Fifty years ago today, a signature on a book of Quinton and Lower Alloways Creek memories
On Oct. 14, 1976, William B. Vanneman signed and dated his name inside a copy of How Dear to My Heart, a collection of the photographs and writings of William J. S. Bradway, a Hancocks Bridge photographer whose glass plates had been sitting forgotten in a storeroom. Fifty years later to the day, the book is still one of the best visual records of life in the Quinton-to-Stow Creek corner of Salem County.
A Bicentennial book built from forgotten glass plates.
How Dear to My Heart was collected and edited by Vanneman and published under the auspices of the Township of Lower Alloway’s Creek, with David A. Fogg as mayor, George S. Stiles as deputy mayor and Samuel F. Donelson on the Township Committee. It was printed by Sunbeam Publishing Company in Salem. The township holds the 1976 copyright.
The book began as a Bicentennial project. According to the introduction of the later volume Fond Recollections, dozens of Bradway’s glass photographic plates were found packed away in the storeroom of Howard Hewitt’s store, and the township arranged to purchase them. In the book’s own acknowledgements, Hewitt is thanked for loaning his collection of the original plates, Fogg for “considerable legwork” in the search for old pictures, and Thomas H. Bowen for helping “put it all together.” Greta R. Peterman was singled out for identifying the people in many of the photographs.
Sunday schools, wheat fields and a 1908 Washington’s Birthday party.
Bradway’s photographs fill the first 96 pages: Sunday school classes, churches, schools, farm work and community celebrations around Harmersville, Hancocks Bridge, Canton, Beasley’s Neck and Cross Roads. Among them are a 1908 Washington’s Birthday celebration in Hancocks Bridge and a portrait of Bradway himself as the “guiding light” of the Harmersville Union Sunday School. The second half of the book reprints his “Journeys Around Jericho” newspaper articles on the mills, taverns, homesteads and early families of the Salem and Cumberland county line.
The title comes from Samuel Woodworth’s poem “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and the book earned its name honestly. Many of the postcards and photos came from neighbors who kept them: ten people loaned original Bradway postcards and three loaned the clippings of “Journeys Around Jericho.”
Also on this date
- Oct. 14, 1665: A land deed dated this day, recorded in Stories of Lower Penns Neck, covered land about a quarter mile below Pennsville. It was signed with the marks of two Native men, Tospecsminck and Hennaminck.
- Oct. 14 (year not given in the clipping): A newspaper clipping reprinted in Fond Recollections notes the dedication of the Cornelia Hancock Library at Laing Middle School in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., named for the Hancocks Bridge-born Civil War nurse.