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Death of Somerset County native became a symbol for those fighting in the Revolution

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

As Americans celebrated another year of independence with fireworks and barbecues, few gave thought to the woman whose involuntary sacrifice made it possible.

For much of the republic's history, Jane McCrea was easily the most famous person ever born in New Jersey. Now, she's scarcely known in her Somerset County home.

As another anniversary of her death arrives, though, McCrea has undergoing a modest revival, albeit one she might prefer to avoid. For like many Americans at the time of the Revolution, Jane McCrea just wanted to live her life in peace.

On a hot Sunday in 1777, Jane plunged from happy expectation of reunion with her lover into sudden and mysterious death. As a victim of the war, she became a symbol of a cause that she did not espouse. Fighting men rallied to her name, and won a great victory.

"The blood of this unfortunate girl, therefore, was not shed in vain," wrote Washington Irving. "Armies sprang up from it."

"In the history of the Revolutionary War, perhaps no single event is recorded which, at the time of its occurrence, created more intense sympathy, or aroused a spirit of more bitter indignation, " David Wilson wrote in his 1853 "The Life of Jane McCrea."

For 175 years, Jane McCrea's violent end was celebrated, and misrepresented, in stories and songs, paintings and plays, novels and movies. Some may be works of art, others are curiosities, and yet more are mere agit-prop, some with nasty racial and gender agendas.

Recently, there have been more determined efforts to establish facts, but when it comes to McCrea, almost everything is in dispute. She was tall, middling, short. Her hair was dark or blonde or red, although certainly long and lustrous.

She was cruelly tomahawked and scalped by native warriors serving with the British army. Or heedlessly shot by pursuing rebels. Or foolishly bludgeoned by one warrior arguing with another over whose captive she was, if they weren't simply escorting her to her wedding.

Any search for particulars begins in the bucolic Somerset Hills, at Lamington Presbyterian Church. A short distance west of Trump National Country Club, the white-spired building, though greatly expanded and even moved up the road, looks as inspirational as when the first minister, the Rev. James McCrea, arrived in 1740.

Its two graveyards, one for blacks, one for whites, have deteriorated over the years. McCrea family markers have eroded or vanished. But George Washington's spy John Honeyman has memorials indoors and out.

An Ulster Scot, McCrea was one of a wave of Scottish immigrants attracted by the diligent advertising of the proprietors of East Jersey. He had graduated from William Tennant's "Log College" in Neshaminy, Pa., which soon moved across the Delaware to Princeton.

On April 8, 1740, a week after taking the pulpit, the Rev. McCrea married Mary Graham, an 18-year-old member of the congregation at the Tennent Church in Manalapan, whose parents had brought her from Scotland as a child.

Mary bore at least seven children who survived to adulthood, including a daughter born in 1752 and known to family and friends as Jenny. But the little girl would know of little of her mother, who died a bit more than a year later.

Already prosperous, the Rev. McCrea soon married Catherine Rosbrugh, whose father was among the wealthiest men in the county. She bore five children, one of whom, Robert, would write that he had been "born into an opulent and elevated family."

Unlike most girls of her time, Jenny had access to a respectable library, her father's. For her time and place, she was well-educated and well-off. And as she grew up in Lamington, she and her siblings found close friends among the Jones family.

"From infancy the children had been playmates," Wilson wrote of Jane McCrea and a boy her age, David Jones. "As they grew to maturity... the friendships of youth were not forgotten."

The children attended school across Black River Road from the now-vanished McCrea house. In time, Jane's older sister Mary married the teacher, the Rev. John Hanna. Eventually, the couple moved to Hunterdon County.

The fecundity of the settlers soon crowded the beautiful land that had attracted them. Following the French and Indian War, the Crown had angered white settlers by putting tribal lands beyond the crest of the Alleghenies off limits.

For those in New Jersey, there was an attractive alternative. With the end of the war, the upper Hudson Valley seemed cleared of enemies. John McCrea, Jenny's eldest brother, was among the first to migrate. Settling on the west side of the Hudson opposite Moses Kill Creek, he gradually established himself in farming and the law.

The widow Sarah Jones followed soon afterward with her six boys and one daughter, settling about five miles north, opposite Sandy Hill, now known as Hudson Falls.

Jenny McCrea remained in Lamington for a time, but her father died in 1769. Within the next two years, she moved to John's new household.

Through one of his brothers, David Jones eventually obtained a 400-acre share of a lease on 1,300 acres. He built a house and cleared 60 acres. David Jones and Jenny McCrea had deferred their dreams, but at last they could see a bright future.

All around them, though, the world was going crazy. While Americans' political views varied, it was the dissatisfied who were forming committees, presenting grievances, joining militias. Now, when David Jones came calling upon his sister, John McCrea was exasperated by the man's complacency about the threats to liberty.