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 2
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FRANK JOHN URQUHART.
September 24, 1913.
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PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
The publishers desire to express their admiration of the excellent work accomplished by the various writers: Mr. Frank J. Urquhart, author of the historical narrative proper; Mr. James M. Reilly, of commercial and manu- facturing development; Mr. W. M. Van Deusen, of the chapter on Anancial Institutions; Dr. William S. Disbrow, of the article on medicine; Rev. Joseph F. Folsom, on church history; and Mr. William von Katzler, on the German element in the city of Newark. All are exhaustive, and the entire work will doubtless find recognition as a first authority on the subjects upon which it treats.
The biographical department has been prepared by our regular staff writers, and all possible pains have been taken to make it entirely reliable.
THE PUBLISHERS.
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CHAPTER I. PREHISTORIC NEWARK
CHAPTER I.
PREHISTORIC NEWARK.
I T required millions of years to prepare the territory we now call Newark for the habitation of modern man, and while this fact is quite as true of most other portions of the earth, the processes by which this region was made ready have striking characteristics of their own. The name "Newark group," for instance, is a term given by science upward of half a century ago to a certain kind of rock formation found in some other sections of the country, but nowhere more clearly and typically defined than here.
This rock was made in the third grand division of time since the very beginning of things, the Mesozoic, in the later Triassic and earlier Jurassic periods of that division. It was also the age of reptiles. This Newark stone is of three principal kinds: Trap rock, which in Mesozoic time was vomitted forth through fissures from beneath the slowly stiffening crust of the earth as lava, and to be seen in the remarkable formations on the Orange Mountains and elsewhere; shale, which was at the same period mud; and sand- stone, which was originally sand. The "Newark group," as State Geologist Henry B. Kummel has described it for this publication, consists of a great thickness of alternating red shale and sandstone with intercolated sheets of trap rock, which latter represent flows of lava from fissures during the deposition of muds and sands which now constitute the shales and sandstones. These rocks extend from the Hudson river, near Haverstraw, southward through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland into Virginia. Other detached areas lie in Nova Scotia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and North Carolina.
"Ripple marks, mud cracks, raindrop impressions and foot- prints of reptiles at various horizons indicate that these beds of shale and standstone were deposited by shallow waters, perhaps by broad shallow streams flowing across a wide plain bordering a lofty
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mountain range. Lakes of little depth or brackish water lagoons communicating with the ocean probably occurred here and there upon the plain."
It was upon this foundation then, fashioned during aeons of time, that the surface was to be built up through more ages, largely during the wonderful glacial epoch and by means of the many changes in level of the surface and the variations in temperatures from Arctic to tropical.
The glaciers, as is well known, brought down vast quantities of stone, earth, gravel and sand, the latter being ground from the rocks as they were forced against each other by the tremendous pressure of the ice around them. Much of this material was carried from points two and even three hundred miles to the northward. The whole glacial mass in New Jersey was from one-eighth to one- fifth of a mile deep.
The ice field, mighty sculptor that it was, wrought marvelous changes in its passage. It hewed and hacked, ploughed and gashed, tore and twisted, broke down and built up, until the whole surface of the earth was made over. It was rough treatment, but to it we owe the natural beauties of upper New Jersey today.
LAYING THE STATE'S FOUNDATIONS.
The rude work of this ice giant was ended when the glacier's edge reached Belvidere on the western boundary of the State, and Perth Amboy on the eastern border. Milder temperature forced it to release its grip; it began to melt. The invading ice field had almost reached the sea, for at that time more than one-third of New Jersey was under water. If you draw a line from Long Branch to Salem on the map, you will come close to describing the coast line as it was then.
As the gentle winds from the south softened the chilly breath of the ice field, great floods of water surged seaward. The chips and dust which this titanic sculptor of the land had made in passing and which it had long held tight, now dropped down. These counties were gradually freed from the ice: Sussex, Passaic, Bergen, Morris,
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Essex, Hudson, Union and the upper halves of Warren and Somer- set. All this district was given a new covering many feet deep of the soil and rock the ice field left, while great masses were washed down upon the rest of the State that was above the sea, and which we can describe as follows: The lower halves of Warren and Somer- set counties ; very nearly all of Hunterdon, Middlesex, Mercer and Monmouth; the upper thirds of Burlington and Camden, and small sections of two counties which were still beneath the sea, Gloucester and Salem. Ocean, Atlantic, Cumberland and Cape May counties were as yet a waste of waters. Presently, however, other gigantic forces within the earth came to the aid of those at work on the surface, and the submerged area appeared, the rivers and floods helping the uprising by bringing down great quantities of glacial drift and spreading it in every direction. The depth of the drift left in the vicinity of Newark varies exceedingly. "In the southern and eastern parts of the city," says Mr. Kummel, "in the meadows or in regions which were meadows before they were reclaimed, borings go 100 to 200 and 250 feet before reaching bed rock. In the western part of the city, however, where the land is higher, the rock is much nearer the surface. Common depths of the drift are 10, 15 and 20 feet." In every section of the city where cellars or trenches are being dug or other excavations made, one may see this glacial drift, beneath such soil as has been deposited over it by the natural process of erosion, gathered during the ages that have elapsed since the glaciers spent themselves.
THE PASSAIC AND WEEQUAHIC.
The Passaic river, as well as the Delaware, had flowed seaward for centuries before the glacial epoch and the ice fields played quite as marvelous pranks with the waterways as with the land. The story of the ancient Passaic, as science has laid it before us, is briefly as follows: When the ice first came it stopped up the river above Paterson, near Little Falls, and for ages there was no river from that point down the present and former course. For a long time before the ice period this river had had two outlets to the sea,
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the one we now know, and the other through a gap in the Second Mountain, at Short Hills. After the ice, in its slow march south- ward, closed up the outlet at Little Falls, it dammed the gap at Short Hills. Then the upper Passaic Valley was drained only through an opening in the hills at Moggy Hollow, which is about eight miles north of Somerville. When the ice stopped the flow toward Paterson Falls, the drainage of the section of the upper valley still free from ice, accumulated in a lake, immediately in front of the advancing glacial mass. Thus the prehistoric Lake Passaic was formed. The lake was, so to speak, pushed ahead of the ice, and when the glacier had covered the whole valley, the lake was temporarily obliterated. When the ice began to melt, or as the scientists say, recede, the lake appeared again. It was at its maximum area just before the ice disappeared from the channel near Little Falls, for the Short Hills outlet was now permanently filled with the glacial drift and that at Moggy Hollow was too incon- siderable to carry off the waters to any appreciable degree. At this time the lake was about twenty miles long, from Little Falls to Moggy Hollow, and approximately nine miles wide, from Summit to the Morristown region.
Geologists have learned enough to know that the Passaic river which flowed through the Short Hills as described above, was a large and powerful stream. That it flowed through a comparatively wide and deep valley would also seem to have been proved. Did it flow through Newark? Its upper bank was certainly very close to the southern boundary of the present city. It reached the sea somewhere between Elizabeth and Newark, possibly at Waverly. It may be that little Weequahic creek, from which the present park derives its name, and which is largely responsible for the present lake there, is the venerable and mightily-reduced relic of the ancient river.
It was but an accident of Nature that the glacial drift did not permanently close the channel at Little Falls and not that at Short Hills. Had it happened this way, the Passaic would now be flowing along Newark's southern instead of its eastern border. What more
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striking and instructive manifestation of the changes worked out in those dim days of the earth's making-over could be found ?
Thus, by majestic stages, through spaces of time of so great duration that the mind can not comprehend their extent, was the Newark ground made ready for the final touches that were to render it habitable for the Indians, the immediate predecessors of the men who founded the city.
We know there was animal life on the site of Newark before and during portions of the glacial era. But prehistoric man, the primeval human, was he here? The Eskimo, some authorities believe, followed the glacial movement southward and retired when the great ice fields began to succumb to a warmer climate.
THEORIES AS TO PREHISTORIC MAN.
Traces of prehistoric man in divers sections of the earth are often found below the glacial deposit or drift, in rude implements which were not accidents of nature but must have been fashioned by human hands. Fragments of bone believed to be those of the mammoth, the musk-ox and the reindeer, have been found in the Delaware Valley, below the so-called Trenton gravels.1 Science still hesitates to admit that these relics prove the existence of prehistoric man along the Delaware; in fact there have been animated con- troversies on this point during the last two decades or so. It may remain for the proof to be brought out in this section of the State, possibly somewhere in the Passaic Valley.
In recent years, we may say since the opening of the Twentieth century, a more general interest in the science of anthropology, archaeology and kindred branches has arisen. In our own State more determined and intelligent efforts than ever before are on
1 See Dr. C. C. Abbott's "Archaeologica Nova Caesarea."
"At the termination of the Newark mountain, at Springfield, and in many of the trap ranges, smoke and in some instances flame, issuing from the crevices of the rock, have been observed by the inhabitants; proceeding probably from carbonated hydrogen gas, indicating coal below. Animal and vegetable remains have been observed in this freestone. Near Bellville, a tooth, almost two inches in length, was discovered some years since, fifteen feet below the surface." Gordon's Gazeteer of New Jersey, 1834.
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foot to pry into the secrets of the State's very early past. The legislature of 1912 set aside a small sum to be devoted to archaeo- logical research under the direction of the State Geological Survey, with a view of locating the Indian villages of former times and to gather together all the relics of the savages that are to be found. If this search is continued it is possible that traces of prehistoric man may also be found. They may lie along the ancient pathways of the Passaic (on any one or all three of them), as well as along the Delaware, and in other sections of Essex county.2
2 Information in detail concerning the Geology of the Essex County region will be found in several of the publications of the New Jersey Geo- logical Survey, one of the most efficient bureaus in the State.
CHAPTER II. THE INDIANS AND THE DUTCH
CHAPTER II. THE INDIANS AND THE DUTCH.
A HISTORY of Newark would be sadly incomplete without some account of the red man who, for unnumbered cen- turies before Columbus found the continent, abode on this soil and knew it for his own. He was the ancient owner, the first, unless prehistoric man had his brute-like existence hereabouts. The men who founded Newark received the territory direct from the Indian, causing him to retire gradually to more and more distant points with constantly reducing numbers until the savage was lost in oblivion. The story of his going hence is much the same as everywhere in the early settlement of the country, with this strik- ing and altogether pleasing difference; while elsewhere the ground was often wrested from him by force and by trickery, here, in Newark, as throughout all New Jersey, the Indian was paid the price he asked for every foot of the land.
There was no Indian village of any considerable size on Newark soil, at least not for several generations before the settlement. It was part of the domain of the Awkinges-awky, Ackinken-hackys or Hackensacks, a sub-tribe of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. The Hackensacks' headquarters were near the site of the present city of Hackensack, and the tribal boundaries were, roughly, Wee- quahic creek (the original boundary line afterwards fixed by the settlers between Newark and Elizabethtown) on the south; the Ramapo mountains on the north and west, with the Hudson and a part of Staten Island completing the confines. Below the Hacken- sacks were the Raritans and above them the Tappans. The whole State was dotted with tribal centres, like that near Hackensack, from which small groups composed of a few families moved hither and thither over the region set aside to their tribe, hunting, fishing, raising occasional crops of maize, corn, etc.
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OLD INDIAN HIGHWAYS.
When the Dutch trappers and traders, the first white men to really explore the region, fared out from New Amsterdam, and from the little settlement at Bergen, a decade or so after Hudson discovered the great river that bears his name, they found the country we now call New Jersey peopled with perhaps fifteen hun- dred Indians, living peacefully, each division and sub-division in its own section under a loose government which served well for all purposes of the aborigines. They welcomed the Dutchmen, piloted them up and down the streams, bartered their furs, showed them the way through the wilderness along the myriad paths which the feet of many generations of their people had worn deep, along the waterways through clefts in the hills, around all natural bar- riers, over meadows and beside marshes and in and out of forests that to the stranger seemed at first quite impenetrable. They taught them many things in woodcraft, and they showed them the mysteries of their crude methods of farming.
The greatest Indian pathway in all New Jersey was undoubtedly the Minisink path, leading from the sea to the headquarters of the Minsis, on Minisink Island high up in the Delaware. This path ran from the Shrewsbury river, northwest, crossing the Raritan a little west of Perth Amboy; proceeding north to and through the Short Hills and then to the Passaic, which it crossed where the oldest portion of Chatham, Morris county, now is, at a ford where Day's Bridge was built, in 1747. From this ford the old path ran a distance of about twelve miles to Little Falls, being seldom more than six or eight miles west of the Watchung (First) Mountain, from the Short Hills to Little Falls. There was another crossing there, from whence the path ran along the eastern side of the valley to Pompton; thence following the Pequannock towards the Delaware river.
"The Newark mountain region," writes Wickes in his history of the Oranges, "was constantly crossed and recrossed by the Indians, going to and from the Hudson, by paths, all of which inter- sected the great Minisink highway. Their nearest or most direct
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route from the Hudson to Minisink Island was through the Great Notch of the First Mountain, four miles above Montclair, meeting the main path near Little Falls. The other intersecting paths were : At Montclair where the highway (Bloomfield avenue) crossed the mountain ; the notch at Eagle Rock; the notches of the Mt. Pleasant and the Northfield highways, and the mountain-crossing at South Orange (South Orange avenue, where it enters the South Mountain reservation). All these routes led to the Minisink path. They all crossed this great thoroughfare and were the highways of Indian travel from the Hudson through the Musconetcong Valley to the Delaware."
The Dutch traders found to their surprise that the Hackensacks as well as all other savages had a name for every path, stream, creek and mountain range, as well as for every other object in nature which could serve as a guide or landmark to the traveler. If he took these names in the regular sequence as the red man gave them to him, remembering the meaning of each as the savage had imparted it, the trader could make his way for long distances, recognizing each point as he came to it by the Indian place names. It was thus for many generations that the natives taught each other how to thread their way up and down and across New Jersey. These place names answered every purpose of the time quite as perfectly as guide books, auto-tour books, road maps, etc., do the present-day denizens of the country. The Dutch officials employed the Indian runners to carry dispatches between their settlements on the Hudson and the Delaware. The trip one way was made in something less than five days.
THE RED MAN ON THE COAST.
The red man had his "season" on the Jersey coast. For at least a thousand years before the watering places that now dot its beaches were thought of, each tribe had its seashore territories. The hill tribes came down from the uplands, sometimes by waterway entirely and sometimes by the paths. The earliest navigators speak in their log books of the swarms of savages noticed on the Jersey coast.
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The making of wampum was carried extensively during those sum- mer sojourns, as vast heaps of fragments of clam and oyster shells and of other shellfish, to be found a few feet below the surface near the coast, testify. The shellfish were dried, salted or smoked, spread on sheets of bark and packed away in bales or strung on strings to be carried back to the uplands in the fall for use during the winter. The larger fish were treated in much the same fashion. While the women were busy curing the fish, the men worked at wampum making among the shells. They removed the mollusks from the shells with clever little tools made out of jasper, the aboriginal oyster knives.
With implements of stone, deftly fashioned, they chipped the shells into little discs, varying in diameter according to the char- acter of the wampum, often working them down to the size of a bead. They perforated each disc or bead by means of a sharp, pencil-like stone which they skillfully rotated between the hands, using sand and water occasionally to increase the friction. They polished the edges of the discs and the surfaces of the beads by rubbing upon stone sprinkled with sand, until they acquired a fine polish. They tested each bead for smoothness by contact with the nose. The white wampum was reckoned as the least valuable. The black wampum, so-called, which was made from blueish or purplish and all other dark colored shells, was the most desired.
It is well-nigh certain that the Indians did not use wampum as money until the arrival of the white man. There is no record of its having been considered as currency by the Lenni Lenape, at least. Everything they had they held in common. When they had food, all were filled. They literally had no need for money. It was a sort of primitive socialism. Wampum was used for bodily orna- ment, for the conveying of messages of war, of peace, condolence; for the binding of agreements of every sort; as an aid to memory and in numberless other ways which are now lost to us. Manifold meanings were worked into wampum by the peculiar arrangement of colors and by means of various well recognized designs and pat- terns. In every tribe and sub-tribe, there was always someone
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skilled in the minute reading of wampum, and the general signifi- cance of a belt or string or collections of strings was known to all adults.
The Dutch traders found the Hackensacks highly skillful at wampum making, and the former were not slow to commercialize it, giving it in barter for furs, foodstuffs, herbs, etc. Later the white folk took to making wampum which they sold to traders. This was done in Bergen county within the last century, as late as 1845.
The Lenni Lenape were among the most facile in the fashion- ing of stone implements. They tooled with infinite care their arrow and spearheads, their chisels, hunting knives, flesh scrapers, fish- line sinkers, fish spears, mortars for the grinding of corn, and a multitude of other articles whose uses baffle scientists to determine. Skill in manufacturing industries has therefore been common to the Newark neighborhood for many centuries.
INDIAN TRADITIONS AND TRIBAL DIVISIONS.
The old Dutch pioneers learned many other things about the Indians of New Jersey from their intercourse with them. To this knowledge was added more gleaned in much the same way by the English when they took possession in 1664. A few missionaries contributed their quota, as did the reports and other records of the early governors and their subordinates. Out of this material we gather all there is to be known now of the original possessors of the territory. It is by no means as complete as one might desire. There are many gaps that can never be closed, and there is here and there a lack of accuracy made manifest by the contradictory statements found in the various sources.
The Lenni Lenape were a branch of the great Algonkin nation. Long before the coming of the white man they had been beaten in battle by the fierce Iroquois to the north, and from that time bore the name of "women" among the Iroquois and other warlike peoples. In compensation for that epithet, given in derision, they came to be known as wise and safe in counsel, and were often
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appealed to by other nations to settle disputes. They showed their wisdom in keeping out of wars, and although they had been con- quered by the Iroquois, they considered themselves superior to their conquerors because they felt they possessed higher intelligence.
The Lenni Lenape held sway, at one time or another, over a large part of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and a portion of New York. They were divided into three branches, the Minsis or Mountaineers, or wolves; the Unamis, or tortoises; the Unalachtigoes, or turkeys. The Hackensacks seem to have been a sub-tribe of the Unamis, with the Minsis above and the Unlachtigoes below them. To the traders and trappers the Lenni Lenape gave various interpretations of their family name: "our men," "Indian men," "the original or pure Indian." To be a Lenni Lenape was to have sprung from a very ancient race of red men, whose blood was unpolluted by that of other nations. To be of the tribe of Unamis was to have been borne of the most ancient of all the Lenni Lenape; for, as the old Hackensack chieftains explained, it was the tortoise who bore the earth on his back and who created all things upon the earth that were good for man; and the totem of the Unamis was the tortoise. Thus the child of the forest babbled of his history, a tale in which myth and fact are inextricably intermingled. If we are to believe him, the Indians who once called the soil of Newark their own were sprung from the oldest of the three great divisions of the Lenni Lenape, and the Lenni Lenape were descended from the very earliest of Indians.
The Lenni Lenape were powerfully built, usually of about the average height of the white men, with dark eyes, glistening white teeth, coarse black hair. Few were crippled, deformed, cross-eyed or blind. "They preserved their skins," wrote Charles Wolley in 1701, "by anointing them with the oil of fishes, the fat of eagles and the grease of raccoons, which they hold in the summer to be the best antidote to keep their skins from blistering by the scorch- ing sun, and their best armour against the musketto's * * ** and stopper of the pores of their bodies against the winter's cold."
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So we learn that the mosquito has been in the land for ages before our time and in fighting the pest we are simply continuing an ancient warfare. They seldom used what is known as wigwams. It is believed, however, that there were a few large structures called community houses, in which a considerable number of natives might assemble. It is quite probable that there was a community house in the old Indian village of Hackensack. But in the main, their houses were mere huts. This is the way William Penn described the habitations of the Lenni Lenape, in 1683:
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