Читать книгу Woodside, the North End of Newark, N.J - C. G. Hine - Страница 29

For several years the Duncans carried on the printing and dyeing of silk handkerchiefs in the Point House, probably the first enterprise of this sort established in the vicinity of Newark. They secured the raw silk in New York and, after converting it into the finished article, one of the brothers would make up a bundle of handkerchiefs and trudge to New York with it. On leaving this place the Duncans established the woolen mills in Franklin, N. J., which have since been known as the Essex Works.

Apparently the next use to which the point was put was for the transshipping of freight, for we are told that rather more than fifty years ago this was a landing where vessels unloaded coal and other commodities which those from the back country, even so far as Bloomfield, were wont to cart home by way of the Division road and Murphy’s lane.

About 1855 our old Point House, which some say was built 150 years ago, was owned by George Jackson, who manufactured fireworks here, while his brother Charles followed the same trade in a small building just north. He is said to have paid $400 for the property. About once in so often the fireworks factory would explode, and it made such a nuisance of itself because of these irregular excursions heavenward that Mr. Gould, who lived just across the way, purchased the property in order to quiet his nerves.

From fireworks to firewater sounds like an easy transition, and so we come to the Holt regime. The Holts and a brother of Mrs. Holt, Ed. Moorehouse, lived in the King house (which we have passed without knowing it, and to which we shall go back shortly) and some time before 1865 removed to the Point House, and here again was trouble for the neighbors, for while this was not a regular tavern, it would appear that a certain black bottle was part of its furniture, and that that black bottle was a magnet which no servant girl of the time and region could resist. Now a drunken cook is not generally regarded as any great addition to the family menage, as I am informed. It was no small undertaking to find a cook who would go so far into the country as this region then was, and when found, to have her almost immediately go astray via the Point House, was considered highly provoking.

The Holts made their own root beer, and there is a story to the effect that while a party of well known Newarkers was in the place one day a keg of this same beer, which stood on the bar, exploded and deluged the visitors with a combination of liquid sassafras and wintergreen that was shocking to see and worse to bear, and it is recorded that those inundated failed to discover a funny side to the experience.