Farming and Milling
at Raritan Landing
From Voices of Raritan Landing
woodcut
Tanner
Thomas Bewick, active 1785-1828
JOHN SMALLEY
I COULD SEE THE Future of Raritan Landing when I put my lot and house up for sale in the 1720s. There weren't going to be many more farmers like me living at the Landing. It was a place for commerce and industry. I had built a good house with a well and a good cellar on an acre of ground, all that was needed for a brewer or a shoemaker or a tanner. There was a brook running through the property with a fine spring, a bark mill and ten pits already dug. I did a little tanning right there on the property although it didn't really suit me. My wife, Liddea, and I were Baptists; we belonged to the church in Piscataway and socialized mainly with people there. They were more like us than the Dutch traders at the Landing who all seemed to come from Somerset families. Of course, there were the fancy men from New York. Mr. Antill, our neighbor, was good enough to us, but we might as well have been living in different worlds. He could talk about the orchard, though, and that we had in common, but that's about all.
engraving
Miller
Georg Andrea Böckler,
Theatrum machinarum novus; das ist:
Neu-vermehrter schauplatz der mechanischen kiinsten, handelt von aller
hand- wasser- wind- ross- gewichi- und hand-miihlen
Nuremberg, 1661
woodcut
Laborers Harvesting
artist and date unknown
JOHN DUMONT
I DIDN'T EVEN LIVE at Raritan Landing, but when my father Henry Dumont died I got his lots in that upcoming place. In 1741, I bought two more undeveloped lots at Raritan Landing as an investment. One was located right down the hill from John Roosevelt's land; Roosevelt was related to the Lows by marriage, but he didn't live at the Landing. I had a big farm of 650 acres in Somerset County, where my wife Annetje and I raised our large family in the old-fashioned way. There were five children, four of them boys, all but one with a good Christian name—John, Peter, and Abraham. The other boy was Dirk and the baby girl was Fenimetje. Like almost all the Dutch farmers in Somerset, we had slaves to work the land, nine in all when I made my will in 1759, valued at £265. We couldn't have done the work without those slaves and they lived right in the house with us, not in separate quarters like in Virginia or the Carolinas. We sent the grain to Raritan Landing for export—wheat was the main crop.
CHARLES SUYDAM
YOU COULDN'T JUST BUILD a mill in those days. I had to get permission from the New Jersey Assembly to put up a mill dam. That I did, and by 1750 1 had the only mill on the north side of the river. That's why my friend, John Duyckinck, and I sponsored the project to build a new bridge across the river in 1772. With the bridge, the grain came from two directions—along the Road Up Raritan and over the bridge from Somerset County. It was a lucrative operation, that is, until the British destroyed it. I sustained £2,033 worth of damage in that damn war. I never recovered.