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Braen: A History Built on Stone<br />
The Story of The Braen Family of Companies<br />
AUTHOR NAME HERE
I<br />
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I<br />
I<br />
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1
Braen: A History Built on Stone<br />
The Story of The Braen Family of Companies<br />
AUTHOR NAME HERE
This book is dedicated to all of the employees,<br />
clients and friends who have made it possible to<br />
write a truly unique history.<br />
COPYWRITE LEGAL, ETC. Ipsant vent quam et que<br />
vellaut quiania sectat laboreic tem custiuntorum<br />
latemquid essitis molore veliquae raernam nonseque<br />
sunt quam, sum et re vendandebis in et voluptaepe<br />
dolupit quis eturiatus moluptat volorepe dolent audam<br />
aborest, conemquod eos millaud itiatendem et<br />
estem reri odis eate evelicab inctur sitae vento dollis<br />
aut fugit faccum vidi digent.<br />
Im aborro blaborrundi sit inimilis nimosanis am<br />
fuga. Itatem lias asperitae nonsed quam ulparcid<br />
4 SECTION TITLE
CONTENTS<br />
Prelude<br />
xx<br />
From Breen to Braen x x<br />
Samuel Braen, Road Builder<br />
xx<br />
Samuel Braen’s Sons x x<br />
Stone Industries<br />
xx<br />
Postscript<br />
xx
This, then, is the story of how five generations of<br />
Braens played a significant part in Northern New Jersey’s<br />
dramatic transformation from a rural place...<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique odiscim<br />
agnatem rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
6 SECTION TITLE
Preface<br />
Braen, with an outsized A in the middle, has been a part of the North Jersey landscape for decades—at<br />
quarry entrances, on trucks, and more recently on a supply store. Today, more than two hundred people—<br />
clerks, drivers, mechanics, managers, and operators—work at these facilities alongside six people who<br />
actually carry that name: the current group of owners--the fifth generation of Braens in the stone business.<br />
Fifty years ago, upwards of 2000 people worked under that name at dozens of places during the peak of<br />
the construction season. Besides quarries and batch plants, there were construction sites for roads, military<br />
installations, water treatment plants, shopping centers, and industrial parks, both in New Jersey and<br />
New York, and for a time even as far away as Bermuda. During those years the Braen logo included the<br />
owner’s first name, “Sam.” Hundreds of trucks painted dark green, gray, and red made the Sam Braen<br />
logo a part of everyday life for anyone touring the region. During the 1950s and 1960s the Sam Braen<br />
companies built a sizable part of modern Bergen County.<br />
Fifty years before that, another Samuel Braen toiled with his sons, John and Abram, in a secluded quarry<br />
near the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a place called the Valley of the Rocks. Manufacturing stone complemented<br />
Sam’s road building business. They used hammers to drive drill bits into the rock, and learned<br />
the art of blasting the hard way, by trial and error. That was the place where Braen and stone became<br />
firmly fused.<br />
Fifty years before that, Sam’s grandfather arrived in the United States. Aart Breen hoped his sons could be<br />
independent people, earning a good living under better conditions than the ones prevailing in the village of<br />
Ouddorp, on the far edge of the poorest region in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He also believed that<br />
God-given skills were not just for personal use. Success meant more than money.<br />
That any family could own a business for five generations is truly remarkable, a milestone rarely reached,<br />
as rare as snow in July. Since 1904, Braen and stone have stood together because Aart’s descendants<br />
remembered the truth he carried with him when he crossed the ocean in 1851: the greater reward is in the<br />
serving, not in the selling. They like to say that the quarry got in their blood. And it has stayed there for<br />
115 years. For the family, their employees, and their customers, living by Aart’s adage meant going to work<br />
and doing business by the rules. That made each day’s work worthwhile for everyone.<br />
This, then, is the story of how five generations of Braens played a significant part in Northern New Jersey’s<br />
dramatic transformation from a rural place, first to a collection of industrial cities and then to suburban<br />
subdivisions. Through building booms, depression, world wars and a cold war this family touched the lives<br />
of not just their employees and customers, but the communities they helped build.<br />
SECTION NUMBER 7
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et facerit<br />
eos resciae eos reribus, sum sit labo.<br />
Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique odiscim agnatem<br />
rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod<br />
ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
8 SECTION TITLE
From Breen to Braen<br />
On April 30, 1851, the three-masted bark Australie, a few weeks out of Rotterdam eased into a lower<br />
Manhattan slip with one hundred passengers aboard. Since it was a Dutch owned ship, a Dutch-speaking<br />
minister stood at the foot of the gangplank to escort the newcomers first to Castle Garden and then to the<br />
boats that would lead them toward their American destinations.<br />
Aart and Cornelia Breen were two of the older passengers, he fifty and she one year older. Six children<br />
trailed behind them, the oldest twenty-three, and the youngest only five. Three more of Aart and Cornelia’s<br />
children lay buried in a cemetery in the tiny village of Ouddorp in the southwestern corner of The Netherlands.<br />
Their oldest child, a daughter, lived with her in-laws on a farm in Wayne Township, New Jersey, not<br />
that the place name meant much to Aart. Aart and Cornelia also knew that another acquaintance, a man<br />
who had recently finished his apprenticeship in Aart’s shoemaking shop in Ouddorp, also lived near their<br />
daughter Maria. He lived in a group of houses built near the Passaic River’s head of navigation. Two years<br />
before, when Maria had left the Netherlands with her husband and infant son, she boarded the ship a wife<br />
and arrived in New York a widow, with her husband buried at sea. Aart and Cornelia had been spared the<br />
sight of a dreaded mid-ocean committal service on their voyage to America.<br />
They came from Ouddorp, a village on an island to the south of Rotterdam. With a shallow harbor, and<br />
a population numbering in the hundreds, it had never been a thriving place. Isolation bred a traditional<br />
society marked by religious fervor. Since the Reformation, Ouddorp supported two congregations, the state<br />
church and a Mennonite group. Until the 1830s two crops sustained the local economy: chicory (a sweetener)<br />
and madder (a root that produced red dyes). When synthetic substitutes rendered them obsolete, the<br />
local economy collapsed. Many saw the hand of divine judgment behind the severe downturn. By 1845<br />
almost half of the households in Ouddorp and the neighboring municipalities on the island survived with<br />
government assistance. It was literally the poorest place in the entire kingdom. And so an exodus began,<br />
first to a new settlement in the Netherlands, and then to the United States.<br />
This was the life in which Aart and Cornelia attempted to raise their sizeable family. He made shoes in a<br />
shop located at the front of his house near the center of town. Getting paid for his services often meant<br />
bartering since cash was very scarce. The prospects for the four Breen sons became bleaker by the year.<br />
They could cadge a few coins as farm laborers, but those wages would never support a family. Ouddorp af-<br />
SECTION NUMBER 9
Photo Credit<br />
Aart and Cornelia had never before seen anything like Paterson.<br />
The seventy foot high falls that powered the cotton looms and locomotive<br />
shop lathes were unlike any natural feature in the Netherlands.<br />
forded only the chance to be a tenant on a glorified garden plot, one hardly likely to produce enough vegetables<br />
for a year. Unless something changed, Aart’s sons would be condemned to being the lowest of the low<br />
in the village, landless laborers. As for daughters, they could offer precious little as a dowry to any suitors.<br />
There were preachers in the Netherlands whose sermons often ended with a call for the faithful to flee<br />
the coming destruction. And there were other preachers, from the Dutch Reformed church in the Hudson<br />
Valley, who believed the United States could use an infusion of the virtues Dutch Calvinists would bring<br />
as immigrants: honesty, thrift, tenacity, fortitude, piety. The American ministers assured the Dutch ministers<br />
that immigrants would be cared for on arrival in New York: fed, housed, and ticketed to their final<br />
destinations. The Dutch ministers wanted the immigrants to settle in separate communities, to maintain<br />
their virtuosity. In 1846 and 1847 two of those ministers founded settlements in Iowa and Michigan. The<br />
American ministers hoped the newcomers would be a leaven in the broader American society. In the end,<br />
both sides won.<br />
Reaching the west required money for boat fares: up the Hudson to Albany, along the Erie Canal to Buffalo,<br />
and then on a steamer to Michigan or Chicago. The folks who opted for Iowa bypassed all this by sailing<br />
10 SECTION TITLE
to New Orleans, steaming north on the Mississippi to Keokuk, changing to a smaller boat to scale the Des<br />
Moines River, before walking the final miles to place called Pella. The first of the Ouddorp exiles lacked the<br />
means to travel beyond New York. Their voyage to America ended on the banks of the Passaic River, or just<br />
over the First Watchung Mountain in Wayne Township. They settled among the descendants of Dutch colonists<br />
who had arrived before the American Revolution. So isolated were they, that a century and half later<br />
many of them still spoke an old form of the Dutch language, both at home and in church. For the Ouddorp<br />
immigrants, that was good enough. Numbered among them: Aart Breen’s sister, Krientje (Catherine), and<br />
her husband, Jacob Tanis. Then Aart arrived, followed by two of his brothers. By 1860 there were a dozen<br />
Breen households in the Paterson area.<br />
Aart and Cornelia had never before seen anything like Paterson. The seventy foot high falls that powered<br />
the cotton looms and locomotive shop lathes were unlike any natural feature in the Netherlands. And the<br />
rocky hills towering to the West of the city were a stark change from the shifting sand dunes by Ouddorp.<br />
In 1851, only one road climbed over that first ridge of the Appalachians. Hamburgh Turnpike had been<br />
chartered and built soon after the first mills appeared by the Falls in 1793. It was the only way that Aart<br />
and Cornelia could reach their daughter’s home in Wayne. Whenever they made that trip, they passed the<br />
place where one day a sign with their Americanized surname would stand, near the crest of the hill.<br />
Aart’s relatives and neighbors from Ouddorp had no problem understanding him when he spoke. They<br />
knew that a Dutch double ‘e’ made a long ‘a’ sound. To Aart’s English speaking acquaintances that remained<br />
a problem. And so, when he pronounced his name the correct (Dutch) way, they wrote it in English<br />
ways: Brain, or Brane, or Braine, or Braen (phonetically the least ‘correct’ English spelling!). They also had<br />
trouble with his first name. He would be called Abraham, or Abram, or Aron, but, until the 1870s, almost<br />
never Aart. He lived his life among those who did understand him, in an enclave near the place where the<br />
Hamburgh Turnpike crossed the Passaic River and intersected with the Goffle Road, within eyesight of a<br />
steep, rocky patch the locals called the Valley of the Rocks.<br />
Paterson’s First Ward housed the city’s largest Dutch immigrant neighborhood. In it Aart lived and worked<br />
at his trade. For several years he worshipped at the Second Reformed Church, with its services in English,<br />
until the immigrants organized their own congregation, First Holland Reformed Church two blocks away on<br />
North First St. He did well enough, soon enough, to convince his brothers, Paul and Martin, to bring their<br />
families to Paterson in 1853. As for his four sons, they all became independent people, as either artisans<br />
or farmers. Two of them joined their sister in Iowa, while two remained in New Jersey. John, the oldest, put<br />
his hand to the plow on a farmstead he bought a few miles up Goffle Road, on the border between Passaic<br />
and Bergen counties.<br />
The 1860s were a time of great upheaval and great growth for the Paterson area. The Civil War sent thousands<br />
into Union army regiments. The city’s textile industry, gun factories, and locomotive shops produced<br />
the uniforms, weapons, and transportation that led to victory in 1865. For people like Aart Breen, the war<br />
meant work producing shoes for both soldiers and factory workers. For farmers, like John Breen (who was<br />
too old to be drafted), it meant high prices for all the products that fed those soldiers and factory workers.<br />
One enterprising Dutch immigrant from Aart’s neighborhood, Abraham Vermeulen, a tailor turned undertaker<br />
and realtor, invested in a stone quarry along Goffle Road, presumably to produce railroad ballast,<br />
curbstones, and materials for macadamized roads. In any event, money poured into Paterson, encouraging<br />
investment in more mills, swelling the population, and stimulating both agriculture and the construction<br />
trades in the area.<br />
SECTION NUMBER 11
This was the world of possibilities Simon Breen inherited as he grew in John<br />
Breen’s household. John’s wife, Maatje Verhoeve Van Heest, was another immigrant<br />
from Ouddorp. She arrived in New Jersey in 1852 at the age of nineteen,<br />
one of ten children in Simon Van Heest’s household.<br />
Martha, as she became in America, was the daughter of<br />
Simon’s second wife, Charlotte. The Van Heests briefly<br />
settled in Passaic, near Simon’s oldest son, Christian, the<br />
shoemaker who had apprenticed in Aart’s shop. Since<br />
John Breen and Charlotte had known each other in Ouddorp,<br />
it was no surprised that they were married in Passaic<br />
less than one year after her arrival. Their first son,<br />
Aaron, was baptized in the local Reformed church. A year<br />
and a half later, on November 26, 1856, Simon was born<br />
on the farm in Franklin Township, today’s Wyckoff. Nine<br />
more children followed, including a set of identical twins.<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis<br />
et facerit eos resciae eos reribus,<br />
sum sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod<br />
milique odiscim agnatem rem latur<br />
sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et<br />
enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
Simon spent most of his growing up years on a farm<br />
his father purchased along Goffle Road, next to the site<br />
where Braen’s Hawthorne quarry would be located. As<br />
a boy roaming the woods behind the farmhouse, Simon<br />
would have seen Vermeulen’s quarry and the nearby cemetery<br />
he also operated. Young Simon attended school on<br />
Goffle Road and toiled on the family farm. As a teenager<br />
he started working in Paterson’s locomotive shops, first at<br />
Cooke’s, and then at Rogers, where he became a “boss<br />
hammerman and machinist.” With a steady job to support<br />
himself, Simon married a second cousin, Mary Breen,<br />
on June 22, 1878. The newlyweds lived in a series of<br />
four-plexes within walking distance of the shops, in a<br />
neighborhood of immigrants from both the British Isles<br />
and the Netherlands. Simon and Mary gave their five<br />
children American versions of their own parents’ names:<br />
Martha, Nellie, John, Abram, and Cornelius. Along with<br />
his brothers Henry and Frank, Simon also began spelling<br />
his surname with an ‘a’ to match its actual pronunciation,<br />
and calling himself Samuel, a more common English name. Feeling underappreciated<br />
in the shops, and likely underpaid, Sam moved to the Paterson Iron<br />
Company to become a foreman. He proudly remembered etching his name on<br />
the new drive shaft for the queen of the Hudson River steamers, Mary Powell.<br />
Whatever his name, even as a young man Sam wanted to be remembered.<br />
During the spring of 1888, Sam’s world took a sudden turn when Mary delivered<br />
her fifth child in ten years. She never recovered from the ordeal and<br />
succumbed to kidney failure on April 1, less than two months after Cornelius’s<br />
birth. Now a single parent with five children under the age of ten, Sam quit his<br />
12 SECTION TITLE
Sam moved to the Paterson Iron Company to become a foreman.<br />
He proudly remembered etching his name on the new drive shaft for<br />
the queen of the Hudson River steamer, Mary Powell.<br />
foundry job with its fixed hours to make his living as a carpenter. He moved to another part of the city,<br />
nearer to the church he had been attending. Within a year he moved again, this time to the Totowa section,<br />
near the farm to which his parents had moved. He now combined blacksmithing with wheelwrighting and<br />
wagon-making. And in 1892 he remarried. Zoetje (Susan) de Krijger Dale had been born in the Netherlands,<br />
in village only a few miles east of Ouddorp. At three, she came to Paterson where her father made<br />
his living caning chairs. She married at fifteen and had three children when she married Sam. Susan and<br />
Sam abandoned worshiping in a Dutch immigrant church and joined the nearby Paterson Avenue Methodist<br />
Church, where they remained active members for the rest of their lives.<br />
Sam’s grandfather had come to America to be an independent person. Sam’s father followed that same<br />
path by becoming a farmer. Now Sam followed in their footsteps. He never again worked for a wage. He<br />
was known to say, “As long as you carry a dinner pail you get nowhere.” That he chose the path that led to<br />
the construction business reflected what many other sons of Dutch immigrants were doing in the Paterson<br />
area during this era. During the 1890s Paterson was an industrial boomtown, the third largest city in the<br />
state, and the fortieth largest city in the nation (today it ranks 178th). It produced more silk cloth than any<br />
other city in the country. The world’s largest dye house stood on the banks of the Passaic River. The locomotive<br />
shops built cutting edge technological marvels that approached speeds of one hundred miles per<br />
hour. And the Colt company built the gun that tamed the West. The city’s population doubled every twenty<br />
years. Nearby, Passaic, Garfield, and Lodi experienced similar growth. Immigrants poured into the Passaic<br />
Valley pushing the demand for housing, roads, water and sewer systems, and factories. By 1910 more<br />
than a third of the contractors and suppliers building those things in the Paterson area were either Dutch<br />
immigrants (like Sam’s uncle Martin) or the sons of the immigrants (like Sam himself). Beginning in 1902,<br />
in quick succession, Paterson endured three natural disasters that further spurred the construction trades:<br />
a fire, a flood, and a tornado. The needs for materials being so high, and the limits of wood construction<br />
so obvious, some eyes spotted a solid solution to the region’s needs. The hills to the west of the city were<br />
alive with rock, trap rock to be precise. That resource, and the Braen name, were fused together in 1904,<br />
at the foot of Passaic Falls.<br />
SECTION NUMBER 13
Legend says that Sam Braen acquired the<br />
Valley of the Rocks quarry as payment for a gambling debt.<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat.<br />
Pis et facerit eos resciae eos<br />
reribus, sum sit labo. Bus.Pid<br />
mi, ommod milique odiscim<br />
agnatem rem latur sequam sitas<br />
res sit et mod ut et enihictatur,<br />
que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
14 SECTION TITLE
From Samuel Braen, Road Builder,<br />
to Samuel Braen’s Sons<br />
Legend says that Sam Braen acquired the Valley of the Rocks quarry as payment for a gambling debt. If<br />
true, the loser would likely have been another son of Dutch immigrants. Jacob Sandford and Sam were<br />
the same age. The parents of both were Ouddorp exiles. The Sandiforts arrived three years after the Aart<br />
Breen family. The Sandfords and the Breens were remotely related by marriage: Jacob being brother-in-law<br />
to one of Sam’s cousins. And both Sam and Jacob had tried their hands at various jobs. Jacob had gone<br />
from peddling vegetables from a wagon in 1880 to quarrying in 1895.<br />
Paterson began sprouting stone quarries during the 1890s. The first, New Jersey Blue Stone and New<br />
Jersey Brown Stone, appeared on the slopes of Garrett Mountain at New Street and Grand Street. Another<br />
company, owned by two sons of Dutch immigrants, Cornelius Verduin and Abram Hartley, worked a site at<br />
the foot of Van Houten Street, across the river from the Valley of the Rocks. Sandford worked this exposed<br />
cliff face off and on for about eight years. That he might have become indebted to Sam Braen, either at the<br />
gaming table or in the ledger books, would not have been an unusual situation, given how closely the various<br />
contractors and suppliers worked with, and lived near each other, and very often socialized together.<br />
As Paterson continued growing, construction methods changed. Already during the 1880s the local cities,<br />
Passaic being among the first, began replacing their wooden sidewalks with ones of more durable concrete<br />
and cement. These new wonder materials inspired Thomas Edison, to heavily invest in the business<br />
of building cast concrete houses. Although his company failed, concrete did catch on as paving material.<br />
Given the number of Dutch immigrants toiling as masons, it was only natural that some of them successfully<br />
bid on the sidewalk projects. Jacob Van Noordt of Passaic, another first generation Dutch-American,<br />
secured enough business to incorporate as the Union Building and Construction Company. He also enter<br />
politics to win a seat on the county Board of Freeholders. Soon after 1900 his nephew, Dow Drukker,<br />
became the head of this firm. Drukker lured in more investors, bought control of the local newspaper and<br />
Passaic’s largest bank, and added quarries and sand pits in Clifton and Riverdale to his holdings. When he<br />
became director of the board of freeholders he oversaw the county’s various construction projects: especially<br />
bridges and roads. In 1914 he won a seat in the United State House of Representatives. Drukker’s<br />
idea to link construction and supply together in one company provided a template Sam Braen would follow.<br />
Another early influence on Sam’s career was one of Paterson’s notable boosters, Nathan Barnert. An immi-<br />
SECTION NUMBER 15
grant from Poland, Barnert had parleyed the profits from his clothing business into real estate investments<br />
in the city, including ownership of some of its largest textile mill buildings. He also set the local standard<br />
for fighting corruption in city government during two combative terms as mayor. Around 1900, Barnert<br />
starting developing some of his holdings into residential neighborhoods in the northern fringes of the city,<br />
aiming to sell building lots to largely Dutch contractors who built houses to sell to Dutch millworkers. Sam<br />
Braen won the contract to pave the streets in Barnert’s development along Haledon Avenue.<br />
Both Drukker and Barnert taught another lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs, the importance of social connections.<br />
Sam followed suit by joining the Masons and other fraternal organizations, where he could meet<br />
with likeminded community leaders. Like Drukker, Sam became active in the Republican Party, which<br />
dominated the county’s politics then. But maybe just as importantly, Barnert set a very high standard<br />
for investing in the community where he thrived and genuinely promoting the welfare of his customers,<br />
neighbors, and employees. Barnert and his wife Miriam attached their names to a hospital, synagogue,<br />
and private school located in Paterson’s upscale neighborhood. While Sam never held public office, his<br />
fraternal memberships required him to be active in the wider community. As a Methodist he believed that<br />
faith produced better people and better communities. That prompted him to support financially the revival<br />
meetings the evangelist Billy Sunday held in the Paterson Armory during 1916. Since his Dutch Calvinist<br />
roots discouraged public displays of generosity, Sam’s public accolades finally appeared in his obituary.<br />
But his trucks and machines all boldly proclaimed, “SAMUEL BRAEN, ROAD BUILDER” or “SAMUEL<br />
BRAEN, CONTRACTOR.”<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique odiscim agnatem<br />
rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
16 SECTION TITLE
...Sam proudly hired a photographer to haul his equipment into the quarry<br />
to picture Sam, his sons, and their fellow workers surrounded by rocks.<br />
Sam and his brothers legally changed their surname’s<br />
spelling around the time of their father’s<br />
death in 1896. None of John Braen’s boys would<br />
be someone else’s employee. Aaron farmed in<br />
Hawthorne. Henry tried his hand as several businesses:<br />
commercial baking and printing among<br />
them. John stitched awnings before joining his<br />
brother Peter in the carpenter trade in Hawthorne.<br />
Frank became a mason; Martin also worked as a<br />
carpenter. Sam’s sisters (Cornelia, Gertrude, and<br />
Elizabeth) married a house painter, a mason, a<br />
metalworker, respectively. In one generation, John<br />
Braen’s son fulfilled the dream that inspired their<br />
grandfather Aart to immigrated in 1851. Each one<br />
of the Braen descendants had climbed a rung or<br />
two on the American social ladder. When their<br />
mother celebrated her seventieth birthday in 1902,<br />
the entire group gathered for a family portrait to<br />
mark her milestone.<br />
By then Sam had already established himself in the local construction business.<br />
Two years later, he took possession of his first quarry, a working site, complete<br />
with a crusher. It had major limitations. It was by the river, on a narrow shelf<br />
of land, with the crusher resting on the floor. In 1903, when the Passaic Valley<br />
experienced one of the worst floods in its recorded history, the quarry had been<br />
under water. There were no guarantees against another flood inundating the<br />
site in the future. The narrow floor, the presence of nearby buildings (including<br />
one of the city’s larger mills), and the river limited the size of the blasts. There<br />
simply was no room for the dislodged rocks to fall. Finally, because all the rocks<br />
fell to the floor, they had to be hoisted up into the crusher by a cart and counterweight<br />
device. This was slow, heavy, dangerous, and expensive. Nevertheless,<br />
Sam proudly hired a photographer to haul his equipment into the quarry to<br />
picture Sam, his sons, and their fellow workers surrounded by rocks. Sam held a<br />
newspaper in one hand; the others displayed their tools. The picture only hinted<br />
at the backbreaking nature of the actual work in 1908. They drilled by hand,<br />
with hammers driving the bits into the rock, smashing the oversized rocks with<br />
sledgehammers, then shoveling material into a cart. None of the men in the<br />
picture appeared overweight. And Sam did some of this work while in his fifties.<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et<br />
facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum<br />
sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique<br />
odiscim agnatem rem latur sequam<br />
sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur,<br />
que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
SECTION NUMBER 17
Beyond the hammers and chisels, they were learning to handle explosives, by trial and error. One noteworthy<br />
“oops” moment made the front page of the New York Times on January 12, 1907. Sam and his crew<br />
were blasting on a rock face along Hamburgh Turnpike (today’s West Broadway) only a few blocks from<br />
where Aart Breen’s shoeshop had been located. When Sam packed too large a charge into the hole “[a]<br />
shower of rocks passed through…heavy plate glass windows, demolishing…Corinthian columns and creating<br />
havoc generally in the interior…”, of an elaborate nearby house, the home of the father of Paterson’s<br />
renowned sculptor Gaetano Frederici. “…Samuel Braen believes that there was too much nitro-glycerine in<br />
the dynamite.” This particular lesson cost Sam about $10,000. His search for more rock led him to work<br />
on Garrett Mountain sites, where he was less likely to take out any houses, and keeping a safe distance<br />
from Lambert’s Castle.<br />
Cars and trucks became more common as Sam perfected his blasting skills. He quickly caught the driving<br />
bug. His new passion provided first hand knowledge that motor vehicles required better roads than horsedrawn<br />
wagons. That truth meant more pavement, more bridges, more culverts, more excavating, and more<br />
concrete. The farmers in places like Wayne, Clifton, Hawthorne, and Fair Lawn, whose livelihoods depended<br />
on delivering to markets in Passaic or Paterson, demanded improvements. The state government’s<br />
policy of carving new municipalities from the old townships produced a ‘borough-mania,’ with these minitowns<br />
vying for new residents. Passaic County’s Manchester Township dissolved into five boroughs (Totowa,<br />
Haledon, North Haledon, Prospect Park, Hawthorne) between 1898 and 1908. In Bergen County, nine<br />
municipalities became sixty-nine by the mid 1920s. Each new unit wanted sewers and water systems, plus<br />
paved streets. For a company like “Samuel Braen, Road Builder,” this meant business.<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique odiscim agnatem<br />
rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
18 SECTION TITLE
As the demands and opportunities for excavation<br />
work increased, Sam bought bigger machines. By<br />
1917 he owned a massive (by the standards of the<br />
day) Marion steam rig that could be fitted with a<br />
shovel, clamshell, crane, or dragline. To move it, he<br />
needed to hire a local hauler who owned a truck with<br />
a specially equipped engine and transmission. Sam<br />
advertised his services in bold letters on his equipment<br />
and in the Paterson City Directory, variously<br />
calling himself a stone cutter, stone dealer, and general<br />
contractor. To save money he refused to rent or<br />
build any separate office space, instead operating the<br />
business from his home on Totowa Avenue. At times<br />
he would mix business with pleasure, using one of his<br />
trucks to carry passengers for a family outing.<br />
As Sam looked toward retirement, his sons John<br />
and Abram traded their hammers and bits for desks<br />
in an office. They also worked to secure a reliable<br />
source of traprock for making the concrete the roads,<br />
bridges, and sewers required. They looked to the First<br />
Watchung Mountain. It was clear there was rock to<br />
be had in the mountain, but how much, and of what<br />
quality was at best a guess, given the ability to drill<br />
core samples one hundred years ago. Back during<br />
the Civil War, Abraham Vermeulen, operated a site<br />
along Goffle Road, only to abandon it. A number<br />
of contractors began betting there were substantial<br />
quantities, based in part on the recommendations of<br />
newly minted geologists who were graduating from the new technical colleges<br />
and universities. They recommended New Street on Garrett Mountain, then<br />
Great Notch near Little Falls. Dow Drukker developed a site along Valley Road in<br />
Clifton. James and Richard Sowerbutt operated in three places: next to Drukker’s<br />
Clifton quarry, along with Haledon and Prospect Park. Their successes<br />
encouraged Sam and his sons to purchase their own site in Hawthorne, next<br />
to the Braen family farm on Goffle Road. Here gravity could do the work that<br />
lifting had done in the Valley of the Rocks. Stone blasted from the top of the<br />
hill, would be dumped down into the crushers, conveyed into the batch plants<br />
further down the slope, and then shipped out as sub-base, asphalt, concrete, or<br />
gravel. The Hawthorne quarry would operate for fifty years.<br />
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et<br />
facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum<br />
sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique<br />
odiscim agnatem rem latur sequam<br />
sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur,<br />
que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
By the mid-1920s Sam felt financially secure enough to buy a modest farm and<br />
orange grove in Florida, and take the time to visit the place during the winter<br />
months. Increasingly his sons John and Abram took the reins of the business,<br />
especially after the purchase of the Hawthorne quarry. The boys had began<br />
SECTION NUMBER 19
CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique odiscim agnatem<br />
rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o<br />
working for their father on the small farm he owned along Totowa Avenue. They wielded hammers and<br />
shovels with the other laborers in the quarry. As the construction business grew, they became foremen,<br />
and then managers. John became the bookkeeper for the business, while Abram oversaw the operational<br />
side. When Sam’s health faltered in 1926, the business formally changed hands. John and Abe soon<br />
placed their own stamp on the business. The ads that for years had read “Samuel Braen, Road Builder,<br />
General Contractor, Manufacturer of Crushed Stone.” Now they read “Samuel Braen’s Sons.” And they had<br />
an office address, “Goffle Road, Hawthorne, New Jersey.<br />
Samuel Braen died at his home in Paterson on January 11,1930, his passing noted on the front page of<br />
the local newspapers. His lodge brothers gathered to honor him, along with his family, friends, and customers.<br />
Susan outlived him by fifteen years. Maybe the most significant testimony to the kind of man Sam<br />
had been could be found in two facts: his sons kept his name on the business, and he had a grandson who<br />
carried that name.<br />
20 SECTION TITLE
Enduring the Great Depression would be the next great hurdle Samuel Braen’s Sons would meet. If any<br />
business could cope in that economic situation, a quarry would be it. During the 1920s the construction<br />
business in northern New Jersey experienced a surge of activity spurred by projects like the Holland<br />
Tunnel in the early years and the George Washington Bridge at its close. The demand for aggregate and<br />
concrete for those monumental structures rippled through the entire region. In 1928, the Braen brothers<br />
added asphalt and concrete plants to the Hawthorne facility. With major projects under way, even ones at<br />
a distance, the batch plants paid for themselves. As the federal government spurred public works projects<br />
to reduce unemployment, Passaic and Bergen counties saw an increased demand for the products Samuel<br />
Braen’s Sons had to sell.<br />
In the depths of the Depression,<br />
the company expanded its holdings.<br />
Along with a third partner, the<br />
brothers formed Braen Sand and<br />
Gravel, with properties in Wyckoff,<br />
Franklin Lakes, and Mahwah to<br />
produce a new line of products. As<br />
their holdings increased, and the<br />
financing requirements changed,<br />
John and Abram legally incorporated<br />
as a privately held company,<br />
with each of them holding fifty<br />
percent of the shares. John was<br />
the president and treasurer, while<br />
Abram was named the firm’s vice<br />
president and secretary.<br />
The Hawthorne quarry remained<br />
the most visible industry in Hawthorne,<br />
and also one of the most<br />
valuable. It was one of the larger<br />
employers in the borough, along<br />
with the railroad yards and a<br />
dyehouse. It generated significant<br />
As the federal government spurred public works<br />
projects to reduce unemployment, Passaic and<br />
Bergen counties saw an increased demand for the<br />
products Samuel Braen’s Sons had to sell.<br />
revenue through the property taxes it paid. The trucks with the “Samuel Braen’s Sons” name on them also<br />
said “Hawthorne, New Jersey” right below the name. The brothers both maintained a high profile both in<br />
Hawthorne, where they worked, and in Totowa, where they lived. They were active in civic life. John belonged<br />
to Hawthorne’s Rotary Club and served on Totowa’s board of education and board of adjustment.<br />
Like their father, John and Abram both were active Masons.<br />
When the Second World War ended in 1945, John and Abram, looked toward retirement. By then their<br />
business had not only survived the depression and war years, it had actually grown. And with the end of<br />
the fighting, the region stood on the threshold of another construction boom, one that would drive the area<br />
and the company to dizzying heights during the next thirty years. Under a new generation of ownership, the<br />
Braen name would be known not just in North Jersey, but nationally.<br />
SECTION NUMBER 21