It Landed in Jersey! The Odd Story of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and America's First Hot Air Balloon

  At five minutes to eleven in the morning on January 9, 1793 a large object was seen descending from the sky on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.

A local farmer who saw the giant airship drift overhead instantly dropped the musket he was carrying to the ground and fell to his knees in reverential prayer.

An enormous yellow silk hydrogen filled hot air balloon, the first ever piloted aircraft flown in the United States, touched down in Deptford Township, New Jersey that morning in a farmer’s field near a tiny stream known as Big Timber Creek.  It landed just astride an enormous gnarled oak tree named the Clement Oak that is believed to have sprouted sometime in the mid 1500’s and that had been used by local Lenapi Indians as a recognizable landmark for decades prior to the arrival of English colonists in New Jersey.

At the helm of the giant yellow balloon, standing in a varnished wicker basket and checking his pulse regularly to test the effects of descent from a high altitude, is famed French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard.

Blanchard is the first man to have successfully flown a hot air balloon across the English Channel.  Always a bit of a daredevil, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, is also one of the first men in history to have successfully used an early silk prototype of a parachute by intentionally leaping from his own balloon just to see if the experimental apparatus would work.  He has conducted successful flights in five different European countries, and now on January 9, 1793 he has just successfully completed the first hot air balloon flight in American history.

All has gone well, even the temperature is an unseasonably warm forty-five degrees fahrenheit that day, but the only problem is that Jean-Pierre Blanchard doesn’t speak a single word of English, and most of the residents living in and around Deptford, New Jersey in 1793, have never even heard of, let alone seen, a hot air balloon.

Before Blanchard can extricate himself from the basket a jittery farmer runs across the field where Blanchard landed and jabs an enormous pitchfork in the direction of the French balloonist.

Within moments of his landing an apprehensive, shouting mass of local New Jerseyians, many of them armed, has gathered around Blanchard and his deflated yellow hot air balloon.

The famed balloonist has no choice but to stand with his hands raised in the air as if in surrender, still stuck inside the balloon’s gondola, for several tense moments.

Eventually, after much shouting and gesticulating, Blanchard is able to produce a folded letter from inside his shirt and hand it to a member of the terrified crowd.

It is a letter signed by George Washington stating that Blanchard, on that very day had undertaken the first manned hot air balloon flight in America and that, “upon landing there is to be no hindrance or molestation to the said Mr. Blanchard.”

Once the letter is read aloud to the assembled crowd, and once it is discovered that the letter is signed by none other than George Washington himself,  a huge cheer goes up and locals come forward to help Blanchard free of the balloon’s basket.  Jean-Pierre Blanchard is then carried back to Philadelphia on the shoulders of the town’s residents and hailed by all as a true hero.  The residents of Deptford each sign a document attesting to the fact that they saw Blanchard land in a field outside their town that morning which is then presented to President Washington to further attest that Jean-Pierre Blanchard did indeed successfully complete his flight.

That morning at precisely 10:09 Blanchard had lifted off in his enormous yellow balloon and ascended into the overcast sky from the courtyard of Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison.

Walnut Street Prison, constructed in 1773, was the first detention facility built in the United States to house prisoners in individual cells and to establish prison work details.  It was also the first jail in America to be referred to as a penitentiary because the local quakers who financed the building of the prison believed that convicts housed within its walls should become penitent for the crimes that they committed through prayer, reflection and separation from human contact.

On January 9, 1793, since the walled courtyard of Walnut Street Penitentiary was the largest enclosed outdoor structure in the nascent United States capital city of Philadelphia, it hosted Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s maiden American hot air balloon flight.

Within the walls of the courtyard that winter day were founding fathers George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison AND James Monroe.  Five future American Presidents all watched the French balloonist ascend into the sky that day.

It cost our founding fathers $5 each, a fee charged by Blanchard himself to cover the cost of his travel from France, to have the privilege of watching Blanchard take off from within the walls of the prison.  Five dollars in 1793 is roughly the equivalent of $150 in today’s money, and though not many were willing to pay such a steep price to watch a man drift skyward while suspended in a basket beneath a balloon, as many 40,000 onlookers did gather outside the walls of the Walnut Street Prison to try and catch a glimpse of the first hot air balloon flight in American history.

The big yellow balloon rose to an altitude of 5,800 feet before it drifted eastward across the Delaware River and floated into New Jersey.

In total Blanchard was aloft for about forty-six minutes before touching down in a field near the Clement Oak just outside Deptford in Gloucester County New Jersey.

For years, until 1797, Blanchard would stay in the United States, eventually picking up enough English to converse with crowds and demonstrate the wonder of ballooning to onlookers all across the original thirteen states.  Wherever he travels in America Blanchard is lauded as a hero and he becomes an acquaintance of luminaries such as President Washington, Vice-President Adams and future President Thomas Jefferson.

In 1797 Blanchard returned to his native France and continued to pilot balloons higher and farther than ever before.  Ironically, in 1808 while piloting a balloon above the Hague, Blanchard suffered a heart attack in mid-air and fell out of the basket of his hot air balloon.  Surprisingly he survived both the fall and the heart attack but died a year later in March of 1809 as a result of injuries he suffered from the fall.

Blanchard’s widow, Sophie, after her husband’s untimely death would take up his mantle and go on supporting herself with ballooning demonstrations of her own, until she too would be killed in a ballooning accident in 1819 just outside of Paris when the balloon she was piloting caught fire after she tried to launch fireworks from the balloon’s gondola and incinerated both herself and the hot air balloon in the process.

Today, in Deptford, New Jersey, images of colorful hot air balloons adorn the town’s water tower and a newspaper from 1793 commemorating Blanchard’s historic flight hangs in the town hall.  To this very day a six hundred year old gnarled oak tree known as the Clement Oak still stands in a field outside Deptford and in the shade of the branches of that legendary tree sits a marker dedicated to the memory of Jean-Pierre Blanchard and the first hot air balloon flight in American history.