Davenport’s Pine Robbers routed near Forked River, 1782

Which Davenport?

The documents that describe the Pine Robber called Davenport never give him a first name. The identification with William Davenport of Gloucester County — who appears in the New Jersey Council of Safety minutes for March 27, 1778, discharged along with three other men on taking the oath to the state — is offered by the Monmouth County Historical Association’s study of the episode as probable conjecture, not established fact. By late 1780 a Davenport was leading a gang in the Stafford Township country. What is documented of that gang comes mainly from postwar pension applications: Thomas Brown, son of the militia captain Samuel Brown, recalled the family house, barn, shop and a schooner burned at Forked River; Thomas Randolph recalled being taken prisoner and carried to Tuckerton; and John Ingersoll, a Burlington County militiaman, recalled his party being captured near Barnegat Inlet and sent to a prison ship in New York. Edwin Salter’s 1890 county history groups Davenport with Bacon, Lippencott, Moody and other refugee leaders whom he supposed, without proof, to have held commissions from the Board of Associated Loyalists.

The raid on Samuel Brown’s saltworks

The New-Jersey Gazette of June 5, 1782, carried the report from Trenton: “We hear from Monmouth, that on the morning of the 1st inst. one Davenport, a refugee landed with about 40 whites and 40 blacks, at Forked-River, and burnt Samuel Brown’s salt-works, and plundered him; they then proceeded Southward towards Barnegat, for the purpose of burning the salt-works along shore between those places.” Saltworks along this shore were repeatedly attacked during the war, salt being essential for preserving meat and fish. The item was reprinted as far away as the Maryland Gazette later that month. It reports the raid only; it says nothing about any fight afterward or about Davenport’s death.

The cannon shot, as later histories tell it

The engagement itself survives through nineteenth-century county historians rather than the 1782 press. Salter’s account has Davenport landing at Forked River with eighty men, half of them Black and half white, in two long barges: first on the north side, where they demanded provisions of the brothers Samuel and James Woodmansee, then at Samuel Brown’s place on the south branch, which they plundered and burned while Brown escaped into the woods. The barges then went down Forked River to its mouth, where one turned up the bay and the other, carrying Davenport, headed down the bay meaning to destroy the American saltworks at Waretown and beyond. Before reaching Oyster Creek he saw a boat standing toward him and ridiculed his crew’s advice to turn back. The Americans had a cannon or swivel where his men had only muskets, and at the first discharge Davenport, standing up in the boat, was killed. His barge was damaged and upset by the frightened crew; the water was only about four feet deep, and they waded ashore near Oyster Creek and scattered into the woods and swamps. Salter adds that the late John Collins of Barnegat remembered some of them calling on his father and other Quakers to beg provisions.

The Monmouth County study tells the same sequence with differences worth noting: it places the surprise at Waretown by a militia gunboat proceeding down Oyster Creek, suggests the overturned barge may have been overloaded with plunder, and names the Quaker who fed the fleeing men as Ebenezer Collins — where Salter names only John Collins’s unnamed father. No document identifies the militia unit; the same study suggests, from John Ingersoll’s pension application, that it may have been Captain Enoch Willetts’ Burlington County company, which manned a gunboat patrolling from Cape May to Shark River through 1782. The death by cannon fire should be read as a well-attested tradition of the 1780s recorded a century later, not as a contemporary report.