The Buchanan family begins in Hunterdon County with the Scottish immigrants, Samuel and Jane or Janet Buchanan, whose name was frequently spelled “Bohannon.” It is not known whether they had any more than one child. But one was enough–their son John left a family with a long history.
In my previous post (A Shrinking Township, part one), I wrote about a petition in 1896 to take a large chunk out of Delaware Township and give it to East Amwell Township. That petition was signed by two East Amwell residents, William H. Manners and Simpson Sked Stout. This post will describe these two, as well as the journey the bill took through the legislature, and the property owners who were affected by it.
On November 18, 1896, two gentlemen from East Amwell Township announced in the Hunterdon Republican newspaper that they would petition the state legislature to change the boundary between East Amwell and Delaware Townships. It was a fairly radical change they were proposing, in which Delaware Township yielded to East Amwell a large chunk from its eastern border and Delaware got nothing in return. On April 17, 1897, the State Legislature followed through and passed a bill to make that happen.
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.
This post returns to an article by Egbert T. Bush titled “Old Farms in Old Hunterdon,” published in 1931. I published large parts of this article before, in “The Moore Family,” in 2016. As the introduction to that article mentioned, two families were discussed in Bush’s article, the Moores and the Haines. Having discussed the Moore family at length, it is time to focus on the Haines family and their farm on the east side of Haines Road in East Amwell. This will conclude my study of some (but not all) of the farms located in the original proprietary tract of John Dennis.
The Haines Family in America date back to the Quaker family that settled in Burlington County in the 1680s. By the early 1700s, one of them had found his way to Hunterdon County. His son bought a farm shortly after the Revolution on which the next four generations of Haines lived and thrived. Unfortunately, I was unable to make a direct connection between the Hunterdon Haines and the settlers of Burlington. I’m sure it can be done, though, with more research. I begin this tree with the first Haines in Hunterdon County.
The first of the Poulson family to appear in Hunterdon County was Rev. Israel Poulson, born in Somerset County. He must have arrived in Hunterdon by the mid 1790s, for he married a Hunterdon woman, Esther Moore, about 1794.
Rev. Israel Poulson was one of those people with enormous influence on those who lived anywhere near him. He must have been fairly charismatic, considering how many people who were named after him. There are ten that I am aware of, not including his son Israel P. Poulson, Jr.
There are two ways of writing about a cemetery. One is to portray the people buried there, which I attempted to do in my previous article. The other is to relate how the cemetery came to be—in other words, the history of the property where the cemetery is located. It usually makes sense to focus on the place since many of its early owners were buried in the cemetery. At first I thought that in this case, none of them were. But, research has changed my mind.
Some time ago, I published a family tree for the Fishers of Amwell, because they figured in my article on the Hart-Taylor Cemetery. Then I began researching the area that was taken from Delaware Township and given to East Amwell Township in 1896 (A Shrinking Township, parts 1 and 2), and learned that a large part of that area was owned by the Fisher family.
Twice in his career, Egbert T. Bush wrote about a small family burying ground in Delaware Township. The first time was in 1911, in a paper presented to the Hunterdon County Historical Society which was later published in the Hunterdon County Democrat. This was many years before Mr. Bush became a regular contributor to the Democrat.1
