It was an ordinary day. Reading the "Lancastrian" Facebook page which is one of a few websites on Facebook that allows you to keep up-to-date on all the local happenings in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, both good and bad! While viewing the site, I came upon another historical story that was recently written by Lancasterian John Earl Hambright whom I have published a few of his stories on this site in the past. I realize that I may appreciate stories about the city of Lancaster more than some, since I live in Lancaster County. But, the history behind the story may make it more enjoyable to those who don't live in my hometown. Begin to read it and see if you too may enjoy it. And...thank you John for your wonderful stories about Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN OF LANCASTER COUNTY
by John Earl Hambright
Have you heard him pounding down Conestoga Road? Perhaps you’ve seen him on cold moonlit nights in November riding on his big black horse through a sleepy hollow called Eden.
He lived on North Lime Street in Lancaster nearly two hundred and fifty years ago as a 24 year-old POW in the house of Burgess Caleb Cope. And although he was a high-ranking officer in the British Army, he was entertained often in the home of Patriot leader Colonel John Hambright, a house that’s still standing on the southwest corner of North Queen and Orange. You may have known the place as Zimmerman’s Restaurant.
All this, of course, was when the horseman still had his head. And what a handsome head it was, full of images, plans, dreams, great fun and grand ambitions.
When I was a boy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, articles about the charming young Major John Andre appeared in the local newspapers with the frequency of features about other colorful figures of our storied past: Conrad Beissel, Baron Stiegel, Robert Fulton.
Robert Fulton may well have received drawing lessons from Major Andre. The young British officer did give drawing lessons to local boys, most notably John Cope, the son of his Lime Street landlord.
At the corner of East King and North Duke -- where the Lancaster County Courthouse is now -- Robert Fulton may have watched over their shoulders as the Major and the Cope boy sketched the tower of Trinity Lutheran Church. John Andre liked to say Lancaster’s Trinity reminded him of churches in London like St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Major Andre’s artistic flair and his willingness to share it with others, like young Cope and Fulton, is an abiding part of his story. He would one day create a theatrical extravaganza in Philadelphia that would be long remembered for its beauty and excitement -- a re-enactment of a medieval tournament followed by a masked ball -- complete with mummers.
Imagination incarnate was Major John Andre. He’s said to have had a heart full of passion, too, and a smile so winning, manners so fine, few women could resist him. Or men for that matter. Even George Washington admired him. The General is said to have wept when he died, even though John Andre, by then the British Army’s Adjutant-General, came close to costing the American commander his own life and altering forever the course of America’s future -- your future and mine.
You probably know the story of John Andre’s complicity with Benedict Arnold in a Revolutionary War plot to restore America to the British Crown. It’s been told often in histories, biographies, films and TV series. The best account is James Thomas Flexner’s THE TRAITOR AND THE SPY.
The Traitor was dour Benedict Arnold. The spy was dashing John Andre.,
But the central character was a woman who knew and loved both men as well as she knew and loved Lancaster.
Do Lancastrian history lovers still know the name Peggy Shippen? Of the Lancaster family that gave us our Shippen Street?
Peggy’s grandfather Edward Shippen was frontier Lancaster’s grand old man in the middle years of the eighteenth century. He was born a Quaker on the island of Nantucket off New England. He became an Episcopalian, a fur trade grandee, and the mayor of Philadelphia.
Putting all that behind him, at the advanced aged of fifty, Edward Shippen came west to live in Lancaster because this was where the money was in 1750. Beyond the Susquehanna, Pennsylvania reached out perhaps the whole way to the Pacific Ocean, so far as anyone knew.
All that land. All those furs. Perhaps that’s why Edward Shippen built his Lancaster house, the town’s biggest ever, on the highest hill around.
Facing west.
The grand mansion stood where later Lancaster’s YWCA had its headquarters and where so many of us kids -- we Hi-Y gents and Y-Teen ladies -- danced Friday night minuets at Hangout. Did we ever pass the headless horseman in the hall?
Did we ever sense his presence across a table in Zimmerman’s Restaurant?
Major John Andre was often in both of Lancaster’s biggest houses during his brief imprisonment in Lancaster after American victory at Saratoga. He first came to know Peggy Shippen hanging out at her grandfather’s house. And two blocks down Orange Street on the corner of Queen, he was often a guest of Colonel John Hambright at the big house that’s still there catty-cornered from where Hess Brothers Department Store briefly rose and quickly went.
John Hambright is often referred to in the history books as a “natural-born soldier.” He first came to notice during the French and Indian War. Two decades later, during the American Revolution he was given responsibility for turning Lancaster County into both a prison camp for British POWs and a hospital for American wounded. So important was his role, he was put on the five-member Supreme Executive Council that governed Pennsylvania.
And this was done even though the man, like most Lancastrians of his day, spoke mostly German. Benjamin Franklin, his fellow councillor, liked to call him The Great Bear.
That was no problem for John Andre. The young officer was fluent in German. Like John Hambright and his brother Adam of Eden -- and their father Conrad before them -- Andre had fought in European wars up and down the Rhine. He learned his German well before speaking it with The Great Bear in the streets of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Some said Andre had entered military life because of a lost love. A father was mentioned who considered his daughter’s suitor rich in charm but poor in all things that mattered -- no title, no land, no guaranteed future.
The Army became his future. Fellow soldiers became his family as he rose steadily through the ranks. He found a home in the saddle and on the dance floor. When he took to the floor in the Shippen mansion or the Hambright home, daughters in both households swooned and memories were born that would last well into the lifetimes of Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan.
Do the Lancaster public school still teach the dalliance of His Majesty’s favorite Major with the Pennsylvania minx who was seven years his junior? Or do our politically correct games prefer thrones that never existed and stars that will never be trekked.
What will children remember of Lancaster County? Other than an empty wind across the parking lot when the party’s left the bar and gone home?
The legend of the Headless Horseman goes on, we notice -- the stuff of cartoons and TV shows.
But what you won’t find in Walt Disney or Johnny Depp or James Thomas Flexner is the reason the Headless Horseman so often comes back to Lancaster County's sleepy hollow at Eden. Many say they've heard him.
Some say they've seen him. And they know the reason why he's there.
After one winter and spring with Andre during the British occupation of Philadelphia -- with the Americans still at Valley Forge -- Peggy Shippen spent one memorable weekend as belle of ball when the Major staged the famous theatrical extravaganza he called the Mischianza. You can still stand on the spot of that broad open field where a Maytime sun lit up the fun, though it’s now a crowded Italian neighborhood called South Philly, birthplace of Mario Lanza the opera singing film star. As well as Frankie Avalon, Fabian. And the Philadelphia cheese steak.
Soon after the music stopped, the Brits packed up the party and moved on to New York in their endless quest to tick off as many American colonials as they could. In the shortest possible time.
Congress returned to Independence Hall and Peggy set her lacey cap for the new man in town, a Rhode Islander, the hero of Saratoga, one of George Washington’s nearest and dearest generals, Benedict Arnold.
Peggy became, in short, an Army wife.
And in time not a very happy one. The war dragged on so long that Washington, Hamilton and Benedict Arnold had little to do but sit around on the bluffs at West Point and play cards.
All the while, on the other side of the Hudson River John Andre -- long since returned to his troops after a prisoner swap in Pennsylvania -- was now Adjutant-General of the entire British Army in America. He was also The Crown's top spy. Who better to play James Bond to George the Third?
One day to his headquarters tent -- Lord knows how it got there -- a strange letter arrived.
It was signed Peggy Shippen Arnold. Bored, restless, fed up with America’s chances to breathe free, Edward Shippen's granddaughter had had enough. Why did Andre go along with the American couple’s plot to send vital information to the British and make him their contact?
What was in it for Major Andre if he stooped low and won the war -- other than an aristocratic title, a country estate and an heiress to wife? The answer is Destiny.
Destiny waited out back of Eden in Lancaster County. Should the Americans be defeated, Major Andre could return to the Hambright farm on the Conestoga and be reunited with Destiny.
You know about Destiny?
So close had German-speaking John Andre become to Colonel John Hambright during his time in Lancaster that the Great Bear gave him the courtesy not only of residence with the Cope family on North Lime Street, he’d also taken special care of Andre’s beloved horse -- the coal black stallion called Destiny.
Destiny was delivered into the care and keeping of one of the most accomplished and best-known horsemen in Pennsylvania -- Colonel John Hambright’s elder brother Adam of Eden.
Adam Hambright had recruited Lancaster County horses and wagon for Braddock's March on Fort Dusquesne in 1755. With his friends, the Reists, he'd done much to develop the Conestoga wagon breed that became known as the Conestoga horse.
Several times the Colonel and Major rode out to the Hambright barn off the Conestoga Road, ostensibly to go angling at Catfish out on Lititz Run at today’s Oregon. That was only a pretext.
In reality, for a happy couple of hours, Andre could exercise Destiny up and down the leafy lanes of Manheim Township, Lampeter and the Earls, always returning the stallion at the agreed time to where the two tall Hambright brothers stood talking by Adam’s stone gatepost.
In gratitude for the gift of an hour or two with Destiny, Andre one day took an extra few minutes to sketch Adam Hambright’s gatepost and farmyard at Eden. He took it back to the Cope house to finish and a Cope descendant later gave it the Library of Congress. You can find it online in the LOC digital collection.
Then came what none expected. When prisoners were exchanged, the agreement signed between the British and the Americans said officers on both sides would be given their swords and no more. No sidearms. No mounts. Guns and horses were too important to surrender.
Destiny would remain behind Adam Hambright’s stone gatepost at Eden.
Sorrowfully -- on foot -- Major Andre walked out of Lancaster County toward quite another destiny than any he’d ever wished for. His plot with the Arnolds was discovered when, quite by chance, Andre himself was found at an American checkpoint with the incriminating papers in his pocket.
He was summarily tried and quickly hanged. Washington wept, it’s said, for the loss of a great good enemy but refused to pardon him.
What happened next is gruesome but essential to the tale. The British, on recovering the spy's body, took out the heart to ship back to England. And to accompany the seat of all his affections, for yet another grave, they severed the realm of thought as well. They cut off the head. And buried what was left of John Andre by the Hudson River.
Or did they?
To this day, in the sleepy hollow out back of Eden, it’s said Major Andre remains. He’s not looking for the lost head that he never gives a thought to. He doesn’t desire the heart already broken long ago, He’s seeking another passion entirely.
Some nights -- when the full moon turns our muddy river to molten gold -- the Headless Horseman is reunited with Destiny.
And Lancastrians in their beds hear phantom hoofbeats pounding down the wind-blown lanes.
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