This area has a new municipal complex now, but it wasn’t always that way. Before the expansion of the township and the university, this was prime farmland. In the late 1800s, it was owned by Giles Merriweather and his wife, Mary Beth.
Giles and Mary Beth were married very young in something of an arranged marriage, allowing Giles to increase his land holdings in the area substantially. While the marriage was successful financially and Giles was not known to seek the affection of other women, the couple became the subject of significant gossip in town as they went from their teens to their twenties and into their early thirties without having children.
Giles was known as a dashing young man and Mary Beth was, as the townspeople put it, rather plain-looking at best. And so it was perhaps unavoidable that the women of Piscataway knew Giles to have a wandering eye when he and Mary Beth were in town. It became worse as Giles’ eyesight began to fail. Giles needed thicker and thicker glasses, and his wandering glances at the women of Piscataway became long, ogling stares, often right in front of May Beth.
Over time, their marriage soured over a rather peculiar fight: Giles was known to lose his glasses and not be able to find them. As his eyesight became poorer and poorer he began to suspect Mary Beth was hiding them from him, and was known to curse bitterly as he stumbled around the property searching for them and demanding Marth Beth help him search for his glasses.
Some folks in town pointed to Giles’ wandering eye and blamed Mary Beth for hiding the glasses. Others pointed to Mary Beth’s tendency towards jealousy. Some others noted that Giles was known to enjoy his drink a bit too much, and they pointed out that Mary Beth denied hiding his glasses, and perhaps Giles was at fault for getting drunk and leaving the glasses lying around before bed.
One day, Giles went missing and was never heard from—err, seen—again. The police and the gossipers in town had several theories. One was that Giles was wandering around his property after having too much to drink one night, without his glasses, and he stumbled into the Raritan River. There was a second, more sinister theory. A law had recently been passed in the state legislature allowing women to own and inherit property in New Jersey. Since they had no children, Mary Beth stood to gain considerable fortune from Giles’ demise. And the day Giles went missing, he had been particularly aggressive in gazing at the young women of Piscataway during a trip with Mary Beth to pick up supplies. The theory goes that Giles took to wandering around and yelling at her to find his glasses, and she just couldn’t take it any more.
This cache is part of the Socially Distanced Halloween series. A number is listed on the log sheet that will allow you to find the bonus mystery cache, The Mysterious Outbreak of 1720. This cache has a log and pencil, and there is room for swag items and trackables.
The rest of the series is here: