Excerpts
Boardwalk Empire
1
Jonathan Pitney’s Beach Village
Medicine wasn’t enough. He needed to be something more than a
country doctor. Jonathan Pitney had been caring for the sick and
injured for more than 30 years, and he was growing weary. A medical
practice in 19th-century America wasn’t yet a path to wealth and
prestige, and Pitney hungered for both. He knew he’d find neither
caring for his patients.
Jonathan Pitney looked like a character out of a Dickens novel. Tall
and lean, nearly always draped in a long black cape, Pitney’s piercing
blue eyes and long thin hands were the first thing others noticed. His
pale craggy skin, together with his large hooknose and high forehead
crowned by flowing gray locks, made him a striking figure. Jonathan,
the son of Shubal and Jane Pitney, was born in Mendham, New Jersey,
on October 29, 1797. The Pitney family had arrived in this country circa
1700. As told to a biographer, Pitney’s great-grandfather and his brother
had come from England to “enjoy civil and religious liberty, of which
they were deprived at home.” They eventually settled in Morris County,
New Jersey. After graduating from medical school at Columbia College
in New York, Jonathan left his parents’ home in Mendham and headed
south to the bayside Village of Absecon. He was 23 when he arrived in
southern New Jersey, and he remained there the rest of his life.
There wasn’t much to New Jersey south of Trenton in 1820. During
the two generations following the American Revolution, things had
changed little. With the exception of the city of Camden along the
Delaware River and the summer resort village of Cape May at the
southern tip of the state, southern New Jersey was a vast pine forest.
This pine wilderness was interrupted by narrow, sandy stagecoach
roads that followed the footpaths of earlier residents, the Lenni
Lenape. Sprinkled throughout this green expanse from the Delaware
River and Bay to the Atlantic Ocean were tiny villages whose residents
descended from the British Isles and Northern Europe. Their
lives were centered on farming, fishing, and the manufacture of glass,bog iron, and charcoal. In time, these pioneers became known as
“Pineys.” Absecon Village was part of that world and the place
Jonathan Pitney chose to begin his medical practice.
Pitney was dedicated to his profession and worked tirelessly. He
made rounds by horseback up and down the South Jersey coast to
places a doctor had never been. Eleven years after his arrival, on
April 21, 1831, Jonathan Pitney married Caroline Fowler, daughter
of Rebecca Fowler, owner of the Sailor Boy Inn in Elwood, 15 miles
west of Absecon and one of the many villages Jonathan Pitney visited.
For years, Pitney was the only doctor many families knew and
it was common for him to be called away from dinner or awakened
in the middle of the night. Delivering babies, comforting the dying,
stitching wounds, and setting broken bones from farming and fishing
accidents made him well known throughout the region and loved by
his patients. But his income was meager. Oftentimes he had no
choice but to barter, and some say he relied upon his mother-in-law
to get by. As the years piled up Pitney’s enthusiasm shrank, and he
became as weather-beaten as his doctor’s bag.
