The Jersey Devil has come back into my life again. I have written about the devil several times before and I suspect that the Jersey Devil has appeared in the pages of The Vermont Standard more often than in any other newspaper in Vermont and possibly New England.
The first time I wrote about the Devil, I was surprised to find that few of my neighbors had ever heard of him. I wrote another piece after that with some of the Devil’s history. Those pieces appeared a number of years ago, so if it happens that you didn’t read them, or have forgotten them, here’s a brief history of the Jersey Devil: Some time in the mid 1700’s, Mrs. Leeds, of Leeds Point, NJ, or possibly Mrs. Shrouds of Leeds Point, found herself pregnant with her thirteenth child. She wasn’t happy about it, and was heard to say “May the Devil take this one.”
Apparently, the Devil was listening, and although Mrs. Leeds surely didn’t mean it literally, and meant nothing more than that she felt twelve kids was more than enough, her poor choice of words came to the attention of the devil and he availed himself of Mrs. Leeds offer. When the child was born, it resembled in no way Mrs’ Leeds’ other children in that none of them had a face like a collie, wings like a bat, a long forked tail and hooves like a goat. Also, not a single one of the other children had eaten the other members of the family after its birth, flown around the house screeching and finally flown up the chimney and disappeared. This child was distinctly different. The final thing that set this child apart from the others is that, as far as we know, none of Mrs. Leeds other children went on to haunt the Pine Barrens of New Jersey for the next 275 years, terrorizing the population, eating farm animals and little children.
That’s the history in brief, although the creature may be far older than that, and may have been known to the Lenape, who inhabited the area long before there was a Mrs. Leeds and long before Leeds Point was called Leeds Point
The reason the Jersey Devil has entered my life again is that a friend gave me a copy of an article that appeared in the fall 2018 Swarthmore College Bulletin that claims that the Jersey Devil legend had its origin in a dispute between Quaker factions, some name calling in connection with that, and in addition, a rivalry between two Almanac publishers, Titan Leeds of Leeds Point, and Benjamin Franklin, that rivalry also involving some name calling and an early example of fake news.
This claim did not originate with the Swarthmore Bulletin, by the way. I don’t know where it originated, but I did a little research and found an August 2013 blog in NJ.Com by Star-Ledger guest columnist Brian Regal who tells the story pretty much as the Swarthmore Bulletin does, but actually says flat-out “Unfortunately, everything you think you know about the Jersey Devil is wrong. It is not a monster of the woods, but of politics. It is not a devilish horse haunting our present, but a scapegoat lost to our memory,” and goes on to provide what he believes to be proof of his claim. Here’s the proposition in brief:
Daniel Leeds was a Quaker but, sometime in the early 1700’s, he fell into apostasy and wrote some things in his almanac that were critical of the Quakers, styling himself a “trumpet sounding in the wilderness.” A faithful Quaker named Caleb Pusey wrote a rejoinder titled “Satan’s harbinger encountered, his false news of a trumpet detected, his crooked ways in the wildrnesse (sic) laid open to the impartial and judicious.” and there you have it. Satan’s harbinger = Jersey Devil. It was Daniel’s son Titan Leeds who carried on Daniel’s almanac and later became entangled with Ben Franklin in the competing almanacs part of the story.
I’ve read what Franklin had to say about Titan Leeds, and he clearly was just having fun, so let’s disregard that right off the bat. I reject the Regal/Swarthmore theory largely because I object strongly to people going around debunking perfectly good legends, especially ones that have stood the test of time the way this one has, and most especially, ones dear to my heart. I could examine the Regal/Swarthmore theory and dissect it in tedious detail, but I won’t. I’ll just scoff at it because I know for a fact that the people who have claimed to have seen the Jersey Devil over the years really have seen the Jersey Devil. I know this because I have seen, with my own eyes, someone who has seen the Jersey Devil with his own eyes,.
The Jersey Devil ranged far and wide through the pinelands, east, west, south and occasionally as far north as our neck of the woods, where it would be seen, usually by some local teenagers, whereupon the other teenagers in the neighborhood would hop into somebody’s car and rush out to the area, hoping to see the Devil and hoping equally not to see it. And here’s where I deliver the proof that the Jersey Devil is real.
To be continued…