Sense of Place: Headquarters Farm

This place where we live lies at an intersection of many threads of culture, landscape, geology, climate, history, and geography. Passing through the hamlet of Headquarters last weekend, just as the big snow of the season was arriving, I stopped by Headquarters Farm, a rather imposing edifice in this modest place.

To my knowledge, this was never a grand residence, rather a home built by a well-to-do local farmer and entrepeneur. Its construction followed the building of a grist mill, the large stone building on the left in the photo above. The mill was built about 1730, and the house in 1757 by John Opdycke, a well-to-do merchant and farmer. It may be that John never lived in the house. Instead, it may have been occupied by the person he hired to run the mill, and half the house on the left may have been used as a store.

The origin of the name 'Headquarters' for both the house and the hamlet in which it is located comes from an apocryphal story of George Washington using the house as a headquarters during the Revolutionary War. Washington, indeed was in this area during the Revolution, and used a house in nearby Lambertville as his headquarters for a brief time (he was on the run), but never this house.

Opdycke, like many Dutch families in this area, probably owned slaves, who helped run the mill and support the local economy. We don't usually think of slavery as part of the heritage of this part of the US, but it definitely was. Not on the scale later found in the South, but it certainly existed.

So what does this picturesque scene in the New Jersey winter of 2009 tell us about our landscape, and our sense of place? How does our knowledge of the existence of slavery here affect our perception of the landscape and its man-made features? Does it recall the earlier devastation of the culture and the lives of the native Americans, the Lenni Lenape, who formerly called these fields, these hills, forests, and streams their home? How does past shape our understanding of the present, alter our understanding of the the place in which we live? How does it affect our choices in the garden?

(I'm indebted to Marphy Goodspeed's article in the Delaware Township Post for some of the facts in this post.)