part 14 of The Route Not Taken
This article comes in two parts. Part one describes the life and property of Gershom C. Sergeant, the brother and neighbor of John P. Sergeant who was featured in my last article. Part two describes the owners of the next property along the route of the railroad that was never built—at different times owned by Baptist ministers and a mining company.
part 12 of The Route Not Taken
My last post (A Rockafellar Homestead Divided) concerned the farm of Jacob B. Rockafellar who died without a will in 1813. His farm was divided into 28 lots in 1820 and distributed among the heirs. A division map was drawn that showed the bordering owner on the north to be our old friend, Elijah Carman.
Some time ago, I began to write about a road in Raritan Township that originated as a private lane used by the Carman and Hoagland families to get from their farms to the main road from Flemington to Ringoes. That private road eventually became Johanna Farms Road. In my previous article, I had gotten to the point where the farm on the south side of Johanna Farms Road was owned by Cornelius Voorhees in 1852 (see Hoagland’s Road, part one). Voorhees bought the farm in 1840 from the assignees of John S. Rockafellow.
Here is an article by Egbert T. Bush about the Copper Hill neighborhood I have been writing about recently, with additional comments from me.
I recently concluded the history of the old Carman homestead farm, the 18th century farmstead that ended up being owned by a Hollywood movie star in the 1930s (The Carman Farm). There was one important fact connected with the Carman farm that I left out and will describe in today’s post: the Carmans owned a road.
