Colonial days. Chief of these in dignity and historic interest was 

 "Morven," the Stockton house, built in 1701, and named in the middle 

 of the eighteenth century by Mrs. Richard Stockton who was a great 

 admirer of Ossian. Though the house is now but httle changed from the 

 time of which I am writing, it had a different setting and stood in much 

 more spacious grounds, for the ill-starred first Princeton Inn, now Miss 

 Fine's School, and the Battle Monument had not been built and the 

 many new streets and roads, which have been cut through the Morven 

 lands, were not yet in existence. From Bayard Lane to Elm Street the 

 only nick in the property was at the southwest corner, where stood the 

 house of Paul Tulane, founder of the Tulane University in New Orleans, 

 the home of the late Mr. George Armour. Morven was then in the hands 

 of Commodore Robert F. Stockton, a naval officer and public man of 

 considerable distinction and, at one time, U.S. Senator from New Jersey, 

 altogether an Olympian and awful personage to my childish mind. He 

 died in 1866. 



Professor Marquand's place then belonged to Judge Field and was the 

 show place of the town, for the large grounds were beautifully kept and 

 were filled with fine exotic trees and shrubs. "Prospect," then a private 

 residence, belonged to Mrs. Potter and was not bought by the University 

 till 1879. The house and grounds of Thomson Hall, which Mrs. Swann 

 bequeathed to the Borough, was another very ornamental place; the 

 house was built by U.S. Senator J. R. Thomson, who died shortly after 

 we came to Princeton. The Cleveland house was built by Commodore 

 Stockton for his daughter, and the late Henry van Dyke's house then 

 belonged to Mr. Frank Conover, a retired naval officer. Those large 

 places were, for the most part, well kept up and they were the scene of 

 much hospitality, though of this I, naturally, had no direct knowledge. 



Except for these large and stately places, the lawns and grass-plots 

 were kept in a very slovenly way. Our front yard and the Seminary 

 campus were mowed with the scythe once or twice a summer, when the 

 grass had grown knee-high, though, after the introduction of croquet, 

 mowing was more frequent. Nothing has done so much to improve the 

 appearance of small towns as the introduction of the lawn mower. 



Sleighing and skating played a much larger part in our lives than they 

 do now, when the former amusement is almost extinct; every well-to-do 

 family had at least one sleigh. Though the weather records do not sup- 

 port the prevalent notion of a climatic change, in retrospect the winters 

 of the '6o's seem to have been much more snowy. Even in the large cities 

 no attempt was made to remove snow from the streets, except, of course, 



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