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Working off some turkey
Hopewell Valley authors unearth uneasy truths about local AfricanAmerican history in new book
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Where the holidays and history meet Annual Pennington Holiday Walk an opportunity for ‘town crier’ to spread the word
By Diccon hyaTT Some say that when the first Dutch settlers came to the ridge of uplands along the Delaware river in Central New Jersey, they found land that was rocky, and the soil so acidic that an acrid smell wafted through the air. They called this remote and desolate place the Sourland Mountains. Around the time of the American Revolution though, another group of people came to the Sourlands. These people, who had once been enslaved, saw something completely different in these mountains. They saw refuge, a place they could be safe from those who would persecute them. And there they made their homes and tilled their farms in the hard land. Now, two Hopewell Valley residents, Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, have written a book on the history of black settlers of the Sourland Mountains going back to the 1700’s, when some of their ancestors came to the area while enslaved. Together with researcher Kate McGuire, Buck, a lifelong Hopewell resident and Mills, a See STONES, Page 14
2018
By micheLe aLPeRin
Zach Schutsky, 27, of Titusville, Matt Schwartz, 27, of Pennington, and Owen Gudenrath, 18, of Corning, New York, run the 9th annual HV 5K Turkey Trot at Rosedale Park on Nov. 23, 2018. This year, 913 people ran the race to raise money for community wrestling programs. (Photo by Mike Schwartz/mikeschwartz.photo.)
Bestselling author returns home Young adult novelist Emily X. R. Pan visits Timberlane students By soPhia cai Most kids get bed time stories read to them, but Emily Pan’s dad would invent bedtime stories for her on the spot. And then once she got old enough, she joined in on the storytelling. “I’ve always been a story teller. I started saying at seven years old that I wanted to be an author,” said New York Times best-selling author and
Hopewell native Emily XR Pan in a recent phone interview. “I copied Harriet in Harriet the Spy even though things don’t turn out great for her.” She carried her notebook around, and Pan carried floppy disks with her writing on it. “In second grade, Pan I tried to write my first book — a riff of Harriet the Spy and Babysitter’s Club. It was a lot of derivative stuff and I would spend way more time picking out font colors than actually writing, but that was my first attempt,” she said. Now she’s the New York Times best-selling author of
Jack’s
The Astonishing Color of After, published by Little Brown and Company, and last month she visited Timberlane Middle School to speak to current students. Pan took her 6th grade assignment to make books very literally—her classmates wrote short stories, but Pan set out to write a full book. “We were printing them out, cutting them out and making covers, so it really liked like a book. It took me forever to do mine because there were so many pages. First finished novel she wrote.” In fi fth grade at the Hopewell See AUTHOR, Page 11
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Stanley Saperstein has managed to juggle three “careers”: the one paying the bills, personnel officer for the state of New Jersey; master craftsman; and local historian. As a master in woodcarving with a master’s degree in history and education from Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey), he became a colonial woodcarver at the craft fairs that sprouted during the Bicentennial, and eventually found his way into historical reenactment. One of the characters Saperstein created is a town crier, which he will play, wearing period clothes, at Pennington’s 35th Holiday Walk, sponsored by the Pennington Business and Professional’s Association, Friday, Dec. 7, starting at 5:30 at Howe Commons. Festivities open at Howe Commons at 5:30 p.m., where restaurants will offer snack trays, followed by tree lighting by Santa at 6:30. Elves from Dance Works, the town crier, and George and Martha WashSee HOLIDAY, Page 12
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