New Jersey Native Honors State's Revolutionary War History In Website, New Book

NEW JERSEY — Al Frazza didn’t set out to spend more than seven years visiting hundreds of Revolutionary War historical sites across New Jersey (by himself). Or to make a huge website. Or to write a book about his experience.

But Frazza, a Little Falls native, has done all three: he visited close to 650 historic sites in the Garden State and compiled a huge amount of research on his website, Revolutionary War New Jersey.

And he’s got a book, which came out in February.

“State of Revolution: My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey Through Revolutionary War New Jersey” is written in a more informal style than the website, Frazza said.

“The book, by design, is a very different experience from the website,” he told Patch. “It’s part memoir, part history, part travelogue, part love letter to the state of New Jersey."

“The historic stories I chose for the book were ones that were very human interest stories,” he said. “I didn’t want to bog the reader down with dates and a lot of facts, which you can find on the website.”

Frazza said he had always been interested in history, even if he didn’t think of it that way as a child.

“In my early 20s, I read a number of books on different aspects of American history and I was really hooked,” he said. “When I started the website, my goal was to increase the understanding (both inside and outside Jersey) of the state's role in the Revolutionary War.”

A web designer by trade, he was not trained specifically in historical research.

“In the beginning, I really was just looking to put up a simple website that just listed the various locations,” Frazza told Patch. “And then I decided to put pictures of them all, which meant I had to go take the photographs of them."

Documenting it all

It was important to him, he said, to do the research properly. There was so much Revolutionary War history in his home state.

“Then as time went on and I added more and more, I became very intent on doing the research properly, and sourcing all of the information on the website,” Frazza continued. “So as it went on, the project grew and grew and grew.”

The first historic site Frazza visited for the project was the Holcombe House in Lambertville, in 2009. But, he said, he didn’t fully understand “the scope of this project” for five years.

“I remember that I was sitting in the Morristown Green in 2014, and I just had a realization that, 'okay, now I know what the scope of the website is, and I know what I’m doing now.’ It sounds like a long time to figure it out, but that’s really what it took.”

He said the Morristown page on the website is one of his favorites. General George Washington made his headquarters at Jacob Arnold's tavern in Morristown during winter encampments in 1777-78 and 1779-80.

In Weehawken, a bust of Alexander Hamilton sits near the former dueling grounds where he and Aaron Burr faced off on July 11, 1804.

As Frazza writes:

The concepts behind dueling are so far removed from our current society that it is difficult to get our minds around it. It now seems particularly strange that two such prominent leaders as an ex-Treasury Secretary and the sitting Vice-President would settle their differences at gunpoint. It is important to remember that while their actions may seem strange to us, they were following customs that made sense to them.

The Village Inn in Englishtown was headquarters for Generals Charles Lee and George Washington for a short time in the summer of 1778, before and after the Battle of Monmouth.

At that battle, Lee reluctantly agreed to attack the British forces and then retreated, prompting an angry Washington to confront him on the field.

Firsthand accounts

Frazza read a lot of diaries and letters, from George Washington to everyday New Jersey residents living through the war.

“In the beginning, I was working from secondary sources," he said. "People that had written about the time period, or books that listed various locations and where to find them. As time went on, I turned more to primary sources.”

In his drive for historical accuracy, Frazza read many letters and journals from that time period. He treasured the humanity shining through the myth in George Washington’s correspondences.

“He’s fascinating,” Frazza said of our first president. “He’s seen too often as the guy on the statue. And he was a towering figure, even in his own time. But he’s also a human being. When reading his wartime correspondence, you can feel the pressure that he’s often under.”

Frazza said the journal of Jemima Condict, a woman who lived in what is now West Orange, was powerful to read.

“Her journal was just heartbreaking. This is something that struck me so much,” he said. “She talks about all of these people dying, and usually young people that are dying in her area. And it’s not about the war, it’s about disease.”

Condict mentioned the “bloody flux,” which we know now as dysentery. Infant mortality rates were high, and life was difficult throughout the colonies.

“It was a very hard time to live even before the war began,” Frazza said. “We live with a level of comfort and convenience that would have been inconceivable to them.”

He said he encourages people to seek out and read these documents for themselves and stick with it, even though the writing style is different than what we use today. Many of these documents are listed in the source notes on the website.

Frazza said the help of librarians across the state was invaluable to him.

"In every interaction I had with librarians throughout New Jersey, they were always helpful, and did their best to help me find what I was looking for."

The other main part of the research, of course, was going to the historic sites.

“Going inside some of the homes, being in the cemeteries. There were plenty of times that I spent just walking on hills, or areas of the Watchung Mountains, or by rivers, trying to figure out what those places were like. So in a sense, those physical locations almost become like documents.”

Frazza said he has “moved on to another area of research” and is currently working on a book about New Jersey in the mid-1900s.

“I’ve been doing research for over two years” on that project, he said. “I want to do more of this with my life.”

Though he is no longer actively researching New Jersey in the 1700s, Frazza’s site is active and his book is available for purchase online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. He said his work hopes to inspire more history lovers to get to know NJ’s Revolutionary War significance.

“Looking back I really feel very grateful that I accidentally walked into this incredible experience,” Frazza said. “Hopefully the book gives a real feeling for what I went through. Though this is a Jersey story, I hope people from other parts of the country could read it and enjoy it.”