On the Banks of the Raritan:The Historical Significance of Raritan Landing

David Steven CohenNew Jersey Historical Commission

Abstract: This paper was delivered as my comments at a session titled “A New Jersey Port Community: Raritan Landing, 1720-1870,”at the annual meeting of Society on Historical and Underwater Archaeology held in Providence, Rhode Island, on January 14-19, 2003. In it I argue the importance of using an interdisciplinary approach (including archaeology, historical geography, architectural history, ethnic history, the history of religion, and local history) to understanding the historical significance of objects and places (both large and small). In this case, the papers all deal with archaeological findings at Raritan Landing, a location on the north bank of the Raritan River in Piscataway, New Jersey, today.

The Landing’s geographical location is at the head of navigation on the Raritan River. Farmers would bring their crops by road from Somerset County both the north and south branches of the Raritan to be loaded onto schooners. This brought Raritan Landingin conflict with Perth Amboy, the former capital of East New Jersey, which was an official port of entry for New Jersey. Also,this put the landing and Piscataway Township in the center of theLand Riots in the 1740s between the East Jersey Proprietors and the settlers of Piscataway who held their land by virtue of the 1884 Elizabethtown Patent from Governor Nicolls of New York.

There was also an ethnic dimension to this conflict, because the East Jersey Proprietors were predominantly Scottish and the settlers at Raritan Landing were a mixture of Dutch and English. This is reflected in the houses and barns throughout the Raritan Valley. The valley was also the center of the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, which split the Dutch Reformed Church into two factions: one based in New York City and the other in New Brunswick. Historians have shown that there was a correlation between these factions and support for the American Revolution.

Finally, and most importantly, Raritan Landing had a strategic military significance during the American Revolution. British

troops were stationed there at the crossing after Washington’s retreat across New Jersey in the winter of 1776-1777. Washington had scouts overlooking the valley from the Watchung Mountains. When the British General William Howe withdrew his troops from the valley, Washington assumed he was sending them up the Hudson River to reinforce General John Burgoyne, was proceeding down from Canada to divide the American colonies in half. Instead, Howe sent his forces to the Delaware Valley to attack the de facto American capital at Philadelphia. As a result, Burgoyne wasdefeated by the American General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Saratoga, which brought France into the war as an American ally, which in turn resulted in the British surrender at Yorktown.

One of the challenges in studying material culture and local history is determining the historical significance of objects and places (both small and large) without blowing them out of proportion. In local history, for example, there is a tendency to make very local skirmish into the “turning point” of the American Revolution. And I can imagine in the field of salvage archaeology, as politicians and construction crews stand by impatiently, there’s a need to justify the time and money spent on a local dig. As a scholar trained in the field of American Studies, I am unapologetic in my belief that questions of historical significance cannot be answered solely in terms of a single discipline, whether it be archaeology, architectural history, economic history, or the history of religion. Thisinterdisciplinary approach is exemplified in the papers presented in the volume, which have drawn upon a multiplicity of sources, not just the archaeological record.Yet I want to suggest some additional avenues that might illuminate a bit more the significance of Raritan Landing.

2

http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/PISCATAWAY/RaritanLanding.jpg

Rebecca Yamin and Brenda Springsted stress the commercial and kinship ties between Raritan Landing and the farming families upstream along the north and south branchesof the Raritan River. They make effective use of business records of the inland country stores owned by Janeway and Broughton in Bound Brook and Peter Dumont in South Branch. Raritan Landing’s significance was in part its location at the head of navigation on the river, making it a transshipment point between land and water. The “Road up Raritan” ran on the Raritan Landing side of the river, not the New Brunswick side. This gave the Landing an advantageover New Brunswick, which had road connections to Middlebush, Three-Mile Run, and Six-Mile Run, but not to theinterior hinterland of the Raritan Valley. This advantage is confirmed in the store records, which show Jeremiah Van Deventer of Raritan Landing carting goods from the landing to South Branch.

The significance of Raritan Landing was not as a major port, but as part of a commercial network. While the other end of the network is not stressed in her current essay, Rebecca Yamin in her 1988 dissertation establishes the

3

kinship and trade ties between Raritan Landing and New York City, most notably in the persons of Cornelius Low and his brother Peter Low, both merchants at the Landing. I think it’s correct to say that New Brunswick and Raritan Landing were not in competition as much as they were complementary in trade. However, as James Levitt has shown in his book For Want of Trade (1981), both New Brunswick and Raritan Landing were in competition with Perth Amboy located at the mouth of the Raritan River.

http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/HISTORICALMAPS/rar_riv%20copy.jpg

I think there was more to the relationship between Raritan Landing and Perth Amboy than initially meets the eye. First, it was one of the three ports of entry in colonial New Jersey, along with Salem and Burlington both onthe Delaware River. Vessels going to and from Raritan Landing had to put in at Perth Amboy, if they wanted to shipto the Caribbean islands. This port of entry status of PerthAmboy was hard-won. In the late seventeenth century, New

4

York governors did not want to grant either commercial or political sovereignty to New Jersey. They claimed the 1664 grant from the Duke of York to George Carteret and John, Lord Berkeley, mentioned a conveyance of land, but there wasno mention of the right of government. As a result, the seventeenth-century governors of New York claimed that theirgovernance extended to New Jersey.

Secondly, Perth Amboy was one of the two capitals of the royal colony of New Jersey (a survival from the period from 1676 through 1702, when New Jersey was divided into thetwo proprietary colonies of East New Jersey and West New Jersey). As such, Perth Amboy was the seat of power of the Scottish proprietors of East New Jersey. The Scottish proprietors, who were also Quakers, switched the capital of East New Jersey from Elizabethtown to Perth Amboy, which they named after the Earl of Perth. According to Ned Landsman in his 1985 book Scotland and Its First American Colony, they wanted to replicate in the interior of the Raritan Valley a society of large, landed estates similar to what they had known in the Northeast of Scotland. They wanted totenant these estates with indentured servants. Several suchestates were established in Somerset County in places such as Peapack.

However, their vision for New Jersey society was on a collision course with the settlers in Piscataway. The Piscataway Patent of 1669 was originally part of the Elizabethtown Patent of 1664, which was granted by Governor Richard Nicolls of New York, not by the East New Jersey Proprietors. The Piscataway settlers were freeholders, not tenants. As freeholders, they did not own the land in the modern meaning of the word. They held the land, which meantthey could buy and sell as well as will and inherit the land, but they still owed a feudal obligation known as a quit-rent. However, because of the claim that they held theland under a grant from Governor Nicolls, the Piscataway settlers, like others in Monmouth, Essex, and Middlesex counties refused to pay quit-rents to the East Jersey

5

Proprietors. In 1700 the freeholders in Piscataway used physical force to prevent the Middlesex County Court of Quarter Sessions from convening. These land disputes were one of the factors that led to the establishment of the royal colony of New Jersey in 1702. The Scottish proprietors in Perth Amboy retained title to the land, if not governance, even after East and West New Jersey were reunited into a single royal colony in 1702. And the issue of non-payment of quitrents continued to be an issue during the so-called Land Riots in the 1740s.

Historian Brendan McConville argues that there was a relationship between the land riots in the 1740s and the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, which swept through the British American colonies at the same time. Thecenter of the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies was in New Brunswick, where Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, domineof several Dutch Reformed churches in the Raritan Valley andGilbert Tennent, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New Brunswick. Randall Balmer has noted that the revival split the denominations and congregations into two factions -- the so-called Coetus and the Conferentie factions in the Dutch Reformed Church. The Conferentie faction was in New York City, where Dutch-American wealthy merchant families were willing to ally themselves, and even in some cases join, the Anglican Church, rather than side with the Coetus faction, with it seat of power in the countryside. The Dutch in New York City settled for a professorship for a Dutch Reformed domine at the predominantly Anglican King’s College (today Columbia University), as opposed to the founding in the Raritan Valley of a separate college to train “New Light” Dutch Reformed ministers, which was named Queen’s College (Rutgers University today). At the same time the College of New Jersey (today Princeton University) was founded to train “New Light” Presbyterian ministers originally in Elizabethtown and later moved to Newark and finally Princeton. Balmer notes that this religious schism is later correlated with the Whig/Tory split during the American Revolution. It is notable that Cornelius Low of

6

Raritan Landing joined the Anglican Church in New Brunswick and later became a Loyalist.

Lowe House, Piscataway, NJhttp://www.revolutionarynj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/132270700377d414c8557e844aeb16881c701e7fff.jpg

The growing gulf between New York City and the Raritan Valley in religious matters might have something to do with the shift in trading patterns noted by Yamin to less dependence on New York good and more local trade starting inthe 1740s. Yamin also notes a growing independence from NewYork City in ceramic types as evidence of growing local identity. (Yamin, 1988, pp. 19, 23.) Brenda Springsted also sees trade shifts in the 1740s in the business records of the Janeway country store which sold locally produced stoneware, rather than imported ceramics. All of this is in keeping with my own research on Dutch-American farms, which points to the 1740s as a watershed period in the Mid-Atlantic Colonies. I see this decade as a time of structural culture change in which the Dutch in America became Dutch-Americans. It can be seen development in a newtype of farmhouse unlike anything they had in Europe (which I term the Dutch-American farmhouse), changes in the Dutch-American family structure, as well as the abovementioned changes in the Dutch Reformed church (Cohen, 1992).

7

This brings us to the question of cultural boundaries in the Raritan Valley. The valley was not a center of Dutch-American regional culture as were the Hudson Valley, Bergen County, and Monmouth County. Rather, the Raritan Valley was part of what McConville has termed a “multi-ethnic cultural zone.” (McConville, 1999, pp. 64-66.) The seventeenth century settlers of Piscataway included Baptistsat New Market (the Fitz Randolph family), New Englanders from the Piscataqua River region of New Hampshire (hence thename Piscataway), Scottish Presbyterians, English (the Antill family), and the culturally Dutch from Long Island and Albany. I use the term culturally Dutch, because they included Flemish (the Bodine family) and French Huguenots (the Perrine family) and well as Dutch from the Netherlands (the Onderdunk and Smock families).

The multi-ethnic culture area is a key to understandingthe material culture of the Raritan Valley. Certainly, therewere survivals of Dutch culture in the valley. Historical geographer Peter Wacker mapped Dutch Reformed churches and Dutch barns in the Raritan Valley. For the barns, he used Revolutionary War damage claims, which perhaps overstated the degree to which the Raritan Valley was a center of Dutchculture in comparison to Bergen County. (Wacker, 1977/78, pp. 952-3.) The British occupied the Raritan Valley during the winter of 1776 and 1777 and their foraging in the countryside probably resulted in more destruction (includingDutch barns) than was experienced in Bergen County.

Certainly, the settlement pattern along the river valley flats was consistent with Dutch settlement patterns. The Dutch were comfortable with this kind of settlement because they knew how to dyke their fields and were not afraid of floods caused by hurricanes, such as the one in 1749 mentioned by Scott Stull. However, dyked fields were also common in the fenlands of East Anglia. True, Dutch engineers introduced this technology to the English, but by the time of the settlement in New Jersey dyked fields were

8

not longer solely the possession of the Dutch. In fact, dyked fields are most common along the Delaware Bay and eventoday are used in salt hay harvesting in South Jersey. There is no proof of a direct Dutch connection for the dykedfields along Delaware Bay, and I don’t believe anyone has studied the existence of dyked fields in the Raritan Valley.(Wacker and Clemens, 1995, pp. 120-127.)

Van Wickle House, Somerset, New Jerseyhttp://www.themeadowsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/van-wickle1.png

The farmhouses in the Raritan Valley also reflect the “multi-ethnic” culture region. There is at least one surviving farmhouse in the Raritan Valley that is clearly Dutch. This is the Van Wickle farmhouse in Somerset, New Jersey, about 2 miles upstream from Raritan Landing, but on the New Brunswick side of the river. Simon Van Wickle was anative of New Lotts on Long Island. He married Geradina Couwenhoven and moved to the Raritan Valley prior to 1726. (Mather, p. 119) The wood-framed farmhouse they built along the banks of the Raritan was similar to those in Brooklyn. It faces the river unlike the farmhouses built by other Dutch families along River Road in Piscataway, which are located with the gable end facing the road and river, which

9

is more characteristic of Dutch farmhouses in northern New Jersey. Most of these other farmhouses represent a mixed tradition with English framing, but gable end chimneys, rather than the New England central chimney. Some of the farmhouses in the eighteenth century along River Road had gambrel roofs, such as Ross Hall, which is no longer standing. However, Ross Hall was built by the English Antill family, not a Dutch family. (Wall, 1931, p. 26.) And, as I have noted elsewhere, the gambrel roof is not an architectural feature that be traced back to the Netherlandsanyway. Furthermore, Yamin has noted the use of English measures in the foundations of structures at Raritan Landing. The orientation of the farmhouses along River Roadwith their gable ends facing the road and the river was common among Flemish farmhouses. On the other hand, it is notable that the Cornelius Low House on a bluff overlooking Landing Lane is an English Georgian mansion, not a Dutch or Dutch-American farmhouse, befitting Low’s status as an Anglicized Dutch merchant.

It also can be said that there is an ethnic component to Raritan Landing being a trading site. While there is a widespread misconception that the Dutch introduced the merchant tradition into American culture, a misconception furthered by the writing of historians such as Donna Merwick, this is a gross oversimplification, as I have argued elsewhere (Merwick, 1990). Like the Puritans, the Dutch were devout Calvinists who had religious and well as economic motives, and despite the origins of New Netherland as predominantly a fur-trading activity, agricultural production was soon added to its economy as the fur trade shifted into the interior. The Dutch traditions that last the longest were the agricultural traditions; Dutch merchants rather quickly acculturating to English folkways soon after the English conquest of New Netherland (Cohen, 1992).

Richard Veit and Bob Wiencek remind us that Raritan Landing also had a military significance, particularly

10

during the Revolutionary War. Like the economic significance of the Landing, its military significance must be seen in terms of the larger strategy of the Revolutionary. One must note the importance of the bridge across the Raritan at Landing Lane, which was built in 1772.Contrary to the famous 1777 map of The Province of New Jersey, Divided into East and West, Commonly Called the Jerseys, published by theLondon mapmaker William Faden, and which contains numerous inaccuracies, there was not a second bridge at New Brunswick, only John Inian’s ferry. Thus, the bridge at Raritan Landing was the only bridge across the river betweenPerth Amboy and Bound Brook.

http://www.rt23.com/maps/images/1780_map.jpg

Once the theater of war shifted to the Middle Colonies in the spring of 1776, Washington was concerned that the British would divide the colonies in two by conquering the Hudson River Valley. This is the reason he fortified Fort

11

Lee and Fort Washington on either side of the Hudson River. Staten Island was strategically important to the British as a staging area. It was here that the British General William Howe landed troops in July 1776 prior to launching his invasion of Long Island. It was from here that the British launched raids into New Jersey during the later phases of the war. In fact, Staten Island is closer to New Jersey than it is to New York. If Howe had sent troops fromStaten Island to Perth Amboy and up the Raritan Valley in November of 1776, after the British defeated the Americans at Fort Washington and Fort Lee, he could have cut off Washington’s retreat across New Jersey and ended the war then and there. As it was, Washington didn’t have time to destroy the bridge at Raritan Landing, and the control of this crucial crossing was the reason why Howe posted an encampment at Raritan Landing in the winter of 1776-1777, after the battles of Trenton and Princeton.

Washington shrewdly went into winter headquarters at Morristown, which was protected from the British in the Raritan Valley and New York City by the Watchung Mountains and the Great Swamp. It also enabled Washington to keep an eye on British troop movements from sentinels posted along the ridge of the Watchung in an attempt to determine whetherthe next British move would be north through the Hudson River Valley or south to attack the de facto American capitol at Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress was sitting. In May 1777, Washington took up a position in the Watchung Mountains at Middle Brook, overlooking the Raritan Valley seven miles upstream from New Brunswick. In June, the British withdrew from Raritan Landing and New Brunswick through Perth Amboy and back to Staten Island in preparationfor an attack on Philadelphia. Washington quickly moved outof the Raritan Valley to intercept the British south of the American capitol. This left British General John Burgoyne, who was marching from Canada to divide the American coloniesin half along the Hudson Valley alone to confront American General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Saratoga. As a result of the American victory at Saratoga, the French

12

decided to come into the war on the American side. (For an interactive online lesson with documentation, see: “What Would You Do? Washington, Howe, Cornwallis and the New Jersey Campaign,” on the New Jersey History Partnership Project Web page.) Thus, during this critical time in the conduct of the war, the Raritan Valley and especially the bridge at Raritan Landing were of crucial strategic importance in the chess match between Washington and Howe for the control of the Middle Colonies.

It was not until 1794 that a bridge was built across the Raritan River at the foot of Albany Street in New Brunswick. This bridge was the beginning of the end of Raritan Landing as an important transshipment location for the Raritan Valley. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a battled developed between New York and New Jerseyfor control of steamboat transportation between New York City and New Brunswick. The dispute went back to a monopolygranted by the State of New York to Robert Fulton and RobertLivingston. The inheritors of this New York granted monopoly claimed that New York waters extended to the New Jersey shoreline and up the Raritan River to New Brunswick. The matter was finally settled by the famous United States Supreme Court decision of Gibbons v. Ogden in which the court negated the New York monopoly on the grounds that it interfered with inter-state commerce. But even more critical for the decline of Raritan Landing was the completion in 1834 of the New York Railroad tracks between New Brunswick and Newark, and the opening same year of the Delaware and Raritan Canal on the opposite shore of the Raritan River from the Landing (Lane, 1939, pp. 173-194).

Finally, Rebecca Yamin and Daniel Roberts examine how Raritan Landing was remembered by local historian CorneliusClarkson Vermeule, who grew up in a house near the Landing. They note that at the time Vermeule wrote down his remembrances in the 1930s the place that he remembered as “adeserted village” was already buried with barely a trace of its former existence. Vermeule was trained as an engineer,

13

but his work on dismantling the Morris Canal in the 1920s probably piqued his interest in local history. Yamin and Roberts emphasize Vermeule’s limitations as a local historian, how his prose was Biblical, his attitude nostalgic, his methodology limited to genealogy (sometimes containing errors), and his emphasize limited to the prominent and wealthy merchants. Yet this is a similarity between Vermeule’s fascination with attempting to understandwhat to naked eye (the “picture” to which he refers in the phrase “We have for you no picture of a deserted village”) was no more than a pasture by the 1930s and the attempt of archaeologists to see the past in what lies below the surface of the present-day landscape.

The local historian, one the one hand, and the

archaeologist and academically trained historian, on the other hand, use different methods, ask different questions, and reach different conclusions. But as Yamin and Roberts acknowledge, the professional archaeologist and historian often sift through the research of the local historian to find the bits and pieces of information that lead to their grander conclusions. I personally became interested in history through exposure to a local historian. Growing up in the Pascack Valley of Bergen County, as a high school student I met local historian John C. Storms, who had written about the so-called “Jackson Whites” of the Ramapo Mountains. I was fascinated by Mr. Storms as a living connection to the past; he was born in the previous century and came from an old Jersey Dutch family. Years later, as agraduate student of American Civilization and Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, I was reminded of Mr. Storms’ work, and I decided to embark upon a study of the relationship between the legendary and historical origins ofthis racially-mixed group. One result of this study was my coming to the conclusion that local historians are often thetransmitters of local legends and in some cases even the creators of them.

14

Thus, local history as done by untrained historians should not be judged by the standards of academic history. Their writings should be examined as folklore, or in the words as Roberts and Yamin, as “memory.” This is not to denigrate the importance of local history. How a place is remembered is as important as what it historically might have been. It is far more important that it be remembered than that it to be forgotten Here both the archaeologist and the local historian are doing the Lord’s work, that is, helping us see the picture that may not be before our eyes.

In summary, the historical significance of Raritan Landing should been seen in terms of the trade networks between the Raritan Valley and New York, the shift in that trade network to the Raritan Valley in the 1740s, the political and economic conflict between New Brunswick and the hinterlands with the proprietors based in Perth Amboy, the multi-ethnic nature of Piscataway and the Raritan Valley, the realignment between ethnic and religious denominations during the First Great Awakening, and the strategic location of the bridge at Raritan Landing during the Revolutionary War. Time has passed by Raritan Landing, just as the cars and trucks that now speed past this site onthe Route 18 extension, their drivers and passengers taking little or no notice of its existence. Although the remnants of the Landing have been buried again by highway widening and expansion, we should be mindful of the significance of this place at another time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balmer, Randall H. 1989. A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and the English Culture in the Middle Colonies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cohen, David Steven.1992. The Dutch-American Farm. American Social Experience Series. New York and London: New York University Press.

15

_________________. 1974. The Ramapo Mountain People. New Brunswick and London; Rutgers University Press.

Lane, Wheaton J. 1939. From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and Transportation in New Jersey, 1620-1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mather, Edith H. “Van Wickle of Somerset and Middlesex Counties, New Jersey.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, 118-199.

Merwick, Donna. 1990. Possessing Albany, 1630-1710 : The Dutch and English Experiences. Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press.

Landsman, Ned C. 1985. Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683-1765. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Levitt, James H. 1981. For Want of Trade: Shipping and the New Jersey Ports, 1680-1783. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society.

McConville, Brendan. 1999. These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Miers, Earl Schenck. 1964. Where the Raritan Flows. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Yamin, Rebecca. 1988. “The Raritan Landing Traders: Local Trade in Pre-Revolutionary New Jersey,” Unpublished Ph.D.dissertation, New York University.

Vermeule, C. C. 1936. “Raritan Landing That Was: The History of a River Port from 1675 to 1875.” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 54: 85-115.

Wacker, Peter O. 1977/78. “Dutch Material Culture in New Jersey.” Journal of Popular Culture 11:948-957.

16

_______________ and Paul G. E. Clemens. 1995. Land Use in Early New Jersey: A Historical Geography. Newark: New Jersey HistoricalSociety.

Wall, John P. 1931. The Chronicles of New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1667-1931. New Brunswick, N.J.: Thatcher-Anderson Co.

17