THE RARITAN

NOTES ON A RIVER AND A FAMILY

BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
One of the Family

PRIVATLEY PRINTED
NEW BRUNSWICK, N. J.
1915
 

PREFACE

   These notes have very slight historical or even genealogical interest.  They mean nothing to the stranger.  They are put out for the use of the Family and are per-haps more of a study in heredity than a bare recital of family deeds, doings, and deaths.  The younger generation may find in them a suggestion of many of their own aspirations and inclinations; and when they have about run their race they may be interested in looking backward to see how their forefathers ran the race be-fore them.  It is with this thought, this hope, that I have prepared these notes telling of the generations that have preceded us in America.  The volume is printed: not published.  It is a private affair and calls for no public attention or recognition. 

Additional Notes:

     There is a River running eastward to the sea--a gentle little River of still waters that reflect, and shal-low rapids that run in lines of amethyst, and slow- moving tides that flood and ebb without a ripple and without a sound.  It is only a commonplace River--so commonplace that the millions who rattle over its railway bridges in express trains hardly put down their newspapers to look at it.  Its history is purely local and it never was grand enough for romance.  No one has written it down in deathless verse or painted it on immortal canvas.  Art, science, history, philosophy have all passed it by.  In fact, it has been left quite alone save for the life and the love of the people who have lived by its banks and watched it through the years slowly drifting to the sea.

 For much of its course the River flows through a low slightly - undulating country.  Off in the northwest there is a range of blue hills where the stream takes its head.  It comes to life, runs its course, and passes out to the sea before a hundred miles are counted.  No stately reach of thousands as the Mississippi; no lake-like breadth of surface as the Saguenay or the lower Danube. The great streams go down to the ocean through broad basins and their shining silver faces may

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be seen from the hill-tops miles away; but this River winds through a flattened valley and you are upon it almost before you see it.  At times it cuts through bluffs and hills, then flows past low-lying meadows, and then again beneath bordering fringes of willows, elms, maples and sycamores.  The upland ridges back from the meadows that make up the valley borders are not more than a hundred feet in height.  They are dotted with houses and huge barns; and around these, back from them, are fields of grain and corn, orchards of peach and apple, small forests of oak and hickory.  The meadows are spotted with bushes, flowers and tall grasses.  Cattle in herds and sheep in droves graze there or stamp away the heated noon under the shade of huge oaks.  All summer long the meadows keep shifting their flower garmenting.  At first they are yellow and white dandelions, starflowers, butter-cups and daisies, then silver with Indian grass or red with the tassel of sheep sorrel; finally they turn yellow again with golden rood or purple with masses of asters.  Spots of wonderful charm are the river's meadows.  You walk there on warm summer afternoons and lose yourself in nature's glorification of the commonplace.

     As the stream flattens down to meet the sea its meadows flatten, too and turn into marshes waving with flag and rush and cat-tail.  These, as the seasons come and go, turn green, turn yellow, turn sere and grey.  The coot and the rail, with the red-winged black-bird, nest there, and in the autumn flocks of wild fowl dip down to its lakes and run-ways, and great droves of reed birds swarm like bees above the nodding rushes.
 
 

Flat as the still sea the tops of the rushes stretch out for miles, glittering in the sun--a huge monotone not the less beautiful because despised and neglected by man.  Very beautiful are the marshes to those who have lived beside them and, through many years, have known the charm of their repose.

 Perhaps repose is the secret of the River's attrac-tion, also.  The lines of uplands, the banks, the meadows, the water, all lie easily and quietly, and in their horizontal repetition create the feeling of rest.  There are no abrupt broken lines, no perpendicular breaks in the scheme.  Nothing jars or startles or utters a discordant note.  You drift to the sea by the flat lines of the bordering uplands as readily as by the lines of the stream, and the scene levels out as effectively on the marshes as on the quiet waters of the Lower Bay.  The flat lands with their high sky and restful horizon ring have always been the loveable and the loveable lands wherever located.

 Far up the River, near the foot of the blue hills, there is a more abrupt and perhaps a more picturesque setting for the stream.  It breaks through cloves and steep valleys, winds under abrupt cliffs, and falls down steps of shale in moderate little cascades.  But it never is, at any time, a brawling mountain stream with a bowlder bed and plunging, roaring falls.  There is a sound of rapid running water; occasionally a little churning and gurgling; but usually only the plaintive soothing murmur of a stream that is quietly running away to the sea.  The steep banks of shale with their mosses, lichens, flowers, stunted cedars and trailing
 

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vines are quite as picturesque as those found elsewhere.  Moreover, the trees grow thick here in spaces and the meadows entirely disappear in favor of side hills and farm uplands.  It is a wilder country than down below, more stimulating, less restful perhaps, but farther from the crowd, nearer to the pure fountain head of nature in the hills.

     Up in these hills the River starts out, like all youth, with purity, alacrity and considerable noise.  For some miles the stream runs clear and swift through wood and valley, then is caught in mill ponds, where it stag-nates, then falls over now neglected dams into beds of stone, and once more runs on through underbrush and willows.  All its contributing streams, in degree, do likewise.  But the South Branch and the Millstone quite change its character and give it a different look.  Draining many miles of farm lands they, naturally, carry to the main stream their burdens of red shale and silt, and, after rains, the whole River turns almost as red as the Colorado.  When the side streams are all in when the broadened River passes Bound Brook, the drainage from town and factory begins to pollute the stream.  Yet still it clears itself somewhat and goes over the Five Mile Dam with a transparent gleam and a low roar to be heard half a mile away.  At the Land-ing it meets the in-pushing tide.  The tide still wells up to the Rapids and stops there just as it has always done.  Then with the ebb the whole volume goes slowly down under the Great Bridge, down past the city of New Brunswick, the bluffs of pine and the long stretches of marsh, down past the noisy South Amboy,
 
 

out upon Raritan Bay, and so, by the Sandy Hook to the wind-tossed ocean.

      From the mountains to the sea the River loses in life, vivacity of movement, purity of color; but it gains in volume, in depth, in restfulness.  The lower reaches of the stream stretches out in width and lie still.  The water is jade-colored but that does not perceptibly mar its reflections.  The morning sun shows here in flashes of silver almost as brightly as on a mountain lake, and the afternoon light streams down the valley, glances from the River's surface, and strikes the arches of the Great Bridge in flashes of Gold.  The whole valley is flooded with light at sunset--that warm mellow light that gilds the most barren landscape and for the moment turns it into fairyland.  The sun is scarcely gone before the moon is up, and the moonlight and the twilight, fighting not for mastery but blending softly with each other, make the lover's light of early evening.  The River responds in tones of old rose and silver, be-comes opaline and amethystine, and finally shades off into a night purple.  The angels' pathway of the moon weaves and ravels on the stream, the stars come forth and shine upon its surface, the night wind steals softly alone the sedges and the rushes.  The stream seems like the Golden River in Elfland.

     Not always thus the mood of nature on the River.  Storms from the land come down with rushing winds and peals of thunder, storms from the sea drive in with clouds of rain and whistling voices.  The River turns leaden grey, rises in leaden waves with crests of white, drives with the wind in shivering sheets or is pounded
 

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and pitted with falling rain.  The meadow grasses, the willows, the elms, even the sturdy oaks, fling out tossed branches on the wind.  The black smoke from factor-ies, the white wings of sea gulls, the grey of rain, the flying scud of clouds all go by one with a rush and are swallowed up in the storm-mist.  Blown by the eastern gales the sea waters heap up in the Lower Bay, and the tide comes in with unusual volume and push.  It rises over the banks, floods over the marshes and meadows, and creeps up alone the foot of the bordering slopes.  Down to meet it comes the red River swollen by rains and muddy with earth sediments.  A freshet results, and all the valley world seems for a time afloat, adrift, inundated.  Thus for a day and a night, and then the waters ebb away and go down to the sea, the meadows dry out, the bushes and grasses shake them-selves free and grow the faster for their muddy bath.

     The great storms come in the winter and with them sometimes clouds of snow that turn the River into a dark flashing purple winding through a world of white.  The marshes and the meadows, the uplands and the fields are all robed in white.  The bare limbs of the elms, the wine-red leaves of the oaks, the dark green of the cedars lift above the snow mantle and answer the purple of the River.  Gradually the River chokes with floating ice, freezes over, and is covered with newly-fallen snow.  Then come the stillness of the winter cold, the glitter of the snow, the clearness of the air, the brilliancy of the stars.  The River and its valley seem sleeping, hibernating under the blanket of snow.  There seems no life.  But beauty still remains.
 

The glorious light, the delicate hues of the snow, the blue and purple shadows, the great harmony of the white with the blue of the sky are not merely attractive by contrast with the summer garmenting; they are beautiful in themselves and for themselves.  Huge towering peaks of mountains are not absolutely neces-sary to the beauty of the snow landscape.  Here in the River's basin--this flat low-lying basin of the winter is abundantly obvious to those who will but see.

     Is it necessary to insist in this liberal inquiring age that beauty does not lie exclusively in romantic haunts or classic climes or spectacular display in any place?  Are not all the arts nowadays insisting upon the beauty of the commonplace, the character of humble things, the dignity of simple truth?  The materials that lie at your doorstep are beautiful if you are sensitive enough in impression, broad enough in comprehension, pro-found enough in sympathy to understand them.

     Why not then this unpretentious River with its humble valley?  Have we grown so far away from nature that the meadow daisy has become merely a mean flower, the water-mirror merely a cheap reflection of dull original, and the fair white clouds of summer merely a pestilential congregation of vapors?  There is something in the ordinary that becomes extraordinary under continued observation; and there is that in the commonplace that has for us an uncommon meaning if
 

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we look at it aright.  We would not alway be dinned and stunned with the startling.  That which is loveable finally becomes loveable.  We cannot live with that which merely startles or overawes.

     But the River was not always so commonplace.  There was a time, and not three hundred years ago, when it was unique and was thought a wild, wild stream.  No one had been to its head; no one knew how far it traveled.  It was then a deeper stream with waters undimmed by the surface drainage from farms.  There were no farms.  The small open spaces on the meadows were planted with Indian maize; but all the rest of the land was forest.  Huge pines grew along the shale cliffs; oak and chestnut and hickory grew on the uplands.  There were no towns or bridges or rail-ways or wagon roads.  Indian trails ran across the land from river to river, Indian teepees were pitched under the great trees in the meadows, and Indian canoes glanced along the surface of the River.  The white man had not yet come, the land was unflayed, the forest and the stream were in their pristine beauty.  And then-------.
 
 

     Such was the River when Thomas Janse the Immigrant come over to live on the neighboring shore of Long Island.  He had sailed out from Amsterdam in one of the high-pooped ships of the Half Moon class--perhaps the first far-adventurer in the Family for sev-eral centuries.  Apparently he had not liked the great city of Amsterdam, though it was then in its blooming time.  Jan de Witt was in power and Holland with its India companies was the commercial center of the world.  The burghers were making money and spend-ing it lavishly in beautifying the new cities of their sea-won land.  It was the time of the inflated Vondel and the merely popular Cats; but it was also the golden age of Hals, Rembrandt, Terborch, Jan Steen and Ver-meer of Delft.  On sea and land, in war, commerce, learning, art; in politics, liberty and religious tolerance, Holland was in the lead.  Why did Thomas Janse, then an old man, wish to leave it?  What was the im-pelling motive for crossing a stormy ocean to take up life in an unknown unexplored land?

     The Family was not originally of city extraction.  Its early members had lived out by the dykes and had taken a name from them.  Up in the northland, behind

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the shelter of the great dunes, with the sound of the sea in their ears, they had fought stubborn circum-stances successfully, had grown resourceful and self-sufficient.  Shut in by the sea in front and the forest behind, what had they to fear from men or their meas-ures, from invaders or governments?  In those early days the highways of the Netherlands were very limited and sea travel along the coast was considered danger-ous.  An enemy could not very well get at the dyke dwellers.  And if by any chance he got across the net-work of canals and morasses there was always a final resource in the sea.  The dykes could be cut and the water let in--the remorseless North Sea that had drowned so many from hither and yon.

     It was a dangerous land for the stranger and not too secure even for the native.  The footing was treacher-ous and every few years the sea was breaking in, without invitation, in vast inundations.  The north lands were at best only the deposit of the Rhine and the Yssel, formed first as lagoons and afterward gathering sands, growing grass and trees and making a sea bar-rier in the form of dunes.  The sea was always a menace, always creeping in by bays and creeks, always stirring up hurricane winds, always breeding fogs that blinded the keenest eyes of the navigators.  Perhaps the very adversities and dangers of the country made the dwellers near the dykes a strong, and independent, a free people.

     And, perhaps again, they loved their north country for its very wildness.  The Hercynian Forest, lying back of them, even so late as the sixteenth century, was
 

trailed by droves of wild horses, and following the droves, preying upon the young colts, were packs of wolves.  Forests belted the whole country--vast woods that only the boar hunters penetrated.  The dunes looked out upon a yellow sea almost always churned to white caps by tempests, great flocks of water fowl came and went on the whistling winds, the few fisher-folk gathered in huts along the shallow harbor en-trances and struggled against winds and driving sands.  On the polders there were low crouching cottages or farm houses, surrounded and protected by bushes and trees, that again fought off the winds, the sands, and the rains.  The struggled for existence was apparent wherever one chose to turn.  It was a lonely struggle, too.  The farm houses stood aloof from one another.  There were no towns.  No travelers come that way.  The northland was an isolated and a somewhat weird country, then.

     It is not strange that such a mournful and misty landscape should, after generations, finally leave its stamp upon the people living there.  The milieu has its effect.  The grey light will finally produce the grey people and cast them in a grey mood.  The dyke dwell-ers early became a sad and serious people who believed in God in the world and they a part of it.  Their trials were many and their joys were few.  The village boors might drink and carouse in taverns, but not the north-ern outliers.  They toiled and prayed and slept and toiled again; and, in measure, were content.  A certain savage satisfaction came to them in their aloofness--a feeling of freedom and independence.  No man
 

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called them slave.  To the south of them the political struggles and wars went on generations without end.  The quarrels of the Houses of the Hainault and Bur-gundy, the Austro-Spanish tyranny, the dominion of Charles V., the Reformation, the wars of Alva, the long fight of the House of Orange succeeded on an-other; but perhaps they meant little or nothing to the northern dyke dwellers. The struggles shook the towns and cities to their centers and cast the citizens in the heroic mould of defiance, but the tremor died out at the north and was lost in the roar of the winds and the surge of the sea.  Serene in their grey land, the grey people read their Bible, earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, and went their way to the shades without murmuring.  Ambition had not crept into their catechism and the wish to dominate or rule others was not in their mood.  God had not given them a Garden of Eden to live in; but a stormy wind-swept sea-bat-tered lowland.  Yet they had made it their own and grown so used to its buffetings and surprises that it pleased rather than repelled them.  They were not willing to exchange it for other and perhaps fairer lands with a serpent in the garden.

     Yet there came at last a new generation that grew uneasy in the north country.  It had heard of cities and men and marching troops, of seas and far countries visited by ships of the India Companies.  A great new world lay beyond the dykes and the pounding seas.  Even the Netherlands themselves had been a vast un-known to the home dwellers at the north.  So at last one of the Jans would go down to Amsterdam to see the
 
 

world and seek his fortune.  There, perhaps, he came to know the shipping people, made money, held offices, and finally died a well-to-do burgher.  Who knows?  Perhaps the people who remained behind at the north heard of his success, talked much of him, were proud of him; but possibly the weary burgher himself often turned his face to the north and sighed for the sea, the dune country, and the dark forests.  When one is born to the wilderness and has love of the wild in his blood the inclination is very difficult to eradicate.

     And the tendency--the fancy for the open country---- will crop out in succeeding generations.  How many of the children of the first burgher lived in Amsterdam is not known; nor is there now any record of the other members of the family that stayed on at the north.  Probably there are descendants of the dyke-dwellers still living there by the sea--living the same life as the ancestors in the days of the Counts of Holland.  As for the Amsterdam branch, there soon came a break in the order.  He whom the records name Thomas Janse put out to sea for the new land of America.  Had he grown tired of city life in Amsterdam?  Had he wearied of people and small ambitions, and the petty scramble for place and prominence?  Perhaps for years he had known nostalgia--the longing for the home by the dyke--but hardly dared to go back to the ancestral roof for fear of the sardonic smile that usually greets the prodigal.  But a new world had been discovered in the golden west and Thomas Janse would see it.  And so finally, seeking the unknown, he cut all the bonds of kin and country and put to sea.
 

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It required something of a stout heart to cross the ocean in a Dutch ship in the year 1652.  There were not only unknown dangers at the end of the journey, but perils of the sea of en route.  Navigation on the North Atlantic was in its infancy, and the ship captains sterred more by faith and the setting sun than by chart and compass.  The voyage was a matter of weeks, and if the western gales were blowing it might be months.  Beating up against head winds in the Roaring Frorties was somewhat different from a fishing cruise in the North Sea.  Besides. Thomas Janse sailed with his wife, Sytie Dirks and a large family.  Here were hostages not only given to fortune but practically hung around the Immigrant's neck.  He was their mainstay, and probably Thomas Janse himself, for lack of better, used his fellow immigrants as some sort of sheet anchor.  They encouraged one another and took no counsel of despair.  Courage sailed with all the west-bound Dutch sloops in those days and sooner or later they all dropped anchors in the sheltered bays of the new world.

     When the Immigrant came up to the harbor of New Amsterdam and the ship swung off the Strand (Pearl street) there was a very modest little village before him.  The Fort and the great square kerk within it were its most prominent features.  There were rows of houses along the Strand and on the Heere Straat, with a few elsewere, all of them somewhat like the houses in old Amsterdam; and wooden landings along the shore perhaps unlike anything the Immigrant had ever seen before.  There were ships at anchor and people
 
 

in pot hats and bag trowsers moved alone the docks and streets.  Everything looked very tentative about the town and very new elsewhere.  Even the waters, the sky, the air, the very sun looked new.  There was a brilliancy to the light, a clearness to the air and waters that the Immigrant had never known before.  And the great shores and banks, lifting high with primeval forests, were overwhelming fastnesses to him.  It was, indeed, a new world and held all the mystery of the unknown.

     It seems that the Immigrant did not stay for long in the new town of New Amsterdam, but moved over to the town on the heights called Brueckelen (Brooklyn).  There he and Sytie his wife are duly recorded in 1661 as members of the First Reformed Dutch Church; and there they lived and died.  Thomas Janse had been adventurous enough in putting out to sea, and in his old age he probably felt little like pursuing further adventure into the wilderness.  He doubtless knew and heard much talk of the River and the unknown land lying beyond it, but had he ever seen it?  His son, Jan the Second, had gone down to New Utrecht to live, and perhaps with him he had gone across to the mouth of the River and had seen something of its lower waters; but there is no record of this.  In those early days about the only family records were in the family Bibles and were merely births, marriage and deaths.  The rest was silence.  People worked and prayed and aspired then as now, but their doings were not flung abroad in the morning's newspaper.  They were con-tent to do their duty and go their ways to the grave as 
 

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the generations before them had done.  It was only with a later and a more conscious race that the thought of "being somebody" became an obsession.  The fore-fathers never had it.

     There seems no record of the Immigrants's death or that of his wife.  The church building have disap-peared and with them most of the church books and documents.  The burying grounds have disappeared likewise, and no one now knows where he and his wife were buried.  One might hazard the guess that the place of their burial now lies under the paving stones or the sky-scrapers of Brooklyn, and not be far from the truth.  Nothing lasts long in America--not even the graves.
 
 

     Jan, the son of Thomas Janse, came over the ocean in the same high-pooped Dutch ship as his father.  Doubtless he was the elder's adviser and was instru-mental in inducing him to quit Holland, even in the evening of life, that he might see and know the new land of which the West India Company made such unique report.  Jan brought with him his wife, Tryntje, and seven children--more hostages to frighten the ordinary immigrant into staying at home.  But Jan, like his father, was stout-hearted and not easily dis-mayed.  He had been born and had grown up in Amsterdam, in that prosperous blooming time of the Dutch, of which mention has been made.  Famous men were in the saddle and careers were almost to be had for the asking.  Politics, law, letters, art, were holding out garlands and wreaths, and commerce was offering golden rewards.  Why did not Jan go in for a career?  Rembrandt came up to Amsterdam from his father's mill; but Jan was already there before him.  Why did he not become the famous painter?  Why  was he not an Admiral Tromp, an Erasmus or a Grotius?  Did he think with his fathers that ambition was merely a vulgar phase of human conceit?  Did he

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believe that those served best who declaimed the least, and that the lowly places were as necessary to fill, and quite as honorable, as the loftier?

     It is probable that Jan was a true son of the dykes and thought he was born and reared in Amsterdam the sea and the wind of the north country were in his blood.  Let dukes and princes and staats-generals quarrel over who should rule; but Jan wished neither to command nor be commanded.  He wished the freedom of his ancestors in the dune country--a freedom to live and let live without interference of any kind.  Under God's sky and by His sea, far from the crowd, alone with nature, kings in their own right and ruler by their own might--that had been the creed of the ancestors.  And Jan in Amsterdam, for all the false gods about him and those who would proselyte him to other faiths, could never forget that creed.  Did it grow upon him with the years until he finally whispered to the elder, Thomas Janse, the project of a venture across seas?  Were there friends in the West India Company who were glad to repeat the wonderful tales of the country round about New Amsterdam?  Perhaps Jan had been associated with them and had made money through them.  Again who knows?  Such things were quite within the possibilities.

     At ant rate Jan sailed, and with him went parents and children--three generations.  He must have put money in his purse, as well as courage in his heart, for shortly after he arrived at New Amsterdam he went to New Utrecht, where he was one of the founders of the town, bought a farm or "bouwerie"
 
 

of fifty acres, and also owned extensive lands running down toward Coneyn Eylandt (Coney Island).  The Dutch were always thrifty and while they never thought in terms of millions and never cared to give up their lives to mere gain, they were very close hold-ers of the guilder and always had sufficient store against rainy days.  Jan the Second was not foolish enough to venture across  the ocean and throw himself and family on the mercy of an unknown country and a West India Company.  He had not lived in Amster-dam the greater part of his life without knowledge and profit.

     But evidently he had no notion of locating in New Amsterdam.  Was it already too settled, too civilized, for him?  There were small quarrels for place and power going on there, and disputes about rights and privileges, into which he did not care to enter.  He wanted to be by himself, and free from domination or restraint.  Besides, down near the Lower Bay his acres reached to the water.  The sea was not far off.  He perhaps liked the sound of the waters and the smell of the salt air.  With the sands, the winds and the fogs they brought back memories of his native land.  Then, too, the Dutch were always great fowlers; and in the spring and autumn the bay in front of Jan's house swarmed with wild swan, geese and ducks.  Doubtless the Dutch swivel flint-lock did great havoc among the flocks, and was brought to bear with some effect on the deer that ate cabbages in the back patch, the tur-keys, partridges and pigeons that enlivened the woods, and the rabbits that thronged Coneyn Eylandt.  The
 

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first settlers had thought the rabbits were conies and had named the island because of them.

     With his hunting proclivities Jan the Second must have known the River.  Its mouth was just around the lower end of Staaten Eylandt (Staten Island), above the mouth great marshes expanded, and there the hunting and trapping were better than elsewhere.  The beaver and the mink that the Indians brought in and traded for cheap goods in New Amsterdam were trapped thereabouts; and the Dutch took very kindly to both hunting and trapping.  The river had then been explored somewhat.  People had gone across to the Delaware and up beyond Middelbrook (Bound Brook).  Perhaps Jan himself had seen and known the upper country.  It was in course of settlement but the banks of pine, the meadows with oaks and chestnuts, the shale cliffs with their moss and cedars were as yet untouched.  The land had not been ridded by the plow nor the timber gnawed by fire and axe, nor the water polluted by surface drainage.  The Naraticongs lived alone the River and planted maize in the open spaces; but they worked no more destruction than the deer and the bear in the forests.  When the white man finally took hold it was quite another story.

     But whatever Jan the Second's knowledge or pos-sible longings for the new country with its wildness, he found himself not altogether a free agent as regards action.  He had duties to the colony on Long Island, as well as to his family, that called for fulfillment.  Shortly after he went to New Utrecht, in 1657, the Governor and Council of New Amsterdam issued a
 
 

proclamation to the inhabitants of the town "to keep good watch"; that they had appointed Jan the Second sergeant of the town, and the people were "to acknowl-adge and obey" him.  Doudtless the office carried with it the duties of burgomaster or mayor, and meant responsibility.  Jan was never free from it.  For many years he was a magistrate of New Utrecht, and the last appointment that came to him of which there is record was that of "schepen"----an office somewhat like our present alderman at large.

     None of the offices were what might be called great, but they were the best that the town and the time had to give, and Jan took them seriously.  He was one of the town leaders, probably dressed like a burgher, and doubtless lived in a house with a stepped-front gable and a high stoop where the family sat on summer even-ings.  The house was likely, after the model of the period, of brick with long low roof lines, windows with great wooden shutters and black painted hinges, and huge doors or half-doors.  All the interiors at that time were simple but commodious.  The open stone fireplace of the kitchen, about which the family gathered at night, was the center of interest.  It was usually faced with blue tiles telling in their pictured subject scriptural stories.  There were hook irons, andirons, tongs, shovels, warming pans, pots of brass, spiders, Dutch ovens for baking--all the paraphernalia of cooking--hanging about.  Silver, pewter, china were on the dressers, the floors were scrubbed and sanded, a wooden wainscotting ran about the room and at the floor was often a surbase of tiling.  All the chairs
 

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were straight-backed, leather covered and brass-nailed; all the tables and cupboards were plain but of good well-rubbed wood, and kept scrupulously clean.  The family kept the house for use, and cleanliness was always with the Dutch akin to godliness.

     Upstairs the same order and cleanliness prevailed.  The great beds were built into the wall and were smothered with quilts and curtains.  There were no closets then, but in their place cupboards with balled feet, and the kas or huge chest, in which the linen was kept or the numerous wadded and quilted petticoats of the women.  Trundle beds for the children, more straight-backed chairs, floor rugs, warming pans, and a miscellaneous aggregation of what the Dutch called boedel made up the furnishing.  Overhead in the gar-ret was the store room and junk shop, where discarded articles were flung across the great hewn beams of oak and where the children used to play on wet days when the rain was pattering on the roof.

     It was probably a well-furnished, well-ordered house in which Jan the Second passed his days, and doubt-less, in his capacity of magistrate, he found it worth while to keep in a conspicuous place on the wall his ancestral coat-of-arms-a silver shield with three golden stars surrounded by oak leaves and, at the top, a helmet and a fourth star of gold.  He probably knew little about the meaning of the coat-of-arms and pos-sibly cared less.  It was one of the trappings brought over from the old country and perhaps had something to do with inspiring respect in the new--especially for one who was an officer of the law.  The colony had
 
 

as yet no strong leanings either toward democracy or aristocracy.  It was only a colony and followed the lead of Amsterdam.

     And within the colony the social life was not very different from what ruled in Holland.  Jan the Second had eight sons and three daughters, and however sober-minded and industrious they may have been, it is not believable that they devoted their whole energies to the farms and the household.  Ten of them married, and that of itself implies much social gaiety under the paternal roof.  Humanity the world over, in all ages, is much the same, and those who went out to the colonies in the early days were not precisely marooned of joy.  They had their frolics and feastings, their courtships and marriages as other people.  In the spring and summer there were banquets on the green with dancing for the young folks and bowling, feasting, smoking for the elders, pleasure parties in wagons and boats, picnics, sports and many games.  The feast of St. Nicholas, New Year's Day, or a family wedding (celebrated at the house, not at the church) were gala days when game, poultry, fish, rolliches, head-cheese, with pancakes, waffles, cookies, doughuts and fruit were consumed in quantity to the accompaniment of cider, beer and heady rum.  They were great occasions, and all the family finery, all the silver, pewter and brass, all the cookery and brewery of which the house was capable were in evidence.

     The Dutch were ever a serious people, but old, as well as young, knew how to unbend and give way to the mirth of the hour.  Jan the Second, with all his
 

28

magisterial and aldermanic gravity, and despite the helmet and golden stars of his crest, probably led the dance with the bride or boisterously gave out the pres-ents on the day of merry St. Nicholas.   With duties, cares and pleasures he probably never had much time to think of the old country and cast up regrets that he was never to see it again.  The new life was easy and full of sunshine, and when he came to give it up it was perhaps with regret.  To those of sound mind and body the joy of living never diminishes.

     He passed out shortly after 1673 and was buried there in the village which he had helped to found.  There was no church building erected in New Utrecht before 1700, so he was not buried in the church but in a local burying ground.  Probably above the grave was placed the common brown-stone slab with a rudely carved cherub head at the top and down below the lettering:

with the date of birth and death.  All the slabs have long since crumbled away and the burying ground has ceased to exist.  Long Island was the stamping ground of armies during the Revolution and even its ruins have perished.

     Jan the Second's heirs sold his first farm in 1675 for 2500 guilders, and his new farm, running toward Coney Island for 2000 guilders.  Some town lots brought 750 guilders.  The sum total was not such a meagre competence considering the times and cir-
 
 

cumstance.  When doled out among a wife and eleven children it, of course, meant little to each; but the children married and scattered into a dozen different families and even the faithful mother of the flock--the redoubtable Tryntie---cosoled herself a few years later (1678) by taking a second husband.  Of the children, one son stayed on at New Utrecht and with him our story continues.
 
 

     The fourth son of Jan the Second was a Jan Janse, which in the old Dutch meant merely Jan Jans zoon, or Jan the son of Jan.  Whether this son of the third generation came over in the Dutch ship with the high poop in 1652 or whether he was born in the New World remains a matter of doubt.  It is no great matter, for in either event he went his parents to New Utrecht and spent his boyhood there in the quiet Dutch town by the Narrows.  To all intents and purposes he was the first American of the clan.

     A boy's life on the shores of the Lower Bay two hundred and fifty years ago was, of course, never thought worthy of recitation in the chronicles; but it must have been an interesting life for all that.  There was school to be attended, for the Dutch early estab-lished public instruction and the schoolmaster was second only to the domine in local importance.  Be-sides this, there was farm work to be done, and chores about the house; but, even so, there was plenty of time for play.  The chief sport was hunting.  The waters in front of the town swarmed with fish, but fishing never had the fascination of hunting and trapping.  The great handicap for a boy's hunting at that time,

however, was the scarcity of powder and lead.  More than once fowling of any kind had been forbidden by the government as a waste of good ammunition that should be kept for defense against enemies.  But a boy's ingenuity was abundant opportunity must have been equal to inventing various spring traps; and were not the Indians there to teach the use of the bow, arrow, spear and tomahawk?

     In those days there were plenty of deer, elk and bear in the Long Island woods, and turkeys, pheasants, pigeons, rabbits were everywhere.  It is not likely that the young Jan effected much slaughter among the Larger game, but the rabbits, squirrels and pigeons were probably worried by fire from bow and sling; and perhaps many a 'possum was smoked out of a hollow tree and hustled to a finish by the dogs.  Youth needs little teaching in such matters.  The reversion to the hunter is natural and dominant in almost every boy.  But Jan the Third, like some of his later descendants, must have received not only inspiration but instruction from the Indians.  There were redskins a-plenty on Long Island and they were all friendly enough with the Dutch.  The boys of either the red or the white race are less reticent than their elders, and it is very prob-able that Jan and his companions soon got upon good terms with the younger Indians.  The wood trails and the water ways, with game grounds and all the methods of hunting and trapping, were known to the young red-skins and were soon picked up by the white boys.  The spearing of fish from a conoe by torchlight, or through the ice in winter, the baiting and trapping of turkeys
 

32

in runways, the settling of springs for muskrats, beaver, and mink, the chasing of young ducks with dogs, the treeing of coons and squirrels, the effective use of the bow and feathered arrow must have been known to Jan.  No boy on a frontier surrounded by a wilderness contents himself with playing at marbles on the side-walk or at ball in the pasture lot.  He is born with a love of the wild and accepts the artificial sports only when the wild with its allurements is no more.

     There can be little doubt that Jan the Third, as his father before him, knew something of the River.  With its marshes and its meadows it was a great hunting ground.  The wood ducks bred there and in October great clouds of mallard and teal swung up or down the stream, passing from lake to lake, while wild geese in Bay.  The back country was the feeding ground for all sorts of game.  The forests of oak and uplands of chestnut and hickory, the far-away blue mountains, the upper River, were haunts of the deer and the bear.  The whole region was as yet unexplored by the whites, and consequently mysterious in its depths.  Even the faint Indian trails that ran through the underbrush were uncanny in their windings and sudden disappear-ances.  It was a new land and had the spell of the wilderness about it.

     Jan must have loved it, must have longed to go there and live; but circumstances intervened and dictated his staying at New Utrecht.  One circumstance alone probably had deciding weight.  Before he was of age to break ancestral ties he had made new ties in New 
 
 

York.  The larger city was only a few miles away; and there he had met and fallen in love with a round-faced Tryntje who was just as Dutch as himself.  There in the city he married the fair Tryntje May 9, 1673.  He could not take a young bride into the wilderness of the River.  Perhaps she was just a city girl, a home-body, and afraid of the unknown.  Jan could not be dumb to her appeal to stay near the city and their parents.  At any rate he took Tryntje back with him to New Utrecht, took up life on the farm like his father before him, raised grain and cattle, turned the furrow, swung the scythe and cared for the herds.

     But there was something more for Jan than the mere routine of the farm.  His fellow townspeople placed his services at a higher value than perhaps he himself did.  In 1679 and thereafter he was a magistrate in the town, and probably held the solemn court customary to the Dutch---a court where an attempt at least was made to be just to all parties concerned.  And both he and Tryntje were prominent in the church.  The records show both of them members of the Dutch Church of New Utrecht in 1679 and Jan as a leader in all that pertained to his town---one of the town fathers.  And perhaps his activities had a still wider range and had to do with the colony.  His later appointments suggest as much, but are not wholly convincing.

     The times were stirring and trying.  Political events were happening.  The colonial government was chang-ing hands so swiftly and so often that stability and tranquility were out of the question.  The West India
 

34

Company had about come to the end of its rope; Con-neticut was pushing Long Island into a quarrel; and no one knew from day to day what conquering ships of the line might sail up the Bay and turn the government awry once more.  The Dutch were losing their grip on the colony and they, naturally, did not enjoy it.  Everyone was interested, including those in the five towns of Long Island, of which New Utrecht was one.

     The first forty years of Dutch rule in New Am-sterdam had not been too successful.  The policy of the West India Company had been niggardly and oppressive and when the English took the town in 1664 and re-named it New York, there were many of the Dutch who accepted the situation with complacency.  At any rate they were not disposed to fight over it.  The English governor, Nicholls, came in quietly and acted with moderation.  There was no bloodshed and hence no deep-seated feeling calling for revenge.  The Dutch, of course, did not relish being ousted from the government, but they submitted and the English had their way.

     In 1673, by a strange fluke and after a good deal of blundering on both sides, the Dutch once more came into possession of New York.  The evacuation of the English was quite as bloodless as that of the Dutch nine years before.  The English simply marched out and the Dutch marched in.  Colve became the governor, the Dutch hope and flag were once more raised, New York was rechristened New Orange; and Jan the Third, probably thinking that at last an era of
 
 

everlasting peace had dawned with the Dutch in the ascendant, marched away and married Tryntje that very year.

    But the hopes of the Dutch were dashed.  New Orange was given back to the English the next year and the city had its name changed once more to New York.  Jan probably set back in his straight chair at New Utrecht and grumbled with the rest of the Dutch, but none of them did anything.  No doubt the world looked very large to them then with a great unsettled continent stretching to the west whose limits no one knew.  What, indeed, was the use of quarreling about a scrap of a colony when a continent was to be had for the taking?

    Still a further time the Dutch cause was revived.  In 1689 Leisler led his revolt, was believed in by the Dutch, and measurably supported by them.  It was at this very time that Jan the Third accepted a commis-sion as lieutenant of militia, and it was Leisler who commissioned him.  His range of activity we know not, but it probably was purely local in and about New Utrecht.  At any rate, there is no note of his figuring in action about New York, and, indeed, the Dutch as a whole did not resist the deposition and even the execution of Leisler.  It is an odd page in the history of the New Netherland Dutch that they apparently gave up so readily to the pressure of the English.  No one quite understands it except on the basis of belief that one government was about as inefficient as the other, and neither of them was worth quarreling over.

    When the Earl of Bellmont came into power in
 

36

New York he was received rather graciously because he had denounced the execution of Lesler as murder, and was disposed to be conciliatory toward the Dutch.  They let his government go on without opposition.  It seems they even upheld and supported it.  As for Jan the Third, the Earl of Bellomont commissioned him a captain in 1700 and he accepted.  The records still show his name upon the rester; but there is no record that he ever went out and did battle for the cause of either the Dutch or the English.  Perhaps Captain Jan Janse, for all his high-sounding name and title never

     During his command possibly there was no need for forceful measures; and, then again, it may be that he was averse to tumult and strife and held his command merely that he might enforce quiet and order.  His ancestors had never been carried away by the trum-pet's clangor and the cannon's roar.  They rather sneered at the struggle for command and prominence, the sordid ambitions of men, the whole travail and labor of society and government.  They were outliers, dwell-ers by the dykes, people who loved the free life in the open with the wind in the forest and the sun on the polders.  Jan was of their blood and probably cared more for the quiet of his "bouwerie," the breeze from the sea, the blue sky overhead, than for all the strident war of words about human rights and wrongs going up from the throats of those who had neither honesty nor truth in their hearts. 
 
 

     At any rate Jan lived there by the waters of the Lower Bay, seeing the suns rise over Long Island and sink to rest beyond Staten Island, and was no doubt content.  The round-faced Tryntje had brought up a family of two sons and six daughters (with the help of only one black stave, according to the census) and before Jan and Tryntje were old the children married and measurably scattered.  At seventy-four, thinking his days of work were over, Jan sold his farm to his son-inlaw, Captain Van Brunt, for £1676.  Nine years later he made a well bequeathing his estate to his children with the exception of certain pounds and shillings which he left to his grandchildren and great grandchildren.  And he did not fail to start the will with the solemn declaration:  "I bequeath my soul to God who gave it, my body to the earth from whence it came  *   *  *   in certain hopes of resur-rection and the union of my body and soul at the last day, and of Eternal Life through the sole  merits of my blessed Saviour."  The declaration sounds trite today but when made it was believed in.  The simple faith of the Dutch is something no one could ever cavil over. 

     Jan did not pass out until 1736.  He was then an old man of eighty-four---old perhaps as the result of having lived sanely and soberly all his days.  He had not quarreled with his time and generation, but had accepted both quietly.  Who shall say he was not wise in his philosophy?
 
 

    From the

****
 

their children

****

40

referred to 

****

Very beautiful 

****
 

42

Annetje heaved 

****

mows of

****
 

44

because he 

****
 

a part 

****

     Jan the Fifth must have been a very small boy when he came up the River with his father and landed at Inian's (or  Inion) Ferry.  He is said to have "lived at New Brunswick" by which was probably meant that that he stayed on there with the elder Jan until after 1730, and then, with his father, went back to the Millstone, and took up life on one of the farms at or near Harlingen.  He inherited from Jan the Fourth a farm of some 230 acres the Harlingen tract, and, before it became his property, hr probably lived upon it.  He was known in the Harlingen region as "John Jr." to distinguish him from his father, and in the records the name is also Anglicized, though it is almost certain that he was baptized with the old Dutch name of Jan.

     Whether Jan met and married his first wife, Margaret, at New Brunswick or at Harlingen is not now apparent, but the ceremony itself took place in 1732.  There were three children by this marriage and one of the children, the eldest son known as Colonel John, was supposed to have put a good many grey hairs in his fathers's head, as will hereafter appear.  When Margaret died Jan married, in 1750, a Garetta of

Rocky Hill, by whom he had ten children. They all seem to have been baptized at the Six Mile Run Church and to have lix ed at or near Harlingen (presumably on the ancestral farms of Jan the Fourth) until they married and scattered. Jan himself took up life there after the fashion of his family, not seeking publicity or notoriety or office of any kind, but leading the frc&~ life of an independent farmer, happy in his independence and enjoying the sunlight and the air like a rational being. None of the Family had ever worried the couiimunity with importunities about office or posi-tion or command.

     But it cannot be presumed of Jan, or his time and family, that because things were not matters of record therefor nothing ever happened or no noteworthy deed was ever doiie. Very few things in those days got into print or were kept even in written documents. The church \\ ith its baptisms and deaths, the courts with their files of cases were records, hut many of these have (lisappeared. Deeds and wills largely shared the same fate. Almost everything before the Revolution has vauiishcd One gropes noxv for happenings that iiluust have been and finds nothing. It may be assumed that Jan hixed the life of his time, gave of his strength iii the service of the community, aiid like his father be fore him, was a man of light and leading in his age an(l ~eiieration lie was a church xvarden at Harhn- gen iii 1754. ail(l either he, or his father, was one of the fouiiders of the church there. It is possible that 1)0th of thieni were near Harhingen up to the death of the (h(lCr an(1, their names being the same, has led to some
 

48

confusion in inference. Again in 1772-73, Jan's name appears on township committees in various capacities. But whatever his deeds or doings before the Revo-lution, and however important or unimportant they may have been, they were all lost sight of in the final act of his life. That was so dramatic that it over-shadowed all his early years and has come down in family tradition as the principal event of his career. It has lived so positively with so many descendants of the Family, and repeats itself with each one of them so accurately, that there is no doubt whatever of its troth, though it never got into the state or county records, was never reported in history, and has yet to be told in romance.

     Jan was one of the company of Minute Men organized in 1-lillsborough township (adjoining Harlmn~ gen) the 3d of May, 1775, "to be ready, at a minute's notice to march in defense of the liberty of our enuil- try '' He was in Capt. Vroom's Company. 2in1 Bat- tahon, Somerset County Militia. Abraham Quick was the Colonel of the regiment. Oii the 16th day of May the officers of the militia and the Committee of Ob-servation appointed three menihers "to 1)rovide ammu-nition for said company and arms for those who are not able to buy for themselves, and the aforesaid gentlemen are desired to take £ 40 Proc. in money on the credit of the township to buy 140 pounds pow(ler, 420 l)oun(ls lead and 120 flints, etc."

     That, and a meagre mention of names on a local poster (saved from destruction by a mere accident) are about the only "documents" that remain but we
 
 

may be reasonably certain about what was not re-corded. The events that culminated in the Revolution xx crc causing apprehension and, among the colonists, a tide of wrath was rising. Jan was out in the open against the British, he had enlisted, taken up arms against the king. England had been the traditional foe in the Family from time immemorable. All the Dutch in his blood, as well as the American. was fired to anger 1 low otherwise shall you account for a man of sixty-seven taking down the gun from the wall and going into the line. He was at that age when he might have held back and let others fight. No one xvould have accused him of cowardice or lack of loyalty. But mi the l)atiei~ce and good humor of his life was eryiallis'ed into anger, his sense of justice was out- rage(l, an(l, (flute asi(lc from the country being in (langer, he would fight because the country had been 5( oruie(l, t raintied lil)on, wronged.

     Jan was not alone in his family in taking this positive '-taitil against the British. Ruloff, his brother, was a (leputv to the Prox incial Congress and also a member of the Committee of Safety, Abraham, another brother, was a Lieutenant of GrenAdiers, Jan's own son, Abraham the Younger, was a firivate in the ranks his cousins an(l nephexvs and relatives by marriage were all in arms against the Icing and for the country. Pitt alas! there was one heart-brealcing exception. I-his first-born, Colonel John, was a tory, a loyalist, an(l wore the Icing's uniform. In matters of that sort where one might xx ush the facts lost and history silent the recor(ls speak with undue emphasis, and they are
 

50

not missing here; but what never was told, never will be told, was the wounded pride and anguish of that old nian at swords points xvith his own son. A faniily quarrel is perhaps the very worst of all, and this was brother against brother an(I father against son. It clove the family in twain, it was never forgotten or forgiven, and both father and son went to the grave in bitterness of soul and with a sense of injury.

     "Well John, if you must go to the British deed back to me the farm that I gave you," was the 01(1 man's ultimatum. The Roman Brutus was not more deter-mined than Jan the Fifth. I-Ie wanted no prosperity with the enemy of the country, even though the enemy was his oxvn son. The son yielded to the (leman(l, but on one condition. That was that in case he was Icilled in the war his wife and children should have the property again. The father was not averse to this. He did not want to visit the sins of the son upon the wife and children, and so he in turn, agreed to the new condition. Then they parted, and it is said they never spoke--never saxv each other again.

     In the Family tradition Jan is always called the patriot and Colonel John, the tory, as though one were altogether right and the other altogether wrong. The father, no (loubt, insisted with force that not even a family tie should be considered before the country. It ixas every one's duty to uphold the land aiid strike down its foes. Perhaps lie was right from that point of viexv. But had not the son some right on his side, too? What was his argument, his excuse, for turning
 
 

against family, home, friends, country, and facing reprobation and perhaps ruin?

     It was a very compelling statement that Colonel John put forth, and at any other time or place would have carrie(l iiot only conviction but commendation; hut it was a period of great excitement, of violent partisan-sbip, and the statenient fell upon unsympathetic ears. lirietlv it xx as thii~ Before, and at the time the Revo-lution brolce out, he was a magistrate and a colonel in the British army. He had taken the king's bounty an(l had worii his uniform. Above all, he had sworn a solemn oath of allegiance to the king. He had been U usted nuphicitly and promoted to high coinniand. Was lie now to prove traitor to his cause and perjurer to his oath? He could not do it. That living up to ones creed that Jan his father had taught him as a boy xvas noxv proving the defect of its (ftiiihity It xvas a great virtue, but to Jan the Fifth it was in this eac ,i x i( e~ a ~erh)ent that he had warmed to Ii fe and that had turiied and stung him. What heart buriiings there inu't have been with those two stubborn men, each of whom was right from his oxvn point of viexv

     Perhaps the Family tradition was never quite just te. Colonel John. I-Ic xvas an honorable uI)right man an(l neither a traitor nor a coxvar(l. And he (lid what he could to h)rexeilt friction and bloodshed. He would not fight against his own men and his king ; but neither would lie fight against his family, friends and neigh-hors, lie asked to be transferred to the British navy, and that request was granted. 1-le did not figure con-spicuotisly in the war, though taken prisoner once and
 

52

confined at Philadelphia. His faithful wife did not rest until she had secured his exchange for an Amen-can prisoner at New Brunswick. His faithful wife! She, indeed, was about the only one that stood with him and for him. There again were more complica-tions, for she was his first cousin-a daughter of his uncle Ruhoff, who was a member of the Committee of Safety and a Congressional deputy. Colonel John nor only had to stand against his father but against his father-in-law, uncles, brothers, cousins - in short, everyone save his wife, the tories, and a few faithful slaves. He must have been a man of iron nerve. The tales told about him, but not repeate(l h rc, confirm such a belief.

     The tories at that time excited more wrath than the enemy. They were spies within the camp and the colonists thought hanging was too good for them. The peol)le at 1-larhingen mobbed them when they could. Did not Major Baird lead a mob that tried to smoke out that notorious tory, John 1-loneyman, at Griggstown - the cattle dealer who was stii)phying the British with cattle and horses, giving aid and comfort to tIle enemy ? Whether Tan the Fifth went xvith the mob no one noxv knoxvs, but he was with it in spirit. I-lad he Icuown then that his grandson Abraham, at that time an infant iI~ arms, xvas destined to marry the daughter of this same tory, John Honeyman, he might have expired in a fit of xvrath. But he xvas not to xvitness that ceremony.

     The events of the Revolution, though they carried over a number of years, probably took place quite
 
 

rapidly for the staid people of the time. Middlesex and Somerset were the scenes of many skirmishes, raids, and minor battles. The River ran on as serenely bright and careless as ever, but its banks in spots were soaked xvith blood, and many a home along its uplands ~~'as standing only in charred ruins. The whole valley was the theatre of a guerilla warfare and the local militia xx as ever on the alert and moving. The climax came with Clinton's retreat from Philadelphia across New Jersey in 1778 Washington came out to haras~ the enemy, to cut oIl his twelve-mile baggage train, to eniltarrass him in every xvav The Somerset militia uIider General Dielcenson was with the Continental army Apparently cx ( ry man xvho could shoulder a gun xx-as there And in the column marched the l)at- riotic if irascible Jan the Fifth.

     There were dippings an(l haxvkings and skirmishes all along the line of retreat, but it was not until Clinton lia(l reached Monmouth-thie 28th of J nile I 778---that the armies finally caine to grips. The sandy tracts and marshes Ilear there nla(le movements difficult, both armies xvere xvorn and weary, and they came together iii a sullen desperate mood. Throughout the day ebeeks a'id counter-eheclcs, advances and retreats fob loxx ed on both sides At the start Lee had failed and led a retreat that brought a sharp reprimand from \Va'~bington avid caused some discotiragement among the Continentals. But the chief rallied them and again they formed and xvent into the struggle. Positions xxere lost and xvOO, ground was shifted, batteries xvere changed, but all day long the fight xvent on with urns-ketry clashing and cannon booming. New Jersey had never known such a terrific cannonading. It was the most violent of all the war. Over in liarlingen and far away up the River toward the blue mountains of the distance the shock carried. The country people 

what xvas left of them-stood in groups listening to that booming of the guns coinilig from afar as a con-cussion, a sharp spat on the air. I-Tow eager must have been the interest! And how those people must have prayed to the God of Battles for the victory that day!
Quite as severe as the cannonading was the heat.~ The sun blazed with ftiry and the soldiers were in an agony of thirst. They threw away packs and blankets, threw away coats and waistcoats, and in their shirt sleeves went on with the fight. Where ranks were cut to pieces they were filled up. Moll Pitcher with her gunner-husband killed went on loading and firing his cannon. All day long the battle continued and dark-ness alone stopped the struggle.~ It had been the most desperate battle on Jersey soil. Something like twenty thousand men had been involved on both sides. The British had lost five hundred men and the Americans less than half that number. The ivorn troops slept on

*F)r Aitken in his Distinqnishcd Families in America de-scended from IVilbelonts Beckman and Jan Thoniassc Van D~i~ quotes one of the family as sayiniz "61 andmotlter told me thAt she was hnsv at her spinet ibM ass Fol 28th div of hine 1778 The heat was intense She heard the dreadful boom, boom of the cannon from the hattie of Monmotith 
* * 6randmother said it seemed to her as if the very earth trembled I-Icr grandfather, that Godly patriot, John Van Dvke. Jr , of New Jersey, gave his life that day for his coun-try on that bloody battlefield

their arms thinking the battle would go on in the morning No one had tune nor strength to look to the dead It must have been a sorry sight-thsat of the pretty slopes and ravines of Monmoutli under the starlight, with forms lying here and there crumpled ~ lit agony or resting quite limp and still as they fell ihte bullet> had been ito resl)eeters of rank. Officers and nien were liting together in death. And the days of a man's years had counted for naught. Young and old were lying there side by side. And among them, with his face to the foe we may be sure, was Jan the Fifth- (lead in his seventieth year.t
J It is pi oper to add here that a less dramatic etiding is attn- 1 oted to 1 in the F~ fth by one of his collateral descendants Mr Warren II Stout in the Samertet County Historical Quar-let ft Oct 1915. states that lie ilted at I larlingen, L)eermbet- 4, 1 777, in d is sit iiposed to lie liii rt e(I in the grot ods stir month rig the ehoich '' It is probable that this was another Jan, as there were set eral of the tianie at liarlingen. In any event the Fain- ii c ii 'iii tion has strottnet confirmation 'lra(littoiis get warped ittil to I stcd in the tel line, bitt a death on a battlefield could hat d l~ lit c teen invented by descendatits who were living at die time of the battle
 
 

Colonel John the tory was the older brother by some years of Abraham the Sixth. He was a half brother onhy, but they grew tip together and must have been close companions. When the Revolution came the brothers parted, as did father and son; and l)erhal)s the feelitig of estrangement was carried on for years after the war closed. At any rate the direct descend-ants of Abraham were warned through several genera-tions to stand by the cotintry and the dag, right or wrong; an(l to take warning by the exainl)le of the Family tory, Colonel John It seems as thotigh there niust have been bad blood between the half-brothers even after the war had ended. They went their ways and probably saw little of each other.

Colonel Jolm hived on at Harhingen in a large house that is still pointed out to the curious, and there is the usual ghost story told about it. Abraham probably heft Harhingen before the Revolution. He had no (loubt often hooked at the bltie hills in the north- west arid had longed to go tip nearer to them. I-Tar-hingen had grown too familiar to him; there were too many setthers thereabouts. It was not wild enough and the 01(1 love of the free unbroken country was his. Be-

si(les, the River atarted up there in the bltie hills and he perhaps wanted to get back upon its waters.
Iterhaps and perhaps. We do not know the why;
e kno\v only that he xvent there-went far up on the Lainington (orginally Alainatong or Allemetunk) a branch of the River and settled about a mile above \\ hat \\ as afterward known as Vliet's Mills. He had e(ttilC itito ~0C5M~ there of a large farm-so large that it has since been cut up into three or four farms. It lay on the 1-lunterdon County side of the stream, not it) Somer~et-a fact that no doubt led to some con-tt~i')n ijf names an(l events thereafter
I ti connection with tlt is harge farm Abraham owned rolls on the Lainnigton, known by his name, and was ((tiisi(lere(l a man of means. Where his means came fi on iiiay now nidy he conjeettircel. He was too young a man to have made wealth and the only other source of acqtiiremeiit was through his father. The&e was a good deal of property owned by Jan the Fourth and Jan the Fifth, for they gave away farms to many children Becides Garetta of Rocky I-Jill. \vife of Jan the Fifth and mother of Abraham the Sixth, in her will left a female shave to each of her four daughters

-a l)ersoisal servant fitting their estate. That, again, suggests \vell-to-ch() circumstances. A great-niece of Ian the Fifth remarked many times in her later years that when she was a child her uncle had "a whole kitchen full of black folks." Some of these slaves with their children came down from Jan the Fourth ail(l later all of them were liberated-manumitted was the term used It is doijtbtless true that Abraham the

Sixth held some slaves on the Lainington farm, but certainly his son and descendants never did. Slavery after the Revolution was voluntarily abandoned in New Jersey.
Just when Abraham the Sixth came up on the Lain-ington is not precisely known, but it was two or three years before the outbreak of the war, and possibly urn-nsedhiatelv after his marriage. The latter event very like-ly tt)Ok place in 1773 when he was twenty and the Ida of his choice was just eighteen. From 1-larhingen the young couple, "with splendid promise iii their eyes," xx ent forth to conquer the comparatively new xvorld Oh) on the Lainington. The first son was born in 1774 and (lied three years later, hut whether horn al Ilarlingeii or ott the Lamivtgtctii fat-ni is not kitoss ii Their secortil son, 1\ brahtain the Sevetithi, was withotit dotil it lion i on the fat in iii 1776, the o~ieiiing year of the xvar. So it appears they were xx dl settled on the farm hiefore the I? Evolution

That (lire event cast its shadow across the threshold of the young cou~)le. The nexv farm neethed the young husband's services, hut the country nee(led them still more, and there was nothing for .hiin to do but take down the gun and go forth. That he did. And did it probably with no feeling that he was tloing anything heroic or dramatic. It was the path of duty and he probably never for a moment thought of it as the path of glory. Little did he or his kin care for glory. And he won hittle, if we may trtist the records. After a htintlred years his very name has disappeared from the published lists and some of his collateral descendants

Itd\ e doubted Ins being in the war at all. But nothing could lie more certain than that he was there Among hits immediate descetidatits the tale has been told too often, and handed doxvn too directly to admit of error.

tUne descendant xvho was born in the farm house at Lamtiigton and lived there until lie was twenty-three, wrote in 1888 (he xvas then over sixty) "Your great gratolfadier was a soldier in the Revolution, was discharged at I\Iorristown, and came home so ragged that his w ife did tiot knoxv him, and with an old flint-lock kept hint standing at die door for some time. I handled his old shooting-iron and kept it as a relic t'ttih I cane \Vest."* I [oxv very familiar that story in the Faintly Lach generation was told it. It used It It rot it cxxl tat el al)i)rate(h xvlicit tol(h to the children at thii-j~ .iiiil lit thittit it xx as a hit axvesome. The fuller inn tilts c ~l oke of Ibe 'mall fantily alone there mit the httnsc, tif die sotiil(l of a galloping horse in the night, the fear of raiding 1-Jessians, the children cowering Vol 1 Ii tished iii a corner, the young xvife standing guard, flint-hock in hand, behind the locked door, the insistence of the soiled and ragged horseman upon getting in. There xxas never much told about the after-recognition anul the ioy of that small family at getting the husband and the father back safe from the war. That was a matter of sentiment-something the Family had in abundance but never cared to talk about, and never cared to show in any conspicuous way.

Noxv the two children who were cowering in the

*V)avid I) Btinn to the writer iii 1888

corner at the time of the soldier's return were the son, Abraham the Seventh, and his sister, Garetta, or as the Faintly knew her, Aunt Charity. Abraham did not die until 1854, and Aunt Charity lived on for ninety three years, not dying until 1871. The soldier died in 1804 but the children had then grown up and had heard at first hand the narrative which they afterward passed on to the younger generation. All the grand-children heard the story directly from Abraham the Seventh and Aunt Charity, and one of them knew it directly from Ida the widoxv, xvho had fmgtmred in thu. h-old-up and (11(1 not (lie until 1821. There ~ alomiul- ance of (hirect evidence to itrove the service ofAbrahamit the Sixth in the xxar, btit in the Faitimly there itever was any need for proof. The fact xvas never ques-tioned.

Just when the young soldier entered the war, how long he was in it, what he did, what his hair-breadth escapes, are not known. Perhaps they were never told. The reticence of the Family about their own affairs, even within the family circles, was ever and always astonishingly great. They were close-mouthed to an irritating degree. It was not that they desired to keep "secrets" or bide deeds, but because they thought them of no particular importance. Their ambitions did not run to notoriety or even distinction; they cared nothing about public recognition of their work or public apl)latise of any kind. It is a singular thing that in ahi the direct generations down to John the Eighth not a single member ever sought office, ever struggled in society for a top place, ever pursued wealth in com-

  ABRAHAM THE SIX XII 
61

merce, ever traded or sold or wrangled over the incre-ment xx ith his fehhoxv nien. Whether through pride- and they were always a rather sneering scoffing hot- or indifference they never cared to go into a contest about small matters. If anything was offered to them it Inight be accepted, but it would not be asked for or run after. That was incompatible with dignity. And the amount of dignity each succeeding head of the Family carried abotit with him might have been amusing had it not been so seriotis. The elders were very self-centre(l, reasonably sel f-satisfied, and always self-sufhicieiit, though they u(lged thenisel yes severely enough by their oxvn stan(lards of right and wrong. 'I hey held aloof as niuch as possible from other people, kehit axx'ay front the toxvns, and settled matters by their own hearthstone or in the open air.

It is 1)rohable that when Abraham th~ Sixth went up on the Lamington he cut himself free from his own family. At any rate we know nothing positively of his after-relations with Griggstown. 1-Te was in a new country, on a nexv farm, with mills and other property to look after, and probably had plenty of work on his hands. The region of the Lamington in those days was rather remote and somewhat unbroken. There xvere dense woods along the stream and abundance of game. The streairi itself xvas lively and below the great farm a mile or more were the mills-a grist mill, a pulling mill and a carding mill. Above on the stream were forges where iron was made, and not far removed was the inevitable (histillery where apple-jack was turned out for domestic consumption. A brisk local trade

along a few lines xvas developed at that time, btit it was limited in area. There were settlers there before the Revolution; but, again, they were not numerous and the houses were far al)art. Abraham had to deal with primitive conditions and he probably enjoyed them. The timber was thick, the water pure, the air clear, and the sunlight fell in golden showers. What more did he need?

He appears to have come home from the war, hung UI) the gun, and assumed the burden of life on the Lamington with alacrity. Though, as has been stated, neither lie nor any of his fathers had ever sought office, yet office quite often sought theiii. For many years Abraham was the local magistrate of his (histrict and perhap~ held other county offices of which we now hax e no rec(ir(l. One of his descendants writes: "IIis old (court) docket was among the rubbish in the garret at your grandfather's and I used to overhatfi and look at it on rainy days. It was kept in a beautiful round hand said by Aunt Charity to be the penmanship of a distinguished penman by the name of Allen."*

'When court business was slack and the mill and farm work would alloxv, l)erllai)s Abraham took the old flint-lock and went out hunting pheasants or dticks or deer. About the only amusement the men of the Family ever indulged in was shooting. They were all born pot-hunters. The love of that sport came down in a straight line from the old North Sea ancestors, and is rife today in the latest descendants. There were

 ABRAHAM THE SIXTH. 63

social amtiseinents for the women and the young people such as husking and quilting bees, apple-paring frolics, and all that; but the elders were staid and rather serious I)eople. They sat by the open fireplace with its hooks and pots, its pewter and brass, they came and went through the double Dutch doors, they wandered in the old-fashioned garden and through the apple orchards, they drove and rode hither and yon; but the xx ere very sober about it at all. Humor never came into the Family while the Dutch blood prevailed.
Did Abraham and Ida ever get far from the double doors, the wide porch, the spring house, the gateway- the limits of the farm ~ Did they ever drag out of the chests their stored finery of silk and satin and go forth

- --she iii thu~ large I)etticoat with much lace and all the faintly jewelry, he in tim 1)ltish small clothes, buckled slippers, blue coat and fancy waistcoat? Did they ever (Irive down to the Landing above New Brunswick on tbe River and there take boat for New York? Did they come and go, visiting relatives and seeing sights in the newly-built cities of the western world? There is a recor(l of the clothes and jewelry, for some of each, with much family silver, caine doxvn the line ; and there is tradition of fine linen, great poster beds, chests, xvonderful carved tables and chairs in that old farm house ; but there is only vague allusion to junketings and trax cbs Perhaps they took Itlace. And if they did who xx-ould be foolish enough to make a record of thietit 2

\hti ahiato the Sixths xvent his way to the shades at fifty-one-rather early for one of the open air. His

 64 THE RARITAN.

fathers had run on into the eighties and close to the nineties. Perhaps the service in the Revolution had in some way undermined what should have been a hong-lasting constitution. At any rate he died in 1804 and was buried in the Lamington churchyard, and his faithful wife, Ida, was laid beside him in 1821. Six of his children grew up on the farm, marrying and living near there. His oldest son Abraham, whom we have styled Abraham the Seventh, evidently lived on and probably took charge of the mills and the old farm, though later on he seems to have bought another farm lying betxveen what was later known as Kennedy's Mills and Peapack. The old homestead farm of Abra-ham the Sixth was probably at that time cut up into smaller areas and either sold or parcelled out to the children.

CHAPTER VIII
ABRAhAM THE SEVENTH

1776-1854.

The Revolution lent something of an afterglow to the life of i-\braham the Seventh. The war had been a momentous happening, and was not immediately lost sight of in favor of something new and startling as at the htresent (lay. Events were not of frequent occur-rence then and were consequently long remembered. Besides Abraham the Seventh had been born during the xvar and had witnessed in a dumb childish way the return of his father and his reception by his mother. I-Ic had no recollection of it, of course; but then he r~aturally took an after-interest in it from hearing it 51)oken abotil.
lIe xvas born on his father's farm above the mills, March 23, 1776, and grew up there very much as other boys of the time, lie was, probably, not an infant prod-igy; at least no remarkable tales have been handed down about him. The first event of his life that seemed to find record was his marriage on January 14, 1802, to 'Zarah, the daughter of a neighbor. who hived on a hiordering 220-acre farm. Sarah had been born in 1780 and xxras a child rif the Revolution hilce her bus- band. Both their parents had been in the war, and Sarah's father was no less a person than that one-time

p65]

66 THE RARITAN.

notorious tory, John 1-loneyman, whose house and fantily had been mobbed at Harlingen, as told some pages hack. John Honeymnan was such a remarkable character amid his daughter's marriage into the Family, of which Abraham the Seventh was the latest repre-~sentative, had such a remarkable effect that some para-graphs niust be given to him.
1-le was not Dutch, hut Scotch-Irish and a Cove-nanter. I-Ic had come to America in 1758 as a con-script with Colonel (afterwards General) Wolfe and through special service had become attached to Wolfe's military family. A year later with his chief he scaled the ileights of Abraham, fought at the battle of Quic-bee with that chief, and when Wolfe was mortally wouiidcd helped bear him from the field of battle, "walking most of the way in blood" as he afterward exh)ressed it. After the war he went to Philadelphia and there married a very intelligent girl, Mary Henry, of his oxvn faith and courage, and, like himself, of Scotch-Irish descent. In Philadelphia he first saw Washington, and after the outbreak of the Revolution, in which he took a profound interest, he sought an opportuinity to be presented to the chief. He was sumccessfxih largely through letters that had been given him by General Wolfe and by his honorabhe discharge from the English-French War. There were a number of interviews. Honeyman never revealed their nature or what was discussed, butt his after actions showed that there was an understanding.
In the early part of 1776, 1-loncyman, with his wife
and several small children, moved to Griggstown in

   THE RARITAN   68

ington's headquarters as a great capture. The chief saxv him alone for half an houir. Then he was lilaee(l in a guard-hotise for trial the next (lay xvith several guiar(ls on l)atrol. In the night a slight fire starteul iii the camp ; the guards ruishied to put it ouit. \Vhen they returned the prisoiter was not there. lIe had cscal)e(l Three (hays hater \Vashiington had re-crossed ttie icy Delaware with his troops and won the hattIe of Tren-ton The x ictory was epoch making. The tide tuiriie(l The country was sax e(l.

The Spy w-as not cah)tnre(l xx mdi the I lessians at Ti cii-ton. lie had gone back to the British, told a (hole fuil talu' of his cahittit c. and the weak condition of the A mericaiw, an(l then quit ckly start e(l for New I truns- xxi ek The miexx (if his capt nrc auth escape at Ti etittimi soon got hack to his home at Griggstoxxii. Fhic neigh- hors were in(hignaiit It xxas "old 1\Iaj or Baird~' that gathert d tIm neighbors together in a mob and led them lix' onzbt to the hone of the SPY, thinking to fiod him in htiditig there They found only thie Spy's xvi fe anul lice small ehildremi She (hith not knoxv xxiiere lie was, hut in (tr(ler to stein Ihe anger of the mob she asked for the leader to come forth. Major Baird caine to her Sb e hantleth him a hialier that was a fterxxard knoxxm 1 v heart in the Famil v. lie reath it ho the cmxx aii(l thereafter the gathering iiuiel~ly dispersed It rea(l
''i\mneriean Camp.
"Mcxx' Tersey, Nov A 1) 1776
"To the gitod ltCOhtl(' of Nexv Jersey amid all
(ithiers xx lion it niav concern It is hereby or-

dered that the wife and children of John 1-loneyman of Griggstown, the notorious tory noxv within the British lines, and probably act-ing the part of a spy, shall be, and hereby are, protected from all harm and annoyance from every quarter until furthor orders. But this furnishes no l)rotection to Iloneyman himself.

GEORGE WASHINGTON,
"Com.-in-Chief."

All throuigh the xx'ar Honeyman played the Spy for Washington and had for it the curses of his country-men amid neighbors: butt after the war Washington and several of Ins generals caine to visit Honeyman, and the story was out. But the Spy, outside of his imme-diate family, was very reticent. He never wished the British to know he had played them false.*
The doings of the Spy and his wife, Mary 1-lenry, are significant in this sketch of a Family only because their daughter, Sarah, married Abraham the Seventh. There was nexv blood amid new spirit injected into the long Dutch line. It had gone on pure Dutch for no one knoxvs boxy many centuiries, buit here~ at last was a

~As mlhtisti ating the ease with which facts are fat gotten amid lost it may lie said that thus hit of history would have corn- idemels' sierished by this tin-c lint for tIme chance chronicle of time Spy's grandson who, in his age, wrote down the story. with many facts not given iwre Since it was written docu-ments disroxered in the Secretary of State's office at Trenton go so confirm it and it has noxy passed into history See An Unwritten Account of time Spy of J-1"aslminqton by John Van Dvke in Our [[nine, Oct 1873 Also time Honexnian Faniilv by A V hi) Itoneyman page 97 Also Stryker's Battles of Trentan and Princeton, page 87 et seq

dered that the wife and children of John Honeyman of Griggstown, the notorious torynoxv within the British lines, and probably act-ing the part of a spy, shall be, and hereby are, protected from all harm and annoyance from every (luarter until further orders. But this furnishes no )rotection to 1-loneyman himself. GEORGE WASHINGTON, "Com.-in-Chief."

All throumgh the xvar Honeyman played the Spy for Washington and had for it the curses of his country-men and neighbors butt after the war Washington and several of his generals came to visit 1-loneyman, and the story was out. Butt the Spy, outside of his imme-diate family, was very reticent. He never wished the British to knoxv lie had played tliemn false.*

The doings of the Spy and his wife, Mary 1-lenry, are significant in this sketch of a Family only because their daughter, Sarah, married Abraham the Seventh. There was new blood and new spirit injected into the long Duitch line. It had gone on pure Dutch for no one knoxvs boxy many centuiries, but here~ at last was a

*As illustrating the ease with which facts are forgotten amid lost it immay lie said that thus hit of history xvouhd have corn- ph-trhs- muerisbed hty this (tine limit for the chance chronicle of the Spy's gran(hson ixho, in liii age, wrote doxvn the story, with mammv facts not given here Since it was xvrittcn docu-ments discovered in the Secretary of State's office at Trenton go so confirm it ammd it has now passed into history See An Unwrmttcmm Account of time Sp'v of fVadminqton hty John Van Dvke iii Our [[time, Oct 1873 Also the I-[onevmmmami Fatuity by A V D Iloneyman, pace 97 Also Stryker's Bathes of Trentamm and Princeton, page 87 et seq