Loyalists Raid Pleasant Valley during Winter Storm

The popular belief is that Revolutionary War hostilities ceased after the British surrender at Yorktown. Yet in Monmouth County, hostilities continued with impunity, fired by vengeful Loyalists in New York and the need to continue provisioning a British Army penned into a perimeter roughly conforming to the boundaries of present-day New York City. In addition to a pervasive illegal trade between Monmouth County and British buyers at Sandy Hook and New York, emboldened Pine Robber gangs defeated local militia in southern Monmouth County. In northern Monmouth County, Loyalist irregulars at Sandy Hook and Staten Island continued to raid the county’s prosperous farms.

Pleasant Valley (more or less, present-day Holmdel) was a neighborhood in western Middletown Township known for its prosperous farms and solidly Whig (pro-Revolution) families. In June 1781, a massive raiding party of near 1,500 men marched through the neighborhood, but spirited resistance from local militia and the county’s State Troops limited the impact of the raid. Monmouth County Loyalists, however, were tempted to attack Pleasant Valley again in February 1782.

The February 1782 Pleasant Valley Raid

According to a report printed in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, a 40-man Loyalist raiding party, led by Shore Stevenson (a former Lieutenant in the New Jersey Volunteers, now operating as a Loyalist partisan) "came over from Sandy Hook" into Pleasant Valley. They "took off upwards of 20 horses, five sleighs, which they loaded with plunder." The raiders also took eight prisoners at the home of Lieutenant Garrett Hendrickson. Two of the men at the house were not taken. Hendrickson’s son and William Thomson "slept in the second story of the house, being awakened by the noise below, secreted themselves.” They “escaped and went to the house of Capt. John Schenck, whom they alarmed.”

Schenck, a “gallant officer” who had previously co-led a daring raid against Brooklyn, “collected a small party... arrived at the Gut just as they had gotten the prisoners" and a few horses over the Gut and onto Sandy Hook. He attacked the raiders, and took twelve prisoners. In the fighting, Thomson was killed and a man named Cottrell was shot in the knee.

After the skirmish, Schenck, on his return home "suddenly fell in with Stevenson and 16 others who had remained behind... a firing ensued on both sides." Stevenson’s men fled when the militia charged with bayonets. During this second skirmish, however, nine of the twelve prisoners taken at the Gut escaped. In total, the Loyalists took 21 prisoners, nineteen horses, and five loaded sleighs of booty. The Loyalists "huzzaed and boasted of their success" as they departed and claimed "they would penetrate as far as Mount Pleasant" (adjacent to Pleasant Valley) on their next excursion.

Antiquarian sources add to the newspaper account. One source claims that the raiders had come for Captain Schenck, who had a bounty on his head in New York and may have been serving as the Middletown Township tax collector. Schenck reportedly slept in different houses in order to make it impossible for Loyalist parties to know his whereabouts. Lieutenant Henderickson, whose house was struck by the raiders, had been wounded at the so-called Battle of the 1500 in 1781 and had one of his hands amputated after that battle. Henderickson was temporarily captured during the raid, but freed himself during chaotic skirmish at the Gut.

One of the local militiamen who battled the raiders was Derrick Sutphin, a newlywed at the time. Altche Sutphin wrote about Derrick’s participation in the raid in his veteran’s pension application, submitted as Derrick’s widow. She recalled her groom "being out just a few days before their marriage... when a fellow soldier by the name of William Thomson was killed on Middletown Highlands, who was buried in the immediate neighborhood of this declarant.” Derrick Sutphin's sister, Elizabeth Snyder, further recalled:

The wedding party dared not remain overnight at the house, but dispersed early in the evening for fear of the Tories who would be upon them - that the bride remained at his house while the groom, the said Sutphin, was called out in the service before the week was out, by the alarm gun being fired at Colo. [Asher] Holmes's; he joined the scouting party which went to Middletown Point in pursuit of the Tories - he returned in a few days.

A week after the raid, Colonel David Forman wrote to Governor William Livingston about the raid and the vulnerability of northern Monmouth County. He summarized the raid:

The enemy marched undiscovered to Pleasant Valley and captured eight valuable citizens and their Negroes, and would have made their retreat good had it not been for a body of ice that broke loose and detained them for several hours on the passage to Sandy Hook. The principal object was the Town Collector, they took him and his two sons, but fortunately the public money had been sent away a short time before.

Forman enclosed a petition calling "for a guard to be called from the interior counties for protection of our frontiers, commanded by Capt. [John] Walton of the Horse."

Forman alluded to talk between Livingston and Thomas Henderson, representing Monmouth County in the state legislature, in which the Governor reportedly admitted to "the inability of Capt. Walton's troops giving security to our very extensive frontiers" at their present strength. As noted in the previous article, recruitment for the State Troops was going badly, with only a few dozen men enlisted at the time of Forman’s letter. In comparison, Monmouth County’s State Troop regiment, first chartered in 1779, topped 100 men each year prior to 1782. Forman complained that New Jersey’s interior counties "enjoy almost perfect tranquility" while Monmouth County remained in a state of war.

The February 1782 Colts Neck Raid

To underscore his point about Monmouth County's vulnerability, Forman alluded to a second raid that occurred just a few days after the Pleasant Valley fight. He wrote: "They [the Loyalists] were off again, plundered Capt. [Moses] Shepherd of Middletown and took his son prisoner, the Capt. had happened to be from home or he would have shared the same fate."

The New Jersey Gazette reported on this second raid on March 6: “A party of refugees, to the amount of upwards of one hundred, under the command of one Ryerson, made an incursion last week in the County of Monmouth as far as Colt's Neck." The reported size of the raiding party is almost certainly exaggerated. The report lampooned Loyalist raiders and portrayals of their raids in Loyalist newspapers:

They have with singular bravery made sundry sorties upon the sheep and the calves, making great numbers of them prisoner. This, no doubt, will be ushered in the Royal Gazette as the most glorious achievement.

The two February raids into northern Monmouth County, in the middle of the winter, demonstrate that: Loyalists were vengeful and desperate enough to raid several miles into Monmouth County in the midst of snow, ice, and winter cold. Conversely, Monmouth county’s defenses were weak. Local militia was spirited but reactive—it could not adequately patrol the county’s long shorelines. The county’s State Troops had shrunk from greater than a hundred men in 1780 and 1781, to just a few dozen in 1782—half of whom were stationed thirty miles away in Toms River. Militia from other counties only intermittently came to Monmouth County’s aid, even when ordered to do so by the Governor. George Washington opposed stationing Continental soldiers in Monmouth County after several prior deployments went badly.  In 1782, the local war in Monmouth County raged without interruption, long after the British surrender at Yorktown supposedly ended hostilities.

Caption: Loyalists raided Pleasant Valley in Monmouth County in February 1782. Amidst snow and ice, they loaded five sleighs, like these used at Ft. Ticonderoga, with plunder and returned to Sandy Hook.

Related Historic Site: Holmes Hendrickson House

Sources: Library of Congress, Early American Newspapers, Pennsylvania Evening Post; New Jersey Gazette, February 13, 1782, reel 1930; William Horner, This Old Monmouth of Ours (Freehold: Moreau Brothers, 1932) p 417; Monmouth County Historical Association, Articles File: "Whaleboat War Anniversary"; David Forman to William Livingston, Carl Prince, Papers of William Livingston (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) vol. 4, p 380; National Archives, Revolutionary War veterans Pension Applications, New Jersey - Derrick Sutphin;  library of Congress, Early American Newspaper, New Jersey Gazette, March 6, 1782, reel 1930; Michael Adelberg, Biographical File, unpublished manuscript at the Monmouth County Historical Association.