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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. CAPTION TITLE HERE: Apitat. Pis et facerit eos resciae eos reribus, sum sit labo. Bus.Pid mi, ommod milique odiscim agnatem rem latur sequam sitas res sit et mod ut et enihictatur, que rerferit, offictae si o 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 12 SECTION TITLE
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. SECTION NUMBER 13
Page 1 and 2: Braen: A History Built on Stone The
Page 3 and 4: Braen: A History Built on Stone The
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS Prelude xx From Breen to B
Page 7 and 8: Preface Braen, with an outsized A i
Page 9 and 10: From Breen to Braen On April 30, 18
Page 11: to New Orleans, steaming north on t
Page 15 and 16: From Samuel Braen, Road Builder, to
Page 17 and 18: ...Sam proudly hired a photographer
Page 19 and 20: As the demands and opportunities fo
Page 21: Enduring the Great Depression would

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