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Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(NEW JERSEY.) John Mullica. Diary of an Alloway man, with his photograph, son's Civil War letters, and more. [246] manuscript pages. 4to, 8 x 6 1/4 inches, crudely stitched, front wrapper worn and detached, lacking rear wrapper; moderate wear to contents. New Jersey, 1846-1858
John Mullica (1816-1881) was descended from early Finnish-Swedish settlers of southern New Jersey; the community of Mullica Hill is named after the family. John lived in Upper Alloways Creek Township (in an area later set off as Quinton Township) in Salem County. He worked as an agricultural laborer: peach picking, gathering bark, plowing, digging potatoes, butchering hogs, and more. He also raised hogs and planted turnips on his own account. He commenced keeping this diary and memorandum book in 1846 and continued somewhat regular entries through 1854. It contains a mix of personal observations, news abstracts, bits of poetry, and medical cures. Mullica notes various battles of the Mexican War, a New Jersey ban on horse racing (24 May 1846), and numerous local births and deaths, such as "A coloured man named Cesar Ajax recently died at Cape May, aged 110 years" (6 May 1846). Some events in his own family predate the diary, such as the death of Mary Mullica in 1842, and the 1843 birth of his son John H. Mullica. He records the expenses for building a new family bedroom on 29 May 1852. He recounts a local murder on 24 December 1846: "A man was killed in Lower Penn's Neck by a Black man named Washington Yates, name said to be Joseph Dunham, a white man . . . struck by the Negro on the head with a piece of scantling which broke the skull in to the brain." The execution of convicted murderer Samuel Treadway is described at length on 1 March 1853; Mullica adds that he "was personally acquainted with the prisoner and his father & mother." On 31 July 1853 he saw one of the few surviving Revolutionary War veterans at a funeral: "His name was Bright Bacon. He told me that he was one of the volunteers to go on the Battle of Brandywine in the year 1777. . . getting there after the bloody battle was over."
Mullica was keen on natural history observations: the early arrival of frogs, the call of a whippoorwill. On 17 August 1847, he "went gunning with James Hopkins and we shot 5 squirrels and some birds." On 15 May 1851 he wrote about a cicada emergence: "Locust year. They came about this time in month, hollering at a most dreadful rate. Pretty much all disappeared about the twentieth of June. . . . The hogs in woods rooted the ground continually for the while they were coming up. It has been seventeen years since they were with us before." He describes a religious camp meeting at length on 9 September 1847. A temperance man, he describes at length the town vote on tavern licensing: "the nefarious business still to be carried on in all the diabolical energies of the landlords. This evening was a serious time, I assure you, wicked men a swearing, drunken men a howling in the agonies of the infernal regionds of everlasting night" (7 December 1847). Much of the diary was abstracted in the 1988 town history, "Alloway Remembers," pages 112-115 (copy of the book included).
His son John H. Mullica (1843-1864) enlisted in the 12th New Jersey Infantry in January 1864. This collection includes 4 letters he sent to his father after joining the regiment. In the wake of the Battle of the Wilderness, he wrote "We hav been marching and fiting 12 days. Today we fell back on the Fredricksburg Pike to rest. I have been in the hardest fiting, so the generls says, that ever was in this world. Offell to walk over the battel field and see thousends laing dead. . . . Our loss in this regment is 300 men out of four. We han't but one hundred left" (15 May 1864). He succumbed to disease the following month.
With--a cased 3 x 2 1/2-inch tintype portrait said to be of John Mullica (no cover); and a tobacco pipe, pair of pince-nez glasses, and razor strop said to be John Mullica's. Provenance: consigned by a great-great-great-grandchild of John Mullica.
