Reflections Along Jacob’s Creek
Even as a child, the creek called to me. Tucking my latched doll case beneath my arm, I would scramble down the front yard of our home until I reached the edge of the creek carving through the base of the property. On our side, grass and a Rose of Sharon bush that bloomed purple each summer. Beyond the far bank, a tangle of trees and thickets. Beyond that, Willow Road.
It wasn’t a wide creek, but it was magical with simple stone-strewn atolls that invited an 8-year-old’s imagination. I would crouch down in the water’s path as the flow swirled around my islet, the light splash filling my ears just enough. I would pull my Little People from the case — plastic pegs with rounded heads. I most remember one I called Junior with a bright blue painted shirt. He nestled nicely into the silver rounded cups I had salvaged from an old Easter basket in the basement. Then, a push into the ripple, and another, and another. I would watch for hours as Junior spun through the rapids in his makeshift boat, bumping over mossy rocks until he washed into the pool downstream.
I experienced such delight in these moments — alone with my toys, yes, and also feeling one with this wild space of motion and eco-detritus. Leaves brewing a sepia stream tea. Spiraling roots festooned in dried vines and snagged sticks weaving like unruly sculpture along the creek banks, most certainly hideaways for snakes, frogs, muskrats. They were always watching me. This capricious landscape held endless, enchanting possibilities.
That longing for a rowdy creek has stirred my heart for 50 years.
On a recent Saturday, I ventured out to Baldpate Mountain near my home in New Jersey for a hike down Kuser Trail to Fiddler’s Creek. After 45 minutes trudging atop uneven snowy tracks, I decided to pivot. Was it always this far away? Had I remembered my COVID meanderings incorrectly? My destination felt elusive at a time when I needed waters to flow through me. Not a misguided hike, only misplaced when my purpose demanded more than surrendering to the path before me. Once back at the trailhead, I jumped in my car and drove to the Jacob’s Creek culvert.
As I clambered down to the muddy Jacob’s Creek Trail, winter had commandeered the landscape. The only flash of color was my fleeting memory of a single spring buttercup clinging to my gray hiking boots — the same boots that now sank into the lifeless loam. And yet, the kind of color that inspires awe and wonder was abundant here, a deep sentient palette that satisfied my seeking.
Fallen trees disturbed the path, misshapen, mossy carcasses that were possibly claimed during flash flooding in Hurricane Ida, a storm that also took local human lives along creek beds just like this one. My gaze fixed on a scatter of lichens atop a patch of snow, fallen from a rotting log like grotesque snowflakes — white on white, oddly contrasted.
To descend into such wildness and then, the release. The rush, the rush, the rush; a symphony of swollen creek amplified by melting snow. Eyes closed, sheets of spring rain pounded the earth outside an open window. Jacob’s water teemed with precious ferocity, capturing unsuspecting twigs and leaves in a stew that sometimes roiled and at others simmered. Partially submerged offcuts of ice bobbed like specters center-stream, trapping traveling beech leaves in yellowing eyelets. Water tumbled over shale stone in glass cascades, merging into a frenzy. And then, a gentle moment in a nearby eddy. Ripples gliding into geometric patterns like the fanned tail feathers of a Cooper’s Hawk.
Who is Jacob, I wondered, that he might embody this elegance?
Andy’s Apartment
I’ve left out an important detail about my reflections along Jacob’s Creek that Saturday. Very soon along the footpath, I looked to the right and there it was on the hill. Andy’s house. The reason they also called this woodsy stretch Franze Preserve. I stared up at the dark brown structure, just visible beyond a stretch of green saturated by melting snow. I searched for someone sitting in the Osage chair on the upstairs deck or peering out through the cloudy downstairs windowpane. I moved closer, the stillness in eerie contrast to the creek’s persistence beside me. It felt both familiar and distant to think that I once called this stretch of land home.
I moved into Andy Franz’s apartment on Penn-Titusville Road when I was 25. A good friend who worked the kitchen line at the Rocky Hill Inn, where I waitressed nights alongside my new journalism career, said her dad was looking for a tenant to live downstairs in his house, her childhood home. Why not, I thought? It was a bit larger than my current apartment, at a decent rent. And, there was the creek, a hilly front yard, even woods to explore. This little girl’s dream.
Still, when I reflect on those few years with Andy, my landlord and ersatz dad moving above me in the home he built with his own two hands, I don’t think much about Jacob’s Creek. It was a constant presence; a scene adjacent to my coming-of-age life as an adult and a professional that flowed perpetually beyond my bedroom window. I suppose it provided comfort in the way nature cradles you and, for me, in the way the past influences our future decisions with just enough intention to exceed coincidence. I somehow engineered this narrative to grow up against the backdrop of my childhood.
What I do remember is Andy. He was a character of exceptional proportions. Standing no more than 5’ 5” tall, with a shock of white hair and a strong Austrian accent, Andy was often a mix of warmth and austerity. He spoke each word with intention, his grit resonating with responses to even the simplest of questions. Honestly, he could be scary: “Diana, your long hair has clogged the shower drain again. This is not good.”
But then flowed the wisdom – in his words and his eyes, which shone with a knowing every time he cocked his head, tugged at his nose as he did often, and flashed his impish smile. To be with Andy was to feel a special presence that I only came to appreciate years later. Even so, I got to experience pieces of this extraordinary man – a legendary shop teacher at Princeton Day School – up close in the space he felt most comfortable. And not until after this outing had I really stopped to reflect deeply on it -- an unexpected tributary to my Saturday creek beckoning.
My now-husband, Gary, lived with me in Andy’s apartment for the year leading up to our marriage and a year after. We actually credit Andy for initiating our very first slow dance when he invited a group of his daughter’s friends to a nearby German Club. That night Gary held me close to the sounds of the Bavarian brass band, trembling, and asked me out on our first date to the Wine Press in Kingston.
While our years as Andy’s tenants were simple and unextraordinary, the edge of a life together carries a deeper truth. Inside that spare, two-room apartment, we endured the blizzard of ’96, trapped behind a barricade of 30 inches. Digging our way out, Gary headed into work as a phone technician -- despite the state of emergency -- only to quickly lodge his truck in a snowbank. “That was really stupid, Gary,” Andy observed.
That same year our cat Lacey spent a cold night cowering in the top branches of an Oak, while resident pups Lumpy and Sandy stalked below. Gary and I have summoned that memory many times through the years with the refrain: “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” recalled in a strong Austrian accent. Something about Andy’s attempts to coax Lacey from the treetops still makes us laugh 30 years later.
Most of my Penn-Titusville memories pass in images, like scenes from a play: Gary navigating the front hillside with a push mower, me sitting cross-legged on the apartment floor lacing purple and green ribbons through 150 potted lavender and rosemary plants for our wedding favors, answering a 1:00 a.m. call from the police after I witnessed a horrific car accident that left a child lying lifeless on Route 1, showcasing our new Nanarosa Noritake china pattern on the drab kitchen table for months after our wedding, wafts of homemade venison sausage drifting down from Andy’s stove.
Truthfully, Andy was the Rembrandt in this character portrait, with a personal story that belied the suggestion of ordinary in the little house above the banks of Jacob’s Creek.
Buzzing circular saws, drills, and tape measures were the music to which Andy choreographed most of his days. He often disappeared into his garage-turned-shop to construct and shape creations from wood, a passion that surpassed an ephemeral hobby. Andy had built a new life in America from sawdust and survival.
Celebration of Life
Andy was born on March 3, 1935, in Batchka, Palanka, Austria-Hungary to Josef and Katharina Franz. In 1944, his family and their ethnic-German neighbors were displaced at gunpoint from their homes. He spent the next four years as an enslaved child in the work camp Jarek, where he, unlike others, survived hunger and typhoid. In 1948, he and his parents escaped by foot to Austria, entering freedom in Hungary on Good Friday, and began their lives as Displaced People. He attended school until age 15, when he apprenticed as a Tischler — a cabinet maker — supporting his family in Graz, Austria, and building cabinets across the country. In 1956, he immigrated through Ellis Island on a Liberty Ship with $12, a cardboard suitcase, and a sponsor in Trenton, where he, along with other Danauschawben refugees, started his life as an American.
A few years later, Andy and his friend Adam Martini found work as master craftsmen at Nakashima Studios in New Hope, P.A., where he studied with famed woodworker George Nakashima to learn the aesthetic that would shape his life. He got married, bought a 22-acre lot outside Pennington, N.J., and with the help of his friends, went on to build his home there. In 1969, after an accident on the day of the moon landing, he left Nakashima and accepted a job at Princeton Day School, a private Pre-k-12 school on 106 acres in Princeton, as an Industrial Arts teacher, where he taught for 29 years.
Andy Franz died in December, 2024 at the age of 88, in the bed and house he built. The previous section was lifted directly from his obituary, published by his daughter Susi soon after his death. In a short, unpublished piece about his life from 2018, Andy wrote, “Reflecting on my life as an immigrant leaves me with a sense of positive accomplishment which I could not have reached in the old country. To rise from a simple cabinetmaker to become a teacher is rare in Austria. To live free and not burdened by ingrained restrictions certainly enhanced my life.”
My husband and I attended his celebration of life, held in Princeton Day School’s Upper School Library in June 2025. There amongst the books, more than 100 people gathered to pay tribute to their dad, grandfather, teacher, colleague, and friend. I’ve never experienced a memorial quite like it; aged faces from another lifetime nearby in wooden folding chairs and others whom I had never met evoking laughter, tears, amazement. I squeezed Gary’s hand in disbelief. I was discovering Andy through adult eyes.
The message that day did not speak to an immigrant’s survival, but rather the beguiling greatness of one man who inspired awe by encouraging students to find joy in the process of learning and creating. Some 20 former PDS students — many of them now in their 50s — stood up to share poignant vignettes of Andy in the wood shop, catching them amidst teenage antics, brusquely correcting their sanding techniques while flashing his two missing fingers, and always showing up with intention as a patient mentor. I recognized that portrayal of sternness and grace.
In response to his death announcement on social, one former student wrote, “He remains the most memorable PDS teacher, perhaps of all time. What a wonderful man. In the workshop, between sawdust and silence, he taught more than craft. He taught life. I feared him. Respected him. Learned from him. May he rest in peace.”
I wanted to take my place at the podium on that day of remembrance — to weave a totally different perspective of the landlord into the stories of Andy’s lasting influence. And yet, I felt oddly unprepared to speak about our long-ago connection. Ours was not an abiding relationship. I had seen him only a handful of times through the years after we left his apartment, once for a salmon dinner in our new house in Pennington, and other times to deliver Christmas cookies or a hot meal when he was ill.
And while not profound, our relationship was meaningful in the way that people enter our lives as observers and caretakers. Thinking about this decades later bubbles up as bittersweet gratitude and admiration. What a gift it was to live in that bottom-floor apartment with the window that looked out on Jacob’s Creek; to benefit from Andy’s generosity, his skilled woodworking, and unconditional acceptance. If I had taken the time to look more intently past my own minutia, I might have gasped at the privilege of knowing this exceptional human. Such naiveté! I suspect Andy, wise and prescient, tolerated my selfish 20-something worldview. He who had mustered such resilience and self-reliance and me to whom so very much had been given. Potted wedding herbs and fine china indeed.
The Deer Stand
A few months before Andy died, Gary stopped by 388 Penn-Titusville for a visit. They sat together in the bedroom chatting about old times, Andy drifting in and out of sleep. They had always shared a love for deer hunting. Among Gary’s most tender memories from our time in the apartment was the image of Andy leading him across Jacob’s Creek on a cloudy afternoon to a homemade treetop deer stand. “Gary, I want you to use this when my hunting buddies aren’t around,” Andy had said, patting him on the shoulder.
Two men with such respect for the land and nature could not believe their good fortune at having the property and mutual purpose to pursue their sport just outside the back door. It was an intimacy I would never know. They talked that day in the bedroom about Gary shooting a four-point buck on the far edge of Andy’s 22 acres and dragging it for what felt like hours along Jacob’s Creek to the backyard. Andy, summoning the skills of his father the butcher, stuffed pounds of venison sausage that winter. It was the last deer Gary ever killed.
In 2000, the year our daughter was born, Friends of Hopewell Valley Open Space bought 18.5 acres from Andy Franz on the South side of Pennington-Titusville Road, naming it Franz Preserve. This was Andy’s planned legacy — that his beloved creek and woods should endure, untouched, and serve as a refuge for wanderers like me.
“Yes, I often went back to Austria. It is a beautiful country,” wrote Andy in his 2018 reflection. “But America is America and it is my home.”
From the FOHVOS Stewardship Plan: “Franz Preserve protects a portion of the Jacobs Creek, one of its tributaries, and adjacent forested wetlands and uplands…Just north of the intersection of Jacob's Creek and its tributary, the preserve harbors a narrow band of 1930s forest. American beech, red oak, sugar maple, and ash compose the canopy. Small, non-flowering individuals of sedges, Indian pipe, spicebush, and white wood aster are in the understory layer. The western arm of the preserve is former cropland or pastureland that is now ash, sassafras, red cedar, autumn olive, Japanese honeysuckle, black cherry, flowering dogwood (trace), garlic mustard, and white snakeroot (abundant).”
Such wonder to discover that Andy’s journey in Austria and the evolution of these woods buffering Jacob’s Creek both began modestly in the 1930s and grew with abandon for nearly nine decades, into abundance. The rush, the rush, the rush. To flow persistently, wildly, without fear.
Oh, to have built a life along Jacob’s Creek.
By Diana Lasseter Drake