This is part three of my series on the Delaware Flemington Railroad Company. Part One was an article by Egbert T. Bush describing the birth and death of the company. Part Two described the reasons for the company’s failure and how its directors fared afterwards. This article will focus on the route that was planned for the new rail line.1
This family tree should be considered a work in progress, as the Higgins family of Raritan Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey is large and complex, more than enough to work on without including Higgins family members who migrated west. They are for the most part left out.
Part one focused on the family of Judson Rittenhouse and Martha Bodine, who lived on the farm now known as the Sarah Dilts Farm Park in Delaware Township for most of their lives. The farm was purchased by Judson’s father, Wilson Bray Rittenhouse, in 1844. This article will first describe Wilson and his family, and then will trace the history of this property back to the first European owner.
This is a return to an article I wrote in 2012 about the family that used to own what is known today as the Sarah Dilts Farm Park. Some wonderful photographs have come my way that have inspired me to take a second look.
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 Arnwines of Hunterdon County begin with the immigrant, Jacob Arnwine and his son John Arnwine, who emigrated from Holland. The name Arnwine is Dutch for winemaker, but Jacob was a miller and a merchant. Other spellings were Erwine and Irvine.
For more on this family, see “Bridge To The Past,” a four-volume family history, written about 1989, by Aimee Berniece Wilson, which includes “The Arnwine History” by Rev. K.E. Irvin.
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
The Lambert family was very prominent in old Amwell Township in the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning with John Lambert and Abigail Bumstead who came to Hunterdon County from Stonington, Connecticut about 1745, and settled in Kingwood Township. John Lambert’s ancestor, Francis Lambert, came to Salem, Massachusetts in 1638, but this tree will deal only with John and Abigail’s children and descendants.