Traders at Raritan Landing

From Voices of Raritan Landing

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"Vendue This Day"
artist and date unknown

ADOLPHUS HARDENBROOK

I CAME TO RARITAN LANDING—well, actually the place didn't have a name—in 1719. I built a warehouse right down by the river and a house up the hill a ways. I bought a good piece of Isaac Smalley's land and sold it off bit by bit. I was the first New Yorker at the Landing and it's due to me that the Lows and Duyckincks came to that growing place soon after. We were all in the shipping business. The Raritan Valley wasn't so different than the Hudson Valley where our fathers had been shippers. We, too, could carry out the grain and bring in the imported goods that were in greater and greater demand among the farmers of means and even the simple villagers. Times were changing and once the people moved into town they didn't want to make everything they needed themselves. My daughter, Effie, married Evert Duyckinck, a boy of our own class, thank God. It was good to see the second generation carrying on at Raritan Landing. I thought the place would last forever.

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Freighter
artist and date unknown

JOHN BODINE

I DID WHAT MY FATHER DID—freighted along the Road Up Raritan. In 1737, the Janeway and Broughton store paid me and my partner Paul LeBoyteaux for wheat we bought and freighted, for 455 gallons of rum bought at Brunswick, for another 100 1/2 gallons, and for the freight of seven hogshead. In the 40s, we handled molasses and other imported goods, like stoneware, cotton, and other sorts of things, and saw that the wheat was properly shipped to New York. We trusted Captain Miller for that, and he brought back the bill if there were any problems once he got to Bowne's wharf in the city. I had a good house and warehouse along the causeway between the river and the Road Up Raritan where I lived with my wife, Catherine (my partner's sister), and our children, Gabriel, Caterena, and Johannes, all baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in New Brunswick. We were as close to Catherine's people in Piscataway as we were to my own right here at the Landing. There was nothing more important than family in those days.

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Wharf Scene
artist and date unknown

EVERT DUYCKINCK

I CAME TO RARITAN LANDING at the behest of Adolphus Hardenbrook, probably because he and my parents wanted me to marry his daughter. The old New York families liked to stick together, you know. The Hardenbrooks and Duyckincks were active in New York commerce, but they also had an eye on the hinterland to the south and sent us out to stake a claim. Under the guidance of the man who was to become my father-in-law, I learned everything there was to know about the trading business. I inherited his house and land on the west side of the brook in 1735. People call it Duyckinck's Brook these days. By the 1760s, I was supplying one of the Landing's major stores with large shipments of goods: 106 gallons of molasses in one shipment, and I delivered 500 skins to the store for Cornelius Low, Jr., in 1761, and freighted the storekeeper's bread to New York when he switched his business to baking. My son, John, and I handled a house that Peter Low owned on the bluff above the Road Up Raritan. The Lows owned a group of houses on the bluff, and the one we had also had a bakehouse with all the utensils necessary for baking. Abraham Van Ranst bought the property—no big surprise since he had married into the Low family. When the war came, my son sided with the British, a mistake that eventually lost him his Raritan Landing property as well as his mills and plantation in Somerset County. He went to Canada and then England, but I saw my days out at the Landing with my dear wife, Effie, née Hardenbrook.