BraenBook-TemplatePages

Braen: A History Built on Stone
The Story of The Braen Family of Companies
AUTHOR NAME HERE

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Braen: A History Built on Stone
The Story of The Braen Family of Companies
AUTHOR NAME HERE

This book is dedicated to all of the employees,
clients and friends who have made it possible to
write a truly unique history.
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CONTENTS
Prelude
xx
From Breen to Braen x x
Samuel Braen, Road Builder
xx
Samuel Braen’s Sons x x
Stone Industries
xx
Postscript
xx

This, then, is the story of how five generations of
Braens played a significant part in Northern New Jersey’s
dramatic transformation from a rural place...
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Preface
Braen, with an outsized A in the middle, has been a part of the North Jersey landscape for decades—at
quarry entrances, on trucks, and more recently on a supply store. Today, more than two hundred people—
clerks, drivers, mechanics, managers, and operators—work at these facilities alongside six people who
actually carry that name: the current group of owners--the fifth generation of Braens in the stone business.
Fifty years ago, upwards of 2000 people worked under that name at dozens of places during the peak of
the construction season. Besides quarries and batch plants, there were construction sites for roads, military
installations, water treatment plants, shopping centers, and industrial parks, both in New Jersey and
New York, and for a time even as far away as Bermuda. During those years the Braen logo included the
owner’s first name, “Sam.” Hundreds of trucks painted dark green, gray, and red made the Sam Braen
logo a part of everyday life for anyone touring the region. During the 1950s and 1960s the Sam Braen
companies built a sizable part of modern Bergen County.
Fifty years before that, another Samuel Braen toiled with his sons, John and Abram, in a secluded quarry
near the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a place called the Valley of the Rocks. Manufacturing stone complemented
Sam’s road building business. They used hammers to drive drill bits into the rock, and learned
the art of blasting the hard way, by trial and error. That was the place where Braen and stone became
firmly fused.
Fifty years before that, Sam’s grandfather arrived in the United States. Aart Breen hoped his sons could be
independent people, earning a good living under better conditions than the ones prevailing in the village of
Ouddorp, on the far edge of the poorest region in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He also believed that
God-given skills were not just for personal use. Success meant more than money.
That any family could own a business for five generations is truly remarkable, a milestone rarely reached,
as rare as snow in July. Since 1904, Braen and stone have stood together because Aart’s descendants
remembered the truth he carried with him when he crossed the ocean in 1851: the greater reward is in the
serving, not in the selling. They like to say that the quarry got in their blood. And it has stayed there for
115 years. For the family, their employees, and their customers, living by Aart’s adage meant going to work
and doing business by the rules. That made each day’s work worthwhile for everyone.
This, then, is the story of how five generations of Braens played a significant part in Northern New Jersey’s
dramatic transformation from a rural place, first to a collection of industrial cities and then to suburban
subdivisions. Through building booms, depression, world wars and a cold war this family touched the lives
of not just their employees and customers, but the communities they helped build.
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From Breen to Braen
On April 30, 1851, the three-masted bark Australie, a few weeks out of Rotterdam eased into a lower
Manhattan slip with one hundred passengers aboard. Since it was a Dutch owned ship, a Dutch-speaking
minister stood at the foot of the gangplank to escort the newcomers first to Castle Garden and then to the
boats that would lead them toward their American destinations.
Aart and Cornelia Breen were two of the older passengers, he fifty and she one year older. Six children
trailed behind them, the oldest twenty-three, and the youngest only five. Three more of Aart and Cornelia’s
children lay buried in a cemetery in the tiny village of Ouddorp in the southwestern corner of The Netherlands.
Their oldest child, a daughter, lived with her in-laws on a farm in Wayne Township, New Jersey, not
that the place name meant much to Aart. Aart and Cornelia also knew that another acquaintance, a man
who had recently finished his apprenticeship in Aart’s shoemaking shop in Ouddorp, also lived near their
daughter Maria. He lived in a group of houses built near the Passaic River’s head of navigation. Two years
before, when Maria had left the Netherlands with her husband and infant son, she boarded the ship a wife
and arrived in New York a widow, with her husband buried at sea. Aart and Cornelia had been spared the
sight of a dreaded mid-ocean committal service on their voyage to America.
They came from Ouddorp, a village on an island to the south of Rotterdam. With a shallow harbor, and
a population numbering in the hundreds, it had never been a thriving place. Isolation bred a traditional
society marked by religious fervor. Since the Reformation, Ouddorp supported two congregations, the state
church and a Mennonite group. Until the 1830s two crops sustained the local economy: chicory (a sweetener)
and madder (a root that produced red dyes). When synthetic substitutes rendered them obsolete, the
local economy collapsed. Many saw the hand of divine judgment behind the severe downturn. By 1845
almost half of the households in Ouddorp and the neighboring municipalities on the island survived with
government assistance. It was literally the poorest place in the entire kingdom. And so an exodus began,
first to a new settlement in the Netherlands, and then to the United States.
This was the life in which Aart and Cornelia attempted to raise their sizeable family. He made shoes in a
shop located at the front of his house near the center of town. Getting paid for his services often meant
bartering since cash was very scarce. The prospects for the four Breen sons became bleaker by the year.
They could cadge a few coins as farm laborers, but those wages would never support a family. Ouddorp af-
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Photo Credit
Aart and Cornelia had never before seen anything like Paterson.
The seventy foot high falls that powered the cotton looms and locomotive
shop lathes were unlike any natural feature in the Netherlands.
forded only the chance to be a tenant on a glorified garden plot, one hardly likely to produce enough vegetables
for a year. Unless something changed, Aart’s sons would be condemned to being the lowest of the low
in the village, landless laborers. As for daughters, they could offer precious little as a dowry to any suitors.
There were preachers in the Netherlands whose sermons often ended with a call for the faithful to flee
the coming destruction. And there were other preachers, from the Dutch Reformed church in the Hudson
Valley, who believed the United States could use an infusion of the virtues Dutch Calvinists would bring
as immigrants: honesty, thrift, tenacity, fortitude, piety. The American ministers assured the Dutch ministers
that immigrants would be cared for on arrival in New York: fed, housed, and ticketed to their final
destinations. The Dutch ministers wanted the immigrants to settle in separate communities, to maintain
their virtuosity. In 1846 and 1847 two of those ministers founded settlements in Iowa and Michigan. The
American ministers hoped the newcomers would be a leaven in the broader American society. In the end,
both sides won.
Reaching the west required money for boat fares: up the Hudson to Albany, along the Erie Canal to Buffalo,
and then on a steamer to Michigan or Chicago. The folks who opted for Iowa bypassed all this by sailing
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to New Orleans, steaming north on the Mississippi to Keokuk, changing to a smaller boat to scale the Des
Moines River, before walking the final miles to place called Pella. The first of the Ouddorp exiles lacked the
means to travel beyond New York. Their voyage to America ended on the banks of the Passaic River, or just
over the First Watchung Mountain in Wayne Township. They settled among the descendants of Dutch colonists
who had arrived before the American Revolution. So isolated were they, that a century and half later
many of them still spoke an old form of the Dutch language, both at home and in church. For the Ouddorp
immigrants, that was good enough. Numbered among them: Aart Breen’s sister, Krientje (Catherine), and
her husband, Jacob Tanis. Then Aart arrived, followed by two of his brothers. By 1860 there were a dozen
Breen households in the Paterson area.
Aart and Cornelia had never before seen anything like Paterson. The seventy foot high falls that powered
the cotton looms and locomotive shop lathes were unlike any natural feature in the Netherlands. And the
rocky hills towering to the West of the city were a stark change from the shifting sand dunes by Ouddorp.
In 1851, only one road climbed over that first ridge of the Appalachians. Hamburgh Turnpike had been
chartered and built soon after the first mills appeared by the Falls in 1793. It was the only way that Aart
and Cornelia could reach their daughter’s home in Wayne. Whenever they made that trip, they passed the
place where one day a sign with their Americanized surname would stand, near the crest of the hill.
Aart’s relatives and neighbors from Ouddorp had no problem understanding him when he spoke. They
knew that a Dutch double ‘e’ made a long ‘a’ sound. To Aart’s English speaking acquaintances that remained
a problem. And so, when he pronounced his name the correct (Dutch) way, they wrote it in English
ways: Brain, or Brane, or Braine, or Braen (phonetically the least ‘correct’ English spelling!). They also had
trouble with his first name. He would be called Abraham, or Abram, or Aron, but, until the 1870s, almost
never Aart. He lived his life among those who did understand him, in an enclave near the place where the
Hamburgh Turnpike crossed the Passaic River and intersected with the Goffle Road, within eyesight of a
steep, rocky patch the locals called the Valley of the Rocks.
Paterson’s First Ward housed the city’s largest Dutch immigrant neighborhood. In it Aart lived and worked
at his trade. For several years he worshipped at the Second Reformed Church, with its services in English,
until the immigrants organized their own congregation, First Holland Reformed Church two blocks away on
North First St. He did well enough, soon enough, to convince his brothers, Paul and Martin, to bring their
families to Paterson in 1853. As for his four sons, they all became independent people, as either artisans
or farmers. Two of them joined their sister in Iowa, while two remained in New Jersey. John, the oldest, put
his hand to the plow on a farmstead he bought a few miles up Goffle Road, on the border between Passaic
and Bergen counties.
The 1860s were a time of great upheaval and great growth for the Paterson area. The Civil War sent thousands
into Union army regiments. The city’s textile industry, gun factories, and locomotive shops produced
the uniforms, weapons, and transportation that led to victory in 1865. For people like Aart Breen, the war
meant work producing shoes for both soldiers and factory workers. For farmers, like John Breen (who was
too old to be drafted), it meant high prices for all the products that fed those soldiers and factory workers.
One enterprising Dutch immigrant from Aart’s neighborhood, Abraham Vermeulen, a tailor turned undertaker
and realtor, invested in a stone quarry along Goffle Road, presumably to produce railroad ballast,
curbstones, and materials for macadamized roads. In any event, money poured into Paterson, encouraging
investment in more mills, swelling the population, and stimulating both agriculture and the construction
trades in the area.
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This was the world of possibilities Simon Breen inherited as he grew in John
Breen’s household. John’s wife, Maatje Verhoeve Van Heest, was another immigrant
from Ouddorp. She arrived in New Jersey in 1852 at the age of nineteen,
one of ten children in Simon Van Heest’s household.
Martha, as she became in America, was the daughter of
Simon’s second wife, Charlotte. The Van Heests briefly
settled in Passaic, near Simon’s oldest son, Christian, the
shoemaker who had apprenticed in Aart’s shop. Since
John Breen and Charlotte had known each other in Ouddorp,
it was no surprised that they were married in Passaic
less than one year after her arrival. Their first son,
Aaron, was baptized in the local Reformed church. A year
and a half later, on November 26, 1856, Simon was born
on the farm in Franklin Township, today’s Wyckoff. Nine
more children followed, including a set of identical twins.
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Simon spent most of his growing up years on a farm
his father purchased along Goffle Road, next to the site
where Braen’s Hawthorne quarry would be located. As
a boy roaming the woods behind the farmhouse, Simon
would have seen Vermeulen’s quarry and the nearby cemetery
he also operated. Young Simon attended school on
Goffle Road and toiled on the family farm. As a teenager
he started working in Paterson’s locomotive shops, first at
Cooke’s, and then at Rogers, where he became a “boss
hammerman and machinist.” With a steady job to support
himself, Simon married a second cousin, Mary Breen,
on June 22, 1878. The newlyweds lived in a series of
four-plexes within walking distance of the shops, in a
neighborhood of immigrants from both the British Isles
and the Netherlands. Simon and Mary gave their five
children American versions of their own parents’ names:
Martha, Nellie, John, Abram, and Cornelius. Along with
his brothers Henry and Frank, Simon also began spelling
his surname with an ‘a’ to match its actual pronunciation,
and calling himself Samuel, a more common English name. Feeling underappreciated
in the shops, and likely underpaid, Sam moved to the Paterson Iron
Company to become a foreman. He proudly remembered etching his name on
the new drive shaft for the queen of the Hudson River steamers, Mary Powell.
Whatever his name, even as a young man Sam wanted to be remembered.
During the spring of 1888, Sam’s world took a sudden turn when Mary delivered
her fifth child in ten years. She never recovered from the ordeal and
succumbed to kidney failure on April 1, less than two months after Cornelius’s
birth. Now a single parent with five children under the age of ten, Sam quit his
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Sam moved to the Paterson Iron Company to become a foreman.
He proudly remembered etching his name on the new drive shaft for
the queen of the Hudson River steamer, Mary Powell.
foundry job with its fixed hours to make his living as a carpenter. He moved to another part of the city,
nearer to the church he had been attending. Within a year he moved again, this time to the Totowa section,
near the farm to which his parents had moved. He now combined blacksmithing with wheelwrighting and
wagon-making. And in 1892 he remarried. Zoetje (Susan) de Krijger Dale had been born in the Netherlands,
in village only a few miles east of Ouddorp. At three, she came to Paterson where her father made
his living caning chairs. She married at fifteen and had three children when she married Sam. Susan and
Sam abandoned worshiping in a Dutch immigrant church and joined the nearby Paterson Avenue Methodist
Church, where they remained active members for the rest of their lives.
Sam’s grandfather had come to America to be an independent person. Sam’s father followed that same
path by becoming a farmer. Now Sam followed in their footsteps. He never again worked for a wage. He
was known to say, “As long as you carry a dinner pail you get nowhere.” That he chose the path that led to
the construction business reflected what many other sons of Dutch immigrants were doing in the Paterson
area during this era. During the 1890s Paterson was an industrial boomtown, the third largest city in the
state, and the fortieth largest city in the nation (today it ranks 178th). It produced more silk cloth than any
other city in the country. The world’s largest dye house stood on the banks of the Passaic River. The locomotive
shops built cutting edge technological marvels that approached speeds of one hundred miles per
hour. And the Colt company built the gun that tamed the West. The city’s population doubled every twenty
years. Nearby, Passaic, Garfield, and Lodi experienced similar growth. Immigrants poured into the Passaic
Valley pushing the demand for housing, roads, water and sewer systems, and factories. By 1910 more
than a third of the contractors and suppliers building those things in the Paterson area were either Dutch
immigrants (like Sam’s uncle Martin) or the sons of the immigrants (like Sam himself). Beginning in 1902,
in quick succession, Paterson endured three natural disasters that further spurred the construction trades:
a fire, a flood, and a tornado. The needs for materials being so high, and the limits of wood construction
so obvious, some eyes spotted a solid solution to the region’s needs. The hills to the west of the city were
alive with rock, trap rock to be precise. That resource, and the Braen name, were fused together in 1904,
at the foot of Passaic Falls.
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Legend says that Sam Braen acquired the
Valley of the Rocks quarry as payment for a gambling debt.
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From Samuel Braen, Road Builder,
to Samuel Braen’s Sons
Legend says that Sam Braen acquired the Valley of the Rocks quarry as payment for a gambling debt. If
true, the loser would likely have been another son of Dutch immigrants. Jacob Sandford and Sam were
the same age. The parents of both were Ouddorp exiles. The Sandiforts arrived three years after the Aart
Breen family. The Sandfords and the Breens were remotely related by marriage: Jacob being brother-in-law
to one of Sam’s cousins. And both Sam and Jacob had tried their hands at various jobs. Jacob had gone
from peddling vegetables from a wagon in 1880 to quarrying in 1895.
Paterson began sprouting stone quarries during the 1890s. The first, New Jersey Blue Stone and New
Jersey Brown Stone, appeared on the slopes of Garrett Mountain at New Street and Grand Street. Another
company, owned by two sons of Dutch immigrants, Cornelius Verduin and Abram Hartley, worked a site at
the foot of Van Houten Street, across the river from the Valley of the Rocks. Sandford worked this exposed
cliff face off and on for about eight years. That he might have become indebted to Sam Braen, either at the
gaming table or in the ledger books, would not have been an unusual situation, given how closely the various
contractors and suppliers worked with, and lived near each other, and very often socialized together.
As Paterson continued growing, construction methods changed. Already during the 1880s the local cities,
Passaic being among the first, began replacing their wooden sidewalks with ones of more durable concrete
and cement. These new wonder materials inspired Thomas Edison, to heavily invest in the business
of building cast concrete houses. Although his company failed, concrete did catch on as paving material.
Given the number of Dutch immigrants toiling as masons, it was only natural that some of them successfully
bid on the sidewalk projects. Jacob Van Noordt of Passaic, another first generation Dutch-American,
secured enough business to incorporate as the Union Building and Construction Company. He also enter
politics to win a seat on the county Board of Freeholders. Soon after 1900 his nephew, Dow Drukker,
became the head of this firm. Drukker lured in more investors, bought control of the local newspaper and
Passaic’s largest bank, and added quarries and sand pits in Clifton and Riverdale to his holdings. When he
became director of the board of freeholders he oversaw the county’s various construction projects: especially
bridges and roads. In 1914 he won a seat in the United State House of Representatives. Drukker’s
idea to link construction and supply together in one company provided a template Sam Braen would follow.
Another early influence on Sam’s career was one of Paterson’s notable boosters, Nathan Barnert. An immi-
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grant from Poland, Barnert had parleyed the profits from his clothing business into real estate investments
in the city, including ownership of some of its largest textile mill buildings. He also set the local standard
for fighting corruption in city government during two combative terms as mayor. Around 1900, Barnert
starting developing some of his holdings into residential neighborhoods in the northern fringes of the city,
aiming to sell building lots to largely Dutch contractors who built houses to sell to Dutch millworkers. Sam
Braen won the contract to pave the streets in Barnert’s development along Haledon Avenue.
Both Drukker and Barnert taught another lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs, the importance of social connections.
Sam followed suit by joining the Masons and other fraternal organizations, where he could meet
with likeminded community leaders. Like Drukker, Sam became active in the Republican Party, which
dominated the county’s politics then. But maybe just as importantly, Barnert set a very high standard
for investing in the community where he thrived and genuinely promoting the welfare of his customers,
neighbors, and employees. Barnert and his wife Miriam attached their names to a hospital, synagogue,
and private school located in Paterson’s upscale neighborhood. While Sam never held public office, his
fraternal memberships required him to be active in the wider community. As a Methodist he believed that
faith produced better people and better communities. That prompted him to support financially the revival
meetings the evangelist Billy Sunday held in the Paterson Armory during 1916. Since his Dutch Calvinist
roots discouraged public displays of generosity, Sam’s public accolades finally appeared in his obituary.
But his trucks and machines all boldly proclaimed, “SAMUEL BRAEN, ROAD BUILDER” or “SAMUEL
BRAEN, CONTRACTOR.”
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...Sam proudly hired a photographer to haul his equipment into the quarry
to picture Sam, his sons, and their fellow workers surrounded by rocks.
Sam and his brothers legally changed their surname’s
spelling around the time of their father’s
death in 1896. None of John Braen’s boys would
be someone else’s employee. Aaron farmed in
Hawthorne. Henry tried his hand as several businesses:
commercial baking and printing among
them. John stitched awnings before joining his
brother Peter in the carpenter trade in Hawthorne.
Frank became a mason; Martin also worked as a
carpenter. Sam’s sisters (Cornelia, Gertrude, and
Elizabeth) married a house painter, a mason, a
metalworker, respectively. In one generation, John
Braen’s son fulfilled the dream that inspired their
grandfather Aart to immigrated in 1851. Each one
of the Braen descendants had climbed a rung or
two on the American social ladder. When their
mother celebrated her seventieth birthday in 1902,
the entire group gathered for a family portrait to
mark her milestone.
By then Sam had already established himself in the local construction business.
Two years later, he took possession of his first quarry, a working site, complete
with a crusher. It had major limitations. It was by the river, on a narrow shelf
of land, with the crusher resting on the floor. In 1903, when the Passaic Valley
experienced one of the worst floods in its recorded history, the quarry had been
under water. There were no guarantees against another flood inundating the
site in the future. The narrow floor, the presence of nearby buildings (including
one of the city’s larger mills), and the river limited the size of the blasts. There
simply was no room for the dislodged rocks to fall. Finally, because all the rocks
fell to the floor, they had to be hoisted up into the crusher by a cart and counterweight
device. This was slow, heavy, dangerous, and expensive. Nevertheless,
Sam proudly hired a photographer to haul his equipment into the quarry to
picture Sam, his sons, and their fellow workers surrounded by rocks. Sam held a
newspaper in one hand; the others displayed their tools. The picture only hinted
at the backbreaking nature of the actual work in 1908. They drilled by hand,
with hammers driving the bits into the rock, smashing the oversized rocks with
sledgehammers, then shoveling material into a cart. None of the men in the
picture appeared overweight. And Sam did some of this work while in his fifties.
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Beyond the hammers and chisels, they were learning to handle explosives, by trial and error. One noteworthy
“oops” moment made the front page of the New York Times on January 12, 1907. Sam and his crew
were blasting on a rock face along Hamburgh Turnpike (today’s West Broadway) only a few blocks from
where Aart Breen’s shoeshop had been located. When Sam packed too large a charge into the hole “[a]
shower of rocks passed through…heavy plate glass windows, demolishing…Corinthian columns and creating
havoc generally in the interior…”, of an elaborate nearby house, the home of the father of Paterson’s
renowned sculptor Gaetano Frederici. “…Samuel Braen believes that there was too much nitro-glycerine in
the dynamite.” This particular lesson cost Sam about $10,000. His search for more rock led him to work
on Garrett Mountain sites, where he was less likely to take out any houses, and keeping a safe distance
from Lambert’s Castle.
Cars and trucks became more common as Sam perfected his blasting skills. He quickly caught the driving
bug. His new passion provided first hand knowledge that motor vehicles required better roads than horsedrawn
wagons. That truth meant more pavement, more bridges, more culverts, more excavating, and more
concrete. The farmers in places like Wayne, Clifton, Hawthorne, and Fair Lawn, whose livelihoods depended
on delivering to markets in Passaic or Paterson, demanded improvements. The state government’s
policy of carving new municipalities from the old townships produced a ‘borough-mania,’ with these minitowns
vying for new residents. Passaic County’s Manchester Township dissolved into five boroughs (Totowa,
Haledon, North Haledon, Prospect Park, Hawthorne) between 1898 and 1908. In Bergen County, nine
municipalities became sixty-nine by the mid 1920s. Each new unit wanted sewers and water systems, plus
paved streets. For a company like “Samuel Braen, Road Builder,” this meant business.
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As the demands and opportunities for excavation
work increased, Sam bought bigger machines. By
1917 he owned a massive (by the standards of the
day) Marion steam rig that could be fitted with a
shovel, clamshell, crane, or dragline. To move it, he
needed to hire a local hauler who owned a truck with
a specially equipped engine and transmission. Sam
advertised his services in bold letters on his equipment
and in the Paterson City Directory, variously
calling himself a stone cutter, stone dealer, and general
contractor. To save money he refused to rent or
build any separate office space, instead operating the
business from his home on Totowa Avenue. At times
he would mix business with pleasure, using one of his
trucks to carry passengers for a family outing.
As Sam looked toward retirement, his sons John
and Abram traded their hammers and bits for desks
in an office. They also worked to secure a reliable
source of traprock for making the concrete the roads,
bridges, and sewers required. They looked to the First
Watchung Mountain. It was clear there was rock to
be had in the mountain, but how much, and of what
quality was at best a guess, given the ability to drill
core samples one hundred years ago. Back during
the Civil War, Abraham Vermeulen, operated a site
along Goffle Road, only to abandon it. A number
of contractors began betting there were substantial
quantities, based in part on the recommendations of
newly minted geologists who were graduating from the new technical colleges
and universities. They recommended New Street on Garrett Mountain, then
Great Notch near Little Falls. Dow Drukker developed a site along Valley Road in
Clifton. James and Richard Sowerbutt operated in three places: next to Drukker’s
Clifton quarry, along with Haledon and Prospect Park. Their successes
encouraged Sam and his sons to purchase their own site in Hawthorne, next
to the Braen family farm on Goffle Road. Here gravity could do the work that
lifting had done in the Valley of the Rocks. Stone blasted from the top of the
hill, would be dumped down into the crushers, conveyed into the batch plants
further down the slope, and then shipped out as sub-base, asphalt, concrete, or
gravel. The Hawthorne quarry would operate for fifty years.
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By the mid-1920s Sam felt financially secure enough to buy a modest farm and
orange grove in Florida, and take the time to visit the place during the winter
months. Increasingly his sons John and Abram took the reins of the business,
especially after the purchase of the Hawthorne quarry. The boys had began
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rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o
working for their father on the small farm he owned along Totowa Avenue. They wielded hammers and
shovels with the other laborers in the quarry. As the construction business grew, they became foremen,
and then managers. John became the bookkeeper for the business, while Abram oversaw the operational
side. When Sam’s health faltered in 1926, the business formally changed hands. John and Abe soon
placed their own stamp on the business. The ads that for years had read “Samuel Braen, Road Builder,
General Contractor, Manufacturer of Crushed Stone.” Now they read “Samuel Braen’s Sons.” And they had
an office address, “Goffle Road, Hawthorne, New Jersey.
Samuel Braen died at his home in Paterson on January 11,1930, his passing noted on the front page of
the local newspapers. His lodge brothers gathered to honor him, along with his family, friends, and customers.
Susan outlived him by fifteen years. Maybe the most significant testimony to the kind of man Sam
had been could be found in two facts: his sons kept his name on the business, and he had a grandson who
carried that name.
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Enduring the Great Depression would be the next great hurdle Samuel Braen’s Sons would meet. If any
business could cope in that economic situation, a quarry would be it. During the 1920s the construction
business in northern New Jersey experienced a surge of activity spurred by projects like the Holland
Tunnel in the early years and the George Washington Bridge at its close. The demand for aggregate and
concrete for those monumental structures rippled through the entire region. In 1928, the Braen brothers
added asphalt and concrete plants to the Hawthorne facility. With major projects under way, even ones at
a distance, the batch plants paid for themselves. As the federal government spurred public works projects
to reduce unemployment, Passaic and Bergen counties saw an increased demand for the products Samuel
Braen’s Sons had to sell.
In the depths of the Depression,
the company expanded its holdings.
Along with a third partner, the
brothers formed Braen Sand and
Gravel, with properties in Wyckoff,
Franklin Lakes, and Mahwah to
produce a new line of products. As
their holdings increased, and the
financing requirements changed,
John and Abram legally incorporated
as a privately held company,
with each of them holding fifty
percent of the shares. John was
the president and treasurer, while
Abram was named the firm’s vice
president and secretary.
The Hawthorne quarry remained
the most visible industry in Hawthorne,
and also one of the most
valuable. It was one of the larger
employers in the borough, along
with the railroad yards and a
dyehouse. It generated significant
As the federal government spurred public works
projects to reduce unemployment, Passaic and
Bergen counties saw an increased demand for the
products Samuel Braen’s Sons had to sell.
revenue through the property taxes it paid. The trucks with the “Samuel Braen’s Sons” name on them also
said “Hawthorne, New Jersey” right below the name. The brothers both maintained a high profile both in
Hawthorne, where they worked, and in Totowa, where they lived. They were active in civic life. John belonged
to Hawthorne’s Rotary Club and served on Totowa’s board of education and board of adjustment.
Like their father, John and Abram both were active Masons.
When the Second World War ended in 1945, John and Abram, looked toward retirement. By then their
business had not only survived the depression and war years, it had actually grown. And with the end of
the fighting, the region stood on the threshold of another construction boom, one that would drive the area
and the company to dizzying heights during the next thirty years. Under a new generation of ownership, the
Braen name would be known not just in North Jersey, but nationally.
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