Part II · THE X ON THE WILL · Chapter 10

The Flying Camp

Bucks County · 10 June 1776

In the record John⁴ Kroesen (1729–1812) · Garret⁵ Kroesen (1759–1849) · Henry⁴ Kroesen (1756–1788) · Derrick⁴ Kroesen (1729–1798) · Simon Krewson (1755–1844) · Rebecca Jones (1757–1830)

In the cemetery at Richboro, in Northampton Township, there is a family plot surrounded by an iron fence, and in it are ten graves. Anne Raike copied the stones in the 1930s. The first two read:

John Kroesen was the son of Garret³ — the boy who, in the will of 1758, was to have "the wagon, plough, harrow, and horse harness and the just and full sum of fifty pounds," and a share of his father's silver buttons. He was born in 1729 and baptized at Bensalem on 3 May 1730, in the family's first Pennsylvania church; he married Jane Nevius, a kinswoman of his mother's, in 1755; and a note in the Raike files records that on 10 June 1776 — three weeks before the Declaration — he was commissioned "a first lieutenant in the army of the Revolutionary War … when the 'Flying Camp' contingent was organized" [1]. He was forty-seven. His son Garret, seventeen that summer, has the same two words on his stone, and lived long enough to see the Mexican War begin.

This is the family's Revolution as its own documents record it: a lieutenant, a boy, two gravestones, and — across the county line, in the direct line of this book — nothing. This chapter is about all four.

What the Flying Camp was

In the first week of June 1776 the Continental Congress, expecting the British to land somewhere between New York and the Delaware and unable to say where, resolved to raise a "Flying Camp" — ten thousand militia from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, to serve until December as a mobile reserve that could be thrown wherever the blow fell [2]. Pennsylvania's share was raised county by county from the Associators, the volunteer companies that the province, with no militia law, had relied on since 1747; Bucks County's contingent was organised that June, and John Kroesen's commission belongs to it [1]. The Flying Camp battalions of Pennsylvania spent the summer in New Jersey, and in November most of them were inside Fort Washington on the Hudson when it surrendered — some 2,800 men, the largest American capitulation of the war until Charleston. Whether John Kroesen's company was among them, or had gone home at the expiry of its term, the Raike note does not say, and this book does not know. A first lieutenant of forty-seven who lived to eighty-three was not, on the face of it, a man who wintered on a prison ship. The commission is what survives. The war itself, for him, is a blank of the same shape as everyone else's.

The war around Moreland

The family's direct line in 1776 was not in Northampton with John but a few miles south, across the County Line, in the Manor of Moreland in Philadelphia County, where Derrick⁴ — Derrick³'s eldest, born 1729, the same year as his cousin John — farmed his father's land and raised eleven children with Margaret Van Artsdalen [3]. His sons that summer were Derrick⁵, twenty-three; Simon, twenty-one; John, seventeen; Christopher, fourteen. Simon had been born on 9 March 1755 "in Bustleton, Philadelphia County," the crossroads village on the road from Philadelphia to Bristol, a few miles from the farm [4]. He is the ancestor. Everyone in the last three parts of this book comes down through him.

The war came to that ground more nearly than it came to anywhere else the family ever lived. In August 1777 Washington's army camped for a week on the Neshaminy, at Hartsville in Warwick Township, ten miles north, waiting to learn where Howe's fleet would land; in September the British took Philadelphia and held it through the winter, and the countryside between the city and the Neshaminy became a no-man's-land of foraging columns and militia patrols [5]. And on the first of May 1778, in Moreland Township itself — at the Crooked Billet tavern, in what is now Hatboro, three or four miles from Derrick⁴'s farm and the same from the old Kroesen farms in Southampton — a British force of light infantry and Queen's Rangers surprised General John Lacey's Pennsylvania militia in their camp at dawn. Lacey's men were Bucks County men. Twenty-six of them were killed, and the survivors and the Philadelphia newspapers reported that wounded militiamen had been thrown into piles of buckwheat straw and burned [5]. It was the closest the shooting war ever came to this family in a hundred and seventy years of living in front of it.

Who of them was there, the record does not say. Henry⁴, Derrick³'s youngest, of Southampton, was twenty-one that morning, and is the one man of the direct family whom the book marks "RWV," Revolutionary War Veteran; he died ten years later at thirty-one and is buried at Feasterville, and what his service was, or where, is not written down [6]. Henry Lott, who witnessed Garret³'s will and later married his sister, was a veteran [7]. Garret⁵ of Richboro, the lieutenant's son, was eighteen. Any of them could have been in Lacey's camp on the first of May; a Bucks County militia class called out in the spring of 1778 was, by the law of 1777, made up of exactly such men — every white male between eighteen and fifty-three, enrolled by the township constable, divided into eight classes and called in rotation for two months' service, with a fine for every man who did not march. Derrick⁴ at forty-nine, Derrick⁵ at twenty-five, Simon at twenty-three, were all on Moreland's constable's list whether they ever shouldered a musket or paid the fine instead, and the rolls that would say which are in Harrisburg, and the family's genealogist did not go to them, and neither, yet, has this book.

The other side of the lines

The Kroesens who had stayed on Staten Island spent the same seven years inside the British lines. The island was occupied from July 1776 to the end of the war — Howe's army landed there first, before Long Island — and it was the base for every British and Hessian movement against New Jersey. On the Kill Van Kull, on the strip of land that had been John Staats's and then the Domine's, stood the house that the family's book calls the Cruser–Pelton "Mansion House," and during the war, the book records, it "served as headquarters for General Cortlandt Skinner, Commander of Skinner's Brigade of American Loyalists" — the New Jersey Volunteers, the largest Loyalist unit of the war [8]. The widow of Hendrick's son Garret, Classje Brinkerhof, lived in it through the occupation and was known afterward as "Widow Cruser" [8]. A French military map of 1780–83, drawn for the Ministry of War in Paris to show the Anglo-Hessian positions on the island, marks "the Kruser family tracts and locations of the two houses" [8].

So while a Kroesen held a lieutenant's commission in the Flying Camp at Bucks County, and a Kroesen lay in Lacey's militia camp at Moreland, or did not, a Cruser's widow on Staten Island had a Loyalist brigadier billeted in her parlour and the family's land drawn on a French staff map as enemy ground. The two branches of Garret the cooper's family — the brother who could write and the brother who could not, the Voorlezer and the man who "disappeared" — ended up on opposite sides of the war that made the country, not by choice but by which side of the Kill they had been on when it started. The family's book does not remark on this. It records the Loyalist headquarters in the Staten Island section and the veterans' stones in the Bucks County section, three hundred pages apart, and leaves the reader to put them together. Put together, they are the whole of the family's Revolution: the Bucks County Dutch, four generations from Breuckelen, went for the new country; the Staten Island Dutch, the same four generations, were occupied by the old one and lived with it. Whether Widow Cruser was a Loyalist by conviction or a widow with a brigade in her house, nothing says. Most people on that island were the second.

Simon

And the one man this book most needs to see is the one it cannot. Simon Krewson — the spelling is his; his generation is where the tree shows "(Kroessen) Krewson," both forms side by side — was born on 9 March 1755 at Bustleton, married Rebecca Jones, born 1757, had a son named John Julien in 1788, and died on 18 November 1844, at eighty-nine [4]. That is the whole of his documented life, and none of it is from the family's book: the Cruise volume, which follows the third generation to their wills and graves and stops, never reaches him. He is in the record because Annette's Ancestry chart had an "S." where his name should be, and a WikiTree profile and a photographed descendants' tree in Oregon both turned out to carry him with the same four dates, and the family's own reconstruction of 2026 put the initial and the name together [4].

He was twenty when the war began, twenty-eight when it ended, and enrolled in the Philadelphia County militia by operation of a law that enrolled everyone. Whether he served, no document in the family's hands says. What can be said honestly is the shape of his world: a farm boy from a Dutch Reformed family on the Manor of Moreland, whose cousin was a lieutenant, whose uncle was a veteran, whose neighbourhood was the scene of the war's ugliest morning in Pennsylvania, and who lived afterward through the whole of the early republic — Washington's presidency, the War of 1812 (in which his son John Julien came of age), the two terms of Andrew Jackson — and died in the year Morse sent the first telegram, on a farm a few miles from where he was born. A man of eighty-nine in 1844 who had served in the Revolution would have been eligible under the Pension Act of 1832, which paid every surviving veteran who could prove six months' service; the applications are on file at the National Archives, indexed by name, and a Simon Krewson, Kroesen, Cruson or Crusen among them would settle the question. His cousin Garret at Richboro, "Revolutionary Veteran" on his stone and alive until 1849, almost certainly has one. Simon may. That is the first thing the next edition of this chapter should have looked for.

What the war left

The Kroesens came out of the Revolution where they went in, on the same ground, minus a son. Henry⁴ died in 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified, leaving twins and a widow who remarried within the year; his father's will had given him the four horses and the cider press and Jude's four bushels of wheat to pay, and he had it all for two years [6]. John the lieutenant lived to 1812 and was buried at Richboro with his widow and, in time, his son the veteran, his son's wife, and six more, inside the iron fence [1]. Derrick⁴ died at Moreland on 3 July 1798 — the day before the twenty-second Fourth of July — and Margaret in 1806 [3]. Their eldest son Derrick⁵, born 1753, was the head of a branch that would go west by stages until, two centuries later, a Krewson Creek ran through the hills near Eugene, Oregon, and a descendant found it on a phone [3]. And Simon stayed, and his son John Julien was born in 1788 and died at thirty-nine in 1827, and John Julien's son Alexander was born in Pennsylvania in 1816 as "Kreuso" and married in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1836 — and the family's hundred and twenty-six years in Bucks County were over [9]. The next part of this book begins in Ohio.

That is Part II: a square mile bought with silver in 1712, a name fixed by a clerk in 1758, three people priced for their freedom in 1784, a lieutenant's commission in 1776, and a churchyard with rows in it. Uncle Al's question — why the family never built up land and wealth like others of its vintage — has an answer in these deeds, and it is not a rift. It is arithmetic. Derrick² gave 1,080 acres to seven children; each of them gave their portion to seven or nine or eleven more; by the fourth generation the shares were farms of a hundred acres, and by the fifth they were not enough, and the sons who did not inherit went to Ohio. The rifts came later, and somewhere else. Here, in Bucks County, the family did the ordinary American thing: it divided its land among its children until there was none left to divide, and then it left.

The ground it happened on

As always, what follows is the period's own account of the things named, not a record of these people. The Flying Camp was the first attempt at a national reserve; it dissolved in December 1776 as its terms expired, and Congress never tried the idea again [2]. Pennsylvania's Militia Act of 17 March 1777, passed after the Associator system had failed to produce enough men, was the first compulsory militia law in the state's history — the Quaker Assembly's ninety-year refusal finally overridden by a revolutionary one — and it is the reason every man of the family between eighteen and fifty-three appears, or should appear, somewhere in the county rolls now published in the Pennsylvania Archives [10]. The Crooked Billet was a tavern on the York Road at what is now Hatboro, in Moreland Township, then Philadelphia County, now Montgomery; the affair of 1 May 1778 is remembered there with a monument, and the burning of the wounded was investigated by a Pennsylvania court of inquiry that took depositions from the survivors [5]. Bustleton, Simon's birthplace, was a village on the Bristol Pike in the north-east corner of Philadelphia County, with a Presbyterian church, a mill, and an inn, and is now a neighbourhood of Philadelphia. Richboro's cemetery, with its iron-fenced plot, belongs to the Reformed Dutch church the family helped found in 1751; the stones Raike copied are the family's first American gravestones with birth years and ages on them, the Dutch habit of the church book giving way, at last, to the English habit of the churchyard.

1. John⁴ Kroesen — baptism 3 May 1730 at Bensalem, marriage to Jannetje (Jane) Nevius in 1755, the Raike note on his first lieutenancy of 10 June 1776 "when the 'Flying Camp' contingent was organized," his will (21 November 1806, proved 29 June 1812), and the ten inscriptions in the Richboro plot: Pennsylvania Vital Records, Vol. I, p. 108; Bucks County Will Book 8, p. 275, file 3858; Anne Raike Files, "Book Two," p. 76, and "Book Three," p. 36; all as transcribed in Warren D. Cruise, The Croesen Families of America, Vol. I (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1998), pp. 238–239. As throughout, the documents are read as Cruise transcribed them.
2. The Flying Camp — Congress's resolution of June 1776, the ten thousand men from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, its service in New Jersey, the surrender of Fort Washington on 16 November 1776, and its dissolution in December: general history of the campaign of 1776; Cruise does not treat it. The inference about John Kroesen's own service is this book's, and is marked as such.
3. Derrick⁴ Kroesen (b. November 1729, d. 3 July 1798 at Moreland), Margaret Van Artsdalen (1729–1806), their eleven children and the Churchville baptisms; the Oregon branch from Derrick⁵ (b. 1753) and Krewson Creek: Cruise, pp. 306–307, and the family record's WikiTree and photographed-tree entries. Cruise's data sheet gives Derrick⁴'s will dates as his father's; see chapter 9, note 5.
4. Simon Krewson — born 9 March 1755 at Bustleton, married Rebecca Jones (1757–1830), son John Julien born 1788, died 18 November 1844 — and how his name was recovered: the family record's entries for Simon and Derrick⁴, drawing on the WikiTree profile Croeson-1 and the photographed Oregon-cousins tree, both agreeing with Annette Maichen's Ancestry pedigree on four points; the Cruise volume does not reach him. The family's story "Ninety Years, From Before the War to Andrew Jackson" is the record's own summary.
5. The Neshaminy camp of August 1777, the British occupation of Philadelphia (September 1777–June 1778), and the affair at the Crooked Billet, 1 May 1778 — Lacey's Bucks County militia surprised by Abercromby's light infantry and Simcoe's Queen's Rangers, twenty-six killed, the burning of the wounded in buckwheat straw and the subsequent court of inquiry: standard histories of the Philadelphia campaign; the Crooked Billet's location in Moreland Township and its distance from the Kroesen farms are from the county maps. Not in Cruise.
6. Henry⁴ Kroesen "RWV" — born 12 September 1756, died 18 August 1788, Feasterville lot 6 plot 8, and his father's bequests: Cruise, pp. 302–305, 309; treated in chapter 9.
7. Henry Lott, "a Revolutionary War veteran," second husband of Catharine³: Cruise, p. 178.
8. The Cruser–Pelton "Mansion House" as headquarters of General Cortlandt Skinner and Skinner's Brigade of American Loyalists; "Widow Cruser" (Classje Brinkerhof, widow of Garret⁴ Kroesen, d. 1760) living there through the war; the French Ministry of War map of 1780–83: Cruise, pp. 341, 345, 366. The occupation of Staten Island from July 1776 and the New Jersey Volunteers as the largest Loyalist unit are general history.
9. John Julien Krewson (1788–1827) and Alexander Deniston Krewson, born 1816 in Pennsylvania as "Kreuso," married in Hamilton County, Ohio, 6 November 1836: the family record's entries, from Annette Maichen's Ancestry pedigree and the WikiTree and MyHeritage records found 2026-08-22; treated in Part III.
10. Pennsylvania's Militia Act of 17 March 1777 — compulsory enrolment of men eighteen to fifty-three, the eight classes, two months' rotation, fines for non-attendance — and the published county rolls: Pennsylvania Archives, Fifth Series, Vols. V (Bucks County) and VI (Philadelphia County); the Pennsylvania State Archives' Revolutionary War Militia research guides. The Pension Act of 7 June 1832 and the pension application files (National Archives, M804) are the research leads named in the text; neither has been searched for this book.