Irwin Richardt was a modern day freedom fighter and a living
relic of the United States’ revolutionary heritage. He lived
in a section of Bernards Township ironically called “Liberty
Corner,” on a 22-acre spread he referred to as “Sons of
Liberty” farm. He’d tap the maple trees that covered it
for syrup, his chosen method of making a living.
His mind and lifestyle seemed a throwback to the late 1700s.
He had no telephone in the Colonial clapboard house in which he was
born and still resided. He rode a bicycle because he refused to pay
for car insurance. Prior to taking to his two-wheeler, Richardt
drove a red, white, and blue bus emblazoned with the words of his
hero, Thomas Jefferson. When he was pulled over, rather than
producing an insurance card, he showed the cops a Bible and argued
that he already had the best coverage available to a motorist. His
refusal to buy car insurance led to a jail stint of two months
during 1987 for the citizen-patriot.
Besides insurance, Richardt also refused to pay certain taxes that
he didn’t approve of. He’d pass out copies of the
Constitution to people he happened to meet, and when he was hauled
into court for refusing to respect laws that he deems contrary to
the spirit of the nation’s roots, he defended himself by
citing that document. He never hired a lawyer.
Probably the most attention grabbing aspect of Richardt’s
property was the plethora of crudely made signs that he posted
around the perimeter that expounded his own personal philosophies.
The most notorious of these was a large American flag next to a
sign that read “That US Flag represents just one thing, the
US Constitution. Obey it or be cited for treason.”
His hero worship of Thomas Jefferson was well known around Bernards
Township. He attended the town’s annual Fourth of July
parades just to get the opportunity to sing all four stanzas of
“The Star Spangled Banner.” An advocate of
self-government and rugged individualism, Richardt was the
embodiment of the Founding Fathers’ ideal citizen for their
new republic–the independent and upstanding farmer. Richardt
once protested the construction of a new police building by
displaying a sign urging, “Raze the police
state.”
As one might expect, this eighteenth-century specimen grew rather
upset when the municipality again decided to nab some a seven foot
wide, four-hundred-foot long portion of his “sacred,
sovereign land” to widen Somerville Road, in January 1999.
The last time the government audaciously swiped part of his domain
(to widen Allen Road over a decade earlier) police had to accompany
workers to his house. An enemy of big and intrusive government,
like the Founders, Richardt threatened to protect his property with
arms, saying “If anyone else tries to confiscate my sacred
land, I shall have no other choice than to do what my forefathers
did at Concord Bridge.”
Irwin Richardt passed away in 2006, but to his death, he fought off
bureaucracy and retained an ideal and a lifestyle that might be,
for all intents and purposes, just American history.
-Weird NJ
