Creative History

  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 fro...