Jean Pierre Blanchard launched his hot air balloon from Philadelphia in 1793, crossed the Delaware River, and landed by the Old Clement Oak in Deptford during the nation’s first manned aviation flight.
Yet, as America gets ready to celebrate its 250th anniversary, the site marking his historic flight is hard to find and in complete disarray. But the Gloucester County Historical Society is determined to clean it up and make it more accessible to the public with help from various organizations.
“The production company tasked with putting together the 52 Weeks of Firsts, the Philadelphia Historic District and visitors’ organizations … will be adding on their map of places to visit Blanchard’s landing site in Deptford,” explained Debbie Harding, past president of the Aero Club of Pennsylvania and owner/operator of Air Ventures Hot Balloon Flights Inc. in Pennsylvania.
The difficulty will be to clean up the site in time for the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley next year as part of the celebration of the Declaration of Independence’s anniversary.
“If you ask most schoolchildren and probably most adults where aviation history began in the United States, their answer is The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903,” emphasizsed historian Hoag Levins, chairperson of the publications committee for the historical society.
“But the community of modern-day air balloonists across the country are keenly aware that the accurate answer to that question is actually Jean Pierre Blanchard, Philadelphia to Deptford, 1793,” Levin pointed out. “And that’s why the nation’s balloonists feel so strongly about this site and why they played such a major role in 1993’s 200th anniversary celebration of the Blanchard balloon flight landing site.”
The First Flight site in Deptford also commemorates the Clement Oak tree that was more than 400 years old when destroyed by a storm five years ago. The area is overgrown with weeds and inaccessible to the public. It’s located behind a 6-foot high fence at the Clements Bridge Road Walmart, and a person would have to sneak through a hole in the fence and walk 50 yards in heavy brush to find it.
“It’s like a jungle back there,” Levin acknowledged. “The jungle has reclaimed it.”
He added that the historical society’s mandate is to advocate for the preservation of local historic sites. He would like to see the First Flight site cleaned up, refurbished and easily accessed by visitors.
When the Walmart Supercenter was built in 2008, it had agreed to maintain the First Flight and Clement Oak site. “Walmart did do that for some years but in recent years – I estimate that to be about five years ago – it stopped maintaining the site,” Levins said.
“During the original approval process for the Walmart Supercenter, the applicant agreed to maintain the property,” Mayor Paul Medany explained in an interview with the Gloucester County Historical Society. For several years after the store’s opening, that did in fact happen.
“That has certainly not occurred in recent years,” Medany observed. “We do not have the municipal funds to maintain this area and we are going to contact the current management (at Walmart) to encourage them to adhere to the original approval and return to maintaining this most historic property.”
“As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, should we abandon and forget the physical historic site that was the 1793 landing spot of the nation’s first manned balloon flight?” asked Levins, who is spearheading the efforts to address the situation.
“It really could be a cool and unique opportunity for Walmart to show community support,” Harding said. “They have grant money available for such things, not in the way of individual payment of wages, but certainly could provide, water, lunch for the cleanup crew as well as the necessary shovels, rakes, pruners, chainsaws wheelbarrows and dumpster space, while getting a good name for themselves back in the community.”
In a 1993 celebration of the balloon landing’s 200th anniversary, Deptford joined the First Air Voyage in America (FAVIA 200 Inc.) – an organization of ballooning enthusiasts based in Scranton, Pennsylvania – to rededicate the historic landing site, according to Levins.
They installed a large bronze marker that reads: “This plaque rededicates the landing site of Jean Pierre Blanchard’s ascension from Philadelphia, on this the 200th anniversary of the first air voyage in America.”
When Benjamin Franklin witnessed that first flight while in France in 1783, he was asked “What good is a balloon?” He answered, “What good is a newborn baby?”
Harding said that Franklin saw the value immediately not just in traveling by air, but also observation by air for military reasons and observation of the world of air as in weather and space exploration. “This was the infancy of a whole new world of possibilities and discoveries,” Harding said.
Ten years later, on Jan. 9, 1793, both Benjamin Franklin and President George Washington attended the first air voyage in America at the then capital of the United States in Philadelphia, she said. Blanchard launched from a yard of the Walnut Street prison, where the Penn Mutual Life insurance building now stands.
Washington provided Blanchard with a “letter of passage” asking whoever he should meet upon landing that they fear not and offer support to reunite the pilot to his quarters where he started from in Philly, also marking the first air mail, Harding said.
“Historians have pointed out that the 1793 flight was not just a spectacle,” Levins said. “Blanchard performed measurements (altitude, pulse, air samples, and magnetism) during flight, underscoring the scientific curiosity of the era.
“The presence of figures such as President Washington and other top government officials at the scene in what was then the nation’s capital lent both legitimacy and visibility to scientific discovery, connecting ballooning with national pride, innovation, and public imagination in the newly established United States,” Levins said.
Ironically, as the physical site of the landing has been abandoned over the years, Deptford’s town fathers have made the event that happened there a central touchstone of the township’s civic identity – and its balloon a proud symbol of the town’s heritage, he continued.
The balloon is the central element of the official township emblem above the front door of the municipal building and on other municipal signage across the area, including the water tower.
For more information go to www.gchsnj.org.
It’s almost impossible to scan the QR code denoting the ballon voyage site because it’s so dirty. It will take lots of work to clean it up for the 250th anniversary of the nation on July 4.
