I’ve been absent for 3 months. (I left off with West New Jersey in 1687.)
Perhaps one reason I stopped blogging is the work it takes to write about a whole year in one post. My daughter-in-law (who has a new blog about gardening that I highly recommend) suggested breaking things down into smaller posts. That’s what I thought I was doing when I decided to take one year at a time. But it turns out that so much happened in these years, one year has become too big a unit of measurement.
Today, Slate Magazine featured the work of Camilo Jose Vegara, who makes it his business to document the slow decay of American buildings and neighborhoods. His photographs are utterly fascinating to me, but what really caught my attention today was his photograph of the William Cooper Manor House located in Camden, New Jersey.
The West Jersey Assembly met in May of 1687. The minutes of their meeting are not included in Leaming and Spicer’s Grants and Concessions, so for many years, people thought they had not met at all. We know of two matters undertaken by the Assembly in 1687. The first was the problem of the Province’s debt. Despite the fact that taxes had been levied, they could not be collected. Much of this was due to the scarcity of coin, which had to come from abroad. By May of 1687 the debt had risen to £1,250.