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action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/goodspeedhist/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Recently I gave a talk at the Hunterdon Co. Historical Society on how to research the history of one\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s house. While preparing for the talk, I decided to look over the history I did for my own house back in 1981. It was the first one I had ever done, and I hadn\u201a\u00c4\u00f4t a clue about how to go about it. I found most of the owners of my home, but some of them were absentee owners, so I didn\u201a\u00c4\u00f4t pay much attention to them. On reviewing my chain of title, I got curious about one of those absentee owners, and began to do some more serious research. It paid off with a pretty interesting story.<\/p>\n
John Prall Rittenhouse was born on May 17, 1820 to Samuel Rittenhouse and his second wife, Hannah Emmons. Samuel and Hannah were living in a stone house near the Covered Bridge in Delaware Township and were good friends with the Sergeant family who lived on the other side of the bridge. As a child, John attended Green Sergeant\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s School, which was opened in 1830 by Green\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s father Charles Sergeant.<\/p>\n
Samuel Rittenhouse became one of the trustees of the Sandy Ridge Baptist Church in 1818, so that is where the family worshipped on Sundays. The church was just far enough away to require the family to pile into a wagon to get there. When Samuel and Hannah Rittenhouse died (she in 1843 and he in 1850), they were buried in the cemetery there, as were their three youngest children.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n John\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s older brother, James E. Rittenhouse died at the age of 21, on Dec. 7, 1835. It was a somber occasion when this young man was buried in the Sandy Ridge Cemetery, and probably quite a shock to his younger, 15-year-old brother John. John\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s only remaining sibling was his sister Martha, who was five years older. She stayed at home during his childhood and did not marry until 1842 (her husband was James Salter).<\/p>\n I have not discovered what John P. Rittenhouse did before 1845, the year he got married, or how he came to meet his new wife. She was Susan Ann Acker Huffman (or Hoffman), daughter of Rachel Hoffman. The identity of\u00ac\u2020Susan\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s father remains a mystery to me. At first I thought he might have been Levi Hoffman, son of John Hoffman of Amwell. But in fact, according to the family bible of Isaac and Susannah Rittenhouse, Susan was the daughter of Levi\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s sister Rachel. And although the Bible listed marriages, there was none listed for Rachel Hoffman. The fact that Susan\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s name was written as Susannah Ann Acker Hoffman should be a clue to her father\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s identity, but I have not pursued it.<\/p>\n In 1848, James Marshall of Lambertville discovered gold in California. News of that discovery must have reached the whole country within days and ignited a wave of migration from the east coast. In a history about Marshall\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s Discovery published in the Hunterdon Republican<\/em> (Aug. 6, 1896), the unnamed author wrote that in 1849, John P. Rittenhouse was one of those who went to the gold fields by way of Cape Horn to \u201a\u00c4\u00fatry his hand.\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 This is surprising given that by that time he had been married for four years. An article published about 1900 in the Hunterdon Co. Democrat<\/em> described how Rittenhouse came to make that trip.2<\/a><\/sup> In 1849, Rittenhouse was employed as \u201a\u00c4\u00faa shipper of produce,\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 and had to visit John Quick at his office in New York City. He had made up his mind to travel to California and mentioned that fact to Quick, who told him that Elisha Holcombe, who also had an office in the City, had invested in a schooner named \u201a\u00c4\u00faOlivia\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 and was planning to send it to California by way of Cape Horn with supplies for the miners. But Holcombe did not want to make the trip himself, and was looking for an agent. To make a long story short, Rittenhouse got the job, thanks to the intervention of one of his former pupils, Jacob Fisher.<\/p>\n