Dalvin Nally was born in this area in 1895. He only ever received an education to the sixth grade, but he left school and took odd jobs in the area, saving all of his money. Dalvin dreamed of buying some land and starting an apple orchard in the area, with the goal of making the most New Jersey of products: Applejack, otherwise known as Jersey Lightning.
Dalvin finally saved enough money to buy his orchard and enough seeds for a first crop. He closed on a plot of land nearby in the fall of 1918, and got his first crop in the ground before the winter came.
Dalvin was never one to keep up with politics or current events. Which was unfortunate, because if he had, he may have known about the growing Prohibition movement. The 18th Amendment was ratified in January of 1919, and the value of apples went through the floor. Earl tried to hang on, but was forced to sell his land for pennies on the dollar in 1923.
He bounced around and struggled to regain some security for a few years, and had just put some money down on a new farm when the Depression hit.
Penniless again, Dalvin took to hustling and gambling. He was run out of several towns in the area, and eventually took to hopping on rail cars and moving from town to town out west, staying as long as he could until his hustling ways got him ran out of each town.
In 1935, Dalvin’s father passed away and he came back to attend the funeral. He of course needed some money to help with the arrangements, so he asked around and found a poker game that happened late in the night on a stump in these woods. To his surprise, he showed up that evening and found several of the people he had previously hustled, and still owed money to. Something in his gut told him to leave, but he needed the money badly, so he took up with the other men playing poker.
But Dalvin never played the game straight. It was around 3:00 a.m. when one of the men he already owed money to caught him dealing from the bottom of the deck. Ironically, it was the apple jack from the still that Dalvin had consumed that lowered his dexterity, leading to getting caught as a cheat.
Justice in those days was often meted out swiftly. And it was in this case. Several of the men held Dalvin’s hands down on the stump and another grabbed an axe.
No one knows what happened to Dalvin after that. Most folks thought he joined a traveling circus, but others thought they recognized a patient who turned up at the State Psychiatric Hospital in Trenton a few years later. But legend has it that Dalvin’s hands are still in these woods, and some people swear they’ve seen them dealing cards on a stump late in the night.
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 only has room for a log, so BYOP.
The other caches in this series are: