A History of the city of Newark, New Jersey : embracing practically two and a half centuries, 1666-1913, Volume I, Part 15

Author: Urquhart, Frank J. (Frank John), 1865- 4n; Lewis Historical Publishing Company. 4n
Publication date: 1913
Publisher: New York, N.Y. ; Chicago, Ill. : The Lewis Historical Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 1186


USA > New Jersey > Essex County > Newark > A History of the city of Newark, New Jersey : embracing practically two and a half centuries, 1666-1913, Volume I > Part 15


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OTHER HIGHWAYS.


The first road actually laid out by the commission of high- ways for Essex county (which was created in 1675) was a highway in Elizabethtown, in 1698, ( Elizabethtown being then and for more than a century thereafter, in Essex). The first legally laid road between Newark and Elizabethtown was provided for in 1705, which run "as the old road runs to Newark." The "old road" was un- doubtedly the ancient Indian trail, one of those leading from the territory of the Raritan Indians below Weequahic or Bound Creek into the territory of the Hackensacks, the Indians who owned the Newark region. In 1707 the road along the west bank of the Passaic, starting apparently at Mill Brook (Clay street) and following the line of what is now Belleville avenue, was laid out. It turned down to the riverside at the present Gully road, on the northern boundary of what is now Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, and proceeded up the river bank to Passaic, then called Acquackanonck.


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High street was probably opened a few years after Newark was founded, but there is no record of it until 1709.


The old Bloomfield road was built about 1716. Bloomfield, then Wardsessons, was begun by the second generation of Newarkers, about 1700. Franklin street, Bloomfield, is none other than the "old road," which entered the present Newark at the head of Branch Brook Park, ran southeast in winding fashion down to what is now Mt. Prospect avenue, entering it at Abington avenue. From there it continued down Second avenue into the present Belleville avenue and thus to the Mill Brook. Several roads were laid out from the main and original streets of the town to the meadows to aid the people in getting out their salt hay.


THE "MOUNTAIN SOCIETY."


The community expanded with the building of the roads. It did not grow at all rapidly, but the people moved further out, appreciating the improving facilities for travel and for the trans- port of their goods, and becoming convinced that they need no longer anticipate trouble from the red men, now disappearing. In 1719 the community in the Oranges had grown sufficiently large to warrant the establishment of a church there, the first offshoot of the original First Church of Newark. This new congregation was known as the "Mountain Society." Two or three years before this, the second edifice of the original Newark congregation was erected, a little north of the first building, on Broad street. It was built of stone (of the brownstone now beginning to come out of the local quarries). The new Newark church gloried in a steeple, the first in Newark, with a bell, likewise the first in all the region. The Rev. Dr. Alexander Macwhorter said of this church in his famous "Century Sermon," preached on January 1, 1801, "that all the people in Newark could have sat upon the foundations of this building," which was no doubt an exaggeration, as there were upwards of six hundred souls in the village by that time. In 1726 a church was established at Second River (Belleville) for a Dutch congregation, and about the same time another further up the river


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at Acquackanonck. These churches did not arise because of schisms or dissensions, but were a natural response to the growth of the region, all of which was still within the confines of the town- ship of Newark.


THE REGION'S POPULATION IN 1730.


It is impossible to closely estimate the actual population of the entire region considered as being in the township, from the east bank of the Passaic to South Orange, Orange proper, Mont- clair, Bloomfield, Belleville, Nutley and Acquackanonck, but it must have approximated two thousand in 1730.


PURITANISM LOSING ITS GRIP.


Newark was, by 1730, casting aside many of its early and original Puritan characteristics. The children of the founders had ceased to impose the religious qualifications set down in the "Fundamental Agreements" and there was now a sprinkling of those of other faiths, notably a small following of the Church of England. This was made up largely of the owners of the fine manor houses on the east bank of the Passaic, in what are now Kearny and Arlington, then called Barbadoes Neck. The persecu- tion of the Congregational and Presbyterian congregations by Lord Cornbury, the first royalist governor, was in some small measure responsible for the growth of Episcopacy here, for while Cornbury was not a Church of England zealot by any means, he was bitterly opposed to the other congregations, apparently consid- ering them instruments for the further disquietude of the Crown's administration in New Jersey.


A Church of England missionary, established for a time at Elizabethtown, wrote, in 1731, that he sometimes traveled as far into the country as Whippany holding services, adding that he found his congregations increasing. Episcopal services were held occasionally in Newark as early as 1730, possibly a year or so earlier.


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COLONEL OGDEN BREAKS THE SABBATH.


Conditions were therefore ripe for the establishment of a congregation of the Church of England, when one late summer Sunday, in the early 1730's (about 1733), Colonel Josiah Ogden, one of the leading men in Newark, got into difficulties with the fathers of the First Church. He was a son of Elizabeth Swain, by her first husband, and she is believed to have been the first of the Branford group of settlers to land upon Newark soil. The summer season of 1730 had been one of much rain. But this particular Sunday was clear and bright, and Colonel Ogden decided to take advantage of the smiling skies. He called his household together and, going into his fields, moved his wheat, already cut, into his barn. He saved his grain, but in so doing destroyed then and there the absolute religious sovereignty of the original church of Newark, the centre and citadel of the "Little Kingdom of God on Earth" which the Puritans founded Newark to establish.


AN EPOCH-MAKING DISSENSION.


Colonel Ogden was disciplined by the First Church for breaking the Sabbath in a manner contrary to all rule and precedent, being publicly censured. The First Church had before this gone over to Presbyterianism and was part of the Philadelphia Synod. The case was laid before the Presbytery, and the drastic action of the church in seeking to humble so powerful and so good a man as Colonel Ogden, whose life was full of public works, and who had represented the town in the Assembly from 1716 to 1721, was reversed. But the Colonel was a fighter. He felt that there could no longer be any peace and harmony for him within the walls of a church where so innocent an action as his seeking to save his prop- erty on Sunday at a time of emergency, could be viewed so harshly by a considerable number of the congregation. Others in the congregation shared his views. It was a revolt of "Progressives" against "regulars" or reactionaries. It was a striking manifesta- tion of the very spirit of self-reliance and independence that had sent the Puritan founders of Newark out of Connecticut; it was


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the last physical demonstration, here, of the inevitable result of the attempt at rigid adherence to the old Puritan doctrines, in a new country, where independence and tolerance were waxing in strength and power every day.


THE FOUNDING OF TRINITY EPISCOPAL CHURCH.


The dissension was even carried before the Philadelphia Synod and solemnly debated. The breach was never healed, and out of it was born Trinity Episcopal Church, for its founders declared they had come to the conclusion that there was more true religion in the Church of England than in the ancient institution that their fathers had come out of Connecticut to establish, which was pure and wholesome enough when first set up in the wilderness on the Passaic's banks, but which had now, in their day and generation, grown too harsh and uncharitable to permit their longer remaining within its doors.


The founders of the new church insisted that they be given a proper share of the parsonage lands, contending that they were as much the descendants of the pioneer settlers as their fellow towns- men in the First Church. They were conceded the right to land for their new church upon some portion of the common lands, even as the First Church had been placed. The location was chosen by a mutual arrangement between the members of the new congrega- tion and the town (although all mention of this dissension is scrupulously avoided in the old Town Minute Book). Committees were appointed on behalf of each party, which met and "staked out the plot." It contained about half an acre and was, where Trinity Church now is, at the head of Military Park. The congregation was not actually organized until about 1736. There is a tradition to the effect that the new church was to remain in possession of the land at the head of what is now Military Park, and which was then the Training Place, "so long as the spire shall stand," which may in part account for the fact that when the present edifice was erected on the site of the original structure (in 1809-10), the tower of the original church was preserved. The old story, occasionally


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heard to this day, that Trinity Church would forfeit to the munici- pality its title to the ground on which it stands, if it ceased to paint its steeple white, has no foundation in fact.


After Colonel Josiah Ogden, the most influential member of the new congregation was Colonel Peter Schuyler, who gave to the church about four and one-half acres of land, the benefits of which the church has scarcely ceased to enjoy to this day (1913). Colonel Schuyler's gift comprised all the land on the upper or northeast side of what is now Park Place, from a point a little west of Park Place terminal, to Broad, then along Rector street to the Passaic, the line returning to Park Place parallel with what is now Saybrook Place and fifty feet or so to the west of it. The first parsonage was built on the southeast side of Broad and Rector streets. Of this handsome gift of land, all that the church now owns is the present rectory property on Park Place and the chapel and graveyard property on Rector street. For more than a century after the War for Independence the church was accustomed to sell small parcels of this tract whenever it needed money.


Beside the land given it by Colonel Schuyler, and the half acre set aside by the town for the church building, in Military Park, there was a certain share of the ancient "common lands" which its members believed belonged to their congregation but to which it did not get title until early in the last century. These lands were located partly in the meadows and partly in the uplands, some of it being in Roseville. But their title was not then and never has. been clear, and the land was leased by the church, at irregular intervals, on ninety or hundred-year leases, which have come to maturity during the last fifteen years or so (1913). In disposing of its right and title to these lands the church has issued quit- claim deeds, requiring in payment, ten per cent. of the actual value of the land (irrespective of buildings), at the time of expiration of the long leases. Thus, during the first years of the twentieth century, Trinity Church congregation has been disposing of the last vestige of its ancient right and title in the so-called common lands.


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THE FEUD THAT LASTED FOR A CENTURY.


The animosities engendered between the two religious factions at the time of Colonel Ogden's memorable Sabbath-day visit to his wheat field did not die out for fully a hundred years. The Rev. Dr. Macwhorter wrote of it, in 1801, as "still before the public." In the War for Independence the greater part of the First Church congregation supported the Continental cause; while nearly all of the members of Trinity remained loyal to the King, suffering the loss of lands and other possessions confiscated by and through the Committee of Safety acting for the new State govern- ment. Yes, the old feud still rankled nearly a score of years after- wards, when many of the one-time loyalists returned from Nova Scotia and from England striving to recover their property. There are old men and women living in Newark to this day (1913), who tell of manifestations of the old differences between the members of the two churches which they noticed as children or learned of by word of mouth from their parents or grandparents.


TRINITY CHURCH BUILDING FUND AUGMENTED BY A LOTTERY.


It was nearly a decade after Trinity Church was established that the first church edifice, the only predecessor of the present house of worship, was completed. The church's charter bears the seal of George II, and the date of February 10, 1746. Funds to finish it were raised by lottery, a very common method for gather- ing money for churches and parsonages, strangely enough. It is hard for us to-day to reconcile the use of the lottery for such a purpose, in a day and generation when a common precept taught the young was, "cards and dice are the devil's device," and when all forms of gambling were rigidly forbidden by acts of the Assembly.


As a matter of fact, the Assembly did frown upon lotteries, but would occasionally authorize them for special and specific purposes. The practice was continued intermittently until after the War for Independence. Many an edifice for divine worship and some for educational purposes reared in various sections of New


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Jersey could scarcely have been provided without lotteries. For the people were poor; there were very few who, even in their day, could be called wealthy. The gaming instinct, also, was strong in those days, as now. The very fact that laws were constantly being enacted to suppress it is the best proof we need of the prevalence of the habit of indulging in games of chance. The end and aim of church lotteries seems in the minds of the people generally, to have justified the practice and to have purged it of all sin. An announcement of the Trinity Church lottery appeared in the New York Gazette in December, 1748. It read as follows :


"SCHEME.


"Of Newark, in New Jersey, Lottery, for raising £337:10:0 Proclamation, for compleating the Church, and building a Parson- age House, consisting of 3,000 tickets at fifteen shillings Proclama- tion, each, 678 of which to be fortunate, viz .: "


The notice then explains that there was to be one prize of £100, two each of £50, of £40, and of £30; three of £20; five of £15; sixteen of £10; twenty of £7; forty of £5; two hundred of £2; four hundred and eighty-seven of £1:10s each. The business was con- ducted in a straightforward manner, every detail being set forth so that the public might know just what sort of a venture it was embarking in. The three thousand lottery tickets realized £2250. From this, fifteen per cent. or £337:10s was deducted as the church's share, leaving £1912 10s for the prizes. The newspaper notice continues:


"The drawing to commence on or before the first day of May next, in Newark aforesaid, under the care and management of Col. Peter Schuyler,' Col. Jacob Ford, Messrs. Frin Lucas and Uzal Ogden, who are to dispose of the tickets and be under oath for the faithful management of the same. The fortunate are to receive their prizes entire, the fifteen per cent. being deducted from the whole sum produced by the sale of the tickets, before the drawing begins, and not from the prizes after they are drawn. Fourteen days' notice at least to be given before the day of draw- ing. The prizes to be printed in this paper when the drawing is concluded. Tickets are to be sold by the printer hereof."


' Who led the New Jersey soldiers in the French and Indian War.


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LOTTERIES THROUGHOUT THE PROVINCE.


On May 1, 1749, the Gazette announced: "The managers of the Newark lottery have began to roll up the blanks and prizes, and [are] preparing to put the numbers in the wheels, so as to be ready certainly to begin the drawing on Tuesday the 16th of this Instant. There remains but a few tickets in the hands of the managers which continue to be sold as usual."


The Trinity Church lottery is the only one in Newark to be noticed in the newspapers of the day. Lotteries came into fashion in New Jersey before 1730. The first acts of the Assembly pro- hibiting them were directed chiefly against schemes for the raflling of goods, and there was then a general feeling that this act was not intended to forbid money lotteries. The most respect- able people of the time embarked in them. The custom grew to such proportions, however, that in the same year and at about the time the Trinity Church lottery was advertised, an act of Assembly was passed putting a stop to all forms of lotteries under heavy penalties. The act was evaded by having the lotteries drawn outside the province, although the managers of the Trinity lottery appear to have had their drawing here in defiance of the law. Ten years later another lottery, the drawing for which was conducted outside the Province, was held, to raise £750 "for the benefit of Trinity Church of Newark and towards building a new English church [Christ Church] at Second River [Belleville]."


A lottery to aid New Jersey College (Princeton) then in Newark, was held in 1749, and the drawing conducted in Phila- delphia. Churches and parsonages were wholly or partially built by lotteries in: Elizabethtown, St. John's Episcopal Church; New Brunswick, New Providence, and Hanover, all about 1748. One printer of that time spoke of the lotteries as "so many at once they were like cabbage too thickly planted, which never suffer one another to come to a head"-from which we infer that not all the lotteries projected came to a successful end.


Colonel Josiah Ogden died in 1763, apparently content with his separation from the Puritan faith of his forefathers and his


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return to the religion which his more ancient forbears in England had found illy suited to their spiritual needs. He left to the church in his will, "my silver cup or porringer with two handles," as Azariah Crane had done with reference to the First Church.


LOCATION OF HISTORIC WHEAT FIELD.


Where was the wheat field that caused all this uproar which took more than a century to quiet? Where were those acres into which Colonel Josiah and his household sallied that peaceful Sabbath day? There is no apparent way of telling with absolute certainty, but the historic grain, in all probability, waved on the gentle slopes comprised between North Canal street and Centre street, or Saybrook Place. In 1763 and for a year thereafter Colonel Josiah's home was offered for sale in the New York news- papers. Here is one of the advertisements :


"To be sold. The late dwelling house of Col. Josiah Ogden, at Newark, being built of Free-stone, two and a half story, has six good rooms and fire-places, besides a kitchen with a Garden and Barn, and also about four acres of very good mowing or pasture land, with an Orchard thereon of choice fruit lying near said house, which is pleasently situated at the most publick Landing in Newark, and very suitable for a storekeeper or merchant."


The "most publick landing place in Newark" at the time was undoubtedly that at the foot of Centre street. Colonel Ogden's tidy little farm probably reached from the river to Park Place, and may have extended from Saybrook Place to the Canal on its western boundary.


When the "Old Burying Ground" was cleared of the graves of the forefathers late in the last century the tombstones of Colonel Ogden and of David Ogden, his brother, were saved from the wreckage and securely set on either side of the tower of Trinity Church, outside the edifice. They were so worn that the legends were well-nigh undecipherable, and early in the present century they were re-cut. On the north side of the tower is the stone of, Colonel Ogden. It reads: "Here lyeth interred ye Body of Col. Josiah Ogden, who died May 17, 1763, in the 84th year of his age."


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On the south side of the tower the legend on the stone there placed reads: "Here lyeth interred Body of Captn David Ogden, who died July 11th A. D. 1734, aged 56 years."


During the controversy which led to the separation from the First Church of some of its leading members and the establish- ment of Trinity, the Rev. Joseph Webb was pastor of the former. He came to the pastorate in 1718 and immediately after the church left the Congregational denomination and adopted Presbyterianism. He was a godly man, meek and unoffending. He was too peaceable by nature to control or in any way influence the warring elements in his congregation and shortly after the Trinity separation was dismissed. He came to a tragic end in 1741, as the following notice in a New York newspaper explains: "We are informed that the Rev. Mr. Webb, sometime minister of the Gospel of Newark, was drowned crossing a ferry over the Connecticut river. His son, who is said to have been with him, endeavored to save himself upon his horse; but if the report be true he shared the same fate as his father."


DR. AARON BURR.


Now began, in the First Church, the pastorate of the Rev. Aaron Burr (father of the vice-president of that name) whose nineteen years here were of the most profound influence upon the advancement of the town, far transcending the limits of his work as leader of the flock. His forcefulness in the church is set forth in the chapters upon Churches of Newark, and will be no further discussed here. He was a man of deep learning and rare intellectual attainments. He was graduated from Yale College in 1735 and came to Newark the following year. His erudition, combined with a natural aptitude, made him a very successful teacher. He con- ducted a grammar school while in Newark, probably from the earliest days of his stay here. He was largely instrumental in the founding of what afterwards became Princeton College, as he was one of the leading Presbyterian clergymen in all this section of the colonies, and the college was established as an institution of the church and directly under its control, as was the custom of the time with regard to all institutions of learning in the colonies.


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DAVID BRAINERD AND YALE.


But while spiritual reasons animated the actual establishment of the college, it would probably not have been created had it not been for a curious and decidedly human incident, which, amusing as it seems to-day, strikingly illustrates the narrowness and intolerance of the perfervid Puritan communities.


In 1741 a student in his third year at Yale was expelled because he had been discovered to harbor religious thoughts and ideas not in entire concord with the dominant religious tenets of the college. He was overheard to remark to fellow students that a certain instructor possessed no more grace than a chair. This manifesta- tion of heresy was reported to the authorities by some eaves- dropper. It was also learned that this student was occasionally attending the meetings of a congregation outside the college und of a somewhat different shade of faith. In spite of the most earnest efforts of his friends in his behalf, the student was expelled.


ORDAINED A MISSIONARY IN NEWARK.


This student was none other than the Rev. David Brainerd, spoken of later in religious history as the "saintly Brainerd" and a deeply devout follower of religion from childhood, with not the slightest blemish upon his personal character that historians have been able to discover, a veritable martyr to the faith, in fact.


Brainerd, after being driven from Yale, resolved to become a missionary to the Indians, and he was ordained to this work, in Newark, as appears from the following extract from a Boston newspaper: "Just published .- A sermon preach'd in New-Ark, June 12, 1744, at the ordination of Dr. David Brainerd, a missionary among the Indians upon the borders of the provinces of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania."


Thus did Newark play its part in launching upon his career one of the earliest missionaries to the Indians in this section of the country. The young man gave his life to the work, living amid great privation among the savages and contracting consumption which brought about his end. His brother, the Rev. John Brainerd,


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took up his brother's missionary work where the latter dropped it. Later he succeeded Mr. Burr as pastor of the First Church, subse- quently taking charge of the first Indian reservation ever estab- Ished in this country, at Brotherton, New Jersey, on the Delaware.


It is difficult for us to understand the times that could tolerate and even foster lotteries and simultaneously give evidence of such Larshness as that meted out to Brainerd by the grim old doctors of divinity who then ruled at Yale. It is to the credit of Newark that it received Brainerd with open arms and that Mr. Burr and his people were not so tightly swathed in the lashings of intoler- ance as to be unable to comprehend and condemn the wrong done him. The boy and the youth of that period, in New England and almost to the same degree here in Newark, seems to have led a far from attractive life, as we view it now.




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