She Was No Dupe

Vance Bourjaily mentions his five-times-great-grandfather, Col. Jacob Ford, Jr., iron founder and gunpowder miller, but fails to tell us that the colonel’s mansion in Morristown, New Jersey, is a major national landmark: headquarters of the Continental Army. In 1779-80 General Washington, his wife, and seventeen of his headquarters family crowded into the house, squeezing the widow Ford and her four children into a few ground-floor rooms. The mansion and adjoining historical museum are open to the public and well worth a visit.