Friday me and the girls took a road trip to take some pictures.
Claire and Brandy are standing behind the main house. Claire will put hers up on Picasa, here are a few I took. Wick House is part of the Jockey Hollow historical site south of Morristown, NJ. It was here that the Continental Army spent the winter of 1779-80, a winter worse than the more famous one in Valley Forge the year before. As part of the site, you can see recreations of the cabins in which the soldiers stayed.
The “Wick House” was where Washington stayed that winter. It’s been well preserved, along with some of its out-buildings, as a historical recreation. I picked this week, because the gardens are blooming. The kitchen garden is especially interesting, full of the kinds of useful culinary and medicinal herbs that would have been grown at the time. In addition to basil and sage, you find horseradish, echinacea, broom corn, and flowers and herbs with uses all but forgotten today. For example, mix the juice of the dianthus flower with alum and you can make ink:
Echinacea is popular herbal remedy even today. And the bugs just love it too. Here’s a cooperative butterfly:
And it’s surprising that I’d be surprised at this; but how often do you see real honeybees anymore? Not wasps, or carpenter bees, or hornets, but these guys:
There’s a rather large orchard adjacent to the house and garden. Usually there are deer ranging on the grass, looking for the stray apple:
It seems she’s expecting:
Besides apples, there were some pear trees. And the raspberry bushes were full of ripe berries. Amazingly, Claire didn’t even realize they were edible. Too much of the sheltered suburban life I guess. Not just edible, they’re delicious.
Here’s the horse barn. The horse has been MIA for a while I guess. Part of the fence was broken down and the ground was covered with weeds. Note the small warning sign!
Next to the current barn you can see the foundations of an older structure. I have no idea what the pile of rock in the center was:
This is just a very small portion of the park. In between the house and the soldier huts is a mile or more of dense woodland, with trails and narrow paved roads running through. Despite the name “hollow,” it’s high up on a hill. The bike club routinely goes by on Tempe Wick Road, and it’s a long climb.
It makes an interesting trip any time of the year. In the winter, for the sense of how brutal that winter was; and in the summer for the beauty of the location.