Frenchtown, New Jersey

The French Revolution and an American misunderstanding combined to produce the enduring name for a charming little New Jersey town on the Delaware River, 32 miles northwest of the state capital, Trenton, and 50 miles due north of Philadelphia.

What today is Frenchtown began as a colonial-era transportation center. By the end of the 19th and well into the 20th centuries it was a humming little industrial town, like others along the river. As its industry declined so did the town. But in recent decades Frenchtown has gradually metamorphosed into a tourist byway, daytrip destination, and weekend getaway thanks to its beautiful river setting and the establishment of galleries, antique shops, good restaurants, cozy B&Bs nearby, and several other appealing river towns in the area.

Before becoming Frenchtown the location had a string of names beginning about 1741 when it became the site for a ferry across the Delaware River. Little existed at the ferry crossing other than a boat and a dock, so for several decades the site’s name changed with changing ownership. London Ferry became Mechlenburg Ferry, then Tinbrook’s Ferry, Prigmore’s Ferry, Sherrerd’s Ferry, and Edwin’s Ferry. Because of its strategic and commercial importance during the American Revolution, New Jersey’s Council of Safety agreed to exempt ferry owner John Sherrerd and his three employees from militia duty.

In 1776, while revolutionary battles raged nearby, Thomas Lowrey purchased a large tract of land adjacent to the ferry. There he built a grist mill, a saw mill, and a substantial home. Lowrey’s mills would continue to operate into the 20th century, grinding corn into meal for the area’s poultry farmers and supplying them with lumber. By Lowrey’s day, the growing settlement around the ferry had acquired the happy name Sun Beam.

A dozen years later and a continent away a young man from a prominent Huguenot family made a fateful move from Geneva to Paris to work in his uncle’s new bank, Bontems, Mallet Frères et Cie. Paul Henri Mallet-Prévost (1756-1833) had grown up in a family of rich bankers with connections to French aristocracy. As Huguenots, his ancestors had fled to Geneva from Rouen, France, in 1530 to escape religious persecution, so for six generations the Mallet-Prévost family had been citizens of the tiny independent republic of Geneva (which eventually joined the Swiss Confederation in 1815).

In 1789, the year after Paul Henri moved to Paris, the French Revolution broke out with the storming of the Bastille. Like many other young aristocrats inspired by the ideas of the philosophes, Paul Henri enlisted in the Republican Army along with his friend the Vicomte Beauharnais. But before long, the Revolution began to turn upon its more moderate supporters—especially those tainted as aristocrats. In 1792, when the Commune imprisoned the royal family and massacred the king’s Swiss Guard, Mallet-Prévost saved the lives of several guardsmen, an act that brought a price to his head.

Paul Henri sent his family into exile on the coast. He then escaped from the military unit he commanded, but he wasn’t able to rejoin his family until December 1793. He was far luckier than Beauharnais, who went to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, thereby leaving behind his young widow Josephine, who would eventually become the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Paul Henri and his family were on the run through the first half of 1794. They moved to Geneva, then Germany, Holland, and England. Several times Paul Henri was detained as a possible French spy. Finally, in June 1794, they were able to sail for America.

How Paul Henri Mallet-Prévost then happened to come to the village of Sun Beam on the western boundary of New Jersey is unknown. But on December 4, 1794, Paul Henri, with his former aide and secretary, Nicolas Louis Toulaine Dufresne, bought from Thomas Lowrey nearly a thousand acres of land around Sun Beam. Seven months later his family joined him.

Here, in a place they must have welcomed for its peace and quiet, the senior Mallet-Prévosts would remain for the rest of their lives. (Two of his three sons eventually moved to Philadelphia.) In 1795 Paul Henri built a house on what is now Trenton Avenue. He then built other houses, including one, much altered, that still stands on Front Street. In about 1805, he had an inn built at the site of today’s Frenchtown Inn. The current building dates from 1838.

The Yankees he lived among evidently did not know what to make of his fancy hyphenated name. So the family was known locally as the Prévosts, which is how they are remembered in Frenchtown to this day.

Paul Henri Mallet-Prévost became a pillar of the local community. He served as a justice of the peace and as a lay member of the Hunterdon County Court. His wife died in 1810, and Paul Henri in 1833. Both are buried across from their then-residence in what is today Frenchtown Cemetery, on Trenton Avenue.

Because of Paul Henri’s French ancestry, the fact that he and his family spoke French, and his prominence in the community, his English-speaking American neighbors increasingly referred to the town as Frenchtown.

Their mistake was not very great: Paul Henri Mallet-Prévost seems to have been French to the core even though he grew up in a place that, long after he left, was annexed to Switzerland. “Swisstown” would have made no sense at all.

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See frenchtownnj.org for information about shopping, dining, lodging, and sights in and around Frenchtown, as well as about the town's annual Bastille Day celebration.

Nearby river towns that are also worth visiting while in the area are Stockton and Lambertville, New Jersey, and New Hope, Pennsylvania. Further downstream are the icy waters of Washington Crossing (PA and NJ) that Obama mentioned in his inaugural address.

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Lynn H. Miller is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Temple University. He is co-author of the book French Philadelphia and a member of the Board of Directors of the Alliance Francaise de Philadelphie. His living room overlooks the Delaware River.
 

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