The original version of this post, published on March 14, 2015, has been significantly revised because of new information I have received. Most of these revisions concern Jonas Thatcher, Jr. Consider this Chapter One of the History of the Sergeantsville Inn.
Query: Trout Farm?
Lora Olsen, clerk of West Amwell Township, got in touch with me recently to see if I knew where this farm was located. She had some reason to think it might have been the farm once owned by George Trout. The Trout family lived on the farm just south of the tract of land owned first by the Robins, and later by the Buchanan family. I wrote about the location of that farm here.
How Locktown Got Its Name
Back in February, I published an article on the cemetery connected with the Locktown Baptist church. Previously I have written about the Baptist congregation here as well as the Locktown Christian Church and its Cemetery. It seems appropriate now to include Mr. Bush’s own history of this neighborhood, which was published in the Hunterdon Democrat, on May 22, 1930. Along with the churches, Mr. Bush discusses the school house, the distillery and the Locktown Hotel, which began its life as a humble tavern, and also some of the old families, like the Chamberlins, Heaths, Lairs, Rittenhouses, Smiths and Suttons. Photographs in this article were provided by Paul Kurzenberger.
Johnson, Lair, Snyder
Query from Janice Earliene Carr, March 3, 2015:
My husband is descended from the SNYDER FAMILY of Hunterdon, County, N.J., which I will get to later!
My husband James William Carr of Washington, D.C.,
his father is James Entwisle Carr of same; his Mother, Olive Ida SNYDER of Ridgewood, N.J.. (dau. Of Gardiner JOHNSON SNYDER & Elizabeth “Lizzie” Amy LAIR; – dau. Of John LAIR & Mary HANN, which both died young
The Supreme School
Having published Mr. Bush’s article, “The ‘Oregon’ and Other Schools,” and then a follow-up on Duck’s Flat, I thought I was done with this neighborhood for now. But I recently found another article by Mr. Bush continuing the story of Ducks’ Flat school. This article has allowed me to identify the mystery school I referred to previously, located down the road from the Ducks’ Flat school that Mr. Bush was familiar with. But I’ll wait until Mr. Bush has concluded before explaining.
Articles by J. M. Hoppock
Jonathan M. Hoppock, known as ‘Jonty,’ was born Sep. 20, 1838 to Henry J. Hoppock and Lydia Wolverton. The family lived on a farm near Sand Brook in Delaware Township. Hoppock became a school teacher and developed a love of local history. Late in his life, the Democrat-Advertiser published articles he submitted about the places he knew best, nearly all of them in Delaware Township.
The Locktown Baptist Cemetery
There has been a Baptist Church in Locktown since the early 19th century, and a cemetery associated with it. The church and the cemetery were located on land belonging to Daniel Rittenhouse, whose home was a short distance west of Locktown on the Kingwood-Locktown Road. Most of the names in this cemetery are of families that lived nearby in Kingwood and Delaware Townships, many of them descendants of original German immigrants. Many of the original stones are now missing, even ones that were inventoried in the 1940s. Old cemeteries are hard to preserve.
Return to Raven Rock
In 2011, I began a series of articles on the history of Bull’s Island, Raven Rock, and Saxtonville. (For the original post, please visit “Raven Rock and the Saxtonville Tavern,” where you will learn something of how the name Raven Rock began to be used.) Recently three documents turned up to shed more light on this subject–a deed of 1722, and two survey maps, one of them made in 1819 showing the original proprietary tracts. It is time to return to Raven Rock for another look.
Rev. Joshua Primer
by J. M. Hoppock, March 24, 1904
published in the Democrat-Advertiser
This is an obituary, for Rev. Joshua Primmer, who died on March 18, 1904. I wrote about Rev. Primmer in May 2014, in my article “From Primmer to Pauch.” At that time, I had forgotten my intention to eventually publish all of J. M. Hoppock’s articles with annotations. So today I am making up for that oversight. If you check the very end of the page “Index of Articles,” you will see a complete list of those articles, separated into those that have been published here, and those as yet unpublished.
It is odd that Mr. Hoppock consistently wrote the name as “Primer.” I wonder if he pronounced the name that way. Apparently that is the way his grandfather wrote it, but it is not the way Rev. Primmer wrote it.
Ducks’ Flat, part two
Last week I posted a continuation of Egbert T. Bush’s article “The ‘Oregon’ and Other Schools,” focusing on the neighborhood once known as Ducks’ Flat. Mr. Bush wrote about Duck’s Flat in 1930. This was two years before a surprising event took place there. Given that the participants stayed at the Stockton Inn, near where Mr. Bush lived, I can’t help but think he knew about the goings-on. But he did not write about it. It wasn’t until 1996 that another talented writer described what happened at Ducks’ Flat—an early experiment in rocket science, which took place on November 12, 1932.
The writer was Bruce Palmer, and his tale was published in the Lambertville Beacon on November 13, 1996. (Note that Mr. Palmer’s article is in italics, and my comments are not.)