Bordentown: A King in Exile and the First Free School

The small Delaware River town of Bordentown, New Jersey, holds two stories that seem too strange for a place this quiet: a deposed European king who held court here for seventeen years, and a woman who launched free public education in New Jersey before being passed over because she was a woman.

After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in eighteen fifteen, his older brother Joseph Bonaparte, the former King of Spain and Naples, crossed the Atlantic and settled here on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Delaware River and Crosswicks Creek. He purchased roughly eighteen hundred acres and built a lavish estate called Point Breeze. When the first mansion burned down in January of eighteen twenty, he simply built a larger one. For the next two decades, the estate became one of the most elegant salons in America. Henry Clay, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Daniel Webster all visited. Bonaparte was, by most accounts, a charming and educated host, a living remnant of a Europe that had just been turned upside down.

A generation later, a young schoolteacher from Massachusetts named Clara Barton arrived in Bordentown. Walking the streets in eighteen fifty-two, she found children who could not attend the town's private schools because their families lacked the money for tuition. She went to the school committee and proposed an experiment: a free school, supported by the town, with herself teaching without salary. She started with six students in a small red brick building on Crosswicks Street. Within a year, enrollment had grown to six hundred pupils.

When the town opened a proper schoolhouse in eighteen fifty-three, they hired a male principal from outside and paid him more than twice what they had offered Barton. She resigned and moved to Washington. A decade later she would organize medical supply lines for the Union Army, and in eighteen eighty-one she founded the American Red Cross. The schoolhouse on Crosswicks Street still stands, preserved as a memorial to the woman who began her life's work of caring for those who had been left out.