Homemakers at Raritan Landing
From Voices of Raritan Landing
woodcut
Woman with Children
Tanner Thomas Bewick
active 1785-1828
JOHANNA GOUVERNEUR LOW
FATHER THOUGHT I MADE a good marriage when I chose Cornelius Low among my many suitors. He came from a landed family and had dreams of making the Raritan Valley as important to New York as the Hudson Valley had always been. We moved to the little village of Raritan Landing in 1730 and had no sooner settled in than my first son was born. He died before he was even baptized, and we were careful to never let that happen again with the rest of the children. There was almost one a year until 1748 when my last daughter was born. In all, ten lived—four girls and six boys, quite a houseful. There wasn't a church at Raritan Landing and the children were baptized wherever the pastor was willing (or my husband had a business partner)—two at Three Mile Run Church in Somerset, one at Middletown in Monmouth, one in New York, several in the German Church at Second River, one at the church lot of Millstone, and the last two in the barn of Arie Mooream. right here at the Landing. I don't know why we never had our own church here, probably because New Brunswick was so close, but Cornelius and I were never comfortable in the Dutch Church there—so old fashioned it was. No wonder our son, Cornelius, Jr., attended the Church of England when he came of age. It was a good life at Raritan Landing once we were settled in the "house on the mountain." We had a cluster of family houses up there and pretty much kept apart from the villagers who were less familiar with fashionable New York ways.
drawing, ink and pencil
Sketch of New Brunswick
Archibald Robertson, about 1795
woodcut
Woman Feeding Chickens
Thomas Bewick, active 1785-1828
LENA SUYDAM BOICE
I GREW UP in Somerset County. There were 11 children and we all helped on the farm. Father called it a "plantation."' My brother Charles and I ended up at Raritan Landing. He opened a mill there in 1750 and I marrried George Boice, a farmer like my father. We lived right on the Road Up Raritan from 1748 until my husband's death in 1779. 1 thought it unfair that he left all the property to our son and only six silver teaspoons to our daughter, Lidda. But that was the custom: boys got everything important.
woodcut
Farm Scene
artist and date unknown
MARGARET DEGROOT FIELD
I MARRIED BENJAMIN FIELD at the Landing and we inherited his aunt's house along the causeway when she died in 1784, but I had my own land, too. My father, Jacob Degroot, didn't believe that only the oldest son should get all the property. When he made his will in 1749, it said my younger brother, sister, and I were to divide equally among us the meadows in Somerset County joining the Bound Brook and also the meadows of Lafert Sebring. And we got the lots fronting on the Road Up Raritan, too, next to the land Robert Clauson lived on. My oldest brother, John, would get the farm and all its land when our mother died or remarried. Other women at the Landing envied me for having my own land. Their fathers weren't so generous. And besides that, my father-in-law, Jeremiah Field, left me his house in 1769.
CATHERINE LEBOYTEAUX BODINE
EVER SINCE MY BROTHER PAUL started a freighting business with John Bodine, I knew that was who I wanted to marry. Father thought it was fine. After all, John was one of the busiest traders at the Landing and we had a fine house right on the causeway between the Road Up Raritan and the river. Both our parents lived at the Landing, mine just a short ways up the road towards Bound Brook and John's down the road in the other direction. Even after I married I saw my mother every day, which was good because John was always working. And when he died so young, my mother helped me with the children. Gabriel was named for my father, Caterena for me, and Johannes for John, of course. We kept to the old ways and had them all baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in New Brunswick. I wish we had had our own church at Raritan Landing, but the other Dutch families liked the excuse to go across the river and they took to the new style reverend, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen. He was too emotional for us though, and my brother joined some other Landing residents in an effort to bring over from Holland a pastor more after our own minds.