The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey [Reprint 2022 ed.] 9781978817708

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Ile Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey

This book was written as a project of the Folklife Program of the New Jersey Historical Commission

DAVID

STEVEN

COHEN

The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey RUTGERS

UNIVERSITY

New Brunswick, New Jersey

PRESS

Copyright © 1 9 8 3 by Rutgers, The State University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by James Wageman

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cohen, David Steven, 1943 — The folklore and folklife of New Jersey. Bibliography: p. 1 . Folklore—New Jersey. 2. New Jersey—Social life and customs. I. Title. GR110.N5C64

398'.09749

ISBN 0 - 8 1 3 5 - 0 9 6 4 - 5 ISBN 0 - 8 1 3 5 - 0 9 8 9 - 0

82-5203 AACR2

(pbk.)

For Linda Prentice Cohen

Contents List of Illustrations xi Foreword by Herbert Halpert xiii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction i Part I: New Jersey Folklore The Jersey Joke 8

A Lenape Indian Myth 10 Names 15 Folk Speech 22

7

Contents

Legend 29 Folk Belief 39 Folk Medicine 50 Folk Music, Folk Song, and Folk Dance

Part II: New Jersey Folklife

75

Folk Painting 76 Folk Sculpture 94 Traditional Boats 112 Folk Architecture 123 Folk Furniture 138 Quilts, Coverlets, and Samplers 148

Contents

Pottery, Basketry, and Glass 157 Foodways 171 Games and Recreation 182 Festivals, Ceremonies, and Rituals 194 Conclusion 207 Notes 211 Works Cited 225 Index 241

E2 Illustrations M a p of N e w Jersey

xxii

Walam Olum pictographs

Photograph of Delaware Bay oyster schooner under sail 113

12

Durham boat

Portrait of Catharine Hendrickson

114

Hudson River sloop

77

Oyster schooner

Portrait of Mrs. Jonathan R. Schanck 80 Portrait of Rebecca Hubbard

119

Sea Bright skiff, garvey, and Barnegat Bay sneakbox izi

8z

Reconstruction of a longhouse of the Pahaquarra-Minisink culture 125

Portrait, "Girl in White with Cherries" 83 Portrait of Rachel Brinkerhoff

84

Painting, " O l d Iron Furnace, 1 7 7 6 " 86 Painting of John Fenwick's home

88

126

German log cabin

127

Farmstead showing Dutch barn, farmhouse, and suburban house Patterned brickwork farmhouse

Paintings of Henry Thomas Gulick's farm and farmhouse 90, 9 1 Birth certificate of John Mason

Swedish log cabin

Early Dutch-American farmhouse 128

Paintings of the house and shop of David Ailing 89

Cigar-store Indian princess

118

Quaker meetinghouse

129 130

131

Dutch barn, English barn, Pennsylvania German barn, and hay barracks 133

93

97

Cigar-store figure, "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" 98

Fishing village, and fisherman shanties and icehouses 136

Tombstone carving designs ioz, 103

Interior of a fisherman's hut

Barnegat Bay decoy Delaware River decoy

101,

Dutch kas

106

Photograph of duck hunting

140

Dutch spoon rack

107

137

141

Fiddleback armchair and Queen Anne armchair 143

111

XI

Illustrations Salt-glazed stoneware jug

Ladder-back chairs from North Jersey and South Jersey 144 Friendship (Medley) quilt Crazy quilt

Wood splint Indian baskets

153

164

Photograph of Piney basket maker 167

154

Munsee incised clay pot

163

Tumbler with floral pattern and heart design 169

159

Slip-decorated earthenware pie plate 161

Photograph of Saint Gerard festival Z03

Xll

Foreword

W

H E N I agreed to write a foreword to this book, I had seen in manuscript David Cohen's impressive bibliography, Folklife in New Jersey: An Annotated Bibliography (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1982). I assumed that this volume would be primarily an anthology, giving sample texts from the wide variety of published sources he had discovered. The book before you, however, is far more ambitious. It not only presents its New Jersey examples, it also contains a laudable attempt to discuss the principles underlying selected categories of the oral tradition (folklore) and of arts, crafts, and customs (folklife). Although a few important American folklore students have preferred to use the historically older and rather more comprehensive term Volkskunde ("folk culture"), it is the bipartite terminology (folklore, folklife) that has had most acceptance in the United States. The introduction gives us a full listing of the subjects included under the two terms. This book is all the more to be welcomed since until quite lately folklore research had neither academic standing nor popular support in New Jersey. There is no folklore graduate program in the state, and less than a handful of New Jersey colleges offer even undergraduate folklore courses, most of them introduced comparatively recently. So far as I know there is not one significant folklore archive. N o university press in the state has developed a scholarly folklore publishing program. The small folklore periodical, New Jersey Folklore, which appears just once a year, did not begin publication until 1976. The reconstituted New Jersey Folklore Society (an earlier attempt never got off the ground) only started in 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 0 . Contrast this with the situation outside the state. Although for over half a century academic course work in folklore was offered at only a few universities and colleges in the United States, this changed dramatically after World War II. Today folklore studies are well established at many of the major state and private universities and at innumerable smaller colleges. There are more than half a dozen extensive doctoral programs; at least a dozen university presses regularly Xlll

Foreword publish scholarly folklore books and monographs; and a number of extensive folklore archives have wide support, some at universities, others at libraries, historical societies, and museums. Equally important is the existence of over a dozen high-caliber regional and state folklore journals in the United States, most of them at least twenty to forty years old, each publishing the folklore collectanea of its own area. The journals have the support of active state folklore societies that involve a broad spectrum of the population. This grass-roots base is especially evident in the varied programs of their annual meetings, normally held in different parts of the state each year. At these sessions academic folklorists are usually outnumbered by schoolteachers, local historians, craft enthusiasts, college and high school students, and interested citizens. Since N e w Jersey has not had a history of active support for folklore, there is, unsurprisingly, a paucity of folklore-oriented research. Of necessity, the subject areas chosen for this book had to be primarily those in which sufficient w o r k had already been published, often by scholars in related fields. Where such published materials are available, the author has made effective use of them. Unlike most American regional folklorists who leave American Indian folk traditions to the anthropologists, he includes some Indian lore in many chapters and by this means achieves a useful time depth. The chapters on names and folk speech give us a further sense of past history by referring not only to the Indians, but also to the earliest groups of N e w Jersey settlers: the Dutch, Swedes, English Quakers, Scots, and Germans. Another kind of historical information is presented in these chapters and that on traditional boats by his attention to several of the traditional occupations: canal boating, oyster dredging, glassblowing, charcoal burning, log rafting, and so on. Happily in the area of material folk culture, especially the arts and crafts, a host of workers from other disciplines and organizations shares the folklorist's interests. For example, Cohen mentions the work of the N e w a r k Museum, whose pioneering exhibitions in the early 1 9 3 0 s did much to promote the current interest in the folk arts throughout the United States. In these chapters Cohen not only assembles a rich body of material whose variety will fascinate the reader, but also interprets each category succinctly, using modern American folklore theory. As a folklorist I find much to admire in the book. I have already stressed h o w well the author achieves historical perspective by his careful selection of material in two of the opening chapters. Let me add that throughout the book

xiv

Foreword Cohen has done an excellent job in adapting current American folklore theories to interpret the New Jersey data. In some of the earlier chapters, Cohen refers to the contributions of some of the ethnic groups that were among the later settlers in New Jersey, but the major representation of the folkways of these peoples is found in the last three chapters. In these chapters the author relies heavily on the reports of student fieldwork projects, most of them made under his direction, and these contributions add unexpected color and variety to his depiction of the folklife of New Jersey. Despite the comparative paucity of adequate fieldwork material in accessible archives or in published form, Cohen presents an interesting and imaginative sampling of both English and ethnic folklore and folklife, demonstrating that the state's folk traditions are rich and have only been awaiting the attention of folklorists. Herbert Halpert

Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada

xv

M

Acknowledgments

T

H E R E A R E many people who should be thanked for their contributions to

this book. They include students at the Newark College of Arts and Sciences and Douglass College of Rutgers University, who did folklore-collecting projects, including: Thomas K. Daly, Kevin Guta, Christopher Hoare, Marilyn Legato, Nan Mutnick, Valerie Ruscitto, Sharon Schuessler, Barbara Schulz, Cynthia Joy Skibo, Patricia Slattery, Audrey Spelker, and Zoriana Tkacz. Thanks also to their informants: Lillian Dieter, Amelia Ferrari, Sam Hunt, Anastasia Kysilewska, Thomas MacFarlane, Modestino Magliacane, Alice Nirmaier, Earle A. Nirmaier, Mary Rozman, Billie Schuessler, Nona Schuessler, Patricia Schuessler, Theresa Schuessler, Mark A. Spelker, Andrew Szproch, and Anna Vaccaro. There were also informants from whom I collected folklore: James De Groat, Jerry Mahony, Robert Milligan, Ed Morgan, John Morgan, Madge Morgan, Wally Morgan, Harry V. Shourds, and Lewis West. Also thanks to the local history and folklore experts who helped me, including: Jim Albertson, Charles L. Aquilina, Robert Baron, Robert Fridlington, Charles T. Gehring, Angus K. Gillespie, Peter J . Guthorn, Herbert Halpert, Field Horn, Mary Hufford, Herbert C. Kraft, James Lee, Rebecca Mullen, Michael Aaron Rockland, Anne H. Sidwa, Don C. Skemer, and Peter O. Wacker. The following librarians guided me to new materials and retrieved old materials: Bette M . Barker, Ronald Becker, Rebecca B. Colesar, Charles F. Cummings, Barbara S. Irwin, Robert E. Lupp, Donald A. Sinclair, Edward Skipworth, and Miriam V. Studley. Help in obtaining visual material came from Suzanne Corlette, Ulysses G. Dietz, Bert Denker, Jon Frank, Alan D. Frazer, Mary Ison, Terence Karschner, Arthur B. Nichols, John T. Schofield, Arlene Palmer Schwind, Kathy Stocking, Robert L. White, and Lorraine Williams. Joseph Crilley did drawings and special photographs. My thanks also to the members of the staff of the New Jersey Historical Commission: Antoinette Raider, Nancy H. Dallaire, Ronald J . Grele, Patricia

xvii

Acknowledgments Thomas, and Lee R. Parks. Most important, I thank Bernard Bush, the executive director of the commission, who probed, questioned, and insisted so that a project that started as a pamphlet ended as a book. This project was made possible by a grant from the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

xviii

Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that I spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of—well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition? . . . It might have threatened, for twenty minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded: it was an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so convenient—to be learning at last, in the maturity of one's powers, what New Jersey might "connote." Henry James The American Scene (1904)



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Ile Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey

M a p of N e w Jersey, showing principal places discussed in the text.

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