The Statue of Thomas Paine at Burnam Park in, Morristown, New Jersey

When I was younger, between childhood and being a teenager, perhaps even into young adulthood, I had a fascination with American history during the colonial era, and particularly to the American Revolution and the war for independence. Anything, particularly any building, that dated back to that era was on my list of places to visit. I appreciated that nearby Ringwood Manor, in a park that we visited fairly frequently, dated back to this era. I found some tourist brochures on New Jersey (yes, there were some back then, in the days of then Governor Tom Kean saying his famous line: "New Jersey and you, still perfect together"), and read about all of the historical places scattered throughout the state, and wanted to visit some.

My family visited Morristown, which is a really cool, historical town. It has Washington's headquarters, which is exactly as it sounds: it was his headquarters during a particularly brutal winter that was worse than the one he experienced at Mount Vernon. It was exciting for me, a living piece of history that stimulated my overactive imagination. 

There was one place in Morristown that I had only heard of and seen maybe one or two pictures of. This was a statue of Thomas Paine, one of the most famous and controversial of the Founding Fathers. He, of course, had written Common Sense, and had also gone to France and participated in the French Revolution on a certain level. I remember hearing somewhere, somehow, that it was the only known statue of Thomas Paine.

The thing was, I had no idea where it was. I had figured - wrongly - that it was likely near Washington's Headquarters, or at least in the downtown district that we had visited, but which we had somehow missed. But I kind of shrugged and left it at that.

Until many years later, no longer myself a kid, but with a kid in the car with me. Yes, my son, who was just entering his teenage years himself, was in the car, when I decided to take a back way home that we usually do not take. Perhaps I just happened to be looking the right way (or the wrong way, if you suggest that my eyes should have been squarely on the road), and suddenly, just like that and without any warning, there was the statue of Thomas Paine, which I had wanted to see ever since my childhood days.

Naturally, I took some pictures. Yet, even then, they proved elusive, because I put them in a blog entry and promptly forgot about them. But I have been trying to go through some of my old, unpublished posts, and came across these pictures, which I figured were worth publishing, finally. So, here they are.