Not long after arriving in Grovers Mill in 1957, we realized that there would be many things about the area that we were not used to. I was from the city (Brooklyn), my wife from the New Jersey shore (Sea Girt), and our daughter from Princeton, where we had lived for the past five years. What is it about a new place that makes you remember it long afterwards? In our case, I’d list three distinctive things: sights, sounds, and smells. History doesn’t include much more than that when you’re describing a place.
The sights in Grovers Mill were dominated by farmland. Within a radius of less than a mile, there were about a half-dozen farmhouses, including a couple that we learned were very old. One of these had been built in the 17th century. Yet there it was, and people were still living there. And, of course, there was the mill building itself. Grovers Mill was said to have been built in the early 18th century. It had been operated as a mill until the early 1940s, but when we moved nearby, it was operated as a feed and garden supply business by Bill Denison. I bought my first power lawn mower from him when I realized that home-ownership involved cutting the grass. (You did it yourself in those days, and that was the best way to get it the way you wanted it.)
Several of the nearby farmers had by then begun to sell some of their land to house builders, and there were a couple of dozen recently constructed houses along Clarksville, North Mill, Cranbury, and Millstone roads. But these were all individual houses, built one at a time. The only “developments” in West Windsor at the time were Glen Acres on Alexander Road, Piedmont Drive off North Mill Road, an area near Edinburg, and part of Colonial Park on Penn Lyle Road, where the new idea of a “split-level” house design was being tried out.
A sight that was unique to our neighborhood, and which attracted all the kids, was the “sand pit.” This was a portion of the adjacent Sanders farm where some of the topsoil and sand had been excavated and sold to developers for use as fill and lawns for new houses elsewhere. The area was sloping and difficult to farm, so it was a good way to use the several acres of land.
But what was left was an open pit about 20 feet deep with nothing but sand on the bottom and sides. It was like a giant sandbox, and all the kids liked to play there. We also discovered that cliff swallows liked it. They scooped out nesting spots in the vertical sides and raised their families there. It wasn’t until Yeger Road was developed that the sand pit became history.
Sights in our rural area also included wildlife, and over the years we have observed many kinds on our own little bit of land. Rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, foxes, weasels, skunks, bats, and flying squirrels have all visited us on occasion.
But flying squirrels? Yes, it turns out they are — or once were — very common. But you rarely saw them because they’re nocturnal. They only came out at night. One evening I heard a noise in our fireplace, and on investigating found that a squirrel had fallen down the chimney. I opened the damper and the animal escaped into the house — naturally arousing the curiosity of our two cats.
I tried to keep the cats in one part of the house while I isolated the squirrel in the room with the fireplace, but I forgot to close the door into the next room. As I was starting to do that, the squirrel found a perch on a shelf near the ceiling. The next thing I knew, it took off and “flew” through the doorway all the way to the middle of the living room floor — a distance of nearly 20 feet. By the time I reached it, one of our cats had already been there and made a swift killing.
As I examined the carcass, I realized that it was not a common gray squirrel, but something else — an animal I had never seen before. It was smaller than a gray squirrel and had loose membranes stretching between its front and rear legs on each side. The next day I called a friend in the biology department at Princeton and described the animal. He said, “Oh that’s a flying squirrel. They’re very common around there, but you never see them because they’re strictly nocturnal.” Chalk up a new species for Grovers Mill — at least in our house.
As for sounds, we had the Plainsboro steam shovel and the nearby peacock that I have described before (The News, March 21 and May 30). But there were many others, mostly associated with the rural habitat for wild animals and the farming operations that surrounded us.
These included the noise a tractor makes when it plows a field like the one where our new neighbor Mr. Sanders grew potatoes or corn. That was a very welcome sound because when we heard it, it meant that spring was arriving. In a farming community the sound of farming equipment in action was to be expected. This included anything from tractors for plowing to airplanes for crop dusting.
But there were also the sounds of nature. Because of the major changes in natural habitat for animals that result when land use changes from rural to residential, most of these sounds have disappeared in much of the township.
Birds: Like many other people, I used to keep a list of those I saw just on our property. After only a few years it included English sparrow, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, robin, catbird, cardinal, mockingbird, purple grackle, blue jay, Baltimore oriole, goldfinch, red-winged blackbird, blackbird, Eastern bluebird, mourning dove, two or three kinds of hawk, crow, and several others. Most of these had distinctive sounds or songs that you learned to recognize.
And, of course, there were the mallard ducks and the Canada geese. You could recognize these anywhere. There was always a large contingent of both on Grovers Mill Pond when they were in town for the warm weather. But, until about 20 years ago, they went south in November and did not return until March. The pond also attracted an occasional heron or swan. There’s a blue heron in residence there right now near the dam.
Other sounds were those of insects; and at certain times of the year you could hear them all over the place, especially in the summer. (Before air conditioning, you kept the windows open at night.) Crickets, katydids, cicadas, and bees were the most prevalent.
I even heard a praying mantis once. I was outside planting something in the garden on a quiet day and I heard a kind of very delicate “crunching” sound. I looked around and found a praying mantis sitting on the fence chewing part of a grasshopper it had caught. The noise of its chewing was audible for quite a distance. Praying mantises make no sound of their own.
Finally, there were the sounds of amphibians. Although we had many frogs and toads on our own property, the ones you could hear were the spring peepers and the bullfrogs at Grovers Mill Pond. The peepers, especially, set up a chorus every spring that everyone in the neighborhood could hear.
The smells that go with the country are many and varied, especially if you once lived near Grovers Mill Pond. When we moved here the pond was a place where people fished, paddled canoes, and watched the ducks and geese swimming around. As time went on we learned that the pond was gradually filling up with silt washed in from nearby farmland.
One result of this was that the shallower water was becoming stagnant and attracting the growth of plants such as duckweed and lily pads. When these plants began to die off in the late summer, the smell of their rotting tissue was terrible, and it permeated the entire area. The smell was that of hydrogen sulfide, popularly known as “rotten eggs.” It was pretty bad and eventually led to the restoration of the pond, which was completed just a few years ago.
But the other smells were many and varied. There were the fragrances being produced by the Firmenich Company in Plainsboro. These were quite pleasant. But at the other extreme there was the smell of the newly harvested cabbage field on Cranbury Road. Rotting cabbage is a smell you could not get used to.
But the best “smell” story is the one that goes with the Bovung plant at the Walker-Gordon Dairy in Plainsboro. What’s Bovung, you ask? It was dehydrated cow manure. Walker-Gordon collected the manure from their milking operation, processed it in a dehydrating tower, bagged the dry powdery product, and sold it as fertilizer for your garden. The dehydrating tower gave off the manure odor throughout the region whenever it operated.
For us in Grovers Mill it seemed that Sunday morning was the time for us to smell it. But it went as far away as the Princeton University campus where students were hard pressed to explain it to their weekend dates. It did not fit in with the rest of the beautiful campus setting. Eventually the Bovung operation ran afoul of new controls on air pollution.
These were just some of the sights, sounds, and smells that went with Grovers Mill when it was our “new place.”
