Blue Highways (61 page)

“In the thirties and forties, governmental bureaucrats—especially in Delaware—they had a time trying to classify tri-bloods because the people considered themselves neither white, red, nor black. Usually they ended up in their own category, one so small as to be forgotten. To this hour, the people remain what you might describe as aloof, and they maintain themselves as independently as they can. Clannish, even secretive. But they always have been landowners and farmers. Never slaves. Still, they are—to use the phrase—‘men of color’ and consequently suspect, especially in border states, despite their features usually being more Indian than Negroid. Aquiline nose, straight hair, high cheekbones.”

“I haven’t seen any blacks in Greenwich.”

“That may be. They live just up the road at Springtown, one of the first stops on the Underground Railroad. The name comes from a place a Negro could ‘spring’ for his freedom. A springboard. But I’m talking now about Negroes, not the Moors. People get it confused.”

“So how does Othello fit in?”

“The upper end of Greate Street was always Presbyterian. The lower end, down on the Cohansey, was Quaker. The Friends Meetinghouse is still there. Both communities recognized an unspoken caste system and lived apart from ‘men of color.’ After some years of going two miles to pick up their mail, people at this end of the street applied for their own post office under the rubric ‘Head of Greenwich.’ Fearing confusion, the Postal Department rejected the name. The people met to consider another. At that time, we had a Shakespearian reading society here that performed in the Presbyterian church. One woman who fancied herself an actress, perhaps provoked over some snub, suggested with deliberate irony they call the town Othello. Realize that Negroes live
up
the road and Moors
down
the road but neither group lives in town. The whites agreed, all the while unaware that Othello, the Moor of Venice, is, as the play says, ‘a great black ram tupping a white ewe.’”

“That’s a pretty complex insult.”

“It never carried because the residents didn’t know the source. And today, even though interest in the old name is coming back, people consider the place part of proud and historic Greenwich.”

“What about Greenwich? Where did that name come from?”

“Settlers from Connecticut, the Greenwich there—Quakers and Presbyterians—were persuaded to come here around sixteen eighty by William Penn’s agent, Gabriel Thomas. Many of them wanted to escape the rigid theocracy of New England. Thomas told them of the deep soil here and the good fishing, the abundant shellfish and timber, the milder climate. When the Presbyterians arrived at the Othello end of the street, they set up a free school—something almost unheard of then. They taught a classical learning rather than the more practical education of the Quakers. They considered reading and writing adjuncts of civilized life, and Greenwich became an Anglo-Saxon island of civilized culture in the wilderness—which it still is in a different way. Italians have replaced Indians.”

He watched for a response. “The Quakers contributed too,” he said. “Their policy was always to purchase land from the Indians. They never purloined real estate, perhaps because establishing title is very important in Quaker thinking. A Friend always tries to pass to his heirs more land than he began with. So they established a strong base of landowners interested in law and order. They never had trouble with Indians. A peaceable moderation, you see. They established stability and wealth too. One Connecticut Friend carried down so much silver goods on his horses, his wife had to walk the whole way. The Quaker ideal is still here in this county for you to see—property bought in sixteen ninety even now feeds the descendants. Preservation is their watchword. Thee must never,
never
touch the principal.”

The old Jerseyman got up. At the door, he looked again at my license plate. “The ancient Incas,” he said, “when they traveled the great mountain empire, were required to wear their own distinct costume so they could be recognized. What do we have now? A license plate? Ideas are a man’s costume, his colors.”

I started to say something, but he waved it off and put his arm on my shoulder. He said, “Descartes believed traveling is like conversing with men of other centuries. Have your miles brought you to agree with the old phrasemaker?”

“I agree.”

“And on your peregrinations, my pilgrim friend, have you met a man from the future yet?”

“I’d have to think it over. Look back.”

“Look
back
for a man of the future? The logic of a teacher. The future is not usually memory projected forward, but I take your point. As a historian, I’m an optimist, and when I look ahead, I see back. I see man crawling out of the ooze again.”

“A peculiar optimism.”

“I speak to tell you—the pendulum is swinging toward the extinction of man. Do you wear those colors?”

“Don’t know what your reference is.”

“Another answer of a teacher. Here’s an answer—I’ve seen our county come a far piece in my time. I’ll not be alive when Greenwich becomes solidly obscured by industry, but you will, and you’ll be younger than I am now when this nook of the bay is an industrial wasteland. There are all kinds of reasons why there will be industrial development here, the greatest of which is that to make change is the most human creation. And there are other reasons, reasons such as a corporate body having no soul. We’ve reached the point where we’ll either take care of ourselves or extinction will be our inheritance.”

He stopped and stared at me. “Your expression says you don’t understand, but Bob Roemer can tell you the story of how we made Rome howl.”

“Is this about that thing called A.C.E.?”

“This is about the limited capacity of men to understand because they measure time in terms of themselves. This is about men who won’t see causes and therefore can’t predict effects. This is about men who fail to realize that geographical refuge is central to our history. It’s about men who exterminate the species of the earth at the rate of one every day.”

He gave my shoulder another shake. “You see no worry in me because I know the natural amenities will finally be preserved for a single reason and for a single reason alone—the force of nature demands it. Its sway is greater than ours. We will have our time of destruction nevertheless. But, in a nutshell, that’s why I’m an optimist.” He released my shoulder. “And for one other reason.”

“Which is?”

“Accidents, discovery, even enlightenment. Any projection must allow for man to change his history, a power second only to that of nature. A projection must allow for free will because only it does not despise or distrust or fear the unknown even if it knows the future is not a better place but only a different one. Any prognosis must consider that men can change their angles of vision and therefore change the future.” He stopped to catch his wind. “And if you reject all that, then say I believe, as did Tertullian, because it is absurd.”

A
T
the foot of the road in front of Roberts Roemer’s home, just where Maple makes a T-intersection with Greate Street, James Josiah Ewing built a house in 1834. He placed it deliberately in the way of Maple to keep the road from being extended to Delaware Bay and dividing his property. At the time, people believed it was self-serving to force a more circuitous route, but now some townsmen considered the Ewing house a preserver of the integrity of Greate Street and, maybe, Greenwich as well. A man’s response to the house was a litmus test to see what colors he wore.

From Roemer’s home, built in 1830 by a Quaker schoolmaster, we could see egrets down on the tidal flats of the Cohansey as they nippered up little crabs swarming the brown mud. From high marsh grasses between skews of river came whistles of bobwhite and from the north a scent of strawberry fields. Roemer handed me a gin and tonic and told the story of A.C.E., the Atlantic City Electric Company.

The substance: A.C.E., using a straw company called Overland Realty and working through local agents, started buying land around Greenwich in 1966. In three years, they had most of the property fronting the bay. Although the sellers did not know what the land would be used for, they “covenanted” with Overland never to vote against any proposed zoning change. Ignoring that a no-vote covenant constitutes an illegal disenfranchisement, A.C.E. bought the silence of nearly a fifth of the township.

Ninety-two residents, mostly farmers, sold forty-five hundred acres (about twenty percent of the township) to Overland for two and a quarter million dollars. Some of them sold blindly because Seabrook Frozen Foods, which once purchased most of the local produce, had closed. Labor costs had become prohibitive and the future of the asparagus fields looked bad for a crop, subject to blight, that has to be harvested by hand. A.C.E. seemed to offer salvation to the vegetable growers. Other residents, in or near retirement, needed the quick capital. But a few people refused to sell, refused even after fires of unknown origin began destroying abandoned outbuildings on unsold land. Teenage vandalism, the word was.

Once Overland owned most of the property, they mortgaged it to Prudential Insurance (one of whose board of directors also sat on the Overland board) for four and one-half million dollars and dissolved the straw company. By then things were becoming clear. Unexplained telephone lines New Jersey Bell was running into empty marsh made sense, and construction of a nuclear generating station only fifteen miles northwest near Salem soon would provide cheap power for new industry.

“Other than the finagling,” I said, “I don’t see the cause for alarm.”

“The alarm is that industry reaching to the perimeter of Greenwich threatens the survival of a town older than Philadelphia. Greenwich and Salem are the first permanent English-speaking settlements on Delaware Bay. Because of the high degree of preservation here, this village is as significant as Jamestown. It’s unique. If it’s destroyed, it cannot, in any way, ever be replaced. So when word leaked out that there were plans for tank farms three miles away at Bayside which would receive oil from ships anchored off Cape May and other plans to run oil north by railroad on the old Caviar line through our township, some of us got worried. Bayside’s in our township.”

“The Caviar line?”

“Bayside’s just fishing shacks now, but it used to be a thriving place called ‘Caviar’ because of the sturgeon fishing. The trackbed down to the bay still exists. We also began hearing about plans for industry to come in, and we learned that another nuclear plant would be built down here. Suddenly, people were visualizing trailers next to a seventeen-thirty-seven house, a hamburger franchise where the British tea was burned. We visualized the end. Things came to a crisis when the township committee, as it was then, rewrote the zoning ordinance so that A.C.E. got the land packaged up as they wanted it. Goodbye to Greenwich. In spite of the township’s own paid consultants and the county soil conservationist both advising against heavy industrial development, they rezoned anyway. This is marshland—a tidal zone.”

Roemer joined with a hundred twenty other citizens to form the Greenwich Emergency Committee for the purpose of filing suit against the three-member township committee to prevent heedless destruction of a village that, undisturbed for most of three centuries, had sat literally at the end of the road. The Emergency Committee worked to elect a new township committee, to arouse residents who hadn’t wanted the bother, to find new and compatible ways to produce income from the land.

“The struggle was to show that a certain amount of open area is absolutely necessary, not just to the atmosphere of the village, but to its health and survival. All of us have seen a continuing reduction in the size of the historic area. Houses being torn down or moved. The Greenwich post office was moved to an ‘olde tyme’ tourist village near Atlantic City. We had to show that one good historic structure can be worth the revenue equal to a one-hundred-thousand-dollar payroll. We wanted to prevent historic land from becoming a commodity.”

22. Roberts Roemer in Greenwich, New Jersey

The governor came to open the state bicentennial celebration, but the visit, in spite of the official recognition of Greenwich’s historical significance, came to nothing. Finally, the committee took its case to the state superior court in Atlantic City. It lost and lacked the ten thousand dollars to appeal.

But by then, things no longer looked so grim. Changes in and outside Greenwich diminished the necessity of pursuing the case. The Emergency group had succeeded in changing the composition of the township committee, and the new committee rewrote the zoning ordinance after finding thirty-three errors in it. While the new ordinance prohibited oil storage and nuclear generating stations along the bay, it did set aside an area north of Greenwich near Springtown for commercial development and another to the west for light industry.

What’s more, the group succeeded in having much of the village placed on the National Register of Historic Sites so that any proposed change in use would be reviewed by the Department of the Interior.