Rev. DeHughes and the ferry disappearance

The reported drowning

A brief item in the Danville Daily Commercial of August 31, 1880 reported that DeHughes had died by jumping from a ferry while crossing from Camden to Philadelphia. That distant paper appears to have relayed a news dispatch; it supplies no witness statement or recovered body. A fuller June 29, 1882 Mount Holly News account, reprinting the Philadelphia Times, says the supposed incident was on the Federal Street ferry and mentions letters left in the boat. Its editor added that the paper had already doubted the suicide and had reported an alleged sighting in a Trenton jewelry store. The earlier local item and the person who made that identification have not been located.

The Ohio claim and its reversal

The June 1882 account said George B. Lloyd, a friend who drove a stage between Riverton and Westfield, had received a letter postmarked Waynesville, Ohio. It purported to be from DeHughes and said he was practicing law there. The article treated the letter as a solution, although it did not reproduce the document or establish its authorship. It also repeated rumors about people associated with DeHughes and speculated about the old ferry scene. Those claims are not evidence of what happened and do not identify a participant in any deception.

On July 13, 1882, the same Mount Holly paper said the Gazette of Waynesville called the Philadelphia Times account a fabrication because no such man lived in town. The original Gazette page has not been inspected. This correction defeats the neat “lawyer in Ohio” ending; it does not, by itself, establish whether DeHughes had died in the Delaware, lived somewhere else, or was misidentified. A Chester County veterans’ burial index lists a Dallas M. DeHughes who died in 1920, but initials and surname alone do not establish that he was the Cinnaminson pastor, so the index is not used here to settle his fate.

Mapping the surviving places

The Asbury congregation’s history says the brick church built in 1874 was moved across its cemetery in 1963. This marker orients the reader to that congregation’s Cinnaminson site, not a claim that DeHughes stood at the present building’s exact position. The reported ferry departure is a separate Camden location; a Federal Street ferry historical marker stands near the old terminal area, but neither an onboard position nor a place in the river can be recovered from the cited reports. Both landmarks can be viewed from ordinary public space.