Tim Richardson

Creekbanks Tim Richardson

On an autumn morning in 1938, 92 year old Civil War veteran Michael McBride begins to tell his granddaughter, Katy Rose, the story of the McBride and Calhoun families. It is a story that begins along the banks of the River Ballynaclough near Limerick, Ireland, in 1789, and ends alongside the New Jersey Turnpike in 1974, a span of 185 years. A house that sits at the intersection of I-295 and the Beverly Rancocas Road outside the village of Rancocas was the inspiration for this story, but Creekbanks was never meant to be a story about a house, but a story about people's lives, and where and how they lived them. From the banks of the Ballynaclough, the Delaware, the Catoctin, and the Rancocas, to the divided City of Baltimore, Beverly's Camp Cadwallader, Philadelphia's Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, provost duty in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, the Union Supply Depot at City Point, VA, and the battlefields of the Wilderness, and the Shenandoah Valley, the decks of the Loving Union, the USS Lexington, and the USS Rhind, Creekbanks is not just the story of the McBride's or the Calhoun's, it is a story about America, it is a story about us. Shipmates, friends, in-laws, cousins, Freemasons. and convertibles, advise from an aging Benjamin Franklin, an encounter with a US President, a meeting with General Ulysses S. Grant, and assistance in pulling off a wedding provided by a US Senator named Harry S. Truman, all have a role to play in this American journey.