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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.
SECTION NUMBER 11