Westfield High School - Weather Vane Yearbook (Westfield, NJ)

Page 27 text:

19 3 4 THE WEATHER VANE 19 3 4 MR. HAROLD THOMPSON Oswego Slate Normal School Wood Working Automobile Mechanics Mechanical Drawing MRS. MARY D. TICE A.B. Mount Holyoke College English MR. WILLIAM H. WARNER B.S. 7 renton Stale Teachers' College M.A. Rutgers University American History Economics Band Seventeen

Page 26 text:

19 3 4 THE WEATHER VANE 19 3 4 MISS ALICE PELTON Bay Path Institute Business Practice Bookkeeping MRS. CAROLYN W. PHILLIPS A.B. Barnard College English MR. C. BLAIR ROGERS Ph. B. Lafayette College Biology Chemistry MISS GERTRUDE M. SWIFT Arnold School of Hygiene B.S. New York University Physical Education Hygiene Sixteen

Page 28 text:

19)4 ■THE WEATHER VANE 19 3 4 WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS CLOSE to the railroad station at Valley Forge you will see an unpretentious building of stone which served as General Washington's headquarters during the anxious winter of 1777 when the Continental Army endured cold, hunger, suffering, despair, and death in miserable huts on snow-bitten Pennsylvania hillsides. This was the home of Isaac Potts, a Quaker preacher and miller, who owned a grist mill which stood on the Valley Creek where it flows into the Schuylkill, not far from the house. Nearby was the Valley Forge where some smithies with a tilt hammer worked at their anvils; it gave its name to the settlement. From the marquee in which he lived for some time after his arrival with about 1 1,000 soldiers on the ninteenth of December, 1777. Washington moved to the Potts house which the family gave over to him. Here he made bis home during the entire winter; here he held his military conferences, met his generals, laid plans, wrote letters to Congress, and kept records. With its low white fence, its tiny paths and box borders, its small trimness, the simple stone house seems a modest place to have held councils of inter-national importance. Downstairs, the front room has an air of being ready for business, its desk equipped with quill pens and other paraphernalia of an office. A grandfather’s clock keeps watch through the years. The dining room is simply furnished, and the kitchen is hospitable, with kettle and crane ready for a guest. Above in the bedrooms are four-posters, rag rugs, candle stands, and pitchers and bowls. And there is an attic—-such an attic! Of the sort in which we used to rummage when we went to grandmother's for a visit. One is led to believe that however much it lacked the luxury of Mount Vernon, the humble Potts house must have assumed a homelike atmosphere upon the coming of Martha Washington to share her husband's hardships. Eighteen