Where It Was

As I’ve mentioned, the events of the How It Was series of booklets took place in the real world as well as in the world of The Boy’s imagination (then and now). The real town where all this happened is in southern New Jersey, on the Delaware River and a few miles north of Philadelphia.

The Missus knows how tightly I cling to memories of that place and time and, accordingly, has set up on eBay some kind of early-warning system for herself, to let her know that something tagged with the town’s highly unusual (almost certainly unique) name has come on the market.

This past Christmas, she came up with some winners: a series of maps, dated 1876, and a couple of postcards. (That’s a thumbnail of one of the maps at the top of this post; click on it for the original as scanned, which will open in a new window or tab.) My friend Jimmy still lives in that area, and occasionally drops me a line to let me know of some item of interest. Recently, the local post office celebrated its 150th anniversary, and issued a series of commemorative postcards — reproductions of the originals; Jimmy sent me a few of them.

One of the things I’d like to do sometimes here at Running After My Hat is to try filling in some background on the town — not necessarily what it’s like now, or even how it really was… but at least how it was in The Boy’s latter-day memory. I’m going to start with this map — a larger-scale, annotated version of -which you can see “below the fold.”

Now let’s take a walk around town; all five red-numbered locations put in an appearance in “Book 1: Spring” of How It Was.

1. The Boy lived about here, in a house on the corner. The most important of the two streets intersecting there was Third Street. “The Lot,” which plays a big part in the first section of “Spring,” was a block southwest of The Boy’s home. One interesting thing about this 1876 version of the map: Had he lived back then, The Boy would have lived practically on the frontier (which would have thrilled him). Alas, by the time he really lived, the town had grown to the northeast quite a bit.
2. The river — the impossibly wide expanse of water across which, on clear days, The Boy could see the gleaming-white columned front of the biggest house he’d ever seen, surely a mansion.
3. The treacherous creek.
4. The bridge across the creek. This annually iced up in winter, and it seemed an annual ritual for some youngster to drown in the creek after slipping from the bridge’s framework.
5. The Sand Island. As you can see, there’s no real island here; it (whose official name was Hawk Island) was actually across a fairly narrow channel to the west of this spot. Location #5 on this map was actually the very leading eastern edge of what The Boy knew as the Sand Island; starting in the 1930s, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged up the channel and dumped the silt into the waterway, connecting Hawk Island to the mainland. Nobody The Boy knew when he was growing up referred to anything as Hawk Island anymore — it was always the Sand Island.

In my next post on How It Was, I’ll include an excerpt from “Book 1: Spring.”