War Stories, A Heroic Nurse, a World's Fair & a Nazi raid.

Today in New Jersey history:

June 28, 1778: The Battle of Monmouth Court House, fought west of Freehold between George Washington’s Continental Army and Sir Henry Clinton’s British army, which was withdrawing from Philadelphia to New York, ended in a tactical draw, but was an American moral victory, as the Continental army stood up to the best of the British and held the field at the end of the day. In addition, “Molly Pitcher” (probably Mary Ludwig Hayes) would become an American icon because of the battle.

June 28, 1861: The First, Second and Third New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the first units of the First New Jersey Brigade, which had enlisted for three years service, left Trenton for Washington by train. The Jersey boys smuggled three women aboard and “got drunk as the devil” on the way.

June 28,1876: Clara Louise Maas was born in Newark to German immigrant parents. Maas graduated from the Newark German Hospital School of Nursing and became an army contract nurse during the Spanish American War. In 1900, while serving in Cuba after the conflict, she volunteered to be bitten by a mosquito in an experiment in the effort to find a cure for yellow fever. Maas contracted yellow fever and died on August 24, 1901 as a result. Her body was returned to Newark, where she was buried with military honors in Fairmount Cemetery. In 1952, the Newark German Hospital, which had been renamed Newark Memorial Hospital during the World War I anti-German hysteria and then Lutheran Memorial Hospital, was renamed Clara Maas Hospital in her memory.

June 28,1939: The New Jersey exhibit building at the New York World’s Fair, a replica of the Trenton French and Indian War era barracks, was dedicated in a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by Governor A. Harry Moore and George de Benneville Keim, chairman of the New Jersey world’s Fair Commission.

June 28,1942: FBI agents and New Jersey state troopers raided Camp Bergwald, in Bloomingdale, arresting several people on suspicion of being Nazi sympathizers. The camp, a resort formerly owned by the German-American Vocational League, which had formally dissolved after Pearl Harbor, had hosted German-American Bund activities in the 1930s.