BraenBook-TemplatePages

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-
SECTION NUMBER 9