Closing in on the Point Pleasant Witch House

A couple weeks ago my coworker Annie Halliday was looking for a fun Halloween image to post for the library, and plucked two images out of our postcard collection that I hadn't seen in a long time: the Point Pleasant Witch House.

Although I've got a strong suspicion that the Witch House was built by Joseph Aaron, the retired circus daredevil who built and ran the Cat and Fiddle Inn along with his wife Carrie, a former trapeze artist, I don't feel confident enough yet to state that as a fact.

The time periods seem to more or less match up — although the postcards aren't postmarked, a cursory bit of research tells me that the stamp boxes on the verso sides (DOPS on one card and AZO on the other) place the manufacture of the paper from about 1925 through 1942. 

This gels with the Aarons' Cat and Fiddle timeline. Carrie B Aaron first purchased the property from Tinicum Pines Association (the TPA is a whole other research rabbit hole I definitely don't have time to go down) in 1932 (Bucks County Deed Book 609, Page 25). The Inn ran for about a decade — in which time Joseph Aaron also built a water wheel below the house (powered by the canal? The river? I'm not sure yet) which he used to provide electricity for his woodworking shop — and then closed in 1942, citing low business due to wartime rationing. In 1945, the Aarons sold their property to Wayne and Emma McGhee.

So like I said, the timeline matches up, more or less. The aesthetic matches up, don't you think? (I do.) The one thing that's planted a little seed of doubt for me is the distances. Old advertisements for the Cat and Fiddle have always described it as "two miles above Point Pleasant." The Witch House postcard, however, is labeled "1/2 mile north of Point Pleasant, PA." 

Still. The acreage laid out in Carrie Aaron's 1932 deed is a whopping 26.329 acres, but there's a lot of legal metes and bounds stuff in the deeds that I don't understand — the Tinicum Pines Association contained something like a dozen parcels of land, and when the whole batch of them were sold in 1967 (the entirety belonging, by then, to Winifred Gauvreau, widow of journalist Emile Gauvreau) the acreage added up to 87.5 acres. A Perkasie Herald article published on October 5 of that year described the property as having "about a mile and a quarter of [river] frontage, of which one mile is Prahls Island."

Obviously I need to do a little more digging.

 

Postcard from the Collection of the Mercer Museum Library of the Bucks County Historical Society (SC-36, 44-225)
Clippings from Newspapers.com