During the Civil War, Frenchtown boys were at war with Uhlerstown boys. T. Powers Williams wrote, “I cannot account for the belligerent feeling that seemed to permeate the boys at home, unless they were imbued by the spirit of their elders at the front and had to fight someone.” So the battle line was drawn between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“One day Milton Slater and another boy went over to Uhlerstown. They came back faster than they went over,” he recalled. Eager for a scrap, “a company of about 20 was collected. And as there was not enough money in the bunch to pay the toll, it was decided to commandeer a flatboat used for picking bootherstones (paving slabs) that was tied to a tree just below the bridge.”
On the Pennsylvania shore, it was decided that Milton and the other boy would return to Uhlerstown and provoke a chase – right into an ambush. With big Si Oakum as their captain, the rest of the force hid behind the fence at Root's Corner, “every boy's pocket bulging with bootherstones.”
Saying these big slabs were in boys' pockets is his hyperbole. (Joke explained; joke ruined. Sorry, Powers.)
In about 20 minutes the two boys “were returning with a howling mob after them. It looked, as we peeped over the fence, as if all the people in Uhlerstown were chasing them. Canal boatsmen, men and boys – there must have been 50 or 60 at least. When Si Oakum, our commander-in-chief, saw the bunch coming only about 100 yards away, he made a break for the boat and all the large boys followed him.”
A half-dozen younger boys stood fast until they'd thrown a rock or two. They literally missed the boat and had flee across the covered bridge. Happily the aggrieved Pennsylvanians focused on throwing rocks at the boys in the boat, and Powers and his warriors escaped onto the bridge.
Holmes LaRue (1865-1940) tells how the boys of yore used to evade the penny toll, coming and going. They would avoid the tollgate on the Frenchtown side by wading between the Jersey riverbank and the first pier.
LaRue explained, “The piers of the old covered bridge those days were, on the north side, covered with heavy planking running up and down, with wide iron bands running across. We used these iron band as steps to climb up and down the first pier.” Thus the boys enjoyed free use of five-sixths of the bridge.
This was their common practice, both coming and going, for a long time until “Lo and behold, one day after climbing the pier we found the window on top of the pier had been barricaded. George Slack, the toll keeper, had this done, and this stopped our getting over the river without paying the toll.”
The accompanying photo was taken from the downstream side, so we can't see the window he's referring to.
The bridge tolls for Frenchtown and Milford were lifted in 1929.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"