Gallows Hill Road

Cranford Revolutionary War hanging site. James Morgan and 10 others swung from an oak here. Residents still see soldiers at the intersection.

James Morgan was hanged here on January 29, 1782. An American sentry, he had shot Reverend James Caldwell two months earlier at a checkpoint in Elizabethtown after Caldwell refused to let him inspect a package. The murder of the "Fighting Parson," the minister who had rallied troops at the Battle of Springfield by tossing hymnal pages out as musket wadding and shouting "Give 'em Watts, boys!" was immediately suspected to be a British setup. Morgan was tried at the Presbyterian Church in Westfield, convicted in days, and marched to a massive oak tree on a rise outside Cranford. Eight days after the verdict, he swung from it.

That oak tree is long gone. Gallows Hill Road is now a quiet residential intersection with Brookside Place, a Cranford corner you drive past without looking twice. A rusted iron post and a scrap of concrete still mark the spot where the gallows rope was anchored. An estimated ten British spies and sympathizers were executed at the same tree during the Revolution. Their bodies were left hanging as a warning to anyone thinking about changing sides.

Drivers see Revolutionary-era soldiers standing along the roadside, clear from a distance, gone the moment you get close. They don't move. People on foot describe the air on the corner going sharply cold for no reason, even in July. Cranford police have fielded calls over the years from residents reporting shouting, yelling, or a crowd of voices somewhere along the road, though officers responding never find anyone there. Locals generally assume it's the condemned still protesting their sentences.

One Cranford resident said she watched tall bushes swaying at the intersection one night and pulled over to check. When she got out of the car, the lawn was manicured flat, no bushes anywhere. The movement she'd seen had nothing to explain it.

The intersection sits on what used to be Gideon Ludlow's farm, near a natural spring on what is now Indian Spring Road. Fairview Cemetery runs up against the eastern edge of the neighborhood. You have hanging ground, a spring, a burial ground, and a road still named after all three. The name Gallows Hill was never going to let anyone forget.

What Morgan and the British spies probably wanted was a proper burial in consecrated ground. What they got was an oak tree outside town. Cranford's given the location a monument and kept the street name, but ten or so men executed at the same tree still seem to be standing along the roadside, waiting for someone to come and cut them down.