Introduction by Alan Keyser

Revolutionary Times

Recollections of Maria Keely

and Other Revolutionary War Insights

2017 Introduction to the

Maria Keely Recollections

by Alan Keyser

Alan Keyser published the Maria Keely recollections as “The Perkiomen and Skippack Township Encampment of the Revolutionary War” in the October 2017 issue of The Goschenhoppen Newsletter and included this introduction.

In 1846 when she was eighty-three Solomon K. Grimley[1] asked his grandmother to record her recollections of the Revolutionary War. Maria Keely wrote her first hand recollections to her grandson. He recopied her notes in 1879. The 1879 copy was found recently among some of Solomon K. Grimley’s historical notes. When he recopied her notes he added some introductory family history.

This first person narrative by a farm girl gives a different perspective of the encampment. It also records the political leanings of Maria’s childhood neighbors. According to her there were several gradations of tory. The most loyal to the King she called “hard dories.”

She was a Pennsylvania Dutch woman thinking in Dutch and writing in English. As a result Pennsylvania Dutch words enter where English fails her. They are translated in the footnotes. Maria wrote her narrative as a single paragraph. I have added paragraph breaks, but have added no punctuation and changed no spelling. The narrative stops abruptly mid-thought, so we do not have its entirety.

[1] Solomon K. Grimley (1824-1895) was a local antiquarian who lived on the Grimley ancestral home, one of the encampment farms east of the Pennypacker Mansion, on present day Haldeman Road, Schwenksville, PA.