LUNDY, Arthur W. – (1816-1905) The gray house at 25 Front Street that will be next-door neighbor to the new ArtYard theater and gallery was the home of Arthur Lundy.
Born in what is now Franklin Township, he was a teacher turned watchmaker. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, he went west to seek his fortune. Apparently that fortune eluded him; he came back, settled in Frenchtown in 1851, married Theodosia Reading, and opened a shop where he repaired watches and other clocks.
By the way, Front Street was called Delaware Street in those days, and that's where the Lundys lived for decades, raising their children and growing old.
Although Lundy was too old to heft a musket in the Civil War, “when the newspapers arrived in the morning mails, standing upon an elevation, often on the front porch of the harness shop of Samuel B. Hudnit, reading aloud to the people war news, he might have been called the public reader,” recalled William T. Shrope years later.
Lundy was one of the men who administered a Frenchtown fund for the relief of soldiers' families. The others were bank president Henry Lott, bank cashier (CEO) Newberry D. Williams, and harness makers Charles A. Slack and Hudnit (who would become Frenchtown's first mayor).
When Richmond fell, Frenchtown's church bells “were rung for thirty minutes, and a large audience assembled at the station, where patriotic speeches were made by a number of citizens,” including Lundy, Shrope wrote.
No doubt he'd be astonished by the construction next door and even more so by ArtYard's future exhibits and productions. But he'd be 204 years old and would have seen plenty on that lot -- the borough's municipal power plant, the ginormous Kerr Hatchery, and the Bio-Serv building.
From “Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia”
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