Buried on a hill rising from the swampy meadows along Vernon’s Black Creek is an iron chest deposited by Tory bandits during the American Revolution. It contains perhaps $30 million worth of gold and silver coins.
Or maybe not.
This is the legend of the Crabtree Island Treasure. It sounds like a sketchy local legend, but was actually first recorded in nothing less than The New York Times, on March 15, 1873. It goes like this: In 1776, Tory bandits robbed the U.S. Treasury in Philadelphia of $100,000 in gold and silver. Escaping up the Delaware Valley, they were hotly pursued. Before they could get to British lines they cut through Sussex County. They decided to bury the treasure on Crabtree Island, in a swamp in Vernon. They were never able to reclaim it.
Some 40 years later – the legend goes – people familiar with the tale interviewed an old woman in Paterson who had been a girl living in Vernon in 1776. Using her directions, they found the island and dug down twenty feet, uncovering an iron chest.
But the treasure was “spellbound,” and when someone shouted “we’ve found it” before they actually secured it, a strange blue light flashed and the chest sunk into the mucky earth, never to be seen again.
It was a great story, for sure. Newspapers as far away as San Francisco and Australia reprinted it.
People do bury valuables in times of strife, and have done so since Roman times. So couldn’t the Crabtree Island legend be true?
Perhaps, but there are a few things about this romantic tale that don’t add up. First, there were U.S. dollars in 1776, but they were only paper currency, not gold or silver.
And while there was a Treasury office in Philadelphia in 1776, it was not sitting on piles of precious metals. On the contrary, it was printing the aforesaid paper money whose actual value was dubious.
And had said Treasury been robbed, it would – to put it mildly – have made the newspapers. But there is no historical record of such a robbery (that I can find). Then too, the Crabtree family didn’t even settle in Vernon until well after the war, so they couldn’t have had a island bearing their name in 1776.
The 1873 account calls the tale an “old legend,” but in fact there is no documentation of it prior to this. Nor do later histories, like Snell’s, so much as mention it, suggesting it was widely dismissed or seen as a joke. And parts of the tale make no sense. The island is described as “an island of quicksand.” How can quicksand, a thick liquid, form an island? And later versions of the legend says the loot came not from the Treasury, but “a rich Whig.”
Which is it?
Likewise, buried treasure that disappears or sinks with a flash of light right after it is discovered is one of the oldest and most threadbare cliches of the genre, going back to Olde England. You find this element in numerous old stories of buried treasure.
And yet, other aspects of the story seem, at least tangentially, connected to reality. There were, in fact, discoveries of buried Revolutionary treasure in the region. In 1869, workers digging at the Ellison House next to Knox’s Headquarters at New Windsor, N.Y., came upon a jar four feet down.
This, the New Windsor coin hoard, contained 692 Spanish pillar dollars, and based on the dates of the coins, had been buried about 1777. That’s about $140,000 dollars today.
And there was a high profile Tory robbery of a treasure during the Revolution. The Doan Gang, a family of Loyalists, robbed the Bucks County, P.A., Treasury in 1781 of over £1,300 Sterling. This was never recovered; it could have morphed into or inspired the Crabtree Island tale.
And while the Crabtree family didn’t live in Vernon in 1776 (they came from Orange County, N.Y.), they did buy land here in the 1820s. This included a large swath of swamp along Black Creek, which does include a very sizeable island. So there’s that.
But greater evidence suggests it was a tongue-in-cheek tall tale cobbled together from bits of old folk history, factual history, and local names and places.
In the end is it fact, tall tale, or satire? A bit of whimsical historical legend? Pure fiction? As with so much local folk history, it is likely an amalgam of all of them. Bits of real history transplanted to local setting, mythologized, retold over generations, and finally crystallizing as its own unique story.
But we will probably never know the true story. Sussex County’s own version of Oak Island will probably remain a mystery.
Ron Dupont is Vernon Township’s Historian
