On Ridgewood Avenue in Maplewood sits a colonial farmhouse with cream-colored clapboard siding, a foundation made of red sandstone and a low-slung roofline. Built in 1743 by Timothy and Esther Ball, the house might well have become just another charming, but relatively obscure, piece of historical real estate in New Jersey were it not for the famous name of a certain reported guest.

“I haven’t heard much about his horse being hidden here,” says Cathy Rowe, who moved to the Timothy Ball House, as it is known by the locals, with her family nine years ago. “But anybody who had a horse in the army would have been high up, so if there were any British spies around and they saw a horse, you knew there was somebody there to go after.”

An observation

"During the Revolutionary War, while (General George) Washington had his troops stationed at Morristown, he frequently came to (the area) to witness the movements of the British near Elizabethtown and Staten Island, which could be seen in the distance," according to a February 1916 account in the monthly magazine The Newarker. "On some of the occasions, Washington visited (the Balls) and there he passed the nights, and more than once, as a precaution, he stabled his horse in the kitchen, which had a stone floor."

The Timothy Ball House is just one of many places across the Garden State to make the “George Washington Slept Here” claim, some more reliably documented than others. After all, portions of 14 counties throughout New Jersey were designated in 2006 as the “Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area.” Quite a few of the Revolutionary War’s pivotal battles were fought here (Trenton and Princeton, among them), as Washington and his Continental Army crisscrossed our state from 1776 to 1783.

Arguably the best known of Washington’s headquarters is the Ford Mansion in Morristown, now owned by the National Park Service as part of the Morristown National Historical Park. As the general’s bedraggled troops hunkered down at nearby Jockey Hollow during the brutal winter of 1779-80, Washington, five of his aides-de-camp, 18 servants and the occasional guard moved into the mansion. Wife Martha visited him there and Jacob Ford’s widow, Theodosia, and her four children remained in the house, as well.

“Unfortunately the unbending Mrs. Ford refused to yield two of four downstairs rooms, forcing the Washingtons to share the floor with her. The kitchen, in particular, was a scene of pure bedlam,” writes Ron Chernow in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “Washington: A Life” (Penguin Books, 2011).

“Washington and his officers hosted four to five dances throughout the winter. At one of those dances, Betsey Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton met,” says National Park Service guide Kim Watts. “The Marquis de Lafayette also came to headquarters in the spring, bringing the word that the French were actually sending men and supplies.”

A few years prior, in January 1777, Washington and his weary army had retired to Morristown for the winter, following their crucial victories at Princeton and Trenton. The general was headquartered at Jacob Arnold’s Tavern on the Morristown Green from January to May of that year. (The tavern was relocated and later burned in 1918. A plaque commemorates its original location on the Green.)

In “This Glorious Struggle: George Washington’s Revolutionary War Letters” (Smithsonian Books, 2008), author Edward G. Lengel includes one of GW’s letters to an aide, which Lengel says, “provides a rare glimpse into daily life at the commander in chief’s headquarters.”

“I dare say you are better acquainted with our Wants than I am, but I shall mention two, which seem to be pretty severely felt at present — namely, Loaf Sugar and Tea,” writes Washington from Morristown on May 1, 1777. “If I was to add Wine, I believe I should not much err, and whilst you are in the humour of getting, I wish you would procure for me two pair of Brown thread Stockings for Boots.”

The Wallace House in Somerville was Washington’s headquarters from December 1778 until June 1779, with Martha again traveling from their Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia to join him. Among the reported who’s who of visitors to the Wallace House were Lord and Lady Stirling, Generals Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox and their wives, as well as Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette.

John Wallace, a successful Philadelphia merchant, received $1,000 for the use of his house and furnishings. New Jersey acquired the title to the Wallace house in 1947 and, according to the state’s historic preservation office, the house is “one of the best and most original examples of Georgian architecture in New Jersey.”

Following the Battle of Springfield, Washington and Hamilton (then a colonel in the Continental Army, later Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury) commandeered the modest home of Henry Doremus for two nights in June 1780, with the general occupying “the lower room at the east end of the house,” according to the Montville Township Historical Society.

“Washington usually chose the best house in the neighborhood for his headquarters,” author Craig Mitchell writes in “George Washington’s New Jersey: A Guide to the Crossroads of the American Revolution” (Middle Atlantic Press, 2003). “This little two room stone house was the best that he could find in what is now Towaco.”

Washington then moved on to the manor home of Dutch-born Dirck Dey in what is now mostly Wayne, which he occupied off and on for three months in 1780.

“When Washington moved the main body of his troops to the nearby Preakness Valley after the first battle of Springfield, Dey (pronounced Dye) invited him to use his home as headquarters,” writes Mitchell. “One legend has it that Washington moved here because of intelligence that he was about to be kidnapped in Morristown.”

Washington wrote his Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States in October of 1783 while at Rockingham, the Rocky Hill farmhouse of Margaret Berrien, the widow of a prominent judge. “Before the Commander in Chief takes his final leave of those he holds most dear, he wishes to indulge himself a few moments in calling to mind a slight review of the past,” writes Washington, in announcing his retirement from military service.

And President-elect Washington spent the night of April 22, 1789, at the Cross Keys Tavern in Woodbridge on his way to his inauguration in New York.

The list of proclaimed Jersey sightings of GW in his nightshirt goes on. The Hendrick Van Allen House in Oakland. The former Eagle Tavern in Newark. The Luke Miller House in Madison. Judge Peter Zabriskie’s Mansion House in Hackensack. The John Van Doren House in Millstone. He headquartered in Chatham, in Pompton Plains, in Trenton, in Englishtown.

Begging the question — where DIDN’T he sleep?

Liberty Hall “is one of the places Washington did not stay the night. That’s one of the jokes,” says Bill Schroh, director of museum operations at Liberty Hall, the former home of William Livingston, New Jersey’s first elected governor.

George did, however, pay a visit to Liberty Hall in May 1789 to collect his wife, who had spent the night there on her way to meet up with her husband, the newly inaugurated president of the United States.

“(Martha) was not at the original inauguration in April. She was still down in Mount Vernon, packing,” Schroh says. “She came up a month later in May and had her own triumphant march from Mount Vernon to New York, known as Lady Washington. She stopped and stayed and was feted at all the major places and cities. Rumor has it that (Liberty Hall) was her last stop before George picked her up in the morning and headed to New York.”

Back at the Timothy Ball House in Maplewood, Cathy Rowe has spent a considerable amount of time researching — with the help of a friend who has a doctorate in American History — the “George Slept Here” claim associated with her house.

“George Washington was actually a fugitive. If he was caught by the British, he would have been hung for treason. So he never wrote down where he stayed,” Rowe says. “He probably did come here but it’s not documented. It would make a lot of sense that he came here. He was in this area a lot, there were very few houses and he knew this house was on his side.”

Nor is it documented, Rowe says, that Washington was a third cousin of Timothy Ball, as some have claimed.

“It was more likely he came to the house because he knew the sons were soldiers (in the Continental Army),” says Rowe. “He (might have) said ‘Your name is Ball? My mother’s name was Ball. Maybe we’re related.’” There’s no trace that they’re related. I don’t know if it was ever sorted out officially.”

Still, documented or not, it’s fun to imagine the general’s horse stabled in the kitchen for safekeeping or the stately commander in chief (he was approximately 6’3” at a time when the average height of most men was 5’6”) ducking his head to avoid bumping it on the low hanging rafters of the Timothy Ball House.

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