# Sometimes the Best Place to Tell History Is the Place That Remembers It 2026-09-29 · Hunterdon County Historic Courthouse · Flemington, New Jersey · Event A workshop of The Crossing brings Jacob Francis and the Ten Crucial Days back into the Hunterdon County courthouse where one part of his own Revolutionary War story was recorded. A workshop of The Crossing brings Jacob Francis and the Ten Crucial Days back into the Hunterdon County courthouse where one part of his own Revolutionary War story was recorded. --- History usually travels badly. We lift it out of the place where it happened, compress it into a paragraph, put the paragraph into a textbook, and eventually teach ourselves to think of the past as information about somewhere else. A new musical workshop in Flemington is attempting the opposite. On September 25 and 26, The Crossing will be performed inside the Hunterdon County Historic Courthouse, and one of the people brought forward in the production is Jacob Francis, a Black Revolutionary War veteran whose own pension story is tied to that very room. That makes the venue more than a convenient backdrop. Francis is not simply another name being added to the familiar story of Washington crossing the Delaware. According to RevolutionNJ, Francis participated in the campaign surrounding the crossing and the victories at Trenton and Princeton, and later successfully applied for his Revolutionary War pension in the same Hunterdon County courthouse where audiences will now encounter his story in musical form. The room has already been part of the record once. This weekend, it becomes part of the retelling. The Crossing is a new musical centered on the ten days when the Continental Army crossed the Delaware River, won at Trenton, and then continued toward Princeton. The workshop includes familiar figures, including George Washington and Thomas Paine, but it also deliberately makes room for people who can disappear beneath the gravitational pull of famous names. RevolutionNJ's event announcement highlights Francis as well as William "Billy" Lee, Washington's enslaved valet and wartime companion. The production's music is by John Allen Watts, with book and lyrics by Jason Huza. Francis is particularly important to what is happening in Flemington because his life connects the broad national story to a specific New Jersey place. Historical accounts describe him as born in Amwell Township in 1754 to a free Black mother. He spent much of his youth in indentured servitude, with his time transferred among several men, before becoming free at 21. Living in Salem, Massachusetts, he enlisted in a Continental regiment in 1775 and served through the siege of Boston, the New York campaign and the Battle of Trenton. After that enlistment ended, he returned to Hunterdon County and continued serving in the local militia for the remainder of the war. Those details complicate the clean version of Revolutionary history that often survives in public memory. Francis fought for independence in a society where freedom was distributed unevenly. He later married Mary, an enslaved woman whom he purchased and freed, and they raised a family in the Flemington area. His life contains patriotism, service, bondage, freedom, family and the unfinished argument over who was allowed to fully possess the ideals being fought for. None of that requires turning him into a symbol. It makes him more useful as a person. That may be the most interesting promise of The Crossing. America's 250th anniversary will inevitably produce enormous amounts of commemoration. There will be ceremonies, reenactments, speeches, exhibitions, plaques and familiar stories told again because familiarity is part of the function of an anniversary. But commemoration can become strangely weightless when the same handful of historical figures absorb every available ounce of attention. Washington matters. Paine matters. The battles matter. The harder task is restoring the people who stood nearby without shrinking them into supporting scenery. Putting Francis back into this story does something different from simply adding a diversity footnote to a famous event. It changes the scale at which the Revolution can be understood. A crossing that can feel monumental and abstract becomes something experienced by an individual whose life began in Hunterdon County, carried him through forced dependency and military service, and eventually brought him back into the civic life of Flemington. The Revolution becomes less like a mural and more like a crowd. And then there is the courthouse itself. Historic sites are often treated as containers. We visit them because something important once happened there, look at the architecture, read a plaque, and leave with the feeling that we briefly occupied the same coordinates as the past. The Crossing turns that relationship around. The building is not merely preserving memory. It is being used to make new memory about the old one. Francis once entered the courthouse as a veteran seeking official recognition for his service. In 2026, an audience will enter it to watch artists decide how that service should be remembered. There are, in fact, several versions of time occupying the room at once. There is 1776, when Francis participated in the military struggle that the musical dramatizes. There is the later period when his service had to be documented and recognized through the pension process. And there is 2026, when performers, historians, educators and an audience are still negotiating how the story should be told. The distance between those moments does not disappear, but the building gives them a physical relationship. That would be interesting even if The Crossing were arriving as a finished production. It is not. RevolutionNJ describes the Flemington performances as workshops: three 60-minute presentations that invite audiences into the creative process before the musical's planned New Jersey world premiere in Trenton. The creators have also worked with Revolutionary War historians and educators and developed classroom materials intended to extend the project beyond the stage. That workshop status adds another layer. Audiences are not only watching history being reconstructed. They are watching the reconstruction itself while it is still under construction. Songs can change. Emphasis can move. Characters can become clearer. A line that works on paper may land differently when spoken in the same town where the person it describes once lived. The contemporary cultural object has not hardened yet either. There is something appropriate about that for a story of the Revolution. We often encounter the founding era after centuries of polishing have made its major figures seem inevitable. Their portraits are finished. Their quotations are selected. Their contradictions are sorted into categories. A workshop restores uncertainty to the act of telling the story. It reminds the audience that public memory is made by choices: who gets a scene, who gets a song, whose name is spoken, which detail gets carried forward and which one disappears again. That is why the most interesting question surrounding America's 250th may not be what America means now. That question is so large that it often collapses into slogans before anyone can do much with it. A more useful question is smaller and more practical: What changes when we stop merely commemorating history and start putting people back into it? The answer may begin with location. A story about Jacob Francis can be told anywhere. It can be read in a book, taught in a classroom or performed on a stage hundreds of miles away. Those forms can all be valuable. But a story told in the place where one of its consequences actually unfolded carries an additional piece of information that cannot be reproduced by exposition alone. The audience understands, without needing a lecture, that this person occupied the same civic landscape they are occupying now. That does not make the room sacred, and it does not magically solve the problems of historical interpretation. It simply reduces one layer of distance. The courthouse stops being scenery. Flemington stops being a pin on a map. Jacob Francis stops being a sentence inserted between more famous names. For an hour, the story is returned to a place that can answer back. The Crossing will be presented at the Hunterdon County Historic Courthouse, 71 Main Street in Flemington, on Friday, September 25 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, September 26 at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. General admission is $30, and doors open 30 minutes before each performance. SOURCE NOTES • RevolutionNJ event announcement: gar-tangerine-2cfl.squarespace.com/events/the-crossing-musical-workshop • RevolutionNJ: revnj.org • Hunterdon County Historic Courthouse: co.hunterdon.nj.us • Mercer County 250 - Jacob Francis: 250.mercercountynj.gov • New Jersey Society, Sons of the American Revolution - Jacob Francis: njssar.org • Ticket information: tickettailor.com --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.