David's Reply:

I do not know if my web site was the source of the information for the Washington Post article. My source was a book called "Doylestown...And How It Came To Be (1724-1980)" by Wilma Brown Rezer. The book is handwritten and was reprinted by the Doylestown Historical Society in 1997. In her chapter "The Doyles", the author states:

This is a painting of a local farm just prior to it being demolished for yet another development constructed in historic Bucks County Pennsylvania.

Thanks to Lynn Maust for the reference photo, other photos and her narrative about Bucks County.

Thank you for that beautiful tour of Washington's Crossing, the subject of my mini-search tonight for information on the event. Your photos are especially beautiful of the nearby historic homes in the Autumn season.

I write to you to offer you a site that has information about the boat type that was supposed to have been used on that special winter day,the Durham Boat.

History of The Durham Boat, by the Durham Historical Society

This site has the information about what a particular person determines to be the actual originators of the boat type, which type may be confused with one called Batso, which again may not be the exact boat used by Washington and his men. The account indicates that Scandinavians built the boat and not an Englishman. I think that you will find these words very persuasive, with more weight to the truth than not.

If you are further interested, perhaps you will connect with the Durham Historical Society and then change your words under the picture of the boat in your "Tour." At least, perhaps you might indicate that the attribution to Durham has been challenged and the real contribution of other boat builders, the Scandinavians, may have a more rightful claim. Ninety years the Scandinavians had been on the Delaware already.

I am not Scandinavian, I am not a Durham native. I live in Bergen County, NJ, and I like to learn about historic places and objects. My husband and I were just reading from the New Yorker magazine of March 24, "Just the Facts, Ma'am," by Jill Lepore, p. 79, about the difference between history and fiction. We were having side thoughts about how true are novels and films about historic figures (such as John Adams, etc). We are up to the part in the article about how one feels about a subject and what one learns about a subject from either "historic fact" or via a novel: does it matter if you come out with the same concept about the subject (having traveled there by two different paths). You ask: Why is this New Yorker business relevant to my message about a boat? I will tell you after the next paragraph.

Well, in addition to the above, we were wondering if George Washington really stood up in the boat across the Delaware. Now, as we are in our mid-60s, we should have asked this question many years ago and tried to seek out an answer. It's good thing we didn't, because the search would have been ever so difficult. Where would we go for our source material? However, we are in the computer Google, etc., age: looking for information is a great adventure right here at home. We found the site above, we found you, we found one about What is wrong with this Painting? (excellent), we have the New Yorker delivered, and, we actually talk at dinner :-); we were having a good time trying to pull this all together tonight.

The answer to my question, why is the cited website and yours and the New Yorker article all important? Think: What does a history site tell us? What signage do we believe? What new thoughts prevail? How do we think about the boat now? Well, we are still in awe of the fact that the men all got across and the colonials won victories so necessary for their eventual freedom from England. Well and good. What are the facts of history, or history books from 1887, or thoughtful investigation and reports in the current century? How do we reconcile these new ideas? What are stories, what is fact?....

It gets late, I leave you to what I hope is a healthy curiosity to follow up my offer to check out the boat business, at any rate. :-)

Please write back to me if you wish. I'd love to hear from you.
Best regards, Joanne

We thoroughly enjoyed your Home page and all the photos etc. My daughter and I are looking for a quick trip from Pittsburgh, Pa. and you make this place look so inviting. My next door neighbor's daughter lives up there and they just love it. I have heard so much of Doylestown, etc. from her. We are going to plan a trip to your beautiful area soon. Your story was fascinating to read. Good Luck and Lots of Love in your life David. Thanks again, Madonna Pastelak

When entering River Rd from the North at Rt 611, be careful driving because half of the North bound lane (next to the River) has been washed away in the recent years due to flooding. The guard rail was moved into the road and now the road is essentially a single lane. Also, approximately a mile from Rt 611before the turn off for Ringing Rocks there is a small quaint restaurant/B&B that might be fun for lunch. Probably the safest and more challenging way to find Ringing Rocks is to "map it" on MSN.com or google and get a detailed street map of the area surrounding Ringing Rocks and River Rd. Then access the area from Rt 611 more from the SW. The streets in the area are well marked and the homes/farms are quite attractive.

http://www.attheriversbottom.com

http://delawareriverjournal-rivergeek.blogspot.com/

I have not, as of yet, completely digested your fine work and therefore such may explain my few questions. In the first place, are you a resident of the County? I read a bit of your home site and believe that you may have spent most of your life in the Chicago area. If so, it is all the more remarkable that you capture in camera and mind the essential beauty and struggle of Bucks County. I spent my formative years there, from about 1947 to about 1964. In those years, I got to know the culture of Bucks County and generally agree with about everything you say about it. Some additional notes, however, could be added. In the 1920s, Bucks County was a very divided place. Lower Bucks County had been little more than a summer colony for working-class Philadelphia Baptists who used the tiny towns of the region to escape the oppressive heat of summertime Philadelphia. Generally, they built their extremely modest summer cottages in a kind of informal square within which was usually cited a kind of religious "band shell" used to conduct summertime services. In the Depression 1930s, many of these summer cottages were winterized to serve as "economic escapes" from the riling unemployment of Philadelphia, Camden, and Trenton. In the 1940s and beyond, many of these humble village cottages burnt to the ground, often casting spectacular fires in the midday sky. I clearly remember witnessing one of these conflagurations taking place on my way home from primary school in the village of Trevose back in about 1949. Trevose itself was perhaps characteristic of Lower Bucks County. A poor town with few paved roads until the early 1950s, it housed oldish families of extremely modest means. There was, however, one notable exception. Anne May Jones, a white-haired diminutive lady whose face was always powdered to a max and whose fancy summertime dresses always suggested she was heading right to a Vogue magazine shoot, had begun the only general store in the region (which, for some reason, she called Irvin's General Store), perhaps back in the early 1940s when she and her late husband, the famous vaudeville talent Billy Jones (of the Jones and Hare duo, popular on radio throughout the 1930s and before) had moved to Trevose. Of course, in those days I did not recognize the significance of Anne May Jones background though, even at the age of 10, did recognize that this lady (who lived directly across from her store in a tiny, charming cottage painted pink and white) was of some importance.

Further up-county the social circumstances changed. Langhorne and Newtown were essentially retirement towns for well-to-do Quaker farmers who had sold off their large farms to manipulative real estate developers, particularly in the years after 1953 when the U.S. Steel Corporation built the largest steel plant in the world -- the Fairless Works on the Delaware River -- causing the influx of huge numbers of working-class outsiders from Philadelphia and Northern Pennsylvania.

In the region around New Hope, as far back as the late 1920s there emerged a particularly interesting social phenomenon. From Broadway came some of the most important names of the theater -- truly glittering names like Oscar Hammerstein II, Moss Hart and his wife Kitty Carlisle, the notable radio personality Ezra ("Henry Aldrich") Stone, and others who shared their lovely gentlemen weekend farms with their friends and professional colleagues. (In the happy 1920s you could buy a one-hundred acre historic Bucks County farm, gorgeous main house, several out-buildings, and grand and ancient barn, for only $15,000.) Out of this arose an impetus to create the Bucks County Playhouse in the late 1930s. I recall, but I know nothing about, a lovely mysterious "village" about four miles north of New Hope embracing roughly six buildings of stone built to look like British Cornwall cottages. I often wonder if those buildings are still there and what was their social history. (Go north of New Hope four miles until you reach a sharp left turn in the road after which you cross over a trundly old wooden bridge. Look to the right of the road to see if these buildings still remain.) In the immediate post-World War II era, a famous Japanese artist took residence at New Hope and began the process of re-creating the town as a home for artsy-craftsy culture. In the early 1950s, the town's canal was improved and lots of charming restaurants and art stores were added. By the early 1960s, however, the pressure of a lower social culture coming from the outside seriously began to transform the town's atmosphere.

Most fondest memory of Bucks County comes from knowing Paul Whiteman, the famous 1920s-1930s society dance band leader. He had settled in retirement in Bucks County after many years in residence in a much larger farm in Hunterdon County, New Jersey not really too far away from Princeton. In those early 1950s, Paul Whiteman was still trying to salvage the musical culture of the nation, then in the feverish throes of rock and roll. As I recall, Whiteman spent his last years promoting a local Philadelphia ABC TV amateur hour show. In the years immediately after World War II, he was influential in promoting the British sports car craze. He was never far from his XK 120 Jaguar roadster.

In the 1960s and beyond Bucks County succumbed to an invasion of monied and uncouth outsiders from Philadelphia and New York who invested heavily in tasteless McMansions and a pretend-lifestyle of culture and refinement. As far as I know, the region is about the same today. But America itself is beginning to collapse from even worse influences so who can say, relatively speaking, that Bucks County has actually lost ground.

Many people, especially the new-rich from Wall Street and Walnut Street (down in Philadelphia) might logically take offense and I don't want to spend my time fending off their crudities. The real heros of Bucks County history are the Quakers, a people who wrestled with the poor soil of Bucks County to gain a measure of wealth over generations of back-breaking struggle. It was the Quakers, moreover, who taught their children to place education above everything else. And thus Quakers of the region built some of the finest colleges and universities in the land - the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Haverford College, and, to an extent, Bryn Mawr College. Quaker moral intellectualism conflicted with the Establishment view of politics in the Spanish-American War (where Quakers properly thought that the motives for that war were American imperialism), World War I (where only the dominance of Anglo-Establishmentarism in American politics overcame a widespread national objection to fighting for England), World War II (where, as in the previous war, Quakers objected to demonizing the enemy as sub-human; and where non-combatants became the target of widespread area bombing which, in the end, proved to be largely ineffective in winning the war); Korea (a stupid war largely predicated on a typically-adolescent American reading of world politics); Vietnam (please refer to my remarks on World War I, II, and Korea), and endless other American military encounters worldwide that have done nothing but dissipate our national wealth (and redistribute it to the munitions manufacturers of the land).

Since I no longer live in Bucks County, I am ignorant of what Quaker activists are saying about our Iraq incursion (though I can imagine). I make these remarks, not as a Quaker, but as one who admires the long Quaker struggle made against American philistinism. Once upon a time we had (Bucks County) Quaker political activists like James Mitchner who became Chairman of the Bucks County Democratic Party in the early 1950s when a Democrat could never expect to be elected in this rock-ribbed Republican bastion. It was James Mitchner, nevertheless, who invited the sainted John F. Kennedy to a Bucks County rally in late October of 1960 as the long presidential campaign was coming to its close. There was Kennedy, bare-headed with a well-fitting top coat on in the late afternoon of a winterish Bucks County day. An astounding half million had showed up to greet Kennedy's motorcade as it wended its way through the packed streets of Northeast Philadelphia to Bucks County's Neshaminy High School campus. Countless thousands had waited patiently (and even reverently) through the long, cold day to catch a glimpse of their hero. It was only when the the last rays of light were glimmering in the blood red sky that Kennedy's motorcade finally made it to the High School grounds. The scene was electric -- never to be forgotten. Waves upon waves of spontaneous adoring applause peeled across the huge crowds as Kennedy tried to deliver a short speech. At first he merely smiled in appreciation. Then his impeccable delivery came forth as the crowd settled down. Thoughts were laced together as complex themes as no American president has ever done since. In minutes it was time for Kennedy to leave. Kennedy's motorcade inched its way through the adoring crowd.

It was a time to remember that few real Bucks Countians will forget.

Nor will they forget the artistry of Bucks County writer Pearl Buck whose themes pleaded for racial harmony. All that is past. In his later years, James Mitchner took up residence on Maryland's Eastern Shore, perhaps to escape the awful suburbanization that overwhelmed Bucks County in the 1960s and 1970s, and to write several more great novels before his passing.

Today the great names of the theater, politics, music, and fine art who gave Bucks County its real integrity are gone, replaced by an affluent mob of pot-smoking petty criminals whose lifestyles tax the capabilities of Bucks County's endlessly-larger police force. At one time, most of Bucks County had few police, depending mostly on the fine Pennsylvania State Police, often located as far away as fifty miles, to take care of the County's few law-enforcement problems. Today, as with most else of the United States, Bucks County has thousands upon thousands of local, township, and County police abetted by countless other federal officers, private police, undercover FBI agents, and God knows what else, all to keep the fine citizens of Bucks County in some semblence of line. You were right to train your Nikon lense on the rustic barns of Bucks County. Doing a careful study of the strange people who now inhabit this once Quaker bastion would be, at best, demoralizing.

Best wishes to you.