A Murder, Wars, Airmail & the KKK in Long Branch

Today in New Jersey history:

July 4, 1772: William Smart was executed in Burlington. Smart had broken into a tavern in Evesham Township and robbed and murdered the proprietor, Elizabeth Knight.

July 4, 1776: Former New Jersey Royal Governor William Franklin (son of Patriot leader Benjamin Franklin), arrested and detained at his Burlington estate, arrived in Connecticut as a prisoner of war. He was exchanged in 1778 and returned to New York to head a Loyalist group that waged war on New Jersey Patriots.

July 4, 1812: Robert Fulton’s steamboat Jersey took part in a historic first, the transport of troops across water by steam-powered craft, Fulton’s “most excellent machine” consisting of two hulls connected by a single platform, ferried a battery of United States regular army “flying artillery” from Paulus Hook to Manhattan. It took four trips for the Jersey to get four guns, caissons, limbers, twenty-seven horses and forty men across the Hudson River. The ferry would continue to serve as an important troop and supply transportation service throughout the war.

July 4, 1813: An American subterfuge of hiding an armed party of sailors below decks on a local fishing boat, the Yankee, succeeded in capturing the British schooner Eagle off Sandy Hook.

July 4, 1912: The first airmail delivery by fixed wing aircraft in New Jersey was made from South Amboy to Perth Amboy in a hydroplane flown by O.G. Simmonds, who was accompanied by Perth Amboy Mayor F. Garretson. Mayor Garretson placed the leather mailbag on his lap, sat on two wooden cross pieces and held onto the plane’s struts with both hands, no doubt for dear life.

July 4, 1924: The Ku Klux Klan held a “Tri-State Konklave” for Klansmen from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York in Long Branch. The weekend-long event included Klan sporting events and parades, including a “minister’s race.”