Haines Farm, part two

This article is a continuation of The Haines Farm, part one.

The Haines farm has a pretty remarkable history, as Mr. Bush wrote:

From the first Isaac Haines the property descended to his son, the second Joseph; from this Joseph to his son, the second Isaac; and from him to his son, the third Joseph, the present owner, to whom it was conveyed by his father and mother, March 10, 1920.

The Second Joseph Haines

The second Joseph Haines and his wife Margaret Hoppock had four children: an infant who died in 1851; the second Isaac (1854-1925) who married Lariene (Lina) Thatcher; Mary Elizabeth (1857-1914) who married Clinton B. Wilson; and Amos Haines (c.1859-after 1892) who married Mabel Lambert and moved to Illinois.

When Margaret Hoppock Haines died in 1859, she was only 32 years old, and her children were still young. Joseph needed someone to take her place, so he married Margaret’s sister, Mary M. Hoppock (1829-1914). That marriage, like the previous one, was not recorded.

Margaret and Mary’s father Amos Hoppock died in 1873, intestate, and his wife Elizabeth Dalrymple died the next year. Joseph Haines was named administrator of the Hoppock estate, and had to oversee sale of the family farm, which was located on the west side of Route 523, south of Sandbrook. This was the first of many instances in which Joseph Haines served as executor or administrator for estates in his neighborhood.

Haines Road

In December 1861, Joseph Haines appeared before the Court of Common Pleas, in a Special term to petition for a new public road “of two rods wide” in the Township of Delaware, beginning “in the Neshanock Road leading from Ringoes to Sergeantsville on lands of Joseph Haines,” then running south “over lands of Joseph Haines, Elias D. Bowne, William P. Fisher and Alburtus K. Wagner, Esq.” to “the road leading from Ringoes to Head Quarters,” there to end 25 links from “the easterly post of the gate leading into said Wagner’s field.”

The Court ordered that “six surveyors of the County” inspect the area to determine if a public road was really necessary, and if so, lay out the most advantageous route. The surveyors were Peter Y. Bambridge and Nelson V. Young of West Amwell, William Servis, Jr. and Abraham Quick of East Amwell, and Jacob Williamson and William W. Runyan of Lambertville.” Notice—no one from Delaware Township, where the road was to be located.

The survey was made and filed with the court on February 15, 1862.¹ Their report included damages for the property owners whose land would be taken: $25 for Elias D. Bowne and $50 to William P. Fisher. Nothing was assessed for Joseph Haines because he was the one to petition for the road.

As you can see from the map, Joseph Haines got his road, and we got an idea of the size of his farm. With three buildings worth drawing, he must have had an impressive operation. None of the other property owners had buildings close to the proposed route.

During the Civil War, Joseph Haines was part of an effort to raise money to support volunteers for the Union side, and in 1864, he was one of many men listed as a draftee. After the war, Haines joined the Republican party, and in 1867 was named an inspector of registry and elections for Delaware Township. In 1870, he was nominated as a candidate for the Assembly, although he did not win the election. In those days, Hunterdon County was dominated by the Democratic Party.

Haines often appeared in the pages of the Hunterdon Republican as “a noted stock-raiser.” He took his farming seriously. And in 1868, as a sign of his prosperity, he took down the original farmhouse and built himself a handsome new house that Mr. Bush described as “a spacious dwelling.” (See The Haines Farm, part one for a photo of the farmhouse.)

Haines actively supported tax reform and became a director of the Flemington National Bank. There is some irony in this, because by 1881, Joseph Haines had become indebted to his son Isaac for a whopping $11,222.56.

The Second Isaac Haines

Isaac Haines, born in 1854, was the only son of Joseph and Margaret Haines. On November 15, 1876 he married Lina (Lareine) Thatcher (1850-1939), daughter of Jacob N. Thatcher and Sarah Ann Trout of Raritan Township. They had only one child, Joseph T. Haines, born on September 25, 1878.

To recover the large amount that his father owed him, Isaac Haines (then age 28) sued his father in the NJ Supreme Court, which ordered sheriff Heber C. Beldon to levy on Joseph Haines’ properties and put them up for public auction. He levied on four lots, the first being the 90.25 acres purchased by the original Joseph Haines in 1786. The highest bidder was none other than Isaac Haines, at $4,850.²

It is a shame that the deed does not tell us more about how this debt was incurred. There must be quite a story here. It is possible that this came about from Joseph Haines’ purchase in 1878 of a share in the David Johnes farm, later owned by James Wilson. That deed states the consideration as only $1, which may have been a way to hide the large amount of money that Haines paid for this property. He seems to have realized the error of his ways by selling that share back to his partners just two years later, again for only $1.³

I’ve seen many many examples of people losing their farms in 19th century Hunterdon County due to debts they couldn’t pay, but this is the first time I’ve seen a son suing his father in court. Considering how active Joseph Haines was in his community, it is all the more surprising.

Considering that Joseph Haines and son Isaac shared the same household is the third surprise. The 1880 census shows them together with Joseph age 51, wife Mary 50, their son Isaac 26, daughter-in-law Lareine, age 30, and grandson Joseph T. Haines, an infant. (The T. probably stood for Thatcher, his mother’s maiden name.) Also in the household was Joseph’s son Amos H. Haines 21 farmer and his sister-in-law Lucy Hoppock 48, “at home.” Lucinda Hoppock (1831-1906) was the unmarried sister of Margaret and Mary Hoppock Haines.⁴

There is no 1890 census to tell us whether this suit caused a falling out, but the NJ State Census of 1895 shows that the family, despite everything, stayed together. Joseph and Mary Haines were each 60 years old, living with Isaac and Lina Haines and their son Joseph.

If Mr. Bush knew about this situation, he tactfully ignored it.

One could argue that it was a good thing that Isaac took his father to court because otherwise we would still be missing a description of the Haines property. This deed is the first one to give metes and bounds for the original farm. It was less than ideal, as the clerk left out some words, and it did not identify any of the bordering owners except John Schenck, dec’d, who died back in 1806! And wouldn’t you know, the clerk left a line out, and dropped a direction, so it isn’t really quite complete. However, by plotting what there is of it, it is clear that the farm sold to Isaac Haines in 1882 is the same as the one shown in the Schenck deed of 1800, with its northern border being the Neshanic Creek, as shown in the map below.

Joseph Haines apparently did not have to worry about his credit rating, despite his being sued for debt. Just a year later, on May 17, 1882, he went and bought another property, adjacent to the one now owned by his son Isaac. This was a lot of 7.78 acres which cost Haines only $311.20.⁵ It had been part of the William P. Fisher land south of the Haines farm.

Township Boundaries Change

It seems as if Joseph Haines was, like many other 19th-century Hunterdon residents, slightly land hungry. That, after all, was where the wealth was. Sometimes it was a whole town that got land hungry.

Originally, the Haines farm was located in Delaware Township. That is because the original boundaries of the township, which was created in 1838, extended all the way to Ringoes. The boundary lines were changed somewhat in 1845 to give most of the village of Ringoes to East Amwell, but Delaware Township still extended much further east than it does today, as can be seen in the Beers Atlas of 1873.

The Beers Atlas shows school districts 85, 94 and 105 as part of Delaware Township that are today part of East Amwell. In other words, all the area east of Haines Road and Wagner Road was ceded to East Amwell. I suspect that many people living in that eastern section of Delaware Township felt a stronger connection to the village of Ringoes than they did to the village of Sergeantsville.

On the other hand, this change in boundaries was initiated by residents of East Amwell. Perhaps they wanted more land surrounding the village of Ringoes, but it is also possible that there were some political motivations, inasmuch as the petitioners for the change, William H. Manners and Simpson S. Stout, were firm Republicans, and the Township Committee of Delaware Township was primarily Democrat. I will be researching this question some more to see if I can pin down the motivations for this change.

The bill passed on April 26, 1897, and thereafter, the Haines family and their neighbors were obliged to change their allegiance from Delaware to East Amwell Township.

The 1900 census was the first one in which the Haines family was counted in East Amwell. Joseph was 71, still working as a farmer, and wife Mary was 70. They had been married 39 years and had no children. Joseph’s children, including son Isaac, were children of Mary’s sister Margaret. Isaac was listed as a 46-year-old farmer, and his wife Lareine was 50. They had been married 23 years and had one child, Joseph T. Haines, age 21, single, farm laborer.

Six months later, Joseph Haines died, on January 2, 1901, age 72. His second wife Mary Hoppock survived him until her death on January 10, 1914. Unlike Joseph’s parents, he and his two wives were buried in the Lower Amwell Old Yard, attached to the German Baptist Church on Sandbrook-Headquarters Road.

In March 1901, Joseph Haines’ heirs (the widow Mary and step-children Amos Haines and Mary Wilson, and their spouses) sold that 7.78-acre lot that Haines had purchased back in 1882 from the Matthews-Fisher family to their brother Isaac Haines for $100. That was the only remaining piece of property in Joseph Haines’ name.⁶

Isaac Haines set about making some improvements to the family property. On May 25, 1903, Trenton Evening Times reported from Sergeantsville that “Isaac Haines will soon begin the erection of a handsome new barn.”

That being the case, it seems odd that Isaac and Lareine Haines were not living on their own property in 1910. That year the Delaware Township census recorded them living with James B. Fulper 61, widowed farmer & employer, owning a mortgaged farm. Also in the household were boarders Isaac Haines 55, farmer, working for wages; wife Lareine R. Haines 60 and step-mother Mary M. Haines 80, widowed.

It seems that Isaac and Lareine and the widow Mary Haines moved out to let Isaac’s son Joseph T. Haines and family take over the old farm. In that 1910 census, Joseph Haines, age 32, was a farmer living in East Amwell. He did not own the farm, but rented it. Living with him were his wife Elizabeth 29 and daughters Aurelia 8 and Magdalen 7.

A word about the farm of James B. Fulper: James Buchanan Fulper (1850-1922) was the son of Asher Larew Fulper and Jane C. Buchanan.⁷ He was also the brother of William H. Fulper, who had gone into partnership with William M. Dilts to create the business known as Fulper & Dilts. The Beers Atlas identifies a large lot owned by Fulper & Dilts on the southeast side of Sergeantsville, the location of a farm sold by Jonathan M. Fisher and wife Asenath to Wm Fulper & Wm M. Dilts on 28 Mar 1865.⁸ After William Dilts died in 1902 and his widow Elizabeth Fulper in 1904, her estate sold the property to her nephew, James B. Fulper.⁹

And therein lies the connection. As it happened, Joseph T. Haines who was living on the old Haines farm in 1910, had married his wife Elizabeth probably shortly after the 1900 census was taken. (I have not found a record of the marriage.) And that Elizabeth Haines (1881-1973) was the daughter of James B. Fulper and wife Sarah. Voila! That explains why Mary M. Haines was described as Isaac Haines’ step-mother. My only disappointment is that I haven’t been able to identify Sarah’s family.

The Third and Last Joseph Haines

The census of 1920 for East Amwell tells us that Joseph T. Haines continued at the old farm. He was then 41, wife Elizabeth 38, and their two daughters Aurelia L. and Magdalin Y. Haines were 17 and 16. Also part of the household were Joseph’s parents, Isaac, now 65, and Lareine R. 69, and Joseph’s “father-in-law” James B. Fulper 72 (born 1848), widowed, and still working as a farmer. James B. Fulper, whose other daughter Jerusha had married Augustus B. Larison, had sold his Sergeantsville farm to Christian and Maria Jurgenson in 1913 and gone to live with his daughter Elizabeth Haines.

Isaac and Lareine Haines conveyed their farm to their son Joseph T. Haines on March 20, 1920.¹⁰ Actually they conveyed eight lots, the first being the original 90.25-acre farm. What astonished me when I read the deed was that the description used was probably the same one as the description used in the deed of 1786 when the Ramseys sold the farm to Joseph Haines! I concluded this when I saw that the bordering owners were named in the recital quoted by Mr. Bush, all from the 18th century—John Loux and heirs of John Schenck. The other seven lots were all small ones, generally located adjacent to the original farm.

In his article, “Old Farms in Old Hunterdon,” Egbert T. Bush wrote of the last owners of the Haines farm:

The present Joseph and his wife, Elizabeth (Fulper) Haines, have no son Isaac to take charge of the old farm when they are done with it, and keep up the established alteration—Joseph to Isaac and Isaac to Joseph—from generation to generation. They have no son, and Joseph feels that the property will soon pass out of the name.

But they do have two daughters, both college graduates and both teachers of mathematics. Aurela married Lloyd C. Harris, and teaches in the high school at Patchoque, Long Island; Magdalen, who teaches in the high school at South Orange, spends her weekends and vacations at home on the old farm.

Lloyd C. Harris was born in 1904 in Washington, worked as a newspaper reporter, married Aurela Haines in 1929, and ended up in Texas, where he died and was buried in 1990. His wife Aurela died in 1992 and was buried in the family plot in Cherryville, Franklin Township, NJ.

Mr. Bush’s article was written in 1931, so he was not to know that daughter Magdalen (1903-1968) would marry Ampleus Leavett Chamberlin (1905-1954) soon afterwards. Chamberlin was the son of Dr. John L. Chamberlin and Mae B. Lennard of Sergeantsville. But A. L. Chamberlin was no farmer. He started out as a bookkeeper in a bank and became an insurance executive, living in Three Bridges. Clearly, neither of the Haines daughters were interested in the farm.

As things turned out, Joseph T. and Elizabeth Haines sold their East Amwell farm just two years after Mr. Bush’s article was published, on July 31, 1933. The purchasers were Frank and Mary Pavlica of New York City.¹¹ What they paid for a farm of 104.6 acres is not known, as the practice in those years was to state only a nominal $1 “and other good & valuable consideration.” The difference between the 90.25 acres of the original farm and the amount sold of 104.6 acres was probably made up by some of the smaller lots Joseph had purchased from his father

Joseph and Elizabeth Haines moved to Bellmar, Camden County, according to the census of 1940, but in 1943 they were living in Readington Township. At the time of his death in 1953, Joseph and Elizabeth had moved to Flemington. Elizabeth Fulper Haines lived to the age of 91, dying in 1973. The couple was buried in the Cherryville Mountainview Cemetery.

An Epilogue

I’d like to give the last word to Mr. Bush, speaking of the deeds he found when visiting Rhoda Wagner:

Such deeds and other old papers are found here, so carefully preserved as to delight the heart of the antiquary; and their perusal is made doubly pleasant by the hearty welcome and cheerful assistance given to the inquirer.

Mr. Bush’s heart would not have been gladdened to learn that those papers were never preserved with the Hunterdon County Historical Society. That deed with the marvelous recital going all the way back to 1729 has disappeared. Perhaps someone still owns these papers, but they are unavailable to the rest of us.

When I inquired about the papers with Donald Cornelius, archivist at the Hunterdon County Historical Society, he told me that “this is not the first time I have been asked to look for something Mr. Bush wrote about or mentioned in his work.” Apparently very few of the documents Mr. Bush referred to in his articles made their way to the Historical Society. It is heartbreaking for us researchers to miss out on seeing these documents, and I encourage you, my readers, to give some thought to arrangements for your own historical materials after you’ve gone.

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