More on the Princeton Trail

Published online Oct. 23, 2017

I enjoyed "Let’s Hit the Road!” I have posted four additions with the article at PAW Online:

Johnny Poe: The article mentions that “Johnny Poe 1895 worked as a watchman before going off to fight somewhere as a mercenary.” He went to Princeton to fight, as it turned out. Poe joined the National Guard in 1903 and went to Princeton (Kentucky, not N.J.) to fight in the “Black Patch Wars” (something to do with tobacco). New Jersey Princetonians might want to add the annual September “Black Patch Festival” to their road-trip itinerary. When visiting Chambersburg, Pa., burned in 1864 by Confederate Gen. Bradley Tyler Johnson 1849, recall that Poe and Johnson were remote cousins from Maryland, and both had extensive Princeton connections.

The Compton Brothers: The article mentions MIT’s Karl Taylor Compton (*1912, Ph.D. physics) Labs and Arthur H. Compton (*1916, Ph.D. physics), director of the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab and recipient of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics. A third Compton brother, Wilson (*1916, Ph.D. economics, possibly named after Woodrow), joined his distinguished brothers. You can visit Compton Quadrangle at Princeton’s Graduate School and also visit MIT, Washington University (St. Louis), and Washington State University, which were concurrently headed by Karl, Arthur, and Wilson after World War II. Can any three brothers match this Princeton record? A Princeton/Compton trip should visit the College of Wooster (Wooster, Ohio), the alma mater for all three, where their father was dean. The college shares Princeton’s Presbyterian roots.

Nassau Hall Replicas: The printed PAW mentions Brown’s University Hall as modeled after Nassau Hall. W. Barksdale Maynard ’88’s Princeton: America’s Campus mentions that by 1830,  Nassau Hall had been "more or less replicated at Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, South Carolina, Rutgers, Transylvania (Lexington, Ky.), Wesleyan, and Williams, as well as at the Princeton Theological Seminary’s Alexander Hall.” There’s another road trip.

Aaron Burr 1772: Aaron Burr Jr. 1772 presents multiple opportunities in addition to Blennerhasset Island in West Virginia in the Ohio River. If we just pursue Burr’s more notorious activities, New Jersey’s Weehawken Dueling Grounds are not to be missed. It’ll take some research to follow the trail of Burr’s conspiracy after he left the island, was arrested, and tried for treason in Richmond, Va.