant as a celebratory bit of boosterism; on the contrary, I want to show the dark as well as the light, the good as well as the bad, the uplifting as well as the grotesque about our state.''Did you know that while waiting for the peace treaty to be signed with Britain, George Washington and Thomas Paine killed time in Rocky Hill in November of 1783 by igniting methane gas on the Millstone River which they forced to rise from the river bottom?
Did you know the wild and scenic Delaware River was called the "Horrenkill'' – ah ... that means the Prostitute's River – by the first Dutch settlers?
Mappen recounts how the first human flight in the western hemisphere took place in New Jersey 110 years before the Wright brothers when Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard in 1793 launched himself skyward in a balloon and drifted from Philadelphia to Deptford.
He recounts how Julia Dent Grant didn't like Mary Todd Lincoln and talked her husband, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, into turning down an invitation to join President Lincoln and his wife for a fateful evening at the theater in April 1865. Instead, the Grants caught a train for Burlington where their four children resided.
Annie "Little Sure Shot'' Oakley and marksman husband Frank Butler retired to Grant Avenue in Nutley after careers in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. At age 22, Alice Huyler of Ramsey became the first woman to drive from New York to San Francisco in 1909 – when there were virtually no paved roads or road maps.
In 1915, self-styled preacher Bill Sunday brought the word of God to the state Legislature where he leaped atop the Assembly speaker's podium, asked the lawmakers if they were men or mutts and urged them to avoid alcohol, the devil's potion.
And with reporters recounting how the latest round of corrupt New Jersey politicians are being led in and out of the federal courthouse in handcuffs, it may be noteworthy to point out that the 210-page paperback would not take up much space in a jail cell.
In the final pages, Mappen eases readers back into real the New Jersey with a chapter entitled, "The Serpent in the Garden State, A Brief History of Corruption.''
Readers learn the first British colonial governor of New Jersey, Lord Cornbury, enjoyed dressing as a woman, was strongly suspected of taking bribes, persecuted religious minorities, and earned dubious praise by New Jerseyans as a "detestable maggot'' before he was recalled to Britain.
Between 1869 and 1896 when Democrats controlled the Legislature and governor's office, even improvements to the Statehouse involved enormous cost overruns and kickbacks. Furniture and carpets purchased for the building were taken away for use in private homes. In 1887, Democratic and Republican legislators brawled on the Assembly floor for control of the bipartisan library.
In 1905, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens reported the "stench of the vice graft'' was stronger in New Jersey than anywhere else in the nation.
And in 2002, Mappen recounts, a psychology professor at Britain's University of Hertfordshire sent out 40,000 jokes on the Internet and asked readers for their help in determining the funniest joke in the world.
After receiving more than two million replies from 70 countries, the professor declared the funniest joke was one about New Jersey. It can be found on page 10.
