Historic Passaic County

HISTORIC 

PASSAIC 

COUNTY 

An Illustrated History 

By Edward A. Smyk 

A publication of the Passaic County Historical Society

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HISTORIC 

PASSAIC 

COUNTY 

An Illustrated History 

By Edward A. Smyk 

Paterson, New Jersey 

Historical Publishing Network 

A division of Lammert Incorporated 

San Antonio, Texas

First Edition 

Copyright © 2004 Historical Publishing Network 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing 

from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Historical Publishing Network, 11555 Galm Road, Suite 100, San Antonio, Texas, 78254. Phone (210) 688-9006. 

ISBN: 0-9654999-4-4 

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 2003116246 

Historic Passaic County: An Illustrated History 

author: Edward A. Smyk 

cover artist: Henri LeJune 

contributing writer for “Sharing the Heritage”: Robert Masiello 

Historical Publishing Network 

president: Ron Lammert 

vice president: Barry Black 

project managers: Richard Kirschner 

Richard Weiss 

director of operations: Charles A. Newton, III 

administration: Angela Lake 

Donna M. Mata 

book sales: Dee Steidle 

graphic production: Colin Hart 

Mike Reaves 

John Barr 

2 ✦ HISTORIC PASSAIC COUNTY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

The author is grateful to numerous individuals, collectors, and institutions for making this publication a reality. 

In 1992, he approached the North Jersey Herald and News, one of the region’s prominent daily newspapers, and 

suggested a series of articles on historical events, which were generally unknown and had not found their way into 

the standard histories. The series, called “Tales of Our Heritage,” met with widespread approval and attracted a 

devoted readership. The articles published here were condensed from a selection of the 114 essays which 

comprised the series. 

The Passaic County Historical Society was the appropriate sponsor for a publication of this type. Fortunately, 

the author had the support and encouragement of several society members, who, along with Director Richard A. 

Sgritta, formed a publication committee. Maryjane Proctor, the society’s president; Trustee Arlette Keri; and society 

member Walter Zalenski spent hours culling through the society’s massive photo collection in search of 

appropriate illustrations. Trustee Robert Hazekamp provided technical support in converting text files, and offered 

his expertise on various computer-related matters. Annita Zalenski, the society’s first vice president and an author 

in her own right, functioned as production manager and editorial adviser. Mr. Sgritta snatched time away from his 

numerous administrative duties and efficiently handled publication-related tasks. Christine Guernic and Mary 

Hayden cheerfully assisted with essential secretarial support. To all of these talented people, as well as the late 

Edward M. Graf and the late George P. Sellmer, respected colleagues in the field of local history, I remain indebted. 

Edward A. Smyk 

The author dedicates this book to the memory of his parents, 

Edward C. and Mildred T. Smyk, who over many years lovingly 

supported his efforts to research and write the history of 

Passaic County. 

Acknowledgements ✦ 3

CONTENTS 

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 

The History 

Passaic County Welcomed Aboriginal Americans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 

Clifton’s Reputation Bloomed As North Jersey Farming Center. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 

Morris Canal Served North Jersey Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 

Telephone Exchange Put Paterson On Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 

Station WODA Played Role In Radio’s Early Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 

Television History Happened In Passaic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 

Oldham Works Linked To Haledon’s Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 

Totowa Man Built Early Flying Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 

Ice Once a Hot Seller In New Jersey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 

Paterson Savings Drew Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 

Loyalist Farmstead Won Place In Revolutionary War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 

Garret Mountain Riot Silenced May Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 

Inventor Speer Headed Drive To Rename Village “Passaic” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 

Brassy Blare Filled the Air In Bloomingdale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 

Albert Payson Terhune Was a Story All His Own. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 

J. Percy Crayon: A Colorful Part of North Jersey Highlands’ Lore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 

Paterson Photographer Brought “Big Muddy” To Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 

The Blizzard Of 1888 Became a Bitter Blanket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 

The Calamities Of 1902-03 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 

Paterson Was Ravaged by The Great Fire of 1902 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 

The 1903 Tornado Left A Terrified Paterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 

The Great Flood of 1903 Uprooted Thousands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 

Physician Brings Education To Acquackanonk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 

Memorial Day Has Roots In Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 

Matthew Maguire Played a Pivotal Labor Day Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 

County’s Natural Beauty Preserved In Minnie May Monks’ Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 

“Old Tim” Popularized Passaic Falls in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 

Hoppers Handled Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 

When Fans Flocked To Doherty Oval. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 

John P. Holland: Submarine Pioneer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 

Horse Sense Helped City Confectioner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 

When Doors of City Saloons Swung Open Only To Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 

“Gambler” Hit Gold With Hotel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 

Old-Fashioned Drug Store Had Children’s Treats. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 

Alexander Hamilton Hotel’s Glorious Heyday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 

Grocery Grew into Landmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 

Weaver Was a “Thoreau of Passaic County” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 

Federici’s Legacy is Cast in Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 

Passaic Druggist Made a Big Deal of a Big Wheel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 

Peter Hasenclever: Eighteenth-Century Industrialist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 

Winter Sport One Group’s Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 

Hugh Irish Left Paterson Grocery for a Hero’s Death at Antietam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 

Pompton Furnace Played Role in Securing American Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 

Wanaque Reservoir Dam: A Monument To Mayor’s Foresight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 

Brownstone from Little Falls Spanned History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 

This Old House Has a Tale to Tell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 

The Remarkable Eleanor Egg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 

Locomotive Magnate Snubbed Paterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 

References Consulted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 

Sharing the Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 

About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 


INTRODUCTION 

In the last century, several books have been written about Passaic County, and, although published at different 

periods, they share several characteristics in common: the progression of dates and events, from the Lenni Lenape 

to more recent occurrences. This book is a departure from the formulaic histories of the past. It consists of a series 

of self-contained articles on hardworking people, who struggled at considerable odds to achieve a better life by 

channeling their creative energies in business, trades, and other vocations. It tells of people who developed a sense 

of community and coalesced during difficult times. It speaks of events long lost to memory that now live again in 

the actual words of those who became witnesses to history. 

In May 1895, Woodrow Wilson said, “The history of a nation is only the history of its villages written large. 

The significance of local history is that it is part of a greater whole.” Perhaps no better characterization could be 

found for Passaic County, a locality whose history stretches back to the first inhabitants, the aboriginal Americans. 

One of the earliest written accounts dates from March 1680, when two Christian missionaries, accompanied by a 

Lenni Lenape guide, traveled up the Passaic River to what is now the city of Passaic. Leaving the waterway, they 

trudged to the hills overlooking the Passaic Falls. The thundering cataract, undisturbed in its primeval beauty, was, 

in their words, “a sight to be seen in order to observe the power of God.” 

The Lenni Lenape sold a track of land known as the Aquackanonk Patent to a group of Dutch colonists in 

exchange for blankets, powder, and other objects. 

The word “Passaic,” from which the river and county derives its name, is in itself of aboriginal American origin, 

meaning “valley.” In 1844, Acquackanonk covered approximately twenty-four square miles, encompassing the 

present day municipalities of Passaic and Clifton. Acquackanonk has been variously translated as meaning “bend 

at the head of tidewater.” 

Prior to the American Revolution, when New Jersey was a British colony, the inhabitants of the area resided in 

what were then Bergen and Essex Counties. It was sparsely settled by industrious Dutch colonists, who, as farmers, 

wrested their living directly from the land. Mineral wealth had been discovered in the northern portions of what 

became Passaic County. Peter Hasenclever, a German-born naturalized British subject, decided to establish an 

extractive iron ore industry in Ringwood’s virgin forests. In June 1764, Hasenclever brought from Europe the 

first of more than five hundred ironworkers and their families to reach these objectives. With the coming of 

Revolution, the region’s iron mines played a significant military role in supplying munitions to General 

Washington’s patriot army. 

Paterson, the county seat, has been inseparably linked to entrepreneurship and industrial prominence since the 

town began as a cluster of workshops near the Passaic Falls. It is not an exaggeration to say that Paterson was the 

locality for one of the nation’s earliest experiments in commerce. After independence had been achieved, U.S. 

Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in November 1791, lent the prestige of his office, encouraged investors, 

and promoted the development of New Jersey’s first business corporation, the Society for Establishing Useful 

Manufactures. With Hamilton’s guidance, the corporation located its factories at the Passaic Falls because of the 

enormous waterpower potential and proximity to New York markets. 

Time and again, Paterson, Passaic, and the rest of the county’s municipalities would contribute to the nation’s 

industrial expansion by producing silk, cotton, and woolen goods. Mill owners collectively employed thousands 

of factory operatives under harsh working conditions, but, in the process, provided successive generations of 

immigrants with jobs and a stake in a more promising future. Industrial growth was countered by exploitation and 

strikes—and the need for labor to organize and protect the rights of workers. 

What was it like to live and work in Passaic County many decades ago? The following essays will hopefully 

provide some of the answers, and, at the same time, prove to be enjoyable and informative reading. 

Introduction ✦ 5

PASSAIC COUNTY 

❖ 

WELCOMED 

ABORIGINAL 

AMERICANS 

Blackfeet Indian delegation with 

Mayor Frank Van Noort on the steps 

of Paterson City Hall, May 1921. 

COURTESY OF THE PASSAIC COUNTY 

HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

During the 1920s, public celebrations reached 

the zenith of their popularity. Towns and cities 

across America vied with one another in 

welcoming a virtual procession of prominent 

visitors and celebrities. Passaic and Paterson were 

no different from the rest of the nation. Visitors to 

either town could be assured of a warm and 

sincere reception. 

In 1921 a delegation of aboriginal Americans 

toured various Eastern cities. Stops were 

arranged for them in Passaic and Paterson, 

and the event was given wide publicity. 

When readers of the Passaic Daily News glanced 

at page one on May 20, they would have noticed 

an eye-catching headline and photograph: 

“Officials are Hosts to Real Live Indians.” 

Mayor John H. McGuire was photographed 

shaking hands with Blackfeet Indian Chief 

Many Tail Feathers, while other members of 

the tribe looked on stoically. 

Mayor “Jimmy” Walker had previously 

received the chiefs in New York. Walker became 

an honorary member of the Blackfeet tribe 

when he donned a chief’s ceremonial headdress 

on the steps of city hall. The delegation of 

eleven men, two women, and a twelve-year 

old boy made the Commodore Hotel their New 

York headquarters. 

According to the May 21, 1921, issue of the 

Paterson Morning Call, the Indians had toured 

“larger cities as guests of the government 

for educational purposes.” Newspapers in 

both cities reported the “braves and squaws” 

had acted in a First National silent movie 

called Bob Hampton of Placer. According to the 

Paterson Press-Guardian’s reporter, the film 

was “a faithful reproduction of General Custer’s 

last stand....” 

When Chief Two Guns White Calf arrived in 

Silk City, he told the mayor, through an 

interpreter, that he enjoyed the city and its tall 

buildings. The chief said his profile adorned the 

1913 Buffalo Nickel then in circulation. He and 

his delegation appeared noble and impressive in 

their ceremonial dress. Visiting Passaic in the 

morning, their schedule included a noon 

reception with Paterson Mayor Frank Van 

Noort, followed with brief stops at Central and 

Ridgewood High Schools. The delegation 

returned to Paterson, where they rejoined 

Mayor Van Noort for a now historic photograph 

in front of city hall. 

The Blackfeet Indian visit 

was memorable, but in 

several respects it reinforced 

the public’s perception that 

all aboriginal Americans 

wore feathered headdresses 

and were figments of a 

“Wild West” imagination. 

Historian Alvin M. Josephy, 

Jr., thought that popular 

stereotypes about aboriginal 

Americans had created 

some misunderstandings. 

In Josephy’s words, the 

Indians “were, and are, all 

kinds of real living persons 

like any others and that 

they included peace-loving 

wise men, mothers who 

cried for the safety of 

their children, young men 

who sang songs of love 

and courted maidens, 

dullards, statesmen, cowards, 

and patriots.” 


While Paterson and Passaic developed a 

national reputation for silk and wool production, 

Clifton was literally the garden spot of 

North Jersey. 

Originally known as Acquackanonk, Clifton 

was populated by hardy Dutch farmers who 

knew something about raising vegetables. From 

the nineteenth century and well into the 1940s, 

Clifton farms provided an astonishing abundance 

of fresh vegetables for the rest of Passaic County. 

Historian William W. Scott described Clifton’s 

Richfield section in 1925. “There are rows upon 

rows—long ones, too—of what appear to be 

every kind of edible vegetables, all in the glory of 

their growth” he wrote. “Never has mother earth 

given so bountiful of vegetable wealth. The 

demand for Richfield’s vegetables is at all times 

greater than the supply. They are considered 

superior to all others. The secret lies with the soil, 

the consistency and strength of which is superior 

to any and all other localities.” 

Scott noted that poverty was unknown on 

Clifton’s farms, which he ascribed “to the industry 

and frugality of the farmers, members of whose 

families—women, girls, men, and boys—together 

with hired help, may be seen from early dawn to 

dusk, working in the various fields.” Different 

varieties of fruits were also cultivated. One of 

Acquackanonk’s prominent nurserymen, Tice C. 

Kevitt, was born in Passaic on April 9, 1860. In 

1894, he was operating the profitable Prospect 

Hill Nurseries, located on what is now Mount 

Prospect Avenue in the Athenia section of Clifton. 

Kevitt was cited in the 1899 Illustrated History 

of Passaic as growing “almost every variety of fruit 

known to this climate...strawberries being one of 

his specialties.” In addition to being a good 

nurseryman, Kevitt had a knack for securing free 

advertising in the local newspaper. Kevitt would 

tell the people of Passaic and Acquackanonk 

about his remarkable strawberries by means of the 

letters column. In the Passaic Daily News of May 

18, 1896, he posed a question and waxed lyrical 

about his luscious red fruit: “Do you like them? I 

do not mean the eastern or southern product, 

picked green, covered with sand, packed in 

dirty—perhaps cholera-seeded-old baskets, and 

shipped long distance by the side of tobacco, fish, 

petroleum, etc., but to our own hill-side product, 

picked ripe, kissed by the 

morning’s dew, packed in 

clean, new boxes…. Do 

you remember the wild 

berries of your youth? 

Their wonderful flavor 

was due principally to 

their being ripe when 

picked, and eaten before 

their aroma had escaped.” 

In the 1890s, Kevitt 

said he was growing 

eighty different varieties 

of strawberries. He 

cultivated five acres of the fruit, and in late May 

1895, anticipated a yield of between thirty-five 

thousand and forty thousand quarts. In one of 

his letters, published on May 22, 1895, Kevitt 

exuded his customary optimism. Poor weather 

would not stop him. He wrote, “A number of 

growers are down in the mouth and see nothing 

but gloom and despair ahead. It was my good 

fortune to have my beds snugly sheltered in the 

valley under the hill, like a hen covereth her 

brood. We have a safe full crop.” 

CLIFTON’S 

REPUTATION 

BLOOMED AS A 

❖ 

NORTH JERSEY 

FARMING 

CENTER 

Left: Strawberry pickers at Tice 

Kevitt’s Nursery, 1894. 

COURTESY OF THE GRAF ARCHIVE. 

Below: The H. N. Piaget Farm on 

Valley Road, c. 1885. The Piaget 

Farm was one of many nineteenth 

century farms in Clifton. 



An Illustrated History ✦ 7

MORRIS CANAL 

SERVED NORTH 

JERSEY INDUSTRY 

❖ 

Scene along the towpath, 1899. 



Until advancing technology rendered it 

economically useless, the Morris Canal was 

essential to North Jersey’s industry. 

The 1830s marked the golden age of canal 

construction in America. On October 15, 1825, 

ground was broken for the Morris Canal at Lake 

Hopatcong. A cannon boomed across the lake in 

celebration, and invited guests consumed an 

elaborate banquet, replete with home brewed 

“Jersey Lightning” (applejack). The president of 

the Morris Canal and Banking Company, one of 

the toastmasters, noted with obvious pride the 

canal’s “elegance of curve, wherever deviation 

from a straight line was necessary.” 

The canal company hired eleven hundred 

men to manually dig the waterway. Its designers 

were confronted with multiple engineering 

problems that demanded creative solutions. 

Canal boats were hauled with wooden cradles 

either up or down a series of inclined planes. In 

1831 the canal was more or less completed 

when it stretched from Phillipsburg to Newark. 

Five years passed before it was extended to the 

Hudson River. 

Canal boats carried an astonishing variety of 

goods to market. Castings, machinery, anthracite 

coal, flour, and timber were just a few items 

transported along the 102-mile-long canal. 

In the Paterson area, the canal passed 

through Clifton, West Paterson, Little Falls, 

and Wayne. A superbly constructed brownstone 

aqueduct carried the canal eighty feet over the 

Passaic River at Little Falls. Its height made the 

aqueduct a favorite stop for shutterbugs. (The 

aqueduct was blasted away in 1925.) 

The development of the railroad, a cheaper 

and speedier means of transportation, hastened 

the canal’s demise. In terms of profit, the 

canal company’s best year was 1866, when 

889,220 tons of freight was hauled, and the 

business grossed more than $600,000. In simple 

arithmetic, a train could make the trip to the 

Delaware River in five hours, rather than the 

five days it took for a canal boat to travel the 

same distance. 

The canal’s days as a viable enterprise were 

numbered, and the state legislature began to 

investigate its abandonment. In 1912, Governor 

Woodrow Wilson appointed a committee of 

prominent citizens to consider the future use of 

the canal. An important component of the 

report was a supplementary plan submitted by 

the New York architectural firm of Carrère & 

Hastings that suggested the canal be developed 

as a highway and parkway. The consulting 

architects were enthusiastic about the potential 

for park development and said, “Even where the 

canal passes under Garret Rock on the 

southernmost edge of Paterson and turns on its 

westward course, the possibilities of an effective 

landscape treatment are many and obvious.” 

Photographs and written accounts help 

preserve the history of the Morris Canal and the 

men called “canalers,” but one can no longer see 

canal boats plying the waterway or hear the 

canalers’ cry of “Low bridge!” or “Lock ahead!” 

Literary critic Malcolm Cowley summed up 

the romance of the Morris Canal when he 

concluded, “The canal was too expensive a 

luxury to be maintained for boys to swim in, for 

youths to canoe in, for men to fish in, [and] for 

lovers to stroll along its banks.” 


In early December 1879, a group of men 

were hard at work remodeling the third floor 

of Morton Clark’s hardware store on the 

northwest corner of Main and Ellison Streets 

in Paterson. Pedestrians paused and wondered 

what the fuss was about. A thirty-foot 

pole, festooned with wires, appeared next to 

the building. A strange-looking apparatus was 

then hauled upstairs. 

People did not have to wait very long to 

discover what was happening. On the afternoon 

of December 24, 1879, history was made 

when the first commercial telephone exchange 

in Passaic County opened for business. 

Subscribers to the new service were two 

Paterson newspapers, a number of manufacturing 

companies, and a few lawyers. Four 

days after the exchange was operational, a trunk 

line connected Silk City with New York. 

John F. Noonan, a Western Union telegraph 

manager in Passaic, realized the communications 

potential of the new device. He 

quit his job and raised about $10,000 to 

purchase the necessary equipment and office 

space. Visitors to Noonan’s exchange climbed 

flights of wooden stairs, and once on the third 

floor, they entered a room which one reporter 

called “a wilderness of wires, batteries, signals, 

and magnets.” 

In the spring of 1881, Gertrude Paul arrived 

at the exchange as one of the city’s pioneer 

telephone operators. In a 1940 interview, Paul 

recalled “not having much to do” between calls. 

She was “allowed to read, crochet and look out 

the window.” Since the exchange was located in 

an old pigeon loft, Paul and her colleagues 

found some of the previous inhabitants 

returning to their former haunts. 

Teenage boys manned the Paterson-Newark 

connection, and Paul recalled that the young 

men were often a testy lot. She recalled how the 

Newark operators behaved. Paul would 

continually ring Newark without success. 

Finally, when connection was made, one of the 

youths would say, “Well what do you want, 

Paterson?” Paul would reply, “I want you to 

answer.” The response from the other end of the 

line was, “I will answer when I get ready!” Not 

surprisingly, it was not long before teenage boys 

were replaced on switchboards in Newark and 

throughout the state. 

In 1881, Paterson had only seventy-five 

telephone subscribers, and although the phones 

had been assigned numbers, they were ignored. 

People simply made their calls by name. Operators 

like Paul were expected to memorize the names of 

all who had phones. Because of electrical 

interference, the phone lines were noisy. An 

operator needed a good, strong voice to overcome 

the hissing and background static. Noonan had 

nevertheless convinced his customers, as well as 

others, that the “device” was here to stay. 

In the summer of 1881, an office was 

established in Passaic. Four years later, the 

Passaic telephone directory listed seventy-four 

subscribers. Boonton, Little Falls, Wayne, and 

Lincoln Park were soon connected, and it was 

not long before most suburban communities 

had telephone service. 

TELEPHONE 

EXCHANGE PUT 

❖ 

PATERSON 

ON LINE 

Paterson Telephone Exchange, 1880. 




STATION WODA 

PLAYED A ROLE 

IN RADIO’S 

EARLY GROWTH 

❖ 

Above: Nick Manfredi and his radio 

in the 1920s. 

COURTESY OF THE PATERSON MUSEUM. 

Below: The O’Dea family music 

store, home of radio station WODA, 

in Paterson. 


Radio is taken for granted today, yet when 

broadcasting made its debut in the early 1920s, 

listeners considered it nothing short of 

miraculous. People with a scientific turn of 

mind rushed to build the first crystal sets and 

tuned in voices and music over the background 

roar of static, sputter, and whistles. 

Nicholas Manfredi, son of Italian immigrants, 

typified the new radio enthusiasts. At age 

fifteen, the Paterson youth had assembled his 

very own crystal set because he was eager to 

hear the first local broadcasts. 

The consumer desire for radio receivers 

would soon develop into a mania. In 1921 only 

a few were commercially available. Two years 

later, an estimated four hundred thousand 

households nationwide had managed to obtain 

radios. Even more amazing was the number of 

people who entered the emerging field of 

broadcasting. Newspapers, banks, pharmacies 

and other businesses wanted to capitalize on 

the marketing potential of the new public 

entertainment medium. 

The radio station that Nick Manfredi, his 

friends and countless others in the area listened 

to was WODA, Paterson’s first broadcasting 

facility. From 1925 until it was sold in 1934, the 

station operated from a second-floor studio 

above the O’Dea family music store at 115 

Ellison Street. The station’s programs were 

received within a ten-mile radius, but, 

depending on atmospheric conditions, it was 

often heard many miles from the studio. 

Richard E. O’Dea was the founder, owner and 

operator of WODA. Realizing that radio, rather 

than the sale of Victrola and phonograph 

records, was the wave of the future, O’Dea 

received an experimental license in 1924. The 

station cost $500 to build, and its call letters 

were derived from O’Dea’s surname. With 

greetings from Mayor Colin M. McLean and a 

program of entertainment by Elks Lodge 60, the 

station officially went on the air in April 1925. 

Local talent provided almost all of the 

programs, although a Paterson Evening News 

reporter was on the air twice a day with news 

flashes. WODA’s newscaster was Bill Tracey, son 

of the city’s police chief. 

The WODA microphone became a familiar 

sight at important events in and about Paterson. 

When Charles A. Lindbergh visited Silk City not 

long after his epochal solo flight to Paris, WODA 

was on hand to broadcast the famed aviator’s 

reception at the Wright Aeronautical plant. 

Radio stations originating in New York 

dominated the airwaves with the 

exception of WODA, Newark’s WOR, and 

WPG from Atlantic City. In September 

1928, hometown programs were typical 

fare on WODA, and local talent appeared 

every day before studio microphones. On 

September 25, there was a broadcast of 

live music from the Colonial Inn in Little 

Falls, a baritone soloist, the Yellow Tavern 

Trio, and entertainment from the wellknown 

Lido Venice nightclub. The station 

signed off with a serenade by Pat Cristello 

and His Gondoliers. 

O’Dea also recognized the medium 

for its educational potential, and from 

1928 to 1931, a “Free Grammar and 

High School of the Air” was given its 

place in programming. WODA merged 

with WAAM, Newark in 1934, and the 

combined stations moved to New York 

and became WNEW. O’Dea, a radio 

pioneer, helped the medium develop its 

mass appeal. 


On the afternoon of March 21, 1944, 

television industry pioneer Allen B. DuMont 

strolled across the flag bedecked stage of 

Passaic’s Central Theater and was greeted with 

enthusiastic applause from hundreds of his 

employees. They had been dismissed from work 

early and had arrived at the theater to witness a 

special ceremony. 

Beginning in 1938, the Allen B. DuMont 

Laboratories at 2 Main Avenue, Passaic, 

manufactured the first home television sets. 

During World War II, the company produced 

electronic equipment for military applications. 

DuMont employees had done such an excellent 

job that Brigadier General G. L. Van Deusen 

presented them the coveted Army-Navy “E” 

(Excellence in Production) award. 

In a larger context, the Army-Navy designation 

represented another personal triumph for a man 

accustomed to accepting challenges. 

DuMont conquered polio and then enrolled 

at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1924, he 

received a degree in electrical engineering and 

found employment with Westinghouse Lamp 

Company. DuMont was placed in charge of 

producing radio tubes. He later moved on to 

become vice president of DeForest Radio 

Company. The young engineer was intrigued by 

experimental television, and when the DeForest 

Company became a casualty of the Depression, 

DuMont pooled his savings and borrowed 

money to finance his own research and 

production company. 

Beginning in 1931, DuMont and his first two 

employees designed and manufactured several 

different-size cathode ray (television) tubes. He 

worked in the garage of his home. Researcher 

Peter Kerr said DuMont was confident “his tiny 

bulbous tubes would light the path to the future 

and a fortune.” 

DuMont moved his business to a store. When 

he could not acquire more space, the busy 

scientist acquired the Passaic plant. Residents 

called it the “old pickle works,” and it was here 

that DuMont Laboratories produced the first 

home TV sets. World War II interrupted 

television production, but shortly after the 

conflict ended, the TV industry boomed. In the 

autumn of 1947, an estimated 150,000 sets were 

planned. Half were built in DuMont’s Passaic and 

Clifton plants, and in RCA’s facilities in Camden. 

The cheapest set sold for $250, but it was still too 

expensive for most families. DuMont reported, 

however, that each day he sold 10 of his top of 

the line models—at a cost of $2,500 each. 

DuMont was not content to become wealthy 

from the profits of TV sales. In 1940, he 

established television station WABD. It was the 

beginning of the DuMont Television Network, 

which broadcast programs such as Captain Video 

and His Video Rangers, and gave CBS News 

correspondent Mike Wallace his start. Others who 

appeared on the DuMont network in the 1950s 

were comedians Ernie Kovacs and Jackie Gleason. 

The DuMont era ended in Passaic in 1960 

when the Main Avenue plant was sold, but the 

laboratory’s place in broadcasting history is 

more than secure. 

TELEVISION 

HISTORY 

HAPPENED IN 

PASSAIC 

❖ 

Above: Television pioneer Allen B. 

DuMont in his laboratory. 


Below: Members of WABD’s studio 

crew in the 1950s. WABD was a 

key station in the DuMont 

Television Network. 



OLDHAM WORKS 

LINKED TO 

HALEDON’S PAST 

❖ 

An engraving of the Oldham Works. 

COURTESY OF THE GRAF ARCHIVE 

The manufacture of cotton, woolen, and 

linen machinery helped define the early history 

of Haledon. 

In December 1829, Benjamin Brundred 

purchased John Lambert’s mill and converted 

it to a foundry-type operation. He named it 

the Oldham Machine Works. Brundred carried 

with him ambitious plans for a manufacturing 

community. It is said he named the little 

hamlet Oldham, after a factory town in 

Lancastshire, England. 

Less than a decade later, Oldham's 

developing industry had attracted skilled 

artisans and craftsmen. On July 4, 1835, 

workers were given a holiday, which they 

celebrated with patriotic gusto. According to the 

Paterson Intelligencer of July 8, “mechanics and 

citizens of Oldham” erected a Liberty Pole in 

front of the machine works. At daybreak, a 

twenty-four-gun salute roared across the hamlet 

in honor of the fifty-ninth anniversary of 

American independence. 

A large procession made its way to Paterson 

for church services, and then returned to 

Oldham and “partook of a public dinner” 

where 150 people listened to enthusiastic 

speechmaking. 

Within a few years, fate dealt Brundred an 

unkind blow. On Saturday afternoon, April 20, 

1839, he watched in horror as the Oldham 

Works, in the words of the Intelligencer, “Burnt 

to the ground together with nearly all its 

contents.” A high wind fanned the flames. 

When firemen finally arrived, all they could do 

was extinguish burned embers. “Nearly 100 

men were thrown out of work,” and as the 

Intelligencer noted, “There was no insurance.” 

The Oldham Works were rebuilt and 

prospered until 1857. The Paterson Guardian 

observed on May 8 of that year, “the store is 

shut, half the houses in the neighborhood stand 

empty, the school is attended by about 12 to 15 

children, and worse than all, the road is going to 

ruin.” Nevertheless, the factory was not idle 

long. According to the November 20 issue of the 

Guardian, Oldham’s workshops were purchased 

for $37,000. The new proprietor was Charles 

Hodges, who appeared to be “a generous and 

true hearted Englishman.” 

William and Charles Hodges converted the 

premises for the manufacture of woolens and 

hosiery. On July 20, 1858, the Guardian noted 

the area presented “quite an animated 

appearance, when compared with the desolation 

which reigned there last year.” 

The property changed hands many times. In 

1958 the old mill served the B. F. Goodrich 

chemical manufacturing firm. 


William P. Gary has not been given the 

widespread recognition he deserves as an 

aviation pioneer, and that is regrettable. 

Gary, an inventor who resided in Totowa 

at the turn of the twentieth century, made his 

living as a pressman and mechanic for the 

Paterson Press and the Paterson Guardian. Like 

others of his day, Gary was intrigued by the idea 

of flying. From 1909 to 1920, the inventor 

amused and sometimes startled his neighbors 

with the non-collapsible “Garyplane,” one of 

the earliest flying machines fashioned by a 

local man. 

Gary built the aircraft in 1909 and housed 

it in a shed near his home at 75 Lincoln 

Avenue. Residents soon dubbed it the “Hoople.” 

The unusual looking craft became something of 

a sensation. Other inventors made flying 

machines with conventional looking wings, but 

Gary’s craft had a circular, tube-like design 

twenty feet in diameter. Gary covered the wing 

with special Irish linen called Niad. 

When hauled out of its shed, the more than 

9-foot long device was a sure bet to attract 

attention. Gary tested the aircraft several times, 

always making technical improvements. 

Needing capital, he incorporated the Non- 

Capsizable Aero Plane Company in July 1910, 

with himself as president. Five months later, 

curiosity seekers watched as Gary pulled the 

device out of its home as he assumed control of 

the plane. He managed to lift it four inches 

above Totowa Road before the plane’s engine 

sputtered out. Gary remained undaunted. He 

continued to make adjustments on the Hoople. 

On February 8, 1912, after seven hours of failed 

attempts in bitter cold weather, Gary had better 

results when the Hoople soared fifteen feet 

above the Passaic River near the Hillary Street 

Bridge. A crowd of spectators gave the plucky 

inventor a rousing cheer. 

Gary became a successful building contractor, 

yet he never lost his love for flying. He 

lived to see commercial aircraft fly over Totowa, 

and it must have given him immense 

satisfaction to know he was one of aviation’s 

local pioneers. The inventor died in Paterson on 

May 29, 1951, at age eighty-four, not very far 

from the place where his odd appearing Hoople 

was first put to the test. 

TOTOWA MAN 

BUILT EARLY 

FLYING MACHINE 

❖ 

Above: William P. Gary. 


Below: The inventor seated in 

his “Hoople.” 



ICE ONCE A 

HOT SELLER IN 

❖ 

NORTH JERSEY 

Vreeland’s Pond in Passaic was the 

scene of many ice harvests. 

SWARTZ PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF THE 

PASSAIC PUBLIC LIBRARY. 

During cold winter months a century ago, 

the frozen ponds of North Jersey attracted more 

than ice skaters and sports enthusiasts. Ice 

harvesters were hard at work clearing snow with 

horse-drawn scrapers, undaunted by lashing 

winds and near-zero temperatures. 

Long ago, electric refrigeration made the 

once-flourishing natural ice industry obsolete, 

but during the days of the sturdy oak icebox, 

the iceman was a familiar sight as he made his 

rounds to homes and businesses across the 

Passaic Valley. Ice dealers obtained their 

supplies from men such as Robert Bridge of 

Haledon. Born in a suburb of Bury, England, 

Bridge was twenty-three when his ship touched 

American shores. He found work in a Paterson 

cotton mill, but he had other aspirations. 

In the mid-1850s, the transplanted 

Englishman was manufacturing fabric for 

women’s hoop skirts. He was in Richmond, 

Virginia, when the Civil War erupted. Local 

authorities were suspicious of Bridge and locked 

him up as a presumed Union spy. Bridge 

demonstrated his resourcefulness when he 

declared himself a British subject. (He was in 

fact, a naturalized American.) With the 

assistance of the British consul, Bridge was 

released, and, much relieved, made his way 

north to Paterson. In 1866, Bridge came to the 

conclusion that hoop skirts would go out of 

fashion, so he looked for a new vocation. He 

concluded there would always be a demand for 

ice. Three years later, he established an ice 

harvesting business that utilized Oldham Pond 

in Haledon. Bridge died in 1899, at age eighty, 

and his son, Phineas, carried on the business. At 

the time, Bridge’s Ice House was considered one 

of the largest suppliers in the Paterson area. 

Passaic County’s northern highlands had 

many more ponds, so ice harvesting was just as 

profitable. Greenwood Lake, Echo Lake, Brady’s 

Pond (Lake Gerard), and many smaller mill 

ponds had on their banks icehouses of varying 

storage capacity. Ice needed to be at least teninches 

thick before it could be cut free and 

stored for the coming months. 

Icehouses were specially constructed to 

protect their contents from melting during hot 

summer days. They were built with double and 

triple frame walls, and filled with sawdust, then a 

popular insulating material. Placed on stone 

foundations, icehouses had to support the weight 

of millions of pounds of stored ice. Harvesting ice 

was demanding work, and wages were poor, 

considering the amount of labor involved. In 

1899, twelve-year-old Marvin H. Post discovered 

he could earn seventy-five cents a day by helping 

out with the ice harvest at Echo Lake. Four years 

later, the now-experienced lad was given a man’s 

wage. Post was paid between $1.50 and $1.75 a 

day for 12 or more hours of 

bone-chilling drudgery. 

Newspapers of the time 

often reported conflagrations 

at icehouses. Sawdust insulation 

was the culprit. 

The ice harvest was once so 

much a part of America's 

nineteenth century iconography 

that Currier and Ives 

published a colorful lithograph 

of three or four men harvesting 

ice on a country pond. 

It is a scene that has passed 

into history, along with the 

iceman and his big tongs. 

In that era, the iceman was 

not summoned by telephone. 

When he spotted a sign in 

a customer’s window, he made 

a delivery. 


In North Jersey communities a century ago, 

architects from across the East competed to 

build ornate public buildings in the then 

fashionable Beaux-Arts Style. 

Banks were among the structures that 

dominated the central business districts of cities 

like Paterson and Passaic. At the turn of the 

twentieth century, the Silk City had a cluster of 

these monument-like buildings. One was the 

Paterson Savings Institution. Local architect 

Charles Edwards, who was in his element when 

it came to large-scale, European-inspired 

buildings, designed it. A few years later, 

Edwards was selected to draw plans for the city’s 

bastion of exclusivity, the Hamilton Club. 

When the savings bank opened its Market 

Street doors in December 1892, depositors were 

awed by the building’s elaborate marble and 

bronze grillwork. Working class people were 

confident that conservative, communityoriented 

bankers would effectively manage their 

hard-earned money. Before the Paterson Savings 

Institution was established, two banks catered to 

the commercial needs of the city’s rapidly 

expanding business community. Yet there was no 

bank that accepted individual savings deposits. 

The need for such a bank was not lost on the mill 

owners and directors of the First National Bank. 

On April 2, 1869, the state Legislature 

approved a charter that contained specific 

safeguards for depositor’s money. Until the 

federal government prohibited directors from 

serving on the board of more than one bank, 

several of Paterson’s leading citizens were on the 

governing bodies of the Savings Institution and 

First National. Shortly before the new bank 

opened, the Paterson Daily Press captured the 

mood of the time, “We esteem the establishment 

of a savings institution, under auspices which 

seem to ensure its permanence and prosperity, a 

subject for profound rejoicing among the 

working classes of our city.” 

When the bank began business on May 1, 

1869, twenty-six depositors opened accounts 

within the first two hours of operation. The Press 

duly reported the event, telling its readers, “One 

of the excellent features of this bank is a 

provision by which a married woman can deposit 

money and keep it entirely independent of the 

control of her husband.” The bank was open only 

on Wednesday and Saturday, from 5 to 7 p.m., 

and one wonders if women crowded the teller 

windows. It paid six percent a year on deposits. 

The Great Depression of 1929, with its many 

bank failures, shattered the public’s perception 

that banks were impregnable. Yet banks did much 

to build and rebuild their communities by 

encouraging thrift, savings and investment. 

Children were encouraged to save. In 1915 the 

Paterson Savings Institution developed a thrift 

campaign for city school children. “Thrift Reigns 

at P.S. No. 6,” enthused one report, which noted 

the school “leads the city” with 757 depositors. 

PATERSON 

SAVINGS 

DREW INTEREST 

❖ 

Above: The bank’s headquarters on 

the corner of Main and Market 

Streets in the 1920s. 



Below: Officers and staff of the 

Paterson Savings Institution exuded a 

sense of confidence in this photograph 

taken April 28, 1897. 




LOYALIST 

FARMSTEAD 

WON PLACE IN 

REVOLUTIONARY 

WAR 

❖ 

The Thomas Ryder farmhouse on 

Weaseldrift Road in West Paterson. 

This sketch was made by Herbert A. 

Fisher, Jr., in 1952. 


Historic sites associated with America’s hardfought 

Revolutionary War, although less 

plentiful in North Jersey than a century ago, 

have managed to survive. 

An outstanding example is the Georgian- 

Style Dey Mansion in Wayne, General George 

Washington’s military field headquarters during 

July, October, and November of 1780. Buildings 

and places where patriot forces encamped have 

been identified. Yet there were sites associated 

with persons who rejected the very notion of 

American independence. Many so-called Tories 

held high convictions, but, as the war 

progressed, they were stigmatized as enemies 

and denounced by neighbors and friends alike. 

The Revolution forever changed the lives of 

those who maintained allegiance to the British 

Crown. In New Jersey, as elsewhere, loyalist 

property was confiscated by the state and sold. 

Given the circumstances, the farmstead of a oncedespised 

loyalist would not be a candidate for an 

historic site designation; however, the Thomas 

Ryder House on Weaseldrift Road, West Paterson, 

does possess historical status for this very reason. 

Located between Garret and Park Roads, the 

farmstead remains a private residence. Few who 

drive by the structure have any idea it once housed 

a man and his family who identified themselves as 

the “King’s Friends.” During the Revolution, the 

house was situated on forty-one acres. Exactly 

what motivated Ryder to reject the patriot cause is 

obscured by the passing of more than two 

centuries, but he was genuinely convinced that the 

Revolution was an unjust cause. 

On May 3, 1775, the farmer “from Weasel 

Mountain” joined twenty-two others in Leslie’s 

Tavern at Acquackanonk Landing (now 

Passaic). The purpose of the meeting was to 

organize a committee to join with adjacent 

communities to oppose the enforcement of the 

British government’s hated tax laws. 

Some committee members embraced the 

patriots, others were lukewarm, and two 

eventually cast their lot with the Crown. One 

was Ryder; the other was Robert Drummond, a 

prosperous Acquackanonk merchant. 

Within a short period, Drummond, like 

Ryder, would be branded a traitor. Two days 

before the Declaration of Independence was 

signed, Drummond cast his vote against 

adoption of the state’s first constitution, and by 

the winter of 1776, Drummond was firmly 

rooted in the loyalist camp. He became a major 

in the Second Battalion of New Jersey Loyalists, 

and, along with his men, went off to battle 

Washington’s southern forces. When the war 

ended, Drummond sailed for Britain. Ryder and 

Drummond both forfeited their properties. 

Between 1776 and the war’s end, the New Jersey 

Legislature enacted a number of laws governing 

the confiscation and disposition of loyalist 

properties. Appointed commissioners in each 

county seized and held property of “traitors and 

disaffected persons.” After a public hearing, the 

properties were sold. The commissioners 

adjudged that “Thomas Ryder, on or about the 

first day of October in the year of our Lord, 

1778, did join the Army of the King of 

Great Britain.” 

In 1928, historian William H. Belcher 

researched the history of the Ryder homestead 

and concluded the family remained there 

unmolested until the war ended. On July 1, 

1779, John Moore acquired the property from 

the commissioners in “consideration” of 121 

pounds. Moore was probably a firm, if not 

staunch, patriot. 

In October 1780 a portion of Washington’s 

army was stationed in the vicinity of Rifle Camp 

Road. Major Thomas Parr’s artillery units and 

Colonel Stephen Moylan’s dragoons in all 

likelihood encamped on Ryder’s property. 

Thomas Ryder, like Robert Drummond, 

never returned from what only could be termed 

an unintended and long exile. 


For more than a century, county residents 

have delighted in the beauty of Garret Mountain. 

A modern-day visitor would never suspect that 

the current county park was once the scene of a 

deadly riot. In the late 1870s, various German 

singing societies would gather there on the first 

Sunday in May to abandon themselves in festive 

song. Little did anyone realize that the 

celebration in 1880 would be one of the last in 

Garret Rock’s history. The tradition came to an 

abrupt end on May 2, 1880, a day marked in 

history as the Garret Mountain Riot. 

The riot was triggered when people 

trespassed on a farmer’s property. William 

Dalzell leased the Robert King farm that was 

near the area where the singing societies 

gathered. Dalzell and his son, Robert, were 

provoked every year when people invaded the 

farm and stomped on their fragile plants. 

Dalzell erected a fence and posted a warning: 

“All persons are forbidden trespassing on these 

premises under penalty of gunshot.” Dalzell 

vowed that his crops would not be damaged 

again; he stood watch, and did not have to wait 

long for something to happen. By 6 a.m., nearly 

six hundred people had arrived on the 

mountain. A group of young men began to tear 

down the fence. Dalzell shouted at them to stop, 

but his remarks were ignored. John Van Houten, 

a nineteen-year-old carpenter, and Dalzell’s son 

argued and grappled. Dalzell brandished his 

shotgun, reportedly aimed at Van Houten’s legs, 

and squeezed the trigger. 

The blast caught Van Houten in the stomach. 

The victim stood up, staggered about ten feet and 

uttered, “My God, he's killed me!,” and died. 

Many people witnessed the incident, and many 

more were riled by the shotgun blast. The 

Dalzells fled to their barn, hotly pursued by the 

menacing crowd. Yelling and throwing rocks and 

stones, they demanded that Dalzell be lynched on 

the spot. With an angry mob on his property, 

Dalzell feared for his life. He responded to the 

hail of rocks by appearing at the barn’s window 

and firing into the crowd below. John Murphy 

was shot in the head and side, and a little girl 

named Vandalinda was struck in the leg. Dalzell’s 

son escaped while the older man fled to his 

home. The mob burned the barn to the ground. 

Word quickly spread about the riot, and Garret 

Mountain became a scene of madness as an 

estimated five thousand people left their homes 

and surrounded the Dalzell farm, clamoring for 

the older man’s execution. City and county officials 

tried to calm the mob while police moved Dalzell 

to safety. The hero of the day was the Reverend 

William McNulty of St. John’s R.C. Church. A 

respected religious leader, McNulty delivered an 

impassioned speech to the milling crowd, not as a 

clergyman, but as a private citizen. As McNulty 

spoke from his coach, Dalzell was thrust into the 

vehicle, and the horses were whipped into a 

gallop. Another coach was brought to divert the 

mob’s attention, and Dalzell was transferred to the 

safety of a Newark jail. He returned to Paterson by 

a roundabout route a day later. 

Dalzell secured the services of a well-known 

lawyer, Socrates Tuttle, and the widelypublicized 

trial was moved to Bergen County. To 

the amazement of many, Dalzell was acquitted of 

manslaughter; he left the court a free man. For 

the remainder of his life, he lived peacefully and 

amicably with his neighbors, willing to forget 

the day he was at the vortex of one of Passaic 

County’s worst civic disturbances. 

GARRET 

MOUNTAIN RIOT 

❖ 

SILENCED MAY 

TRADITION 

William Dalzell firing upon the 

besieging rioters after they had 

torched his barn. 

ILLUSTRATION FROM FRANK LESLIE’S 

ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER, MAY 27, 1880. 




INVENTOR 

SPEER HEADED 

DRIVE TO 

RENAME VILLAGE 

“PASSAIC” 

❖ 

Above: Alfred Speer in the 1870s. 

COURTESY OF THE PASSAIC PUBLIC LIBRARY. 

Below: Speer’s Grape Wine 

Warehouse, Passaic. 



Alfred Speer of Passaic was the nineteenth 

century equivalent of a Renaissance man. 

Inventor, cabinetmaker, editor, publisher, and 

successful vintner, Speer was responsible for 

changing the name of the Village of 

Acquackanonk Landing to Passaic. 

Born in Belleville on November 2, 1823, Speer 

received a common school education. Apprenticed 

to a Newark cabinetmaker, he developed the habit 

of rising by 4 a.m. and reading. After six years he 

was on his own. Speer found work repairing 

broken furniture for families in Passaic, Bergen and 

Essex Counties. He even supplemented his income 

by making coffins. 

Speer was thinking far beyond his cabinetmaker’s 

shop. In his spare time, he invented a 

number of items and secured a patent for a window 

and door fastener that repelled dust and the 

elements. Speer found a buyer in Louisiana, sold 

the patent for $3,000, and invested the money in 

the wine business. His vineyards were located in 

the Athenia section of Clifton, and what is now 

Vineyard Place, Passaic. Speer’s wines were wellknown 

for their purity and quality. Sold by druggists, 

the wines were recommended by physicians. 

Although much of Speer’s wine was made for 

sacramental and medicinal use, Speer himself 

believed in the temperance movement. He 

organized the first temperance society in Passaic. 

It was named for a biblical tribe, the Rechabites, 

whose members were forbidden to drink wine. 

A Republican, Speer never hesitated to 

denounce corruption in the Republican or 

Democratic parties. Three months after he 

founded the Item, Passaic’s first newspaper, he 

castigated both parties in a ferocious sounding 

October 8, 1870 editorial. 

Speer never lost his inventive curiosity. From 

his office in New York, he observed firsthand the 

objectionable effects of increasing traffic, noise 

and congestion. Speer devised a solution: the 

“Endless Traveling or Railway Sidewalk.” 

Patented in 1871, it was the first practical device 

for rapid transit in New York. Speer’s invention 

was profiled in Scientific American. It had the 

support of New York Tribune founder Horace 

Greeley and received a favorable reception by the 

New York Legislature. The system, however, 

never became a reality. Legislation was submitted 

to incorporate the system in 1873, and again in 

1874, but Governor John A. Dix vetoed the bills 

each time. Historian Donald C. Lotz has written, 

“Alfred Speer’s traveling sidewalk was never 

adopted as a method of rapid transit in New 

York City, but the ideas of his invention were 

used. A moving sidewalk was in operation at the 

Columbia Exposition in 1893, and in 1964, the 

New York World’s Fair had moving sidewalks 

available as transportation.” 

Speer found many challenges during his long 

life—he lived to be eighty-six—and historians 

give him the lion’s share of credit for changing the 

name of the Village of Acquackanonk Landing to 

Passaic. Speer proposed the change for practical 

and business purposes. The meeting to discuss 

the idea was held on February 15, 1854, at Eutaw 

House, then a well-known inn. 

Judge Henry P. Simmons, the antiquarian and 

yarn-spinner who favored the old name for 

historical reasons, opposed Speer. The meeting 

created an uproar, and Speer found himself the 

most unpopular young man in town. A bitter 

battle ensued between the Speer and Simmons 

factions. Speer managed to outwit the judge by 

writing to Postmaster General James Campbell, 

requesting that the name of the local post office 

be changed. Campbell complied. Speer was not a 

man to leave loose ends. He painted a sign twelve 

feet long with the name “Passaic.” With the help 

of Andrew Z. Terhune, a ladder, and the cover of 

darkness, the sign was nailed to the Paterson and 

Hudson River Railroad Depot. It looked as if the 

postal and railroad authorities had accepted the 

new name, and the controversy ended. 


Practically every town and city in North 

Jersey at the turn of the twentieth century had 

its own resident brass band, ready to march in 

holiday parades and serenade residents on 

warm summer evenings. 

When it came to entertainment or other 

amusements, people in those days were left to 

their own devices. Recorded music was still a 

novelty, and talking machines had just started to 

make their way into the American home. It was 

not unusual for people with musical talent to 

form an ensemble, or, for that matter, a brass 

band, and that is what happened in 

Bloomingdale. Alfred Bedson and eleven of his 

friends organized what became the Bloomingdale 

Cornet Band, and they marched for the first time 

in the town’s 1884 Memorial Day parade. 

Bedson, the original bandmaster, was in turn 

succeeded by his son. Over the next few years, 

three other men served in the post. In January 

1889, British-born Samuel R. Donald took over 

the baton and directed the band with unstinting 

devotion for more than fifty years. Donald was a 

natural born musician, and, judging from his 

long tenure, a good leader as well. He 

immigrated to the United States along with his 

two brothers and four sisters in October 1897, 

and, in all likelihood, recalled the splendid 

brass bands of his hometown of Cornwall. In 

Britain, brass bands enjoyed an immense 

popularity, and the cornet in particular 

remained a favorite instrument among the 

majority of the population. 

The cornet band was full of surprises. A local 

newspaper announced in 1898 that when two 

newlyweds arrived on the evening train, “The 

Bloomingdale Brass Band was lying in wait for 

them and tendered a serenade.” 

Over the years, the cornet band performed in 

several quaint-appearing bandstands. One was 

erected on the Main Street property of dogfancier 

Fred G. Sloan. On Friday evenings in the 

summer of 1909, the mellifluous sound of 

cornets filled the air, broken only by the 

applause of an appreciative audience, which no 

doubt coaxed encores from bandmaster Donald 

and his uniformed colleagues. After Sloan Park 

was developed, the band found a permanent 

home for summertime concerts. When a 1968 

flood destroyed the bandstand, the concert 

series was moved to nearby Butler Park. 

Bloomingdale celebrated the fiftieth anniversary 

of its incorporation in 1968, and long-time 

resident Ella V. Card traced the history of the band. 

She believed the group had survived changing 

times because the members of the band had good 

spirit and an “inherent love for band music in each 

of their souls.” 

BRASSY BLARE 

FILLED THE 

AIR IN 

BLOOMINGDALE 

❖ 

The Bloomingdale Cornet Band ready 

to serenade its audience. 

COURTESY OF THE RODGER CRUM COLLECTION. 


ALBERT PAYSON 

TERHUNE 

WAS A STORY 

ALL HIS OWN 

❖ 

Albert Payson Terhune with artifacts 

found at “Sunnybank” and elsewhere. 


In 1942, when novelist Albert Payson 

Terhune died at “Sunnybank,” his forty-fouracre 

estate on the border of Pompton Lakes, 

he was fondly remembered as the writer who 

made collies one of America’s better-known 

breed of dogs. 

Educated at Columbia University, Terhune 

was an imposing man with ambitions that 

matched his 6-foot-plus, 200-pound frame. 

In 1893-94, he traveled on horseback 

through Syria and lived among Bedouins. He 

was caught up in the spirit of adventure, and 

the first works from his pen explored this 

genre. Beginning in 1915, Terhune found his 

heroes and heroines in the exploits of collies. 

Within a few years the novelist had attracted 

a core of faithful readers. 

As a former New York newspaper reporter, 

Terhune enjoyed the energy and feel of 

Manhattan. He spent part of the year among 

its bustling environs. From spring until 

Christmas, Terhune and his wife settled in at 

Sunnybank. It was here that Terhune 

disciplined himself to write an estimated eight 

hours a day. 

Terhune’s well-crafted dog stories made 

him a celebrity, and, initially, he enjoyed the 

fame. The author welcomed visitors, 

especially children, to Sunnybank. They 

arrived in droves. An incident in late August 1930, 

however, changed Terhune’s attitude. According to 

Terhune, a Detroit family named Norris drove 

through his estate unannounced. The car killed 

Sunnybank Jean, one of the novelist’s best-loved 

collies. The author became enraged by press 

reports of his behavior. Terhune asked the public 

to accord him the basic courtesy of an advance call 

before visiting Sunnybank. He made no secret of 

his unhappiness with people who intruded upon 

and vandalized his peaceful sanctuary. Terhune 

thought he had “the right to object and become 

angry.” The nature-loving Terhune was somewhat 

able to control unwanted curiosity seekers, and, 

with a shrug, dismissed crank letters of protest 

from people who were turned away. 

Terhune, however, could not prevent others 

from purchasing nearby property, nor could he 

stop the Passaic County Freeholders from 

improving the then inadequate road that passed 

in front of his property. In November 1930, 

Terhune learned that the Freeholders had plans 

to widen Oakland Road (Route 202) with 

reinforced concrete, from Hamburg Turnpike east 

to the Oakland line. He objected vigorously. 

Terhune told the New York Times, “My beautiful 

trees will be despoiled to make room for a great 

concrete sheet.” 

In spite of Terhune’s dim view of the 

Freeholders, they were aware of his status in the 

world of letters. At the Freeholder’s meeting of 

September 4, 1935, they acted on the suggestion 

of Clerk William P. Leary to change the name of 

Oakland Road to Terhune Drive. The honor was 

also a tribute to Terhune’s father, Reverend 

Edward Terhune, who generously gave a large 

strip of property for building Oakland Road. The 

Freeholders voted unanimously in support of the 

new designation. 

Terhune’s biographer, Irving Litvag, developed 

exceptional insight into his subject’s complex 

personality. He noted that Terhune, “whose 

substantial ego always welcomed recognition— 

gracefully accepted the renaming.” 


In the 1870s, J. Percy Crayon was a familiar 

figure to residents of the sparsely settled North 

Jersey highlands. Crayon was the schoolmaster on 

horseback who looked after the educational needs 

of pupils in Passaic, Sussex, and Morris Counties. 

Crayon developed a lifelong affection for the 

highlands, its customs, legends, and plain-spoken 

settlers. Married and the father of three children, 

he still managed to find time for historical 

research and writing when his chores were done. 

Joseph Percy Crayon was born on the first day 

of July 1841. James and Mary Strait Crane, his 

parents, were descendants of a family that was 

long associated with the settlement of Newark. For 

reasons that are still obscure, young Joseph did not 

want to carry the family surname. Historian Leslie 

L. Post, in preparing a biographical sketch on 

Crayon, thought his subject “was an individualist 

and felt that a man’s name was his own to 

pronounce as he chose, and he chose to spell 

Crane [as] ‘Crayon.’” 

Crayon was teaching in village schoolrooms 

when the Civil War erupted, and, like many of his 

generation, he heeded President Lincoln’s call to 

preserve the Union. On August 27, 1864, the 

twenty-five-year-old teacher married Minnehaha 

Webb of Vernon. Two days later, he enlisted for a 

year’s service with Battery D of the First New 

Jersey Artillery Regiment. Crayon returned from 

the war with indelible impressions of camp life. 

Discharged from the army in mid-June 1865, 

Private Crayon returned to his schoolhouse. He 

was planning to raise a family. In 1872, according 

to a letter written to his brother-in-law, Crayon 

was living in the Newfoundland section of West 

Milford. He remained there until 1890, when he 

sold the house and property for watershed 

development. Pride of place and a pronounced 

attachment for the highland area were factors that 

motivated Crayon to pursue historical and family 

research. His reputation as a knowledgeable local 

historian was well established by the turn of the 

twentieth century. When the Newfoundland 

Village Improvement Society issued a booklet 

extolling the area as a vacation paradise, it was J. 

Percy Crayon, “formerly of this place, but now 

residing at Rockaway,” who supplied the 

historical data. 

For the most part, Crayon’s essays appeared in 

local newspapers such as the Dover Index and 

Butler Argus. His nicely balanced prose must have 

delighted readers of his day. In 1873 the 

schoolteacher described “Five Mile Woods,” a 

section between Newfoundland and Bloomingdale, 

with wry humor. Crayon said, “In the days of 

the Revolution these woods were infested by 

bands of robbers and counterfeiters, and true 

believers in witches and ghosts asserted that their 

‘departed spirits’ were more terrible to meet and 

more numerous than wild animals and Indians.” 

Illness stalked Crayon during 1908, and the 

sixty-seven-year-old historian came to the Belleville 

home of his daughter, Lillian May Davenport. It 

was there, on June 13, that death claimed J. Percy 

Crayon. The North Jersey highlands’ historian and 

genealogist lies in Denville’s Hill Family Cemetery. 

❖ 

J. PERCY 

CRAYON: 

A COLORFUL 

PART OF 

NORTH JERSEY 

HIGHLANDS’ 

LORE 

Above: J. Percy Crayon. 

COURTESY OF THE NORTH JERSEY HIGHLANDS 


Below: Crayon with his camera at 

Clinton Furnace in the early 1900s. 

COURTESY OF THE NORTH JERSEY HIGHLANDS 



PATERSON 

PHOTOGRAPHER 

❖ 

BROUGHT 

“BIG MUDDY” 

TO LIFE 

Above: J. P. Doremus and staff in his 

Paterson studio. 



Below: Doremus’ floating 

photographic studio, the Success. 



In March 1863, John P. Doremus opened a 

photographic studio on Main Street, Paterson, 

and, like many of his colleagues, took pictures of 

Civil War soldiers and others to make a living. 

The most unusual episode in Doremus' 

career, however, was his “Floating Photographic 

Gallery” on the Mississippi River. Doremus 

headed west with an ambitious plan to 

photograph, as he later described, “grand and 

varied scenery through which the ‘Father of 

Waters’ flows from its headwaters to the Gulf.” 

Doremus spent more than $4,000 to 

construct and equip his craft. He christened it 

the Success. On July 20, 1874, the photographer 

was in Minneapolis, ready to start the first of his 

travels down the mighty river. The Success had 

on board all the necessary equipment, as well as 

suitable living quarters. 

During the second half of the nineteenth 

century, stereoscopic photos became immensely 

popular. When viewed through a special device, 

the identically paired photos gave a threedimensional 

effect. Doremus decided to issue his 

Mississippi views as stereographs, which made 

good business sense. Beginning in 1874, and 

then for a number of years, Doremus and his 

floating gallery plied the waters of the 

Mississippi, capturing images on glass plate 

negatives. Returning to Paterson in winter, 

Doremus published his photos in series, noting 

that his work encompassed the “Falls of St. 

Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico.” 

In 1877 the photographer promoted the sale 

of his photos by publishing a descriptive 

pamphlet, Floating Down the Mississippi. The first 

page contains a brief history of the river, but 

more interesting is Doremus’ account of his 

adventures. The editor of the St. Paul Daily Press, 

impressed by what he had seen aboard the 

Success, filed a dispatch that was more praise 

than news article. He characterized Doremus’ 

vessel as “a little palace in itself...fitted up 

handsomely with marble top table, water cooler 

and oil paintings, chromos, carved brackets, 

etc.—showing lavish taste and expenditure.” 

Doremus, like the novelist Mark Twain, had 

his share of close calls on the Mississippi. In 

April 1875 the photographer ran into some 

difficulty when “a storm overtook him and very 

nearly made an end of the Success, but the 

staunch boat survived it and reached Maiden 

Rock, Wis., in safety.” 

Although Doremus produced his photographs 

for commercial purposes, they demonstrate a 

superb artistic and technical competence and 

constitute an invaluable historical record. 

Doremus died suddenly in January 1890 in 

Greenville, Mississippi. A plucky, determined 

photographer, Doremus’ work remains a unique 

visual record of life along one of the nation’s 

greatest rivers. 


North Jersey residents were sound asleep in 

the comfort of their homes when snow began 

falling after midnight, March 12, 1888. 

The weekend had been cold under leaden 

skies. Few were surprised that a snowfall would 

soon blanket the area. Commuters who had to use 

train or trolley service Monday morning shrugged 

off the swirling snow and bitter wind as just 

another winter storm. When the Blizzard of ’88 

finally ended, snowdrifts were as high as 20 feet, 

and an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people had been 

stranded on stalled trains throughout North Jersey. 

The storm, with its near-zero temperatures, 

had created an unprecedented 20.9 inches of 

snow. Historian David M. Ludlum said, “The 

Blizzard of ’88 attacked New Jersey with 

unprecedented fury and achieved a reputation 

unrivaled by any other storm.” The local press 

dispatched scores of reporters into the field. They 

braved the elements in describing the storm and 

its aftermath. Turmoil ruled at area rail stations. 

One man told a reporter he was stranded on a 

passenger car with sixteen other people. Cold 

and hungry, they took up a collection and sent 

out a relief party to purchase food and blankets. 

After a long wait, the rescuers returned with “a 

meager supply of crackers and cheese and 13 

quarts of whiskey, acquired at the cost of $1 a 

quart.” The reporter thought the provisions were 

“a most unhappy investment.” 

The ferocious blizzard claimed its share of 

casualties. The Passaic Daily Herald, reporting 

on Monday’s events observed, “There is no use 

comparing this storm with any former one. The 

fact is that nothing like it has ever been within 

500 miles of this locality” One youngster was 

found on Passaic Street “frozen stiff.” He was 

rescued by N. G. Vreeland, who carried the 

nearly lifeless boy into a nearby hotel “where his 

clothing was removed and he was restored to 

life after a great deal of rubbing.” 

Communication among towns and cities 

virtually ceased. One telephone line managed to 

escape the wrath of the storm. It remained 

functional between Passaic and Paterson until 10 

a.m. Monday, when the blizzard knocked it out of 

service. After the storm abated, people started to 

tunnel their way out of homes. Some drifts were 

two stories high. According to the March 14 issue 

of the Paterson Morning Call, unconscious, 

insensible, and frozen people were pulled from 

snowdrifts on many streets of Silk City. 

In Paterson and Passaic, snow shovels were as 

good as gold. Demand exceeded supply. 

According to the Paterson Daily Press of March 

13, one merchant sold nine hundred shovels in 

one day. Perhaps the most amusing press 

account concerned a man who lived on 

Lakeview Avenue in Paterson. He reportedly 

opened the second floor window of his house 

and found the drift even with the window. 

Bundling up, he exited the window only to fall to 

the bottom of the drift. Characterized as a 

“brilliant man” by the Press, he was pulled into 

the house with a clothesline lowered by women 

of the household. 

THE BLIZZARD 

OF 1888 

BECAME A 

BITTER BLANKET 

❖ 

Paterson was inundated during the 

Blizzard of ’88. 




THE CALAMITIES 

OF 1902-1903 

❖ 

The smoldering ruins of Paterson’s 

central business district after the 

Great Fire of ’02. 



PATERSON WAS RAVAGED BY THE 

GREAT FIRE OF 1902 

On Saturday night, February 8, 1902, 

Paterson residents were thankful they had 

places of shelter. It was bitter cold, and a 

northwest wind with gale forces of almost sixty 

miles-per-hour howled through the city. Some 

people had braved the weather and trudged to 

late shift jobs. Commuters were then served by 

trolley lines, and motorman Forrest Abrams had 

reported to work at the Jersey City, Hoboken 

and Paterson Railway Company’s shed, a blocklong 

wooden structure that extended from 

Broadway to Van Houten Street. Just after 

midnight, Abrams was transfixed in horror: 

flames had started to engulf the building. 

Night dispatcher William Dengelmann called 

the first alarm, but the huge building acted like 

a flue, feeding the flames. All engines in the fire 

department were called out and Patersonians 

were soon aware that a destructive force of 

incredible energy was at work in Silk City. It was 

now early Sunday morning, February 9. The 

night air was filled with sounds of galloping 

horses, the shriek of fire whistles, and the rustle 

of terrified people fleeing what history has 

called the “Great Paterson Fire of ’02.” 

Gale force winds carried burning embers and 

debris into the central business district, and despite 

heroic efforts by firefighters, the conflagration 

could not be contained. Mayor John Hinchliffe 

telegraphed neighboring towns and cities for help. 

Passaic, Rutherford, Hackensack, Newark, Jersey 

City, and Hoboken were summoned. 

One resident wrote his wife later that day, 

telling her he was safe, but noting, “When the 

Eastside woke up this morning, we all thought a 

calamity had befallen the city.” In detail, he 

outlined the plight of Paterson’s fire victims, 

who fled the “whirlwind of flames.” When the 

fire was finally brought under control, the writer 

said streets were cluttered by “vans, hacks, 

bedding, and furniture on sidewalks.” 

Not counting small sheds, an estimated 459 

buildings had been destroyed, including most of 

the business district, banks, and city hall. The 

library, with its entire collection of thirty-seven 

thousand volumes, was another casualty. 

Insurance and property losses amounted to 

nearly $10 million. About five hundred families 

lost their homes and possessions. Surprisingly, 

only one person died. Jacob Mesler succumbed 

to burns he received while trying to escape 

sparks and flames on Van Houten Street. 

Governor Franklin Murphy arrived in 

Paterson during the night, and militiamen joined 

forces with Paterson’s finest in patrolling ravaged 

streets. There was little public disorder. The 

militia was able to end their patrols and leave by 

Thursday of that week. The tragic fire seemed to 

unite, rather than divide, the city’s populace. An 

eyewitness claimed that “everyone was doing his 

best, no disorder, no foolishness…everyone 

grave, apprehensive, waiting.” 

Offers of financial aid and assistance poured 

in from all over the country, but Mayor 

Hinchliffe was resolute in uttering a statement 

that symbolized Paterson’s determination— 

“Paterson will take care of its own.” 

Indeed, Paterson did care for its own. On 

February 15, only six days after the disaster, 

construction started on the first new building. A 

decade later, the Paterson Evening News published 

a special issue commemorating the anniversary of 

the fire. Illustrated by photographs of restored 

and reconstructed buildings, the newspaper 

touted the “recuperative powers” of the city and 

its businesses. 


THE 1903 TORNADO LEFT A 

TERRIFIED PATERSON 

On the morning of July 22, 1903, the sky 

over Paterson darkened with rain clouds, 

something not out of the ordinary for a 

midsummer day. Yet as people went about their 

daily activities, few were aware that a natural 

disaster was in the making. Shortly after 3 p.m., 

a tornado of frightening intensity swept through 

the densely populated southeastern part of the 

city, leaving death and destruction in its path. 

Three people were killed, and more than one 

hundred were injured, many seriously. 

Accompanied by flashes of lightning and a 

deafening roar, the tornado swept down from 

the Great Notch area, increased in velocity, 

and passed through Valley Road to the Paterson 

city limits. 

The tornado shrieked its way to nearby 

Barclay and Marshall Streets, reducing houses to 

kindling. The Paterson Daily Guardian later 

reported, “Beams were caught up and hurled like 

catapults, piercing the walls of adjoining houses 

as if shot out of a gun.” 

At 680 Main Street, four plumbers were at 

work renovating Meyer Bone’s house. The 

storm’s fury caused the building to cave in. The 

owner and workmen were injured, and the 

plumber’s helper, Joseph Van Damm, was 

crushed in the ruins. 

The tornado claimed the life of eight-year old 

Richard Hancock. He was standing in a fruit 

store when the storm approached. Frightened, 

the boy reached his nearby home, but it was not 

a safe haven. As the lad rushed to escape, a heavy 

grape arbor fell upon him. He was decapitated. 

The next day, the Paterson Morning Call 

analyzed the storm and its destructive force, 

commenting, “It was a true tornado. Twisting 

spirally through the air, it would strike to earth 

and then, rebounding by its ballistic force, 

would dart upward; then plunge again on a new 

mission of destruction.” 

The Call’s reporter lamented the destruction 

of many of the city’s stately shade trees. “Mighty 

monarchs of the woods…have stood as an 

ornament to the city for fifty years, were 

plucked up by the roots as if a giant had been at 

work, and, twisted and strained out of 

symmetry, were thrown to the roadway.” 

At Paterson General Hospital, a carpenter 

was working in the attic when the tornado 

struck. He was stunned and driven to the floor 

as howling winds stripped off more than eight 

thousand roof slates. Doctors, nurses, and 

matrons confronted shouting patients, whom 

they brought to safe quarters. The damage to the 

hospital was later estimated at about $5,000. At 

St. Joseph’s Hospital damage was slight, and the 

hospital staff acted boldly to assist the injured. 

According to the Call, “The heroism of the 

Sisters of Charity was commendable. While the 

elements seemed to be exhausting their passions 

outside, the black robed sisters, serene and 

faithful, ministered to the patients with their 

usual devotion and calmed the fears of the weak 

and hysterical.” 

After the storm spent its fury, the sun broke 

through the clouds. Probably no one was more 

eager to see the tornado’s end than Susquehanna 

railroad flagman Michael Cronin. When the 

storm approached, he was at his post, a shanty 

standing at the corner of Park Avenue. Talking 

to a local baker, Cronin noted the blackness of 

the clouds and remarked he had better return to 

his “castle.” Once inside, Cronin found himself 

airborne. The powerful winds carried the 

railroad worker and his shed fifty feet up and 

over the Susquehanna tracks. Concerned 

neighbors later found Cronin lying in the ruins. 

Cronin survived the ordeal with minor 

scratches. The lucky flagman asserted he did not 

know what had happened to him. 

❖ 

Residences were tilted and ruined by 

the tornado. 




❖ 

The Great Flood of 1903 as it 

rampaged through Paterson. 



THE GREAT FLOOD OF 1903 

UPROOTED THOUSANDS 

When rain started falling on October 7, 1903, 

and continued as a severe downpour the next day, 

residents of the Passaic Valley expressed concern. 

The drenching rains finally tapered off four days 

later, and weather observers had recorded an 

average of 11.74 inches of precipitation. The 

usually placid Passaic River, as well as its 

tributaries and streams, reacted to the deluge. 

Storm waters passed over the Passaic Falls at a rate 

of thirty-four thousand cubic feet per second. 

It was not until October 19 that the swollen 

rivers became somewhat normal again, but 

memories would persist for years of the Great 

Flood of ’03. In its wake, thousands were left 

homeless, roads and bridges were washed away, 

and several lives were lost. Total damage to real 

estate and other property was estimated at $7 

million—and that was in gold dollars. 

Neighbors came to the aid of neighbors in 

Pompton Lakes, Passaic, and Paterson, and there 

were many tales of rescue and incidences of 

heroism. Pompton Lakes resident Louis Tobias and 

his family became terrified prisoners in their house, 

which was torn from its foundations and carried 

downstream by the rampaging waters. The house 

crashed into the Colfax Bridge, allowing rescue 

workers to evacuate the panic-stricken inhabitants. 

Passaic residents responded to the disaster by 

collecting five truckloads of clothing for 

youngsters whose homes in the Eighth and 

Ninth Street area had been partially submerged. 

Paterson was still scarred by the devastating 

1902 fire and more recent tornado, and the 

latest calamity was front page news for even 

out of town papers. On October 17, the 

Saturday Globe of Utica, New York, carried a 

front-page pen and ink illustration (in color) of 

one of the city’s flooded streets, as well as 

photographs from the scene. 

News reports tell of amazing rescues in 

the Silk City. In one case, a man was snatched from 

the deck of a small craft as it was 

swiftly carried under the Spruce Street Bridge and 

on toward destruction at the Passaic Falls. The 

little steamer had been used for pleasure trips. The 

flood claimed at least three lives. Superintendent 

George S. Chase of the Broomhead Mill, which was 

located near the river, was seen on duty and then 

later reported missing. After the flood receded, an 

unidentified man was found drowned in a 

neighborhood saloon. 

The residents of the Passaic Valley eventually 

recovered from the Great Flood of ’03. It had 

disrupted lives but was not without its odd 

occurrences. On July 15, 1950, the Paterson 

Evening News published a special mid-century 

edition, and an article on the flood said that 

“One storekeeper found hundreds of cans in his 

shop that came through undamaged, but had 

the labels washed off. Customers took their 

chances when purchasing afterward.” 


In April 1853 when Dr. John Moffat Howe 

moved to Acquackanonk (now Passaic), it was a 

picturesque township of little more than three 

thousand inhabitants. 

Howe’s practice was in New York, but the 

physician-dentist was induced to settle in 

Acquackanonk by two good friends, Paterson 

silk manufacturer Daniel Holsman and the 

Reverend Alexander H. Meade, a local minister. 

Howe eventually purchased the fifty-acre King 

farm. He needed a house to accommodate his 

wife and six children. Howe constructed a large, 

square dwelling at 129 Prospect Street, which 

remained standing until rising real estate values 

brought about its removal in January 1905. 

After settling in his new homestead, Howe was 

dismayed to learn Acquackanonk had an 

inadequate school. The dilapidated building was 

primitive in appearance and offered pupils only a 

rudimentary education. Three years after arriving, 

Howe tried to interest his fellow citizens in 

providing youngsters with a better education. He 

attempted to raise $5,000 for this purpose, but 

was rebuffed and threatened with legal action by 

one of the local justices if he persisted. Howe 

abandoned the project, but not the cause. 

According to a biography published in 1889, 

Dr. Howe was aware that his own children 

needed a proper education, and the situation in 

Acquackanonk had become “a very embarrassing 

question.” A well-to-do resident helped Howe 

resolve the problem in a rather unusual manner. 

Described in the Howe biography as a “wealthy 

and intelligent Christian lady,” the resident had 

applied to St. Paul’s Mission in New York for a 

gardener. She was told they had no gardener, but 

a young teacher was available who might wish to 

work in that capacity. The lady spoke to Howe 

and suggested the teacher might be employed as 

a tutor. Howe liked the idea. 

The young teacher was Duncan Campbell, 

and he must have been relieved to learn that he 

would be instructing children instead of 

working in a wealthy woman’s garden. 

Campbell was soon at work, imparting his 

knowledge to Howe’s children on the top floor of 

the family’s imposing residence. Howe was 

impressed with Campbell’s abilities and urged 

the teacher to invite a half-dozen children from 

surrounding homes to join his class and thereby 

increase his income. Campbell wanted Howe to 

keep the tuition fees, but Howe would hear none 

of it. 

Campbell’s humble classroom developed into 

what became Howe Academy, one of Passaic’s 

first private schools. It was located at Prospect 

and Academy Streets. 

According to published accounts, the school 

flourished. Howe employed the teachers, 

established admission policies, and kept his eye on 

the curriculum. When the Passaic school system 

was formally organized in 1870, the private 

academy had served its original purpose—to 

provide quality education. 

PHYSICIAN 

BRINGS 

EDUCATION TO 

ACQUACKANONK 

❖ 

Above: Dr. John M. Howe. 



Below: The Howe Academy in 1899. 




MEMORIAL DAY 

HAS ROOTS IN 

CIVIL WAR 

❖ 

The Memorial Day Parade in 

Paterson, c. 1910. George H. Wanton 

(on horseback on the left) was a 

recipient of the Congressional Medal 

of Honor for his actions during the 

Spanish-American War. 


In recent years, Memorial Day has been 

celebrated as an extended holiday weekend, 

giving people the opportunity to be with family 

and friends. 

Originally, the holiday was established to 

perpetuate the memory of soldiers who died 

during the Civil War, or as it was officially 

known, the War of the Rebellion. Southern 

women started the practice of decorating the 

graves of troops who fought for the Confederate 

states. Gradually the custom spread north. In 

1868, John A. Logan, commander of the Grand 

Army of the Republic—the leading organization 

of Union veterans—selected the date of May 30. 

Memorial Day parades still attract attention, but a 

century ago they were a major community event. 

Aging Civil War soldiers headed the marching 

columns, and, in later years, veterans of the 

Spanish-American War swelled their ranks. 

George H. Wanton of Paterson was one 

young man who enjoyed Memorial Day, or as it 

was then called, Decoration Day. Wanton and 

his boyhood friend, William Thompkins, 

returned from the Spanish-American War as 

acclaimed heroes. Both were awarded the Medal 

of Honor, the nation’s highest military award. 

After war was declared, Wanton and Thompkins 

joined the United States Cavalry and were 

dispatched to Cuba. Beginning June 20, 1898, 

an invasion force of fifteen thousand men was 

conveyed to the island nation. A little more than 

a week later, the two young recruits performed 

an act of exceptional bravery. 

Wanton and Thompkins volunteered to free a 

group of men pinned down by enemy fire. With 

two other soldiers, they advanced under a hail of 

bullets and shellfire to rescue sixteen of their 

beleaguered comrades. A year later, the two 

privates received their medals. They were the 

first African Americans to receive the award in 

that conflict. 

On June 16, 1942, Wanton’s prized 

decoration was given to the Passaic County 

Historical Society, where it has been displayed at 

the Society’s Lambert Castle Museum. Engraved 

on the impressive bronze medal is, “The 

Congress to Private George H. Wanton, Troop 

M, Tenth U.S. Cavalry. For gallantry in action at 

Tayaboca, Cuba, June 30, 1898.” 

Wanton was discharged from the service with 

the rank of master sergeant. He moved to 

Washington when he retired in 1935. The 

valiant soldier died in Walter Reed Hospital at 

age seventy-four in November 1940. He was 

buried with military honors at Arlington 

National Cemetery. 


Labor Day has a special place in the history 

of Paterson and Passaic County. Matthew 

Maguire, a Paterson alderman and socialist party 

leader is credited with helping establish Labor 

Day as a holiday for workers. 

Maguire died at age sixty-two on New Year's 

Day in 1917. His obituary, published in the 

Paterson Morning Call, detailed Maguire’s lifelong 

effort to improve conditions and benefits for the 

average worker. As a result of Maguire’s 

persistence, President Grover A. Cleveland 

proclaimed Labor Day a national holiday. In 1894 

it became a national observance through an act 

of Congress. 

The man who became a champion of organized 

labor was born in New York in 1855, later settling 

with his parents in what was then Paterson’s 

Eighth Ward. Apprenticed as a machinist, Maguire 

secured employment with the Columbia Iron 

Company of Brooklyn. His emerging leadership 

abilities became evident when the young 

machinist aided workers when they went on strike 

for shorter hours. Maguire became deeply 

involved with the labor movement and socialist 

party. (In 1894, he was nominated as the Socialist 

Labor Party’s vice-presidential candidate.) 

Elected to the Paterson Board of Aldermen, the 

young labor activist proved to be a colorful, 

imaginative public official. In July 1894, Maguire 

created a stir in aldermanic chambers when he 

introduced a novel resolution that was intended 

to help unemployed city residents who could not 

pay their real estate taxes. Maguire proposed that 

the city hire the unemployed, who would improve 

and grade city streets in lieu of paying taxes. 

The resolution was debated at length, and 

when it was adopted, Maguire was told to 

organize the unemployed workers. On July 17, 

1894, the Paterson Evening News reported, 

“Alderman Maguire has since his election steadily 

advocated socialistic doctrines, but that a 

Republican board of aldermen should subscribe 

to his doctrines seem almost beyond belief.” 

Considering the political affiliations of the 

aldermen, Maguire’s presence must have caused 

seismic rumblings. Democratic Alderman Boylan 

was one of Maguire’s opponents, and the two 

men clashed. When Maguire thought Boylan, and 

Democrats in general, “couldn’t be educated,” his 

opposite number became indignant. Boylan said 

of his feisty counterpart, “I remember when he 

was a Democrat, when he was a Republican, 

when he was a Greenbacker. Now he is a 

socialist. God knows what he’ll be next.” 

Contrary to Boylan’s assessment, Maguire 

retained his socialist convictions until his death. 

What Maguire accomplished on behalf of Labor 

Day, however, was obscured and nearly forgotten. 

The Maguire obituary noted that “the 

deceased was in reality the originator of the 

national holiday known as Labor Day.” It was 

Clifton resident and retired machinist George 

Pearlman who helped correct what he called a 

“perversion of memory.” 

Maguire was tireless on behalf of the labor 

movement, and he published a socialist weekly, 

The Paterson People. In Maguire’s editorial of 

October 14, 1894, he requested a large turnout 

for the Labor Day parade, exhorting working 

people to support organized labor. Maguire said, 

“The dignity of labor will only be realized when 

those who perform honest toil stand by one 

another…. Be a partisan, but be a labor partisan!” 

MATTHEW 

MAGUIRE PLAYED 

A PIVOTAL 

LABOR DAY 

ROLE 

❖ 

Matthew Maguire (inset) and Labor 

Day Parade woodcut. 



COUNTY’S 

NATURAL 

BEAUTY 

PRESERVED IN 

MINNIE MAY 

MONKS’ WORKS 

❖ 

Winbeam Mountain at the turn of the 

twentieth century. 

VERNON ROYLE PHOTOGRAPH. COURTESY OF THE 

GEORGE P. SELLMER COLLECTION. 

When local author and poet Minnie May 

Monks died on February 5, 1970, three days 

after her ninety-first birthday, her accomplishments 

had faded into peaceful obscurity. The 

press gave her a modest obituary. A few days 

later, the eldest unmarried daughter of Peter and 

Maryann Pellington Monks was laid to rest in 

the Bloomfield cemetery. 

Monks’ legacy is her writings. Individuals 

who are attuned to the beauty of nature, 

especially the woodlands and mountains of 

northern Passaic County, will find genuine 

satisfaction in reading her essays. 

A descendent of one of the early pioneer 

families that settled Ringwood, Minnie May 

Monks was a nurse. Her distant cousin, William 

H. Belcher, noted in a family genealogy that 

Miss Monks wrote “books between cases.” 

During her productive life, she published 

four volumes. 

One book was entirely verse, but the 

Knickerbocker Press published her most 

popular work in 1930. She called it Winbeam 

after the mountain east of Wanaque Reservoir. 

Monks recalled with amazing clarity the 

summers she spent in the shadow of Winbeam 

Mountain. Her humble, uncluttered prose 

resonates with a love of nature, home, and the 

people who influenced her life. 

In Winbeam, she makes frequent references to 

her family, so it is natural to conclude that her 

vibrant interest in nature was part of the family 

heritage. She was the great-granddaughter of 

George W. Monks, who was born in 1814 in the 

Stonetown section of Ringwood. Monks was 

a farmer. 

In particular, Monks had a pronounced 

romance with Winbeam Mountain. Her rustic 

cabin stood on five-and-a-half acres facing the 

imposing natural formation. As a youth, Monks 

could hardly wait for summer so she could 

spend her vacation in the mountains. She 

commented in Winbeam that “School days had 

to be lived through, of course; but it was the 

glorious free days out of school I loved, when I 

had the run of two big farms up here in vacation 

time, for my two grandfathers lived only one 

mile apart....” 

Monks speaks about a way of life that has 

vanished from upper Passaic County. She tells of 

her appreciation for plants, herbs, animals, and 

assorted flora, and includes some history of the 

area’s iron mines. Even today, more than seventy 

years after it was published, Winbeam is a 

delight to read. 

In a December 6, 1932, letter to her cousin, 

William H. Belcher, she said, “when I retire (if I 

ever do) I want to go right back to my beloved 

mountains, and one of the things I want to do is 

write a column for one of the Paterson papers. I 

can’t do it as long as I nurse, for when I nurse, 

I nurse and allow nothing to interfere with 

my work.” 

Her enthusiasm seemed boundless. She 

wanted to write on many different subjects, take 

care of her chickens, do some gardening and hike 

through the mountains. Monks did manage to 

fulfill many of her plans. Several of her articles, a 

blend of personal reminiscence and 

local history, appeared in the Paterson 

Morning Call in 1938. 

Monks’ essays are a joyous 

affirmation of life, nature and the 

picturesque beauty of Winbeam 

Mountain. On Christmas night, 1932, 

she penned the following lines, which 

capture the essence of this gentle and 

resolute woman: “I have climbed 

every one of the mountains…and 

followed the old roads. I have paddled 

in most of the streams and fished 

some of them. I love every foot of the 

way and wish I could go back and 

hike through my mountains the rest 

of my life.” 


Timothy Crane could be called the father of 

tourism in Passaic County. Standing 6 feet tall 

and weighing almost 200 pounds, Crane came to 

Paterson from New York. At first he operated a 

saw and gristmill but later seized an opportunity 

to capitalize on the lush beauty of the grounds 

atop the Passaic Falls. On August 14, 1827, 

Crane purchased the falls’ acreage from Robert 

Carrick, and then busied himself with improving 

the property by planting sixty shrubs and trees. 

The grounds were called Forest Garden. 

History credits Crane with erecting the first 

bridge over the Passaic Falls, a commercial 

venture used to his advantage. The bridge 

opened on Sunday, September 30, 1827, at 2 

p.m., and Crane charged his visitors one penny 

to cross. Once across the falls, visitors could 

then repair to Crane tavern, which dispensed 

liquid refreshments for thirsty sightseers. 

“Old Tim,” as he was known in later years, did 

his best to make the Passaic Falls a popular tourist 

attraction. Lawyer William Gledhill recalled a 

1829 circus performance and “war dances by 

homeless Indians.” The bareback horseman 

James Cooke demonstrated his equestrian skills. 

A staple of Crane’s entertainment was a grand 

display of fireworks. 

Crane wanted the grounds to be a place where 

“the painter and poet can find ample scope for 

the display of their talents…and the man of labor 

and industry [can find] relaxation from the toils 

of his occupation.” He refused to rescind the 

practice of collecting tolls for crossings. Decent 

people would be driven away, Crane asserted, 

and Forest Garden would be “occupied by a set of 

lazy, idle rascally drunken vagabonds.” 

Crane thanked his “goodly patrons,” and 

expressed his continuing pleasure of waiting upon 

ladies and gentlemen. Sarcastically, he noted, “Not 

everyone who wears fine clothes on his back and 

who worms his way through life without paying 

his expenses is entitled to the appellation. I make 

this distinction because I have been favored by 

many gentlemen of this character.” 

“Old Tim” operated the tavern and garden 

until 1839, when he sold the property to Peter 

Archdeacon, another enterprising businessman. 

The next year, Crane built a small log cabin near 

the falls and river. He continued to sell 

refreshments, but on a much smaller scale. One 

September morning in 1845, Crane was found 

speechless and disoriented. A disabling stroke 

soon ended his life. Crane was buried by his 

wife’s side, almost in sight of the rustic cabin. In 

October 1871 their remains were moved to 

Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson. 

In the 1820s, an artist made a sketch of 

Crane relaxing at Forest Garden with his trusty 

handsaw and famous fireworks. The Crane 

sketch was turned into a lithograph. Beneath it 

was the saying, “Old Timothy was a great 

admirer of DeWitt Clinton, a former New York 

mayor and unsuccessful presidential candidate.” 

(Crane named the falls bridge after Clinton.) 

Forever associated with Timothy Crane is his 

assertive remark: “I am an Englishman? No, 

thank God, I’m an American, and an old 

Clintonian in the bargain!” 

“OLD TIM” 

POPULARIZED 

PASSAIC FALLS IN 

THE NINETEENTH 

❖ 

CENTURY 

Above: A sketch of “Old Tim” Crane 

in the 1820s, with his carpenter’s 

tools and famous fireworks. 

JOHN REID PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF THE 

PASSAIC COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

Below: “Forest Garden” at the 

Passaic Falls. 

JOHN REID PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF THE 

PASSAIC COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 


HOPPERS 

HANDLED 

SUCCESS 

❖ 

William H. Hopper in the 1880s. 


During the second half of the nineteenth 

century, employment opportunities for Paterson 

residents of African descent were limited. 

Census reports disclose that most 

African Americans were relegated to jobs 

as laborers, farmhands, waiters, and domestics. 

Yet, despite prevailing prejudices, a small 

number of black Patersonians managed 

to overcome the restrictions imposed by 

the existing social order. 

Henry Hopper’s hammer and tool-handle 

factory was an outstanding example of a 

minority business that managed to flourish at a 

time when blacks were routinely 

excluded from finding work in the 

city’s textile mills. 

Born in 1817 to parents 

who were once slaves, 

young Hopper had 

both talent and a plucky 

sense of determination. 

In later years, he was 

described as being in 

possession of an 

“indomitable will.” 

Hopper decided 

to not passively 

accept a lifelong 

sentence of toiling in 

some ditch or serving 

in a menial occupation. 

During spare 

moments, he developed 

an aptitude for crafting 

axe handles entirely by 

hand. His only tools were a 

knife and hatchet. Hopper 

sold a number of his well-made 

wooden handles, and word of a good 

product traveled quickly in the Paterson 

of 1840. 

At the time, the city had less than 8,000 

inhabitants, of which 182 were black. Selftaught 

and resilient, Hopper decided to 

open his own business. In time, he hired 

others, and the small plant hummed with 

activity. Hopper was so well established 

that he was profiled in the mid-1880s as 

having an “extensive manufactory” that 

employed several workers who were “constantly 

engaged in getting out hammer and tool 

handles.” Known in Paterson as “Ax-Handle 

Hopper,” he died in July 1887, at age seventy. 

The business was carried on by his son, 

William, who expanded it further. The plant 

was located at 159-161 Marshall Street, and 

William H. Hopper presided over a company 

that shipped specially made tool handles across 

the nation. He also supplied a half-dozen 

railroads, locomotive works, mining and coal 

companies, and other large firms with customdesigned 

tool handles. 

When not attending to business, William 

Hopper was active in the African-American 

community. Described as a “staunch 

Republican,” the privately educated 

William maintained a keen 

interest in school matters, 

particularly those concerning 

black children. Although 

defeated in 1883 for 

Paterson school commissioner, 

it was largely 

through his efforts 

that black children 

were admitted to 

the city’s schools. 

William’s daughter, 

Susan, was the first 

woman of African- 

American heritage 

to graduate from 

Paterson High School. 

Hopper’s business 

success was mingled 

with personal sadness. In 

July 1861, he married Eliza 

Jane Tonnor, and the couple 

had eight children. At Hopper’s 

premature death in March 1893, at 

age fifty-two, only his wife and two 

children were still living. 

Three years before he died, the Paterson 

Morning Call described Hopper’s business 

and alluded to his integrity and character. 

According to the Call, it was the “excellence 

of his goods, promptness in furnishing all 

work, and straight uprightness in all business 

transactions that has placed Hopper among 

the well-known businessmen of this city and 

the Paterson Handle Works among the 

successful business houses of New Jersey.” 


Few people would dispute that baseball is the 

national pastime, and Take Me Out to the 

Ballgame its unofficial anthem, as crowds pack 

ballparks, munch on hot dogs, and cheer their 

favorite teams to victory. In Clifton, thousands 

of diehard fans once flocked to the ballpark in 

the rear of Doherty’s four-story brick silk mill at 

1500 Main Avenue, eagerly waiting for an 

umpire to shout “Play ball!” From 1915 until 

almost the end of the prosperous 1920s, the 

Doherty Silk Sox baseball team attracted 

thousands to Doherty Oval. It was not unusual 

for the semi-pro team to have major-league 

clubs like the New York Yankees as opponents. 

The Henry Doherty Silk Company sponsored 

the Silk Sox. At its zenith, the company grossed $4 

million in sales and provided work for one 

thousand Clifton, Passaic, and Paterson residents. 

In 1909, Doherty consolidated various manufacturing 

enterprises and constructed the sprawling 

Main Avenue mill. Doherty died in February 1915, 

and his four children continued the business. The 

Doherty brothers believed in strengthening 

employee loyalty through recreation. Thus was 

born the company baseball team. On July 17, 

1915, the Passaic Daily News encouraged the public 

to attend a game between the Silk Sox and People’s 

Park Athletic Club at Doherty Oval, a “modern and 

up-to-date ball park.” 

The Silk Sox did not have to wait long before 

they had a legion of admiring followers. 

Newspapers such as the News whipped up 

enthusiasm for the ball club. When the team 

opened its 1917 season, the News reported seven 

thousand fans had filed into Doherty Oval. The 

Boston Braves opposed the team. Before the 

game started, the two teams “marched around 

the field headed by the Clifton Carnival Band.” 

In the July 11, 1917, edition of the News, the 

mill owners were said to have “red sporting 

blood flowing through their veins. They are 

athletes, admiring outdoor sports of all kinds, 

baseball in particular. Being true Americans they 

cannot help showing that national trait.” 

In their heyday, the Silk Sox helped created a 

number of local baseball legends. In one game, 

baseball superstar Babe Ruth smacked a home 

run in the seventh inning, and the ball sailed 

out of Doherty Oval. Spectators went wild with 

approval. They surged over the field and 

mobbed the “Sultan of Swat.” Ruth fled, and the 

game was called. Ruth’s electric presence was 

felt at Doherty Oval and gave life to a durable 

legend. The Doherty brothers presented $5 to 

each player who slammed a home run. It is said 

the Babe walked over to a concession stand, 

took the money in nickels, and returned to the 

field. He supposedly tossed the nickels into the 

air and encouraged the kids in the stands to 

get them. 

Historian William J. Wurst tried to verify this 

account by contacting the Silk Sox’s mascot, 

Eddie Mayo. Mayo disputed the Ruth tale. The 

former mascot wrote, “Henry Doherty, who sat 

in the upper stand box seat, squeezed a five 

dollar bill through the chicken wire, and as it 

fluttered to the ground, the Babe and others 

who homered doffed their cap and caught the 

bill before it hit the ground.” 

Baseball immortal John “Honus” Wagner also 

played ball at Doherty Oval. Described as a 

“bandy-legged, barrel-chested Dutchman,” the 

agile ballplayer was one of the first athletes 

elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame. 

The Doherty Mill still stands on the eastern 

side of Main Avenue. The famed ballpark is long 

gone, yet the time when Doherty Oval was filled 

to capacity by people eager to cheer their 

hometown ball club will always remain a 

memorable chapter in local sports history. 

WHEN FANS 

FLOCKED TO 

DOHERTY OVAL 

❖ 

Doherty Oval in Clifton in the 1920s. 




❖ 

JOHN PHILIP 

HOLLAND: 

SUBMARINE 

PIONEER 

Above: John Philip Holland: A 

scholarly, yet practical man, c. 1910. 



Below: Holland I is raised from the 

Passaic River in 1927. 



Submarine inventor John Philip Holland was 

born in 1841 in the small fishing village of 

Liscannor, Ireland. He successfully passed a 

navigation examination in 1854, but poor 

eyesight prevented him from joining the Navy. 

Instead, he became a teacher. Holland had barely 

started teaching when illness forced him to 

temporarily relinquish his assignments. For two 

years he rested in the western section of Cork 

and actively followed news of the American Civil 

War, in particular the encounter between the 

first ironclad vessels, the Monitor and Merrimack. 

Holland began to think about submarines as 

vessels that would render wooden navies 

obsolete. Upon regaining his health, he returned 

to teaching for the next ten years. 

Holland immigrated to the United States in 

1873. Among the few items the thirty-two yearold-teacher 

carried with him in steerage was a 

sketch for his first submarine. 

Holland was in Boston when he slipped on an 

icy street, breaking his leg and suffering a minor 

concussion. During his three month 

convalescence, Holland refined his thoughts on 

building a workable submarine, but the young 

inventor needed to earn a living. In 1874, he 

accepted a teaching position at St. John’s 

Parochial School in Paterson. Holland continued 

to refine his plans for a workable submarine. He 

offered the plans to the Navy Department in 

February 1875, but they were rejected. Holland 

remained undiscouraged. 

Building the submarine required capital, and 

Holland found support from members of the 

Fenian Society, the American branch of the Irish 

Revolutionary Brotherhood. Plans for the 

submarine were carefully guarded. Local 

newspapers thought one of Holland’s wealthy 

friends had offered needed financial support. In 

reality, the Fenian “skirmishing fund” provided 

$4,000 to construct what became Holland’s first 

experimental vessel. The craft was finally ready 

for testing. On the afternoon of May 22, 1878, it 

was hauled to a spot approximately one hundred 

yards above the Spruce Street Bridge in Paterson. 

Millhands on their way home crowded the bridge 

and watched a wagon containing a strangelooking 

craft approach the Passaic River. 

Holland anxiously observed the launching. 

For a few minutes the four-ton boat floated. 

According to Holland’s memoirs, the vessel 

“settled deeper in the water and finally sank to 

the great disappointment of the multitude which 

was loudly expressed in Oh’s and Ah’s.” The boat 

was pulled to dry land. On June 6, 1878, the 

plucky inventor demonstrated the submarine’s 

diving capabilities before representatives of the 

Fenian Society. Holland slid through the vessel’s 

turret and into the crammed compartment. He 

flooded two tanks, and the submarine began to 

submerge. As the men watched in silence, 

Holland’s craft descended in twelve feet of water. 

Shortly later, it bobbed to the surface. John Philip 

Holland emerged from the hatch, beaming. 

The boat lay undisturbed in its watery grave 

until 1927, when a group of ambitious 

engineering-minded youths decided to raise the 

historic vessel. The salvage operation provoked a 

flurry of national publicity. Two months later, the 

Holland I was presented with much fanfare to the 

Paterson Museum, where it remains to this day. 

John Philip Holland died at his home in 

Newark on August 1, 1914, and was buried at 

Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Totowa. Holland’s 

reputation as the “father of the modern 

submarine” found its rightful place in history, 

but his grave was never properly marked. 

Raymond J. Guernic, an instructor at Becton 

Regional High School, East Rutherford, invited 

his students to help mark the grave. With a 

sense of efficiency and organization that 

Holland himself would have admired, Guernic 

contacted a multitude of people and sparked a 

national fundraising drive. A splendid granite 

headstone, with a likeness of Holland emerging 

from his submarine, was dedicated on October 

10, 1976. 


Rarely seen nowadays, the horsedrawn 

conveyance was once a common sight on city 

and country roads. During the ninteenth 

century, city residents were accustomed to 

hearing the monotonous clip-clop of horses’ 

hooves and the rumble of delivery wagons on 

busy streets. 

In 1887, William Tims owned one of 

Paterson’s largest wholesale and retail 

confectionery establishments, and his fleet of 

well-maintained delivery wagons was a 

permanent feature of the Silk City’s landscape. 

Tims started the business in 1859. Over the 

next thirty years, he developed a solid 

reputation for the excellence of his products. 

When Paterson celebrated its centennial in 

1892, Tims was occupying a commodious, 

three-story brick building at 106 Washington 

Street. He employed ten skilled workers 

who turned out several different varieties of 

“French and American confectionery.” Retail 

businesses in Paterson and elsewhere could 

offer their customers a selection of Tims’ 

mouth-watering chocolates, caramels, and plain 

and mixed candies. 

Tims had two sidelines that are not 

associated with the confectionery trade today— 

fireworks and cough drops. Noting on his 

billhead that fireworks and flags were a 

specialty, Tims must have been overwhelmed 

with orders during Paterson’s centennial. His 

factory was festooned with flags and bunting on 

patriotic occasions and holidays. 

The confectioner was particularly proud of his 

medicated cough drops and advertised the 

product on the front of his delivery wagons. Tims 

used good business sense in reminding the public 

of his cough drops and lozenges every time his 

wagons made deliveries. He manufactured other 

confections “for the drug trade.” An 1892 biographical 

sketch notes Tims made “Homeopathic 

pellets, used by physicians of that school, and 

others, which have gained a wide reputation for 

their excellent medicinal properties.” 

The “upright and reliable” William Tims died 

in Paterson on July 2, 1895. 

HORSE SENSE 

HELPED CITY 

CONFECTIONER 

❖ 

William Tims’ “Candy Wagon” in 

Paterson, c. 1890. 




❖ 

WHEN DOORS 

OF CITY 

SALOONS 

SWUNG OPEN 

ONLY TO MEN 

Ed Morgan’s Tavern on Broadway 

in Paterson. 



In the mid-nineteenth century, the neighborhood 

saloon was entrenched in a town’s psyche as 

an all-male bastion. Weary mill workers and 

factory hands found a welcome respite from the 

day’s toil when they passed through the swinging 

barroom doors, ready to slake their thirst. 

Local temperance organizations had a much 

more jaundiced view of the community tavern. 

They considered the saloon an institution of vice, 

and, with evangelical zeal, campaigned against the 

dangers of alcoholism, immorality, and a host of 

real, and sometimes imagined, problems. Not 

surprisingly, the largest numbers of saloons could 

be found in cities such as Paterson and Passaic. An 

informal census in 1874 noted that more than 

three hundred taverns sold liquor and beer. The 

frothy brew then cost six cents a pint. Fresh 

buttermilk was also available at some taverns. 

Tavern and hotel owners became favorite 

targets of men like Ben Doremus, a temperance 

leader in Silk City, who organized a “white ribbon 

army” to oppose the evils of drink. Tavern owners 

who operated within the law thought they were 

unfairly stigmatized and organized the Liquor 

Dealers’ Protective League of New Jersey. 

The Passaic City Liquor Dealers’ Association 

was a component of the state league. It had a 

membership of decent and honorable saloon and 

hotel keepers. One was former butcher Adam 

Zaun. Born in Germany in March 1852, Zaun 

eventually found his way to Passaic and became 

the genial proprietor of the Acquackanonk House 

on Main Avenue. Zaun was proud of his ten-room 

hotel, in particular the bar. An 1895 advertisement 

said Zaun “adopted the carbonic gas pressure now 

recognized as the best method of drawing beer and 

his house soon gained a reputation for the 

excellence of his beverage.” 

With the proliferation of saloons nationwide, 

per capita consumption of alcohol increased from 

eight gallons in 1878 to seventeen gallons two 

decades later. Temperance groups could not 

denounce popular, non-alcoholic beverages such 

as birch beer. It quenched the thirst of numerous 

patrons. Paterson taprooms had a reputation for 

serving Spruce and Cherry beer as well. The 

foamy, carbonated drink was manufactured in 

copious quantities at the Pfannebecker plant on 

Bridge Street. Not all patrons who emerged from 

local saloons with bottles under their arms would 

catch the scornful glare of local temperance 

leaders. If it was a heavy stone bottle with a cork, 

the patron was carrying home a sample of 

Pfannebecker’s best “brew.” 


Frank H. Williams was a man with many 

ideas and some money to invest, and Passaic 

in the 1890s offered enticing business 

opportunities. A Rhode Island native, Williams 

started out as a photographer, thought he could 

do better in England, found he made a mistake, 

returned to New York, and eventually 

established a profitable studio. Williams was 

something of a gambler when it came to 

business, and his risk-taking gambits made him 

almost insolvent. Nearly all of the money he 

earned from photography was lost in Brooklyn 

real estate ventures. 

Williams heard that an unusual building, 

originally constructed by a retired tea merchant, 

was for sale on the river near Passaic Bridge. 

Because of its pagoda-like design, the property 

was dubbed the “Chinese House.” Williams 

purchased the structure, probably with the idea 

of turning it over for a decent profit. Once 

again, luck deserted Williams. Unable to find a 

buyer, Williams made the building his 

residence. Possibly someone suggested to 

Williams that he turn the place into a hotel. (In 

those days, the Passaic River had a number of 

hotels near its banks.) Williams himself may 

have developed the notion while living in the 

oriental-style building. Whatever the case, 

Williams secured additional funds and 

renovated the structure. On May 23, 1893, the 

hotel opened to the public. It was renamed the 

Pagoda Hotel. 

According to the Illustrated History of Passaic, 

published in 1899, “the venture was a great 

success. It became the favorite hostelry with the 

better class of pleasure-seekers throughout the 

whole of Northern New Jersey, 

as well as being popular with 

people residing in New York 

City and Brooklyn.” 

Four years after the hotel 

opened, Williams suffered 

another abrupt reversal of 

fortune. On the morning of 

July 3, 1897, fire struck the 

hotel. Guests escaped in the 

nick of time as flames devoured 

the wooden structure. Williams 

was again confronted with 

the task of rebuilding his 

establishment. The hotel proprietor 

refused to be defeated. Even as the ruins 

smoldered, Williams hired a team of carpenters 

to construct a temporary structure. A month 

later, a new hotel stood on the property, 

although it no longer resembled the old place. 

In 1894, Williams advertised that his 

establishment provided “meals at all hours, 

choicest wines, and cigars.” He also enjoyed 

giving “special attention to bicycle, boating, 

riding, and sleighing parties.” 

The determined hotelkeeper had developed 

an excellent reputation, and guests continued to 

patronize his Victorian gingerbread-style 

building. During the summer, an excursion boat 

called the Passaic Queen chugged its way up the 

Passaic River, and excursionists soon enjoyed 

the hospitality of the Pagoda Hotel. The wellknown 

landmark was demolished in July 1928, 

never again to satisfy, in the words of the 

Illustrated History of Passaic, “the most critical 

epicure’s appetite…at a moment’s notice.” 

“GAMBLER” 

HIT GOLD 

WITH HOTEL 

❖ 

Above: The Pagoda Hotel in 

Passaic, 1894. 


Below: The excursion boat River 

Queen stopped at the hotel. This 

photograph was taken in the 1890s. 



OLD-FASHIONED 

DRUG STORE 

HAD CHILDREN’S 

❖ 

TREATS 

William H. McNeill in his pharmacy 

on Straight Street, Paterson, in 1911. 



The mortar and pestle are the ancient 

symbols of the pharmacists’ profession. They 

still are seen in drug stores across North Jersey. 

Druggists also had in their establishments large 

vessels filled with tinted water. Edward 

Valentine Mitchell, one of the nation’s popular 

writers on Americana, characterized them as 

“great colored glass bottles, ruby, emerald, and 

topaz, which glistened like traffic signals in the 

druggist’s windows.” 

It is not known if Paterson pharmacist 

William H. McNeill had the colorful bottles, but 

his turn of the twentieth century store contained 

row upon row of jars filled with medicinal herbs 

and other natural remedies, all neatly labeled 

in Latin. 

McNeill was born in Silk City on July 14, 

1884. He attended local schools, and, while still 

a youngster, demonstrated his enterprising 

spirit by selling newspapers. His pharmacy 

career started at age fifteen. One day, McNeill 

walked into the drug store operated by Gordon 

E. Pellett, one of Paterson’s pioneer druggists. 

McNeill enjoyed the work so much that he 

enrolled in classes at the New Jersey College of 

Pharmacy. He graduated in 1907, and qualified 

as a registered pharmacist later that year. 

Three years after leaving college, the young 

druggist opened his first store at Straight and River 

Streets. Like his modern day counterparts, McNeill 

attended to the health needs of neighborhood 

residents. He dispensed prescriptions and helped 

those who needed liniments, salves, cough drops, 

and other concoctions. 

McNeill was apparently a well-liked, 

gregarious man. Over the years he was active in 

business, fraternal, and civic groups. He was a 

member of the New Jersey Board of Pharmacy 

from 1916 to 1929, and also served a term as 

president of the association. 

It was a real treat for children to visit the oldfashioned 

drug stores of McNeill’s day. 

Pharmacists usually had large jars filled with 

peppermints, lemon candy, gumdrops, and 

licorice sticks. In 1911 the twenty-seven-yearold 

pharmacist was photographed in his 

well-stocked store, eager for business. The 

young druggist stood behind the counter nattily 

attired, beaming, and ready to serve his 

customers—along with a few children. 


On a warm June evening in 1925, scores of 

smartly attired men and women crowded the 

ballroom of the Alexander Hamilton Hotel in 

downtown Paterson. They consumed an elegantly 

prepared seven-course, French-style dinner and 

then waltzed the night away to the music of the 

Harry Cox Orchestra. It was the official opening of 

what was then touted as Paterson’s “only first 

class, up-to-date, efficiently managed fireproof 

hotel in New Jersey north of Newark.” 

Constructed of brick and trimmed with 

limestone, the new hotel was proposed four years 

earlier. A community-wide movement to raise an 

estimated $1.5 million was effectively organized 

by the Paterson Chamber of Commerce. 

It is difficult now to imagine how the 

construction of a large hotel, no matter how 

luxurious, could have commanded the attention 

of so many people. Newspapers gave the hotel’s 

opening extensive coverage. Preceding the 

elaborate dinner on Wednesday evening, June 

24, was a parade and flag raising. Festivities 

included the Paterson Police Band, which blared 

marching tunes. 

Paterson architect Frederick W. Wentworth, 

aided by a Newark firm, designed the Colonial 

revival-style building. Hamilton’s coat of arms 

embellished the facade. The 210-room edifice was 

described by the Paterson Press-Guardian as 

“something more than a commercial enterprise...It 

is a monument to the great financial genius whose 

name looms so largely in early American 

history....” Hamilton’s name was eagerly associated 

with the project because of his role in the city’s 

early history. The elaborate, gilt-edged souvenir 

menu handed out to dinner 

guests proclaimed the nation’s 

first treasury secretary as the 

“patron saint” of Paterson. 

The theme of the hotel 

celebration, as well as some of 

its furnishings and appointments, 

was the greatness of 

Paterson’s industrial heritage. 

Opposite the main entrance of 

the dining room were three 

paintings, which depicted the 

birthplace and later residence of 

Hamilton along with a fanciful 

scene of the Passaic Falls in the 

eighteenth century. The Press- 

Guardian reported the second-floor assembly room 

had silk wall coverings, all of which represented 

the “output of the silk mills of Paterson.” The 

cream-colored ballroom, with its impressive 

crystal chandeliers, had a series of murals 

portraying “various stages of the silk industry, from 

the growing of the silk worm to the finished 

product for which Paterson is internationally 

known.” When the gala opening party was over, 

guests departed the ballroom with souvenir 

menus, silk U.S. flags woven in Paterson, and 

silver match cases. 

The future seemed bright and promising in 

1925. The souvenir menu reinforced the notion of 

a prosperous future, noting, “To strangers tarrying 

within our gates [the hotel] will afford creature 

comforts and entertainment unsurpassed in any 

other inn of any other town.” 

❖ 

ALEXANDER 

HAMILTON 

HOTEL’S 

GLORIOUS 

HEYDAY 

Above: The Alexander Hamilton 

Hotel dining room in 1926. 


Below: The Alexander Hamilton Hotel 

on the corner of Church and Market 

Streets in Paterson, c. 1927. 




GROCERY GREW 

INTO LANDMARK 

❖ 

Totten’s Grocery in Passaic. Samuel 

Totten, seated, was founder. This 

photograph was taken in the 1890s. 


Samuel and John O. Totten’s grocery is now 

considered a footnote to the history of Passaic. 

Yet, in the mid-1870s, and for years afterward, 

S. Totten & Son was a recognized landmark. 

When Totten opened his new store at the 

southeast corner of Bloomfield Avenue (now 

Broadway) and Prospect Street in 1875, he was 

already a well-established merchant. The firm sold 

a wide variety of fresh vegetables, provisions, 

flour, and grain to local patrons and those from 

neighboring communities. Passaic’s population 

was steadily increasing, and Totten’s business 

benefitted from the influx of new residents. Totten 

occupied a two-story building at 13 Bloomfield 

Avenue. The first floor was reserved for walk-in 

trade. A large percentage of Totten’s fresh 

vegetables, corn and potatoes were obtained 

locally. Clifton was then luxuriant with farmland, 

and many crops were cultivated for sale to grocers 

such as Totten. The second floor of Totten’s 

establishment was partly used for storage and the 

sale of grain and feed. In 1883, Totten reported 

his retail and wholesale business brought in nearly 

$75,000. The store bustled with activity. 

That same year, a New Jersey business 

directory reported that Totten employed a force 

of ten or more clerks and assistants. Employees 

hurried to fill orders and many wagons were 

“continually before the door.” The same 

publication said the Tottens were “stirling and 

stirring businessmen,” and it probably was not 

an exaggeration. A century ago, a local 

tradesman would soon be out of business if his 

firm developed a less than honest reputation. 

In the early 1890s, Samuel and his son John 

posed with their employees for a group 

photograph. Flanked by men wearing long 

white smocks, the founder is seated in an 

armchair holding his cane. He appears like a 

genial, contented family patriarch, secure in 

knowing that his business would continue 

serving another generation of Passaicites. 


Joseph Rydings was one of the multitudes of 

handloom weavers who came to Paterson before 

the turn-of-the twentieth century. Born in 

Lancashire, England in 1845, Rydings eked out 

a living by weaving a fabric made of silk and 

pure wool known as “Ruskin homespun.” 

When not seated at his loom, Rydings took 

pen in hand and described with honest and 

moving simplicity the beauties of nature in and 

about Paterson and its then rural suburbs. In an 

affectionate 1932 reminiscence, librarian Mollie 

Chadwick Winchester described Rydings as “a 

Thoreau of Passaic County.” It did not matter to 

Rydings, as Winchester noted, that “his too-long 

overcoat sagged over his weary shoulders,” or 

that “his mustache was shaggy” or his suit 

threadbare and his “cap green with thrifty use.” 

Rydings’ essays reveal a man at peace with 

himself and his environment. After the 

naturalist’s death in 1919, his essays were edited 

by an admirer, Carl Schondorf, and published as 

a popular weekly newspaper column under the 

title “Country Walks in Many Fields.” 

The gentle loom weaver and essayist 

attracted a regular audience, and a direct result 

of his writings was the formation of the Paterson 

Rambling Club in September 1904. With 

Rydings as their guide, the hikers would meet 

for walks or “rambles” where they found 

relaxation in observing the native flowers, trees, 

and shrubs of the Passaic valley. Rydings was a 

poet as well as an essayist, and he composed an 

Ode of Welcome that was sung when the ramblers 

arrived at their chosen destination. 

After one jaunt to the home of Mr. and Mrs. 

Thomas Fleming in the heart of the Preakness 

mountains, Rydings wrote, “Here the Ramblers 

were glad to leave the dusty road and the smell 

of gasoline and wander where the air was pure 

and where they could admire the charms of 

Nature without the danger of being run over.” 

Little seemed to escape the notice of the 

keen, self-trained naturalist. His essays reveal a 

cultivated mind as well as the lyrical qualities of 

the poet. After a day of rain, Rydings decided to 

take an evening walk along one of the banks of 

the Morris Canal in south Paterson. He was in 

search of glowworms, luminous beetle larva that 

emitted light from their abdomens. Delighted at 

finding insects that eluded him since childhood, 

Rydings wrote, “here are a thousand lights 

brightly burning from a thousand small 

battlements, and the ardent insect lovers need 

not despair at finding his lady love at home.” 

Rydings would in all probability be forgotten if 

it were not for the efforts of his friends, who 

created a suitable memorial to this humble and 

revered man. In October 1932, Rydings’ associates 

had the naturalist’s remains reinterred in a new 

grave at Laurel Grove Cemetery in Totowa. It is 

surmounted by a specially carved tombstone 

which resembles a tree trunk. Ever since, the 

naturalist and his stone tree have maintained an 

eternal vigil over the hillside where he is buried. 

WEAVER WAS A 

❖ 

“THOREAU OF 

PASSAIC 

COUNTY” 

Joseph Rydings at his loom in 

the 1900s. 


HISTORICAL SOCIETY 


FEDERICI’S 

LEGACY IS 

CAST IN STONE 

❖ 

Gaetano Federici and Harry B. 

Haines, publisher of the Paterson 

Evening News, with the sculptor’s 

Andrew F. McBride statue in 1947. 



In the Depression-era 1930s, Paterson sculptor 

Gaetano Federici was overwhelmingly associated 

with the best public monuments in Silk City. An 

outgoing, friendly man, Federici derived 

considerable enjoyment by walking and chatting 

with friends on Ellison and Cross (now Cianci) 

Streets, then the center of Italian-American 

community life. Sporting a neatly trimmed artist’s 

goatee, Federici would not fail to be recognized, 

even by those who did not know him personally. 

If Federici strolled in the direction of the 

classical revival-style county courthouse on 

Hamilton Street, he would see his superb, largerthan-life 

bronze statues of Congressman James 

Fleming Stewart and Senator William “Billy” 

Hughes. Gracing the lawn of nearby St. John’s 

Cathedral is the seated likeness of Reverend 

William McNulty, one of the city’s pioneer 

clergymen. Another Federici creation is in City Hall 

Plaza, where the imposing statue of former Mayor 

Nathan Barnert stands atop a granite pedestal. 

While Federici was still a youngster, his 

father, Antonio, said, “follow in the footsteps of 

great men.” The suggestion was not lost on 

young Federici. Great men, in his opinion, were 

not connected with passing fads. He dismissed 

the modernist tendencies of 1930s art by telling 

one journalist what he thought conferred a 

measure of immortality: “The sculptors and 

artists whose work will endure will be those 

who have striven for the creation of true 

likenesses of people, scenes and events.” 

The man who is considered to be Paterson’s 

greatest sculptor was born in Castlegrande, Italy, 

on September 22, 1880, and immigrated with 

his family to America. 

Leaving Paterson High School in 1897, 

Federici pursued his studies with New York 

sculptor Giuseppe Moretti. Even at this early 

point in his career, Federici’s emerging talents 

were receiving their first recognition. In March 

1898, Federici gave his alma mater a plaster 

bust of Shylock, a character in Shakespeare’s The 

Merchant of Venice. 

According to a brief notice that appeared in 

the Paterson Press, the sculpture was wellreceived. 

The Shylock bust was destroyed when 

the great fire of February 1902 ravaged 

Paterson, but, by that time, Federici had 

launched what would develop into a promising 

and remarkable career. He furthered his studies 

at the Art Students’ League in New York. 

Federici was inseparable from Paterson. It was 

a place, he admitted in 1938, that “I love very 

much.” During more than six decades, his 

sensitive hands fashioned an amazing number of 

marble, bronze, and stone sculptures, as well as 

other art objects. His life, though, was not 

without its disappointments and sadness. He had 

to endure a bizarre incident in the spring of 1930 

when his daughter, Teresa, was kidnapped and 

held for ransom. 

Federici’s enduring bronze statuary and other 

sculptures have continued to attract sustained 

and widespread admiration. Eleven of his 

monuments embellish Silk City today. 


The time when high-wheeled bicycles once 

crowded local streets is long gone. Equipped 

with a large front wheel that varied from 36 to 60 

inches in diameter, and with a smaller rear wheel 

from 15 to 20 inches in size, the “Ordinary” was 

the bicycle of choice in the 1880s for people 

who could not afford the upkeep of a horse 

and buggy. 

Wilfred E. “Fred” Shuit of Passaic probably did 

own a horse and buggy, but the popular city 

druggist was one of the county’s leading cyclists. 

Shuit was a member of the prestigious and elite 

Passaic City Wheeling and Athletic Association. 

Skill and a measure of courage were needed to 

operate an “Ordinary,” so named because it was 

the “ordinary” bicycle of the day. If someone were 

not alert to even a small obstruction in his path, 

tumbling from the tall bike was the likely result. 

Shuit’s reputation in Passaic as an outstanding 

cyclist turned him and his cycling colleagues into 

local celebrities. These fortunate young men 

looked upon their bikes as status symbols. A well 

engineered high-wheeler sold for about $100, the 

equivalent of more than $1,000 today. The 

Passaic Echo employed a columnist, writing under 

the pen named “Jodo,” who covered cycling 

events. On August 25, 1887, Jodo reported that 

Shuit “deserves great credit for his interest in the 

race [held at Roseville, Newark]. Having entered, 

he discovered that business would prevent him 

from having more than 2 1/2 hours spare time on 

Saturday. But he mounted his wheel, made the 

run to Roseville, 12 miles in 45 minutes, arriving 

just in time to start the race. Notwithstanding the 

hard ride, he finished third and rode back to 

Passaic at business in the allotted time.” 

Shuit became a master at preparing ice cream 

sodas, and he developed the art while an 

apprentice druggist. In September 1929, Passaic 

Chamber of Commerce Secretary George S. 

Aldous recalled Shuit’s expertise. He wrote, “No 

soda you can get today equals the taste of the 

syrups and soda that used to be concocted by 

Fred Shuit at the soda fountain.” 

After 1890, the days of the high-wheeler 

were numbered when more secure safety bikes 

with equal-size wheels came on the market. 

Safety bicycles helped create a new generation 

of riders, and not all were men. Women and 

children could enjoy the thrill of cycling, and 

the number of bicycle makers quickly 

multiplied. North Jersey, as elsewhere, was 

gripped by the great bicycle craze of the 1890s. 

Conservatives were scandalized when they 

caught sight of women on bikes, since it was not 

considered a proper pastime for respectable ladies. 

Women took to wearing bloomers—a garment 

that sometimes provided a glimpse of a woman’s 

mid-calf. Some physicians predicted cycling 

would produce “vibrated brains,” but the “bloomer 

girls” persisted in enjoying their bikes, despite 

their detractors, who were soon outnumbered. 

The Passaic City Council did not consider the 

challenge cyclists made to pedestrians an 

amusing matter. Apparently responding to irate 

citizens, on July 17, 1894, the Council enacted 

an ordinance specifically prohibiting cyclists 

from using local sidewalks. If apprehended, 

violators were subject to a $5 fine, a penalty 

most people would have disliked paying. 

PASSAIC 

DRUGGIST MADE 

A BIG DEAL OF 

A BIG WHEEL 

❖ 

Above: Wilfred “Fred” Shuit and 

his “Ordinary.” 


Below: A local cycling group, the 

Passaic Wheeling and Athletic 

Association, in 1887. Wilfred E. 

Shuit is fourth from the right. 



PETER 

HASENCLEVER: 

EIGHTEENTH- 

❖ 

CENTURY 

INDUSTRIALIST 

Above: Hasenclever coat-of-arms 

from Das Geschlecht 

Hasenclever, 1922. 

COURTESY OF ERWIN L. SCHROERS. 

Right: Peter Hasenclever, 1716-1793. 

COURTESY OF THE STADTARCHIV, 

REMSCHEID, GERMANY. 

The peaceful solitude of Ringwood’s forests 

was never quite the same after the autumn of 

1764. In the remote northern highlands, hardy, 

able-bodied miners spoke German, and the 

hills echoed with the metallic sound of 

hammers striking anvils. An iron empire was in 

the making. 

The person responsible for this undertaking 

was Peter Hasenclever, who historians have long 

recognized for his remarkable contribution 

toward developing the iron industry in America. 

Hasenclever was born on November 24, 1716, 

at Remscheid-Ehringhausen, Germany. At age 

fourteen, he was sent by his parents to become 

an apprentice in a steel mill. 

Hasenclever thrived on hard work. In 1733, 

he was in Belgium, perfecting his 

knowledge of French. Extensive 

travels throughout Europe 

widened his scope of knowledge 

and business contacts. By 1749, 

Hasenclever was a partner in a 

mercantile business in Cadiz, 

Spain. He became an expert 

in the linen trade, and, judging 

from his frequent travels over 

Europe, he could be regarded 

as one of the earliest international 

businessmen. 

Fluent in German, French, 

and English, Hasenclever was intrigued by reports 

of iron ore deposits in the British colonies and the 

relative cheapness of obtaining land. He became a 

naturalized British subject. In January 1764, 

Hasenclever and two partners established the firm 

of Hasenclever, Seton & Crofts. With the addition 

of other investors, it was commonly known as the 

American Company, or in this country, the 

London Company. Hasenclever invested eight 

thousand pounds of his own money, and the firm 

enjoyed the backing of several prominent and 

well-connected Britons. 

Hasenclever’s ambition was to develop mines 

and properties on a large scale. He arrived in 

New York in June 1764. Approximately two 

months later, 300 German workmen and their 

families had also arrived. Hasenclever’s cousin, 

Franz Caspar Hasenclever, had been given the 

task of recruiting miners, smelters, and 

ironworkers from the Palatinate, Saarland, and 

other sections of Germany, and he did his job 

well. (Descendants of the early iron workers still 

reside in North Jersey.) 

On July 5, 1764, Hasenclever paid five 

hundred pounds for a “decayed ironworks” 

owned by the Ogden family of Ringwood. By 

November the forges were glowing. Hasenclever 

moved at a pace that even today is astonishing. In 

addition to the Ringwood property, Hasenclever 

acquired iron works at Charlottesburg, on the 

west branch of the Pequannock River, Long Pond 

(Greenwood Lake), and extensive real estate 

holdings in neighboring New York. By the end 

of 1766, Hasenclever planned to operate 

twenty-four forges and furnaces in the North 

Jersey Highlands. 

The construction of so many facilities on such a 

grand scale, as well as land 

acquisition, the importation of 

workers, and other expenses 

drained huge amounts of capital. 

Hasenclever had overextended his 

budget, but the iron he produced 

was nonetheless considered a 

superior product. Unfortunately, 

Hasenclever became embroiled in 

a bitter controversy over finances, 

and he was supplanted as general 

manager by Jeston Humfray, who 

proved to be incompetent. 

In 1769, Hasenclever left New 

York and sailed for London. He would never 

return to the Colonies. Hasenclever’s partners 

attempted to destroy his reputation, and, in the 

spring of 1773, the distressed entrepreneur 

published a ninety-seven-page defense of his 

activities. It remains as one of the best accounts of 

early iron manufacturing in Colonial America. 

Hasenclever’s documented account was used for 

court litigation, and the convoluted case dragged 

on for years. The German-born entrepreneur was 

eventually vindicated and his reputation restored. 

Peter Hasenclever died at Landeshut, 

Silesia, on June 13, 1793. Historian James M. 

Ransom, who wrote the definitive history of 

North Jersey’s iron industry, said that 

“tremendous courage and indomitable spirit” 

predominated in Hasenclever’s character. “These 

qualities, despite numerous obstacles,” Ransom 

concluded, “enabled Hasenclever to establish 

the first large-scale iron operations in the 

Colonial wilderness….” 


In the 1870s, nearly one-fifth of Paterson’s 

inhabitants were either natives of Scotland or 

could trace their origins to old Caledonia. They 

brought to America many customs, including a 

fondness for the unique Scottish winter sport 

known as curling. It was played on numerous 

ponds along the city’s periphery. Local 

newspapers often carried detailed accounts of 

curling matches, especially those that occurred 

in nearby Haledon. 

Curling has a four-hundred-year-old 

pedigree, and it is evident that contestants 

required a certain degree of hardiness once on 

the ice court. Curlers would lug to area ponds a 

squat-looking oval-shaped stone of polished 

granite. It weighed about forty-four pounds. 

Each stone was fitted on top with a handle that a 

player could grip. Men would assemble in two 

teams of four, who stood their positions around 

an iron foothold called a crampet. Curlers would 

hurl their stones as near the target as possible. 

The teams scrambled along the ice with specially 

designed brooms, sweeping the ice along the 

way to affect the stone’s velocity. Points were 

awarded for stones that landed closest to the 

target. Curling derives its name from the way the 

stone curves, or “curls,” along the ice. 

When a long anticipated match between 

Paterson and New York curlers materialized in 

the winter of 1876, the Paterson Guardian gave it 

extensive newspaper coverage. The match was 

held in Haledon on the morning of January 25, 

and the Guardian called it a “memorable day in 

the annals of curling for our Paterson laddies.” 

Paterson and New York curlers faced off for the 

first interstate curling match, and, before the 

day was over, “Jersey knights of the brooms” left 

the ice victorious. They were proclaimed state 

champions and held a handsome silver medal to 

prove it. John Hamilton, president of the 

National Curling Association, had donated the 

medal. On hand to make the presentation was 

Scottish Consul Angus McDougal. Hamilton 

hoped the medal would become the “harbinger 

of many an annual social reunion.” Every year 

he wanted to see curlers from opposite sides of 

the Hudson compete for the medal. 

The Guardian reported that a splendid spirit 

of sportsmanship prevailed among the players 

during the historic championship game. 

Venturing out on the frozen expanse of Haledon 

Lake, a Guardian reporter did his best trying to 

understand the game. The article noted, “Our 

reporter went on his beam ends twice in his 

persistent endeavors to understand the thing.” 

Observing the curlers’ furious activity, the 

unnamed reporter described the gleeful shouts 

of men during the good-natured contest. One 

exclaimed in the spirit of a true son of 

Caledonia, “O Jamie, mon, what a curler ye are!” 

When intermission arrived, hot coffee was 

served to the curlers. New Jersey was behind, 

but when the game resumed, the “lads kept 

pegging away.” When the umpire called time 

at 5 p.m. the Guardian said, “the battle was 

won and New Jersey’s star was in the 

ascendent.” The team came off the ice with a 

twelve-point majority. 

WINTER SPORT 

❖ 

ONE GROUP’S 

LEGACY 

A curling match on Oldham Pond, 

North Haledon, c. 1890s. 




HUGH IRISH 

LEFT PATERSON 

GROCERY FOR A 

❖ 

HERO’S DEATH 

AT ANTIETAM 

Right: Hugh C. Irish in uniform. 

Intensely patriotic, he said, “I say 

come along, I am in it for the war!” 



Below: Poster advertising the sale of 

Irish’s grocery when he left for the 

Civil War. 


Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, 

Maryland, commemorates one of the bloodiest 

battles of the Civil War. It is believed more men 

were killed or wounded at Antietam then any 

other single day of battle in the entire war. One 

of the men who met his death—Hugh Crowell 

Irish from Paterson—was the only New Jersey 

officer killed in action at Antietam. 

It was at Antietam, on Wednesday morning, 

September 17, 1862, that General Robert E. Lee 

and forty-one thousand Confederate troops 

attempted their first invasion of the North. The 

fighting raged for an entire day and when it was 

over, neither side could claim a decisive victory, 

although the Confederate commander was forced 

to withdraw his forces to the safety of Virginia. 

The conflict resulted in the death or wounding of 

more than twenty-two thousand Union and 

Confederate troops. 

Hugh Crowell Irish was scarcely a month 

past his thirtieth birthday when a 

Confederate bullet ended his life. 

Born in Victory Township, New 

York, Irish was sixteen when he 

arrived in Paterson. His brother 

had arranged a job for him in the 

print shop of Lewis R. Stelle, then 

publisher of the Paterson Weekly 

Guardian. According to Orrin 

VanDerhoven, his old friend and 

business associate, Irish was an 

enthusiast in everything he undertook. In 

May 1856, Irish became co-proprietor with 

VanDerhoven in running the Guardian. His 

ambition seemed boundless. Irish became city tax 

assessor, clerk of the freeholder board, and later 

owned a grocery store. Irish married Betty Ann 

Haight, his childhood sweetheart, and started to 

build a home on what was then East Carroll 

Street. Irish disliked the name and petitioned the 

board of aldermen to rename it. On November 4, 

1861, East Carroll became Auburn Street. 

(Auburn, New York, was the town where Irish 

had been in the printing trade). 

The rapidly escalating Civil War was not far 

from Irish’s mind. When Confederate shore 

batteries bombarded Fort Sumter, South Carolina, 

forcing its surrender, the news electrified the 

citizens of Passaic County. On April 23, 1861, a 

meeting was held in Paterson, where a band 

played rousing martial music, and speeches were 

made in defense of the Union. All of this hoopla 

was not lost on Irish. Intensely patriotic, he 

thought every capable person should answer 

President Lincoln’s call to defend the Union. Irish 

was well thought of in the city. Former Mayor 

Brant Van Blarcom sized him up this way, “I like 

his walk, I never saw him smoking up money for 

cigars. I never saw him standing at a bar.” 

Irish, though, was not comfortable as one of 

Paterson’s grocers. According to the reminiscences 

of VanDerhoven, his newspaper partner, Irish 

“had been grossly deceived in his purchase” of the 

grocery business. “Irish soon realized he was 

saddled with an unsaleable stock of stale 

groceries,” VanDerhoven said, “so he started off 

handicapped, for no one wanted stale stuff.” 

VanDerhoven claimed his friend “eventually 

realized the dreadful mistake of his life and grew 

somewhat morose, and finally decided to sell out 

the grocery and enlist.” 

Irish was advised by military 

commanders that if he could 

assemble a company of men, he 

would be designated its captain. 

Evidently Irish had a good deal of 

charisma, because his friends 

opened a recruiting office in the 

now-empty grocery. With a fifer 

and drummer on hand and the 

place festooned with flags, Irish had a 

justice of the peace available to swear in 

new recruits. On the fourth day, fifty-seven 

men had been enrolled and were ready to depart. 

Irish’s fervor and bravery never deserted him 

at Antietam. Only two weeks out of mustering 

camp in Newark, Captain Irish and his 

Company K, Thirteenth New Jersey Volunteers, 

encountered withering fire from Confederate 

forces. Irish fearlessly led the way into battle, 

climbing a fence and shouting, “Rally, boys, 

rally!” Heber Wells, a fellow Paterson resident 

and personal friend of Irish, was horrified when 

his commander toppled from the fence. He 

rushed to Irish’s aid, asking if he had been 

injured. In a letter sent home the day after the 

battle, Wells said Irish moaned a few times and 

uttered, “Heber I am killed.” Death supervened. 

Captain Irish’s body was recovered and returned 

to Paterson for burial. An immense crowd of 

mourners attended his February 1863 funeral 

despite the bitter cold, zero-degree weather. 


On a bright, sunny day in the summer 1854, 

ironworkers at Pompton Furnace in what is now 

Pompton Lakes would have noticed a young 

man setting up his cumbersome-looking camera 

directly opposite the facility. 

It was hot under the July sun, but Frenchborn 

photographer Victor Prevost had probably 

waited for near-perfect weather. He went about 

his task with self-assured confidence. Described 

by historian Peter Bacon Hales as “ambitious, 

talented and superbly trained,” the thirty-fiveyear-old 

Prevost had transported his camera 

from New York. 

The reason he photographed Pompton 

Furnace is somewhat a mystery, but Prevost was 

keen on the idea of publishing his prints in 

book form. Whatever his motivation, the view 

of Pompton Furnace, signed and dated July 13, 

1854, is remarkable for its artful composition 

and technical excellence. 

At the time Prevost visited the site, Pompton 

Furnace already had a long and productive 

history. James M. Ransom relates in his welldocumented 

study, Vanishing Ironworks of the 

Ramapos, that as early as 1726 a small-scale 

ironworks was under construction. The area had 

plentiful deposits of iron ore. Bloomeries turned 

out iron bars and the addition of furnaces 

increased production capacities. Pompton 

Furnace, according to a time-honored tradition, 

supplied musket balls for the French and Indian 

War. “It also supplied the usual firebacks and 

utensils for local residents, and pig and bar iron 

for the trade,” Ransom wrote. 

During the Revolutionary War, Pompton 

Furnace and other iron-manufacturing 

complexes were enlisted in the patriots’ cause. 

They were veritable beehives of activity. When 

General Henry Knox needed ammunition, the 

Pompton ironworks responded by manufacturing 

more than 7,000 cannonballs weighing between 

4 and 18 pounds each. The facility also supplied 

Knox with ten tons of grapeshot for use against 

the British crown. Strategically located, Pompton 

ironworks played an important military role in 

securing American independence. 

In 1797 the Pompton ironworks was 

acquired by Martin Ryerson and, along with his 

other iron-manufacturing sites in Ringwood and 

Long Pond, became part of a profitable, largescale 

business enterprise. 

Eventually the Ryerson properties were sold 

to various partnerships. When Prevost took his 

1854 photograph, Pompton Furnace was owned 

by William C. Vreeland and Associates. Under 

another owner, steel and handmade files were 

produced. Ransom relates, “In 1898 the site 

became the Ludlum Steel & Spring Co. Nine 

years later it was moved from Pompton to 

Watervliet, New York, thus bringing to a close 

more than 175 years of iron manufacturing 

at Pompton.” 

POMPTON 

FURNACE 

PLAYED A ROLE 

IN SECURING 

AMERICAN 

INDEPENDENCE 

❖ 

Pompton Furnace on July 13, 1854. 

COURTESY OF THE POMPTON LAKES 

WOMENS’ CLUB. 


WANAQUE 

RESERVOIR DAM: 

A MONUMENT 

❖ 

TO MAYOR’S 

FORESIGHT 

Dedication of the Raymond Dam at 

the Wanaque Reservoir, July 14, 1931. 


On a hot summer evening more than seventy 

years ago, Wanaque’s serenity was disturbed by 

an unusual number of visitors. Traveling by auto 

and train, an estimated three thousand people 

arrived from across North Jersey to witness 

the impressive dedication of an engineering 

marvel, Wanaque Reservoir’s main dam. The 

ceremony took place just about 7 p.m., Tuesday, 

July 14, 1931. 

Fountains illuminated with colored lights 

cast reflections on a large bronze tablet that 

stood directly in front of the huge dam. 

Prominent was the bas-relief image of the late 

Newark Mayor Thomas Launitz Raymond, 

whose vision made possible the Wanaque 

project. Raymond is remembered for the fifteenhundred-foot 

dam, as well as a boulevard in 

Newark, named in his honor. He died in 1928 

while the reservoir was slowly filling to capacity. 

It was Raymond who persuaded the state 

Legislature to create the North Jersey District 

Water Supply Commission. The commission in 

turn constructed Wanaque Reservoir, and thus 

assured the communities of Newark, Paterson, 

Passaic, Clifton, Bloomfield, and Glen Ridge an 

ample supply of water. 

The project was complicated. Although the 

northern highlands were considered as a 

possible source of water supply in 1879, the 

difficulties inherent in assembling the necessary 

watershed properties seemed insuperable. 

When at last the project was a reality and 

construction had advanced, the commission 

confidently reported in 1925 that it was “a step 

far in advance of the private well or the spring 

piped through hollow logs to the public 

watering place.” Creating the project, as the 

commission noted, represented “years of 

struggle and patient effort—struggle between 

selfish interest, public and private, and patient 

effort on the part of foresighted, public-spirited 

officials and citizens who realized the first need 

of any community is a copious supply of pure 

and wholesome water.” 

When the project got under way in 1920, 

only the cities of Newark and Paterson were 

major participants. Other communities joined a 

couple of years later. The conception, design, 

and ultimate completion was staggering in 

scope. Seventy buildings were demolished, and 

it was necessary to relocate seven miles of 

highway and six miles of railroad. When the 

commission tried to purchase lands used for 

grazing purposes by the Hewitt family, it was 

confronted by solid opposition. The issue was 

settled after considerable litigation before the 

work could move forward. 

On February 13, 1930, construction neared 

completion. Officials celebrated by driving 

a gold rivet in the facility’s main aqueduct. 

In the final analysis, the project spanned 

a decade and was financed by a $26.5-million 

bond issue. Thomas Raymond did not 

live long enough to see his cherished 

project completed, but his legacy was simply 

one of determination and perseverance. 

Raymond’s other accomplishments included 

developing Newark’s seaport facilities and 

involvement in establishing one of the nation’s 

first municipal airports. 


The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in 

Paterson and New York’s Trinity Church are two 

stately houses of worship that share a common 

architectural feature: the brownstone used in 

their construction was taken from quarries at 

Little Falls. 

Exactly how many houses, churches, and 

public buildings were made from this attractive, 

fine-grained sandstone will never be known. 

Despite the ravages of time and the destructive 

hand of man, enough structures survive as 

testimony to the almost lost art of master 

stonecutters. The first people who widely used 

brownstone for building purposes were the 

early Dutch settlers. Representative examples of 

their stone homes dot North Jersey’s landscape, 

and, in many instances, have survived the last 

two centuries. Admired for its aesthetics and 

considered a durable building 

material, Little Falls brownstone 

was recognized for its commercial 

value early in the nineteenth 

century. When the Morris Canal 

was constructed, huge quantities 

of brownstone were shipped 

from the Passaic River gorge at 

Little Falls and used for bridges 

and aqueducts. 

Investors from New York 

realized that money could be made 

in quarrying brownstone. On 

February 7, 1854, five entrepreneurs 

established the Passaic 

Freestone Company. It was 

capitalized at $300,000, not an 

inconsiderable sum at that time. 

Purchasing forty-two acres 

adjacent to another quarry, the 

trustees thought the brownstone 

was “the finest quality and the 

most desirable color...that exists 

in the vicinity of New York.” 

Accompanying the company’s 

prospectus was a detailed report 

by New York marble dealer 

N. Swezey, who predicted 

the brownstone would “soon 

become the fashionable material, 

externally and internally, for New 

York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and 

Boston first-class buildings.” 

The sounds of men with pick axes and carts 

wheeling stone to waiting Morris Canal boats 

were commonplace in Little Falls. When the 

Bank of New York rebuilt its headquarters in 

1856, brownstone was shipped to contractors 

by means of the winding inland waterway. 

Industrial pollution has exacted its toll on 

the area’s nineteenth century brownstone 

buildings, but they have stood the test of time. 

In Little Falls, the Van Ness-Brower Home has 

graced Paterson Avenue since 1821. Two other 

venerable Little Falls brownstones are within 

walking distance of each other on Main Street. 

Erected in 1847, the Matches-Beattie House 

retains the charm of a bygone era, and the First 

Reformed Church, which dates from 1840, has 

long been a cherished landmark to generations 

of residents. 

BROWNSTONE 

FROM LITTLE 

FALLS SPANNED 

❖ 

HISTORY 

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist 

in Paterson, c. 1901. 




THIS OLD 

HOUSE HAS A 

TALE TO TELL 

❖ 

The Van Allen House in Totowa, 

c. 1890. 

COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

The Dutch settlers of North Jersey were 

thrifty, industrious farmers, and the houses they 

built were expected to last for generations. In 

Passaic County, there was once an abundance of 

these well-designed, stone, eighteenth century 

Colonial Dutch homes, with their distinctive 

overhanging eaves. Escalating property values 

and an ever-increasing population have brought 

about the demise of countless structures that 

predated the American Revolution. 

The Van Allen House at Crews Street and 

Totowa Road, in Totowa, has managed to defy 

the fate of similar Dutch-style buildings that 

were once commonplace. It is a sturdy survivor 

from the days when the land it occupied was 

once part of Bergen County. While the house 

was probably not built by John Van Allen in 

1761, it does have what architectural historian 

Clifford G. Wendehack has called the “tenacious 

individuality” of the Dutch pioneer. 

Without question, the home was constructed 

by its owner, who probably had the help of 

his wife, sons, and neighboring farmers. The 

Van Allen House weathered the Revolution, 

and over the last two centuries its brown 

sandstone walls have withstood the assaults of 

time and weather. 

The house is not far from the imposing Dey 

Mansion, General George Washington’s military 

field headquarters during July, October, and 

November 1780. Washington had directed his 

surveyor general, Robert Erskine, to develop a 

series of area maps, which are preserved by the 

New York Historical Society. Erskine notes on 

map 56B the existence of the Van Allen House 

by means of an inked square. Since it was 

customary for local patriots to show their 

hospitality to Washington’s officers, the Van 

Allen House probably welcomed Brigadier 

General Henry Knox, whose artillery company 

was bivouacked in its immediate vicinity. 

According to Van Allen-Garretson family 

descendants, the house was owned by the 

family from 1818 until 1938. John Peter Van 

Allen and his wife, Agnes, bought the house and 

property from Roeliff Van Houten on September 

30, 1818, paying $500 for 40 acres of orchards, 

a barn, and other outbuilding. 

The farmstead remained in the family for 

several generations, and its owners worked the 

land, selling produce in the bustling Paterson 

markets. According to an article in the October 

17, 1929, edition of the Totowa Union, Margaret 

Garretson was living in the home. Reportedly, she 

was “very proud of the relics stored in her parlor.” 

Although Garretson was comfortably 

surrounded by her collection of family china and 

paintings, she considered moving to a more 

modern residence. The Union reported that the 

landmark would “neither be sold nor torn 

down…but kept standing as a memory to 

those departed.” 

The Depression-era Historic American 

Buildings Survey considered the Van Allen house 

of sufficient historical and architectural 

significance to warrant a field study. When the 

house was examined in 1938, it was owned by 

Garretson’s son, John G. Garretson. Project 

architects estimated the house was built around 

1750. On October 22, 1938, the Paterson 

Morning Call announced the sale of the building 

to Adrian de Knuypf of New York, a retired 

railroad engineer. He intended to “restore the 

quaint old colonial architecture and make it one 

of the showplaces of the borough.” Since then, 

the home’s owners have changed, but its 

distinctive Jersey Dutch lines continue to give an 

impression of coziness and historic authenticity. 


During the late 1920s and well into the ’30s, 

Eleanor Egg was applauded as Paterson’s first lady 

of sports. The champion track and field star held 

nearly every women’s national title. 

Egg was born on February 3, 1909, in Wilkes- 

Barre, Pennsylvania. Her parents were part of an 

acrobatic team known as The Spauldings. The 

family performed a high-wire act. When Egg was 

about two years old, she joined the team and was 

billed as “The Youngest Acrobat in the World.” The 

family decided to settle in Paterson, and while 

attending Public School 9, Egg realized she 

possessed athletic talents. In one contest, she beat a 

champion boy sprinter. Her father, Charles, was a 

source of encouragement and challenged his 

daughter to race against other children in the 

neighborhood. She defeated them easily. 

Once in high school, she continued to compete 

under the banner of the Paterson Girls’ Recreation 

Association. In July 1929, Egg demonstrated her 

skills by winning the high jump and the hundredyard 

dash. On top of that, she shattered the record 

in the eight-pound shot put in the Metropolitan 

AAU Senior Women’s Meet at Wingate Field in 

Brooklyn, New York. In 1931, as a representative 

of the Charles V. Duffy League, she raced against 

Stella Walsh at the national women’s track meet in 

Jersey City. Egg emerged victorious as the women’s 

national champion in the hundred-yard dash. 

She was considered for the 1932 Olympics, but 

just before the team was to depart for Europe, she 

injured the ligaments in her left leg. Egg recalled 

her disappointment in an interview given more 

than two decades later to Paterson Evening News 

writer George Fitzmaurice, “The day the boat 

sailed for Holland, they were putting a cast on my 

foot,” she said. “Even though I couldn’t run, the 

girls on the team wanted to chip in $100 each out 

of their expense money so I could take the trip. It 

was so nice of them, but I declined.” 

Although the injury brought her days of 

competition to a close, Egg did not rest on her 

laurels. She began coaching young athletes, taught 

acrobatics, and instructed young women in 

physical fitness. During her sports career, Egg was 

awarded 227 medals, 22 silver cups, 15 statuettes, 

and enough memorabilia to fill a trunk. 

Paterson officials thought so much of Egg that 

they immortalized her image in bronze at 

Hinchliffe Stadium. Famed sculptor Gaetano 

Federici portrayed her in a running pose. Federici 

was a meticulous craftsman and took many 

photographs of Egg in the field. 

She posed several hours in the famed sculptor’s 

studio. In order to relieve the tedium, she asked 

Federici for some clay. The champion runner 

modeled a small figure of her boyfriend’s dog and 

presented it as a gift. When the tablet was unveiled 

on August 1931, Federici surprised Egg with an 

aluminum casting of the dog. 

The sports champion died in Florida on 

October 27, 1999. 

THE 

REMARKABLE 

ELEANOR EGG 

❖ 

Above: Eleanor Egg in the uniform of 

the Duffy League, c. 1930. 


Below: In 1931, Eleanor Egg (left) 

and her parents looking over her 

many awards. 



❖ 

LOCOMOTIVE 

MAGNATE 

SNUBBED 

PATERSON 

Jacob S. Rogers in the 1880s. 



During the ninteeenth century, Paterson was 

a major center of locomotive manufacturing. 

The machine and erecting shops of firms such as 

Rogers, Danforth-Cooke, Grant, and Swinburne 

employed thousands. 

One set of manufacturing statistics bears 

repeating. From 1837 to 1881, a total of 

5,671 “iron horses” were produced and 

delivered to the satisfaction of prosperous 

railroad companies. The industry was 

personified by men like Jacob Smulliger Rogers, 

owner and president of Rogers Locomotive and 

Machine Works. Rogers inherited the company 

when his father died in 1856. The 

company continued producing 

powerful, efficient locomotives. 

Often elaborately 

decorated and painted, 

Rogers’ engines left his 

shops with brass 

fittings polished to 

a mirrorlike finish. 

At its height, 

the Rogers Works 

made locomotives 

at the rate of 

one per day, 

with profits on 

each “iron horse” 

averaging between 

$7,000 and $8,000. 

Jacob “Jake” 

Rogers—he despised 

the nickname—developed 

a reputation for hardnosed, 

tightfisted business practices. 

He amassed a large personal 

fortune, and in the process, his enterprise 

occupied almost an entire city block. Rogers 

was not, however, much liked either by 

the people who toiled to create his wealth or 

by the city where he lived. Few would risk 

Rogers’ wrath by differing with him. He 

was reputed to have arrogantly said to his 

house servants, “I owe the world nothing and will 

do as I please.” 

Rogers feuded with city authorities when 

they prevented him from buying a plot of 

land near his plant. In spite of his great 

wealth, Rogers loathed to part with even a 

few dollars. Representatives from local hospitals 

and charities would come away from his 

offices disappointed. His reputation as the 

“meanest man in Paterson” survived long after 

his death. 

Rogers often visited Manhattan and stayed 

at the Union League Club. He was unpopular 

with the help, mainly because he never tipped 

anyone. In July 1910, Rogers died at 

the clubhouse, apparently from heat 

prostration. The locomotive manufacturer 

had one more unpleasant surprise for the city 

where he had made his fortune. When Rogers' 

will was probated, Paterson learned he 

had bequeathed $4,524,150 to the 

Metropolitan Museum of Art in 

New York City. 

Rogers became a 

museum member in 

1883, and he liked to 

deliver his annual 

$10 renewal check 

in person. Why he 

left the museum 

the bulk of his 

estate is open to 

speculation. Some 

people believe 

he was influenced 

by the museum’s 

annual reports, 

which contained an 

appeal for endowment 

funds needed for 

new acquisitions. At any 

rate, during its first year, 

the Rogers Fund yielded an 

annual income of nearly $200,000. 

The museum’s historian noted that the 

Rogers bequest had made a struggling 

institution into a “powerful and independent 

force in the markets of art.” 

Eccentric, irascible and disagreeable, Rogers’ 

epitaph could very well be what he once 

told Paterson publicist Charles A. Shriner, 

“When a man is past sixty-five, when women 

have lost their charm and he has also lost 

his appetite for fine wines and victuals, and 

he cares no longer what his bank balance is, it 

is time to quit, and if nature does not attend 

to that, it ought to be given a hint not to neglect 

its duty.” 


REFERENCES CONSULTED 

Page 6: 

George Walsh, Gentlemen Jimmy Walker, Mayor of the Jazz Age. New York, 1974. 

Paterson Evening News, May 20, 1921. 

Passaic Daily News, May 20, 1921. 

Paterson Press Guardian, May 20, 1921. 

Paterson Morning Call, May 21, 1921. 

Warren Joseph, “Jimmy Walker’s City Hall,” New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1976. 

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Indian History of America. New York, 1974. 

Page 7: 

“Richfield, The Garden Spot of the State,” Passaic Daily News, August 13, 1925. 

William J. Pape, ed. and comp. and William W. Scott, The News’ History of Passaic, From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Day. Passaic, 1899. Hereafter cited 

as Pape/Scott, News’ Illustrated History of Passaic. 

Commemorative History of the Passaic Fire Department. Passaic. 1894. 

Page 8: 

William M. Gordon, “The Hundred Years of the Morris Canal,” Suburban Life, August, 1969. 

“The Morris Canal,” Stories of New Jersey, Federal Writers’ Project, 1937-38 series, Bulletin 17. 

Barbara N. Kalata, “The Morris Canal, George P. MacCulloch’s Answer to the Original Energy Crisis,” The Times Bulletin, Boonton, N.J., February 13, 1975. 

Barbara N. Kalata, A Hundred Years, A Hundred Miles: New Jersey’s Morris Canal. Morristown, 1983. 

Myra E. Lane, “The Morris Canal,” Historic Little Falls. Little Falls, 1989. 

Malcolm Cowley, “Low Bridge and Lock Ahead,” Charm Magazine, July, 1926. 

Page 9: 

“First Phone Exchange Shared Loft with Pigeons, 62,000 Phones in Area,” Paterson Evening News, Mid-Century Edition, July 15, 1950. 

John J. O’Rourke, “John F. Noonan, Telephone Pioneer,” Passaic County Historical Society Annual, Vol. I, No. 4, September, 1930. 

“History of Telephone Development in City,” Paterson Press-Guardian, September 19, 1930. 

“First Telephone Exchange Shared Loft with Pigeons,” Paterson Evening News, June 29, 1940. 

“Operators in City’s First Telephone Exchange Recall How Girls Memorized All City Numbers,” Paterson Evening News, April 11, 1953. 

Page 10: 

Nicholas Manfredi memorabilia, Paterson Museum. 

Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air, the Men who made Radio. New York, 1991. 

James P. Johnson, New Jersey: History of Ingenuity and Industry. Windsor Publications, 1987. 

Jimmy Smith, “O’Dea Recalls Birth of Radio,” Paterson Evening News, August 25, 1955. 

Paterson Press-Guardian, September 25, 1928. 

Page 11: 

The Raster, published by and for the personnel of Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, Passaic, N.J., April, May, October, 1944 issues. 

William Starr Myers, The Story of New Jersey, Vol. IV. New York, 1945. 

Paterson Evening News, November 16, 1965. 

Passaic Herald-News, May 9, 1946, August 29, 1956. 

Newark Sunday News, October 12, 1947. 

Peter Kerr, “A Network of the Past Could be a Model for the Future,” New York Times, June 3, 1984. 

Page 12: 

Paterson Intelligencer, December 28, 1829, July 8, 1835, April 24, 1839. 

Borough of Haledon 50th Anniversary Souvenir Booklet, 1908-1958. Haledon, 1958. 

Paterson Guardian, May 8, 1857, November 20, 1857, July 20, 1858. 

Page 13: 

E.A. Smyk, “The Saga of the Garyplane, Totowa’s First Flying Machine,” The Leader, March 13, 1980. 

Paterson Morning Call, July 30, 1910. 

Paterson Daily Press, February 8, 1912. 

History and Highlights of the Borough of Totowa, 1898-1973. Totowa, 1973. 

Page 14: 

Edward M. Graf, Research Notes on “Robert Bridge.” Graf Archive. 

Leslie L. Post, “Ice Cutting Days,” North Jersey Highlander, Winter, 1967. 

Jack Chard, “The 19th Century Ice Industry,” North Jersey Highlander, Spring, 1980. 

Douglas L. Brownstone, A Field Guide to America’s History. New York, 1984. 

Edward Valentine Mitchell, American Village. New York, 1938. Hereafter cited as Mitchell, American Village. 

Borough of Haledon 50th Anniversary Souvenir Booklet, 1908-1958. Haledon, 1958. 

Mildred T. Smyk interview, December 4, 1993. Author’s files. 

Page 15: 

County Bank and Trust Company: A New Era in Banking for the People of Passaic County. Paterson, 1951. 

E. A. Smyk, The Hamilton Club: A Chapter in Paterson History. Paterson, 2001. 

Three Quarters of A Century: The Paterson Savings Institution, 1869-1944. Paterson, 1944. 

New Jersey Bank, 100 years, 1869-1969. Paterson, 1969. 

History and Institutions of the City of Paterson. Paterson, 1899. 

Page 16: 

George Athan Billias, “The First Un-Americans: The Loyalists in American Historiography,” in Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias, Perspectives in Early 

American History, Essays in Honor of Richard B. Morris. New York, 1973. 

William H. Belcher, “The Thomas Ryder Farm,” Passaic County Historical Society Annual, Vol. I, No. 2, September, 1928. 

William W. Scott, ed. History of Passaic and Its Environs, Vol. I. Passaic, 1922. Hereafter cited as Scott, History of Passaic. 

Pape/Scott, News’ Illustrated History of Passaic. 

E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of New Jersey. Newark, 1927. 

William Nelson, History of the City of Paterson and County of Passaic. Paterson, 1901. 

Page 17: 

Harper’s Weekly, May 22, 1880. 

Paterson Daily Press, October 15, 22, 1880, May 3, 4, 1885. 

References Consulted ✦ 53

Paterson Daily Guardian, May 5, 1879, October 4, 1880, May 2, 1892. 

William Nelson and Charles A. Shriner, History of Paterson and Its Environs, Vol. II. New York, 1920. Hereafter cited as Nelson/Shriner History of Paterson. 

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, May 22, 1880. 

Page 18: 

Paterson Morning Call, February 17, March 1, 1910. 

The Record, February 24, 1991. 

Passaic Daily Herald, June 1, 1922. 

Kent MacDougall, Tales of Our Heritage. Passaic, 1959. Hereafter cited as Tales of Our Heritage. 

Donald C. Lotz, “Alfred Speer, Passaic Vintner, Publisher and Inventor,” Passaic County Historical Society Newsletter, January-April 1987. 


Passaic Herald-News, March 24, 1940. 

Page 19: 

Bloomingdale Cornet Band Brochure, Bloomingdale, 1934. 

Borough of Bloomingdale 50th Anniversary, 1918-1968. Bloomingdale, 1968. 

Dennis Arnold, gen. ed. The New Oxford Companion to Music. New York, 1984. 

Emil R. Salvini, Historic Bloomingdale. Lyndhurst, 1984. 

Page 20: 

Paterson Morning Call, March 19, 1942. 

Irving Litvag, The Master of Sunnybank: A Biography of Albert Payson Terhune. New York, 1977. 

Cara Hammer, “An Intimate Chat With A.P. Terhune,” Paterson Evening News, September, 1930, clipping mounted in Passaic County Historical Society’s 

Scrapbook No. 4. 

Proceedings of the Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Passaic, Regular Meeting, September 4, 1935. Paterson, 1935. 


Page 21: 

Leslie L. Post, “J. Percy Crayon, A Biographical Account,” North Jersey Highlander, Winter, 1967. 

John Y. Foster, New Jersey and the Rebellion. Newark, 1868. 

Newfoundland in Story and Picture. West Milford, 1905. 

Inas Otten and Eleanor Waskerna, The Earth Shook and the Sky Was Red. West Milford, 1976. 

Page 22: 

Falls City Register, March 25, 1863. 

John P. Doremus, Floating Down the Mississippi. Passaic, 1877. 

Paterson Daily Press, May 2, 1874, January 8, 1890. 

Letter, Ida Doremus Hayden to Edward M. Graf, August 21, 1972. Passaic County Historical Society Archives. 

Page 23: 

Paterson Evening News, March 11, 1952, March 12, 1968. 

E. A. Smyk, “Memories of the Blizzard of ’88,” The Leader, March 20, 1980. 

David M. Ludlum, The New Jersey Weather Book. New Brunswick, 1983. Hereafter cited as Ludlum, New Jersey Weather Book. 


Paterson Daily Press, March 12, 13, 1888. 

Passaic Daily Herald, March 13, 1888. 

Page 24: 

“Paterson’s Great Fire of 1902,” Paterson Evening News, Mid-Century Edition, July 15, 1950. 

John T. Cunningham, “Three Weeks of Terror,” The Royle Form, March 15, 1970. 

Vincent D. Waraske, “Paterson Fire of 1902,” Paterson News, February 9, 1972. 

“10th Anniversary of the Big Fire,” Paterson Evening News, February 8, 9, 1912. 

Letter, February 9, 1902 from correspondent signed “Albert.” Graf Archive. 

Page 25: 

Paterson Daily Press, July 22, 1903. 

Paterson Guardian, July 22, 23, 1903. 

Remembrances, Passaic County Historical Society, 1969, No. 1. 

Page 26: 

Paterson Evening News Mid-Century Edition, July 15, 1950. 

Paterson Evening News, June 29, 1940. 

Ludlum, New Jersey Weather Book. 

Frederick J. Talasco, “The Great Flood of 1903,” North Jersey Highlander, Spring, 1980. 

“Its Fourth Affliction! Paterson Again Swept by a Destructive Flood,” Saturday Globe, Utica, N.Y., October 17, 1903. 

Page 27: 

John M. Reid, comp. Filial Tribute to the Memory of Rev. John Moffat Howe, M.D. New York, 1889. 

Passaic Daily News, December 20, 1920. 

“Old Landmarks to be Removed,” undated clipping from Passaic Daily Herald. William W. Scott Scrapbooks. Collections of the Passaic County Historical 

Society. 

W. Woodford Clayton and William Nelson, History of Bergen and Passaic Counties. Philadelphia, 1882. 

Scott, History of Passaic. 

Page 28: 

World Book Encyclopedia, 1927 

Irwin H. Lee, Negro Medal of Honor Men. New York, 1969. 

Congressional Medal of Honor, Passaic County Historical Society, accession number 14979. 

Paterson Evening News, November 29, 1940. 

Page 29: 

Murray Zuckoff, “Paterson’s Maguire,” Paterson Morning Call, September 4, 1967. 

“McGuire, Maguire or McDonnell? Which Deserves Labor Day Credit?” Paterson News, September 2, 1968. 

James Gambino, “Matthew Maguire Credited as The Father of Labor Day,” Paterson News, September 1, 1969. 

Kenneth McKenna, “Discussion over the Founding of Labor Day, was it Maguire or McGuire?” New York Daily News, September 2, 1974. 

Page 30: 

Paterson Evening News, February 7, 1970. 

William H. Belcher and Joseph Warren Belcher, The Belcher Family in England and America. Privately printed, 1941. 

Minnie May Monks, Winbeam. New York, 1930. 

Monks’ family biographical data. Graf Archive. 

Letter, Minnie May Monks to William H. Belcher, December 6, 1932. Graf Archive. 


Minnie May Monks, “The Wilderness of the Wanaque Watershed,” Paterson Morning Call, May 6, 1938. 

Minnie May Monks, “The Lure of Old Mines,” Paterson Morning Call, May 25, 1938. 

Letter, Minnie May Monks to William H. Belcher, December 25, 1932, as published in Paterson Morning Call, January 23, 1933. 

Page 31: 

William Gledhill, Notes on Paterson History, 1865-1866. Unpublished manuscript. Collections of the Passaic County Historical Society. 

John A. Craig, History of Paterson. Unpublished manuscript. Collections of the Passaic County Historical Society. 

Edward M. Graf, Research Notes on “Timothy Crane.” Graf Archive. 

Howard D. Lanza, Gateway to the Past: A Guide to Cedar Lawn Cemetery. Paterson, 1997. 

Page 32: 

Karel M. Waer, The Negro in the History of Paterson, New Jersey. May, 1969. Unpublished college research paper. Paterson Public Library. 

Richard Edwards, ed. Industries of New Jersey, Part VI, Hudson, Passaic and Bergen Counties. New York, 1883. 

“William H. Hopper, Proprietor, Paterson Handle Works, 159-161 Marshall Street,” Paterson Morning Call, March 6, 1893. 


Page 33: 

“The Silk Sox To Meet Again After 40 Years,” Paterson Morning Call, April 26, 1967. 

Howard Klausner, “Silk Sox Centerfield Remembers…,” Passaic Herald-News, April 24, 1967. 

William J. Wurst, “Clifton’s Golden Days of Baseball,” Dateline Journal, October 17, 1990. 

Scott, History of Passaic, Vol. II. 

“Doherty Nine vs. Peoples’ Park,” Passaic Daily News, July 17, 1915. 

“Banner Crowd at First Game, Boston Braves Defeat Doherty Silk Sox before 7,000 fans,” Passaic Daily News, April 30, 1917. 

“Sam Crane Pays His Respect to Silk Sox Team,” Passaic Daily News, July 11, 1917. 

“Doherty Silk Sox a Diamond Legend,” Passaic Herald-News, March 7, 1972. 

Letter, William J. Wurst to Eddie Mayo, September 4, 1990; Letter Eddie Mayo to William J. Wurst, September 21, 1990. William J. Wurst files. 

“Honus Wagner Dies at Age 81,” New York Times, December 6, 1955. 

“Honus Wagner, All-Time Great Shortstop, Dies,” Passaic Herald-News, December 6, 1955. 

Page 34: 

Richard Knowles Morris, John P. Holland 1941-1914: Inventor of the Modern Submarine. Columbia, South Carolina, 1998. 

Washington Evening Star, January 6, 1900. 

Courtlandt Canby and Richard K. Morris, “Father of the American Submarine,” American Heritage Magazine, February, 1961. 

“That Submarine Boat Again,” Paterson Daily Press, June 15, 1878. 

Simon Lake, The Submarine in War and Peace, Philadelphia, 1918. 

John P. Holland, Memoirs. Typescript prepared by Edward M. Graf from holographic original. Holland collection, Paterson Museum. 

“Holland Boat Leads Parade,” undated newspaper clipping, September, 1927. Holland collection, Paterson Museum. 

“Holland Sub in Parade, then Given to City,” Paterson Morning Call, October 3, 1927. 

“John P. Holland, Inventor, Dead, Succumbed last Night at his home in Newark to an Attack of Pneumonia,” Paterson Morning Call, August 13, 1914. 

“John P. Holland Dead; Inventor of Submarine Boat Succumbs in Newark at 72,” New York Times, August 13, 1914. 

“Father of the Modern Submarine Commemorated by New Gravestone,” New York Times, October 11, 1976. 

Page 35: 

Quarter Century Progress of New Jersey’s Leading Manufacturing Centers. New York, 1887. 


Paterson Evening News Centennial Edition. Paterson, 1892. 

Biographical data, “William Tims.” Graf Archive. 

Page 36: 

Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days – They were Terrible! New York, 1974. 

George H. Burke, “Looking Backwards,” Paterson Evening News, undated clipping c. 1935. Graf Archive. 

George H. Burke, “Looking Backwards,” Paterson Morning Call, September 4, 1939. 

History of the Liquor Interest of the State of New Jersey, State Liquor Dealers’ Protection League, 1895. 

Page 37: 


Souvenir History of the Passaic Fire Department, compiled and issued by the Passaic Daily News in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the organization of the 

department, November 1, 1894. Passaic, 1894. 

Passaic Citizen, 60th Anniversary Edition, May 7, 1981. 

Page 38: 

Mitchell, American Village. 

Paterson Evening News, May 2, 1961. 

Page 39: 

Souvenir Menu, Inauguration of the Alexander Hamilton Hotel at Paterson… on the evening of June 24, 1925. New York, 1925. 

Prospectus: Alexander Hamilton Hotel. Paterson, 1921. 

Paterson Press-Guardian, June 24, 1925. 

Page 40: 


Passaic Herald-News, special supplement, October 23, 1948. 

Page 41: 

Joseph Rydings, Country Walks in Many Fields. Paterson, 1934. 

Paterson Morning Call, October 19, 1932. 

“The Joseph Rydings Memorial,” Passaic County Historical Society Annual, Vol. II, No. 1, September, 1931. 

Page 42: 

Flavia Alaya, gen. ed. Gaetano Federici: The Artist as Historian. Paterson, 1980. 

Edward M. Graf, Research Notes on “Gaetano Federici.” Graf Archive. 

Paterson Daily Press, March 24, 1898. Graf Archive. 

Gaetano Federici, “The Inside Story of Sculpture,” address before the Passaic County Historical Society at Lambert Castle, November, 1938. Graf Archive. 

“Alois, Accomplice of Janton, Admits Kidnapping Miss Federici,” Paterson Morning Call, June 11, 1930. 

William M. Gordon, “The Cast is Clear,” Star Ledger, April 15, 1993. 

Page 43: 

Robin D. Chait, “Antique Bikes Are Riding High Again,” New York Times, July 13, 1975. 

Passaic Herald-News, special supplement, October 23, 1948. 

George S. Aldous, Passaic Reminiscences. Passaic, 1929. 

Barbara J. Mitchell, “When The Wheels Began To Turn,” Women’s Sport and Fitness Magazine, March, 1987. 

City of Passaic: Charter and Ordinances. Passaic, 1895. 

References Consulted ✦ 55

Page 44: 

Gerhard Spieler, “Peter Hasenclever, Industrialist,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, Vol. 59, No. 4, October 1941. 

James M. Ransom, Vanishing Ironworks of the Ramapos. New Brunswick, 1966. 

Frederick W. Ricord and William Nelson, eds. New Jersey Archives, Vol. IX. Newark, 1885. 

Adolf Hasenclever, comp. Peter Hasenclever aus Remscheid-Ehringhausen, ein Deutscher Kaufmann des 18. Jahrhunderts. Gotha, 1922. 

Hermann Hasenclever, Das Geschlect Hasenclever im ehemaligen Herzogtum Berg, in der Provinz Westfalen und zeitweilig in Schlesien. Remscheid and Leipzig, 1924. 

Page 45: 

“Bobby Burns Birthday,” Paterson Daily Guardian, January 26, 1876. 

Paterson Daily Guardian, June 16, 1870, January 12, 1876. 

Paterson Press, January 4, 1881, for accounts of curling matches. 

Robert W. Maynard and Louise Goeres, eds. Golden Anniversary Story of North Haledon. North Haledon, 1951. 

Paterson Guardian, January 26, 1876. 

Page 46: 

Antietam National Battlefield. Washington, 1950. 

Facts About the Civil War. Washington, 1959. 

Paterson Daily Guardian, September 17, 1903. 

“Hugh C. Irish” biographical sketch in William Nelson, ed. Abstract of Minutes of the Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Passaic. Paterson, 1875. 

Orrin VanDerHoven, “Hugh C. Irish,” undated newspaper account, c.1890. Graf Archive. 

Levi R. Trumbull, A History of Industrial Paterson. Paterson, 1882. 

Edward M. Graf, Short Sketches on Passaic County History. Paterson, 1935. 

Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: The Everyday Experience of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War. New York, 1906. 

Page 47: 

Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915. Philadelphia, 1984. 

James M. Ransom, Vanishing Ironworks of the Ramapos. New Brunswick, 1966. 

Page 48: 

“3000 at Dedication of Raymond Dam Tablet,” Paterson Evening News, July 15, 1931. 

“Unveil Raymond Memorial At Wanaque Dam Tomorrow,” Paterson Evening News, July 13, 1931. 

Dedication Program of the Thomas L. Raymond Tablet at Wanaque Water Supply System by North Jersey District Water Supply Commission, July 14, 1931. 

Wanaque Borough Diamond Jubilee Book, 1918-1993. Wanaque, 1993. 

North Jersey District Water Supply Commission Report for the Period May 5, 1916 to June 30, 1925. Newark, 1925. 

“Wanaque Reservoir One of Finest Engineering Feats in Eastern Part of U.S.,” Paterson Evening News, Mid-Century Edition, July 15, 1950. 

Page 49: 

Barbara Carper Lang, “Quarry for the Brownstone Era,” Royle Forum, March 15, 1964. 

Myra E. Lane, “The Famous Brownstone Quarries of Little Falls,” Little Falls Historical Society Newsletter, March, 1992. 

Passaic Freestone Company, Incorporated February 7, 1854. Prospectus. New York, 1854. 

Barbara N. Kalata, A Hundred Years, A Hundred Miles: New Jersey’s Morris Canal. Morristown, 1983. 

Page 50: 

Clifford C. Wendehack, “Early Dutch Houses of Northern New Jersey,” The White Pines Series of Architectural Monographs, 1925. 

Historic American Buildings Survey, Garretson House, Totowa Road, Totowa, Passaic County, New Jersey, HABS-NJ-480, Library of Congress. Washington, 1938. 

Rosalie Fellows Bailey, Pre-Revolutionary Dutch Houses and Families in Northern New Jersey and Southern New York. New York, 1936. 

Robert Erskine Map 56B. Photostat. Collections of the New-York Historical Society. 

“The Dutch Colonial Architecture of Northern New Jersey,” Stories of New Jersey, Federal Writers’ Project, 1937-38 series, Bulletin 18. 

Section of Passaic County Typographical Map, with notations c. 1926 by Albert H. Heusser, showing the position of Washington’s troops at the Dey Mansion, 

and nearby encampments in 1780. Graf Archive. 

Margaret Garretson Daly and Maureen Daly Jeter, “The Van Allen-Garretson Family of Totowa,” typescript prepared by Edward M. Graf from letter, Mrs. James 

Jeter, December 21, 1973. Graf Archive. 

Totowa Union, October 17, 1929. 

Paterson Morning Call, October 22, 1938. 

Page 51: 

Dorothy Voss, ed. “Paterson’s Track-and-Field Heroine,” New Jersey Bell Tel-news, June 1987. 

George Fitzmaurice, Eleanor Egg Interview, Paterson Evening News. Undated clipping. Graf Archive. 

“Eleanor Egg Captures Three Metropolitan Titles,” unidentified news clipping, c. July, 1929. Graf Archive. 

Flavia Alaya, gen. ed. Gaetano Federici: The Artist as Historian. Paterson, 1980. 

Brian Costello, “Top Ten Athletes of All Time, No. 10, Eleanor Egg, Track Star was Idol of Paterson,” Herald News, July 6, 2003. 

Page 52: 

Edward M. Graf, “The Locomotive Shops,” Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society, October, 1944. 

Charles A. Shriner, Random Recollections. Paterson, 1941. 

John T. Cunningham, “Early-To-Bed Rogers,” Capsules of New Jersey History. Trenton, 1974. 

Gene Coughlin, “Heartbreaks of Society: Jacob Rogers’ Futile Love,” The American Weekly, August 13, 1950. 

Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1989. 

John Zeaman, “The Met’s backhanded benefactor, Paterson man left fortune to museum,” The Record, April 15, 1990. 

“Rogers Property Cannot Be Sold,” Paterson Guardian, July 10, 1901. 


SPECIAL 

THANKS TO 

The Bergen Record 

SHARING THE HERITAGE 

Community Bus 

historic profiles of businesses, 

organizations, and families that have 

contributed to the development and 

The General Hospital 

Center at Passaic 

economic base of Passaic County 

State Farm Insurance Companies.......................................................58 

Berkeley College .............................................................................60 

Anthony S. Cupo Agency ..................................................................61 

Zozzaro Brothers, Inc. .....................................................................62 

The Passaic County Historical Society Museum and Library...................63 

Capitol Soap Corporation.................................................................64 

PSE&G .........................................................................................65 

Sikora & Sons, Inc. .........................................................................66 

Verizon-New Jersey .........................................................................67 

Record City/Recitco Home Entertainment ............................................68 

Holiday Inn Totowa.........................................................................69 

Thomas Electronics, Inc. ..................................................................70 

MPL Systems, Inc. ..........................................................................71 

North Jersey 

Newspaper Company 

St. Joseph’s Hospital & 

Medical Center 

St. Mary’s 

Hospital, Passaic 

Wayne General Hospital 

Wayne Subaru, Inc. 

Sharing the Heritage ✦ 57

❖ 

STATE FARM 

INSURANCE 

COMPANIES 

State Farm founder George Jacob 

Mecherle. 

Since the beginning of the 1960s, State 

Farm—the largest property insurer in the United 

States—has called Passaic County one of its 

favorite “hometowns.” State Farm’s Northeastern 

Regional Office, located on Route 23 in Wayne, 

New Jersey, is one of 27 regional offices located 

across America and Canada, serving the 

companies’ over 65 million policies. 

Like all great companies, State Farm started 

with a vision—a vision of its founder, a 45 yearold 

retired farmer named George Jacob 

Mecherle. In the early 1920s, Mecherle decided 

to form a company to sell affordable auto 

insurance to the farmers of Illinois. To highlight 

his goal, Mecherle picked the name “State Farm” 

when he founded the company on June 7, 1922. 

State Farm charged rural drivers lower rates 

than those charged to higher-risk city drivers. 

Instead of the traditional annual payment, the 

company asked for payment every six months 

and centralized its billing, giving field agents 

more time for service. And, unlike the many 

stock insurance companies of the 1920s, 

Mecherle’s State Farm was a mutual company 

owned by the very people it serviced. 

State Farm flourished beyond Mecherle’s 

expectations. The values he instilled—providing 

policyholders peace of mind and placing their 

interests above all others—helped attract loyal 

customers, agents, and employees. The company 

soon expanded beyond the auto market. In 

1929, the State Farm Life Insurance Company 

issued its first policy, and, in 1935, the State 

Farm Fire Insurance Company was organized. 

By the 1940s, State Farm had become the 

largest auto insurer in the country and was 

licensed to do business in 43 states. New Jersey 

joined that list at the end of 1940. 

State Farm began aggressively cultivating the 

Garden State market in the mid-fifties, and an 

office was established in Clifton’s Styertowne 

Shopping Center to support an agency force of 

18. Unlike the storefront agency locations found 

throughout Passaic County today, at that time, 

agents worked from home. State Farm saw the 

Clifton area as “an ideal location to service New 

Jersey’s population.” 

To gain a bigger metropolitan area market 

share, the company began sponsoring the Jack 

Benny Show in 1960. The advertising worked, 

and more customers began purchasing 

insurance from State Farm. To better service this 

area, a Northeastern Regional Office was 

needed, and State Farm settled on land in 

Wayne for its new location, citing the potential 

size and quality of Passaic County’s work force. 

On a frigid February day in 1961, ground 

was broken for the new regional office. About 

100 people—including former Freeholder 

Robert A. Roe and Wayne Mayor Richard 

Browne—braved snow-covered grounds to 

watch Northeastern Regional Vice President Jim 

Tindall turn the first shovel of dirt. 

The ten-acre plot overlooked Route 23, then 

a sleepy four-lane highway. Original plans called 

for the Regional Office to house 250 

employees—a number that would swell to 390 

by its opening. After completion, the building 

housed two large IBM 650 computers, six 

sewing machines to stitch correspondence to 

applications, and a four-room hotel available to 

visitors conducting State Farm business. 

The new Northeastern Regional Office was 

responsible for 200,000 policies spread over 


New Jersey, New York, and New England. By 

State Farm’s 50th anniversary in 1972, the 

Northeastern Region’s policy count grew to 

almost a million policies in force. 

The Wayne office expanded during the 1960s 

and ’70s to accommodate more employees. State 

Farm opened convenient drive-in claims centers 

throughout New Jersey (a Wayne claim center 

opened in 1989). By 1980, the Northeastern 

Regional Office expanded again—this time to an 

adjacent two-story building. 

State Farm’s next challenge in Passaic County 

would not be to expand, but to rebuild. 

On August 6, 1981, an early morning fire 

ripped through the Northeastern Regional 

Office’s record storage room, causing $6 million 

in damage and destroying 10,000 square feet, 

including the mechanical and electrical areas. 

The building was evacuated without any 

injuries, though several of Wayne’s fifty 

volunteer firefighters were treated for smoke 

inhalation. Though flames spared parts of the 

building, lingering soot and water damage did 

not. Employees cleaned their areas, and files 

and documents were dried with hair dryers. By 

August 18, service to 98 percent of the Region’s 

1.8 million policyholders was restored. 

The 1990s produced perhaps the most significant 

events in the Northeastern Region’s history. 

Due to increased business, in September 

1991, the Northeastern Region divided, and a 

new North Atlantic Region was established in 

Malta, New York, to service State Farm business 

in Upstate New York and New England. The 

Northeastern Regional Office continued to 

service business in New Jersey, New York City, 

and Long Island. 

Another milestone event was the company’s 

creation of the State Farm Indemnity Company 

on October 1, 1992, to serve only New Jersey 

auto customers. Wayne Agent Joe Kneis, a State 

Farm Crystal Excellence Award winner, wrote 

the Indemnity Company’s first policy. 

State Farm continued to grow in the Garden 

State. On June 7, 1997, the Northeastern 

Region’s 2,700 employees and nearly 400 agents 

celebrated State Farm’s seventy-fifth 

anniversary—a three-quarter-of-a-century mark 

of commitment to its policyholders. And in 

October 1997, State Farm Indemnity Company 

marked its five-year anniversary. 

Today, under the leadership of Regional Vice 

President Terry Welsh, State Farm policyholders 

throughout Passaic County and the rest of New 

Jersey enjoy enhanced claim service, supported 

by 24-hour, seven-day-a-week service. 

State Farm agents are now offering new 

services, along with traditional insurance 

products. The company’s aim is to be a leader 

not only in the insurance industry, but also in the 

financial services arena. But what will never 

change is State Farm’s “good neighbor” 

mission—to help people manage the risks of 

everyday life, recover from the unexpected, and 

realize their dreams. 

On February 3, 1999, State Farm announced 

plans to move its Northeastern Regional 

Office from Passaic County and build a new 

five-story, 400,000 square foot building in 

Parsippany, New Jersey. The company moved 

into a new building in 2001, but the older 

Wayne claims center continued to operate and 

service area customers, as will the eleven 

dedicated State Farm agents in cities throughout 

Passaic County. 

State Farm’s decision to move its regional 

office was not an easy one. But with the company’s 

growth (the State Farm Indemnity Company 

became the Garden State’s largest auto insurer in 

1999), continued expansion was not feasible at 

the Wayne location. However, with the new 

regional office only fifteen minutes away, State 

Farm expects to continue to employ a large percentage 

of workers living in Passaic County. 

State Farm is proud of its nearly 40-year association 

with its original New Jersey hometown 

and plans to continue serving the needs of its valued 

Passaic County customers for years to come. 

❖ 

State Farm’s Passaic County agents. 


BERKELEY 

COLLEGE 

BERKELEY COLLEGE MEANS 

SUCCESS FOR GRADUATES 

AND BUSINESSES ALIKE 

Berkeley College is one of the most 

exciting, fastest growing coeducational 

institutions in the New Jersey and New 

York metropolitan area and has been 

enjoying record enrollments. Expansion 

plans have been made, adding more 

classrooms, more offices, residence 

facilities, and even an auditorium at 

Berkeley College’s main campus on 

Garret Mountain. 

“Wherever an organization is on the 

continuum from explosive growth to 

downsizing, to managing global issues, 

to managing internal issues, our 

programs can offer many solutions,” says 

Kevin Luing, President of Berkeley’s 

three New Jersey campuses. “There is a 

very useful, mutually beneficial 

symbiosis with Berkeley and the New 

Jersey business community. It’s a benefit 

that directly effects the business bottom line. 

What can effect profits more than an extremely 

well educated workforce?” 

With a consistent commitment to high caliber 

education for over sixty-five years, Berkeley 

College has always been a valuable resource to 

New Jersey’s business. But today it’s more 

valuable than ever, helping thousands of students 

achieve excellent careers and fulfilled lives, 

and helping hundreds of businesses hire 

knowledgeable employees, even helping them 

train their own personnel. 

Berkeley is available to students full-time, 

part-time, days, evenings, and weekends at 

five locations in New 

Jersey and New York 

and on-site for many 

businesses. Berkeley 

College is comprised 

of five diverse 

locations, giving students 

the choices and 

opportunities of both 

suburban and urban 

campuses—West 

Paterson, Waldwick, 

and Woodbridge, New 

Jersey, and White Plains and New York City in 

New York. Students may receive associate degrees 

in business administration with specializations in 

accounting; office systems management, 

marketing; management; travel and tourism; 

paralegal studies; health information management; 

fashion marketing and management; international 

business; hotel and restaurant management; and 

interior design. 

Today, business relies on Berkeley for high 

quality, outcomes-oriented programs in 

computer instruction and business competency 

development, Berkeley educates the corporate 

world on the latest advances and most 

sophisticated tools and techniques. The 

Corporate Services Division can train on site and 

deliver our offerings in a relaxed meeting 

atmosphere, or we can run classes in our 

facilities. Berkeley College’s technology experts 

conduct needs assessments and provide software, 

hardware, networking and telecommunications 

services to enhance organizational productivity. 

Berkeley was founded in 1931 in East Orange 

and in 1965, the reins were passed to Larry Luing, 

now Chairman of the Board. Since then, 

thousands of graduates have gone on to rewarding 

careers and happy, fulfilled lives. 


ANTHONY S. 

CUPO AGENCY 

In Passaic County, the Anthony S. Cupo 

Agency represents not only a family of firms (the 

Clifton-based Cupo Companies) serving a 

variety of needs of the local community but also 

the Cupo family itself that is dedicated to serving 

the people of the county-wide community. 

The Cupo insurance agency itself was the 

offshoot of Anthony and Janet Cupo’s first venture, 

a stationery and office supply store in Clifton’s 

Botany section that was started in the historic year 

of 1941. As that war-torn decade progressed into 

the dramatic growth of the postwar years, 

diversified insurance needs supplanted stationery 

as the primary products of the Cupo agency. 

Today, the Anthony S. Cupo Agency is helping 

clients plan for the future by focusing on such 

services as long-term care plans, financial and 

estate planning, as well as affordable individual 

healthcare programs as fewer employers provide 

company-paid health benefits. That part of the 

firm’s business expanded in 1996 by acquisition 

of the long-time Clifton firm of Raymond Luchko 

Insurance. Four years later, in February 2000, the 

Cupo Agency acquired the Smith Agency of 

Clifton, which handled all aspects of personal 

insurance lines as well as commercial policies 

In 1950, as Clifton underwent a transformation 

from a farm community to major suburban 

residential developments, Anthony Cupo seized 

on new opportunities by opening Cupo Realty, 

which fueled the residential development of many 

of Clifton former farming tracts. The Cupos’ son 

Thomas joined the family enterprises in 1957 and 

began expanding the scope of the insurance 

services being offered, as well as growing the 

business itself through acquisition of other firms. 

One such acquisition in 1965 was of Brown Travel 

(which itself dated back to 1891). The diversified 

Cupo interests served the insurance (primarily life, 

auto and property but increasingly into the 

business) needs of local residents, helped them 

buy or sell their homes, and arranged travel for 

business and pleasure, which with the advent of 

the jet airliner was no longer the exclusive domain 

of the wealthy. 

Tom’s interests took him into public life as well, 

and he served Clifton as a council member for 

eight years while also finding time to serve as 

president of the Clifton Chamber of Commerce (in 

which he was instrumental in the merger that 

formed today’s North Jersey Regional Chamber). 

He also provided his special brand of leadership 

and generosity to many community organizations 

including the United Way, UNICO, and the Boys 

& Girls Club of Clifton for which he was 

recognized with numerous civic awards. 

Crest Management and Development was 

added in 1978 and has become the engine for 

such developments in Clifton as the fifty-unit 

Botany Estates condominium project, Renaissance 

Manor (the city’s first Urban Development 

Assistance Grant project carved out of the old 

Magor Car plant site), and Hamilton Crest town 

house development on Valley Road. The firm is 

now developing professional office space, such as 

the beautiful Atrium on Route 3. 

With a strong core of professional business 

managers and Tom Cupo at the helm as chief 

executive, his children Allyson Cupo Hughes, 

Jeff Cupo, and Susan Cupo are now emerging as 

the new leadership of the Cupo Agency and 

related companies for the twenty-first century. 

❖ 

The staff of the Anthony S. Cupo 

Agency, December 2003. 


ZOZZARO 

BROTHERS, 

INC. 

If CNN’s Ted Turner is supposed to have been 

in Cable TV before it was “cool,” then the 

Zozzaro Family was in recycling before it 

became “hot.” 

Zozzaro Brothers, Inc., is a subsidiary of 

Zozzaro Industries, the diversified Clifton 

company that operates Confi-Shred Division, 

which deals in the destruction of records, 

Cellufiber International, Ltd., a fiber export 

operation that ships worldwide, Larral 

Associates, Inc., which deals in wholesale and 

retail textiles and textile services, and Circle Five 

Associates, LLC, a real estate holding group. But 

Zozzaro Brothers is the unit upon which the 

family’s fortunes have rested since 1921 when 

John Zozzaro and his wife, Frances, emigrated to 

America from Sassano, Italy and purchased a 

small plot of land off Hazel Street in Clifton. 

John started a scrap business that would bear 

his family name for more than half a century. 

From that small scrap yard the elder Zozzaro 

started his “American Dream.” He was able to 

build a house and support his wife and four 

children. At the end of World War II his sons, 

James and Philip, returned from overseas and 

joined their father and a family business was 

born. They collected and then sold scrap paper, 

rags, metals, anything that had some value. John 

retired in 1950 following a devastating fire. 

Undaunted, by September 1950, Jim and Phil 

had rebuilt the plant, installed their first electric 

baler, purchased their first forklift, and 

incorporated Zozzaro Brothers, Inc., “Paper Mill 

Supplies.” When Phil left the business in the 

mid-1960s, first Jim’s son, James Jr., and then the 

eldest son, John, and finally his two youngest 

sons, Lawrence and Allan, all joined in the family 

business after completing their college education. 

With his sons at his side, Jim continued to 

expand Zozzaro Brothers, Inc. They were now 

“recycling” materials, and the term was just 

beginning to enter the language. By the mid- 

1970s, the firm had the first automatic baler in 

New Jersey, the state’s first roll-off container 

system in use for paper drives, and the nation’s 

first mandatory curbside collection program. The 

“junkmen” had become full-fledged recyclers. 

With the growth of the environmental 

movement and the younger Zozzaros’ realization 

that usable landfills were becoming increasingly 

scarce, the firm dedicated itself to develop 

systematic and comprehensive approaches to 

solving local governments’ problems of 

disposing great volumes of waste materials. 

Today, Zozzaro Brothers, Inc., employs 85 

people and is the lead subsidiary of Zozzaro 

Industries. The firm is among the largest 

shippers from Port Newark, sending recycled 

materials to the Pacific Rim and beyond, as well 

as to mills throughout North America. “Looking 

ahead,” says President John L. Zozzaro, “it is 

obvious that the company must continue its 

rapid expansion in order to meet the challenge 

of ensuring an optimum ecology in New Jersey 

as it enters the new millennium.” 

The Four Zozzaro Sons also have a dream…. 


A historical society is not a mere 

antiquarian’s attic. It is the combined 

memory of a community. 

Founded in Spring 1926 by a devoted band 

of history-minded individuals, the Passaic 

County Historical Society’s purpose is to 

maintain a museum and library for the 

preservation and utilization of historical 

materials, hold meetings, arrange lectures and 

programs, and generally encourage the study, 

discussion, and publication of county history. 

Toward that end, the Passaic County 

Historical Society has worked in tandem with the 

Passaic County Freeholders to restore Lambert 

Castle, the opulent mansion constructed in 1892- 

93 by silk magnate Catholina Lambert. It was 

here, on the eastern slope of Garret Mountain, 

that Lambert built Belle Vista for displaying his 

impressive collection of European paintings and 

objets d’art. Lambert pursued the agreeable life of 

an art connoisseur until his death. Afterwards, 

the Castle’s exquisite paintings and furnishings 

were auctioned. The Society has attempted to 

recapture the grandeur of Lambert’s era by 

restoring paintings from its collections, and 

placing them in the Castle atrium. Today, 

museum visitors come away with a glimpse of the 

Castle’s storied past. 

Since 1934, the Castle has sheltered the 

Society’s museum and library. By means of 

changing exhibits and displays, the Society 

seeks to interpret the history of the entire 

county, from the eighteenth century to more 

recent times. The Society’s research library, 

endowed with a generous bequest from 

Elizabeth Ann Beam, contains an extensive 

collection of books, manuscripts, maps, and 

genealogy records of Passaic County and 

adjacent counties. 

The Society is a private, not-for-profit 

501(c)(3) educational institution, which 

operates and manages Lambert Castle, a 

property owned by the County of Passaic. The 

Castle is located in Garret Mountain Reservation, 

3 Valley Road, Paterson, New Jersey 07503. 

Please call 973-247-0085, or access the Society’s 

website, http://www.lambertcastle.org for 

more information. 

❖ 

THE PASSAIC 

COUNTY 

HISTORICAL 

SOCIETY 

MUSEUM AND 

LIBRARY 

Above: Silk magnate Catholina 

Lambert, c. 1920. 



Below: “Belle Vista,” Lambert 

Castle in Garret Mountain 

Reservation, Paterson. 




CAPITOL SOAP 

CORPORATION 

A family business, passed through three 

generations, is based on trust, is the case of 

Clifton’s Capitol Soap Corporation, between 

father, son and grandson. 

Recognizing the need for cleaning 

compounds that could be used in a variety of 

manufacturing and commercial settings, James 

G. Capobianco started the business that would 

become Capitol Soap Corporation in New York 

City in then early 1940s. Serving as a 

distributor, Capobianco sold other companies’ 

products to his clients. Then in 1948, he moved 

the company to an almost rural community in 

Passaic County, Clifton, and began producing 

Capitol Soap’s own soaps, detergents and 

sweeping compounds. 

Joined by his son, James J., who is now board 

chairman of the company, Capobianco 

expanded the breadth of the company’s service 

area throughout the New York-New Jersey 

Metropolitan Area. The company has never been 

large in size, currently employing fifteen people, 

but it is one of the leading janitorial supply 

businesses in the region. 

Now under the direction of another James, in 

this case James F., president of Capitol Soap 

Corporation and grandson of the founder, the 

company is expanding into new frontiers 

outside the Northeastern States and indeed 

going beyond the borders of the United States 

via catalogues and distributors. 

Says the young president; “My father and 

grandfather had a great deal of foresight. They 

recognized the environmental implications of 

our business and used biodegradable soaps 

and detergents. Today our focus is on nonpolluting 

products.” 

He improved products, such as sweeping 

compounds; improve the health and well being 

of employees by cutting down on particles and 

contaminants in the air. “That’s why we are 

looking outside the U. S. as important markets. 

As countries in Latin America industrialize, 

for instance, they will need our products to 

ensure the cleanliness of their plants for quality 

control purposes, as well as for the health of 

their workers.” 

James F. says the company is broadening its 

base beyond the industrial and commercial sectors 

by reaching out to educational and healthcare 

facilities. He noted that both private and public 

schools benefit from using sweeping products to 

cut down on asthma-inducing irritants in the air, 

as well as a variety of cleaning compounds, hand 

soaps, and ice and snow melters. 

“All of these products make a healthier, safer 

workplace,” says the young president, “while 

helping preserve the environment. Indeed, most 

of our products are made from naturally based, 

recycled materials. Even the barrels they are 

placed into are recycled!” 

Celebrating over fifty years as a member of 

the Passaic County community, Clifton-based 

Capitol Soap Corporation is geared up to keep 

twenty-first century businesses and institutions 

clean and healthy. 


The City of Paterson’s roots are in power, by 

virtue of the waterpower of the Great Falls that 

provided the force for late eighteenth and early 

nineteenth century manufacturing. While the 

city grew as a residential and business center, as 

well as the county seat of government, more 

efficient and reliable sources were needed to 

power the industrial plants and commercial and 

residential districts. 

With the formation of Public Service Electric 

and Gas Company in 1903, several Paterson gas 

and electric operations were folded into the new 

public utility. The city and most of Passaic 

County have been served by PSE&G ever since. 

For over a century, PSE&G has faithfully 

served Passaic County. The company has led the 

industry in technological advances to provide 

the levels of customer service—and output of 

electric and gas energy—needed by the 

expanding New Jersey economy. Currently 

PSE&G serves more than 300,000 electric and 

gas customers in the county. 

And PSE&G does more than just deliver 

energy. The company is instrumental in 

promoting the public policy goals of state 

government, including energy conservation 

programs and providing grants to community 

action programs for the weatherization of lowincome 

homes. In addition, PSE&G is also a 

good corporate neighbor in Passaic County by 

supporting local educational programs with 

donations of computers to schools, providing 

educational presentations, assisting grassroots 

organizations, and offering mentoring and 

leadership training for students. 

Major changes have taken place requiring 

utilities to offer consumers an opportunity 

to choose from whom they buy their electricity. 

PSE&G, meanwhile, continues to deliver 

the electricity and gas in its territory. 

Competition has increased consumer choice, 

controlled costs, and fostered product and 

service innovations. 

PSE&G employs about 6,400 individuals, 

almost all of whom work out of facilities located 

in 52 New Jersey communities, including 

Paterson and Clifton. More than four hundred 

PSE&G employees live in Passaic County. 

PSE&G believes that its highly trained, 

experience workforce is its strongest asset as the 

company faces new competition, while the 

public utility continues to provide safe, reliable 

service to residents of Passaic County and 

throughout New Jersey. 

PSE&G 


SIKORA & 

SONS, INC. 

Since 1925 the source for church and 

religious items within Passaic County, and now 

across the country, has been a small, familyowned 

firm named Philip E. Sikora & Sons, 

Inc., known as Sikora’s. 

The City of Passaic in the middle of the 

“Roaring 20s” was well known for its growing 

textile and electronics industries. With the 

economic upsurge of the area, the small, 

compact manufacturing center was also known 

as the “City of Churches,” with dozens of houses 

of worship of most Christian denominations as 

well as many Jewish synagogues woven as 

jewels into the fabric of the city’s diverse ethnic 

neighborhoods. German, Irish, Hungarian, 

Polish, Russian, Italian, Eastern European 

Jewish, and many other nationalities and ethnic 

groups gave a special seasoning to their 

own houses of worship. Among the Roman 

Catholic parishes, in particular, there were 

predominantly Italian, Polish, and German 

congregations reflecting the make-up of each 

neighborhood...and all bringing their own 

customs and identify to their local churches. 

Against this backdrop of religious diversity, 

Philip Sikora, a reporter with the Passaic Herald 

News, recognized the need for a supplier of 

religious goods. He began operations on Passaic 

Street in 1925. The growing business would 

relocate four times before settling on the current 

spot on Market Street in the mid 1950s. 

From the very beginning, Sikora’s has been a 

true family business. Early on, Sikora would be 

calling on churches (where he employed his 

knowledge of Slovak and Polish) while his wife 

Mary and their daughters—Mary, Joan, and 

Claire—minded the store. 

Just like other business people during the 

Great Depression, Sikora and his family 

struggled. But with their specialized market and 

growing reputation for quality and service, they 

managed to muddle through that economic 

cataclysm. World War II presented other 

challenges because sources for specialized 

religious objects were cut off. To broaden their 

services, Sikora’s began framing both religious 

and secular artworks. 

After the war, the Sikora sons, Edward and 

Philip T., became more active in the business. In 

the late ’50s, Arthur Brown married Mary, the 

oldest daughter and buyer for the store. As 

Edward and Philip pursued other careers, the 

Browns became directly responsible for 

management of the business. Brown was 

instrumental in expanding merchandise 

selections, offering specialized goods and 

publishing catalogues of merchandise carried by 

Sikora’s beyond North Jersey into far away 

places such as Hawaii and Guam as clergy were 

called to those locations. 

Today, Sikora’s offers liturgical vestments, 

altar appointments, candles, furnishings such as 

baptismal fonts, as well as goods for laypersons 

(such as memorial, baptism and confirmation 

gifts and cards), books, art, music, and 

videotapes. The success of the catalogue 

brought expanded staffing, now up to twentythree 

persons, including Mr. and Mrs. Brown 

and their three daughters, Barbara, Patricia and 

Theresa Brown Calabresse. In addition to 

hundreds of churches in North Jersey, who 

look to Sikora’s for the best in religious 

articles, some of the most special clients include 

military chaplains across the nation and outside 

the U.S. borders as well as the federal 

prison system. 

On any given day, clergy members 

are rubbing elbows with laypeople as they 

browse through the store on Market Street, 

while staff takes telephone, mail and fax orders. 

You may visit Sikora’s on the Internet at 

www.sikoras.com. 


Verizon-New Jersey has served Garden State 

residents and businesses since 1927. Today, it 

provides advanced telecommunications services, 

which have carried Passaic County and the entire 

State into the twenty-first century. 

Through its parent company, Verizon-New 

Jersey is a member of the largest regional 

telecommunications network serving the 

Northeastern United States and extending 

throughout the nation. As far-reaching as 

the company may become, in New Jersey its 

focus continues to be on its customers and 

delivering the highest quality service and 

technology available. 

The company has accelerated the availability 

of new technologies and services to New Jersey 

customers as the result of an innovative program 

called Opportunity New Jersey (ONJ). The 

program was created in 1993 in cooperation 

with the Board of Public Utilities and Verizon 

already has invested nearly $4 billion in New 

Jersey as well as hiring 3,600 employees. 

We have installed more than one million 

miles of fiber-optic lines in ninety-six percent of 

New Jersey’s municipalities. That’s more than 

one-and-a-half times the amount of fiber-optic 

cable installed in all of California. Our network 

is now one hundred percent digital. All of these 

network improvements mean that our 

customers will have access to the latest 

telecommunications services. 

As part of the ONJ plan, Verizon 

implemented Access NJ(sm) in which the 

company invested more than $80 million to 

bring advanced telecommunications services, 

including interactive video and high speed data 

transfer, to every school and public library 

served by Verizon by year-end 2001. We 

connected schools in the State’s twenty-eight 

special needs districts to the network by the end 

of 1999. In addition, we offer schools and 

libraries up to $50 million in discounts for 

network services. 

At Verizon-New Jersey, we see ourselves as 

more than a service provider for New Jersey’s 

businesses and residents. Verizon contributes to 

statewide and local charitable and civic 

organizations, including the Passaic County 

Historical Society. 

Verizon-New Jersey also provides leadership 

in education by initiating a variety of programs 

to help New Jersey students access the latest 

computer and telecommunications technology. 

Further, we are investing our time and resources 

in school-to-work programs that help high 

school students and people entering the 

workforce prepare for successful careers. 

Verizon-New Jersey employs thousands of 

New Jersey residents. Our shareholders 

nationwide and worldwide include more than 

140,000 New Jersey residents alone. 

Passaic County, the State of New Jersey and 

Verizon nurtured each other. Stretching from 

the era of crank-style wooden telephones to the 

Space Age, the company, its employees and the 

communities we serve enjoy a mutually 

beneficial relationship that has carried us 

though many challenges and opportunities. 

VERIZON- 

NEW JERSEY 


RECORD CITY/ 

RECITCO HOME 

ENTERTAINMENT 

A teenager’s love of classic rock ‘n’ roll in the 

1950s led to a career covering over forty years 

and gave rise to a company that now offers pop 

music across international borders. As a teen in 

the late fifties, John Dent of Lodi was always on 

the prowl for R&R “45s” by such artists as Sam 

Cooke, Drifters, Everly Brothers, and Buddy 

Holly. He would purchase his music at the 

legendary Frankie’s Market in Lodi. 

In 1958, Philip Weissman opened his first 

record concession in the Silver Rod Drug Store 

in Paterson. The following year, Phil opened 

another concession for his wife Bea in the 

Passaic Silver Rod Drug Store. Dent’s mother 

noticed the new record concession in Passaic 

and told John that they were selling records for 

sixty-nine cents. John visited the new 

concession and was enthralled and quickly 

became one of their best customers. “Hanging 

out” at the record department, young John 

became more familiar with the inventory than 

the owners. John helped the Weissman’s move 

the record concession to 6 Lexington Avenue in 

1960. It became the first Record City. 

John graduated high school in 1960 and got 

a job, but was unhappy with his first job. He 

agreed to Mrs. Weissman’s invitation to work at 

Record City. He would be trained at the Paterson 

outlet and then work in Passaic. John left 

Record City after a few years to work at other 

retailers, but returned on a temporary basis after 

military service. 

In the 1970s, John bought the Passaic 

Record City store and used it as the foundation 

to build his company, Recitco Home 

Entertainment Company. 

Joseph and Andre Hunter, brothers who also 

grew up in Passaic and gravitated like John to 

the little shop as teenagers and brought the 

sweet sounds of soul and disco to Record City, 

joined John in his business venture. 

In 1981, John formed a partnership with 

Joseph and Andre, purchased the record 

shops in Paterson and started Recitco Home 

Entertainment. Today, Recitco is an amalgam 

of three record stores (the Passaic store has been 

at 4 Lexington Avenue since 1976), plus 

two shops in Paterson, a card and gift shop, an 

export company that sends music and video to 

the four corners of the world, an online 

entertainment site, and an investment and 

real estate holdings company. 

Acknowledging that the music may 

have changed over the past forty years, 

John says that the love of music is the 

common thread that binds himself, his 

partners, Joe and Andre, and the staff in 

Passaic and Paterson together. Today, 

music is available online and in large mall 

stores. But there remains nothing more 

enjoyable than going to a local record 

shop like Record City, where everyone 

knows your name and the people in the 

store have an intelligent knowledge of all 

music and are familiar with your taste in 

music. Nothing can—or will—replace the 

local record shop. 


The stretch of US Highway 46 running 

through the Borough of Totowa is one of the 

busiest commercial and retail areas of Passaic 

County and indeed of the entire nation. From 

auto dealers to fast-food restaurants, “big box” 

office supply stores to service stations, all 

prosper along the banks of this stream of 

vehicular traffic. 

The Holiday Inn Totowa itself anchors an 

eclectic retail complex that includes a Ski Barn 

and a CompUSA store. But doing the 

unexpected is to be expected of this hotel that 

has transformed itself into one of the most upto-date 

lodging and entertainment facilities in 

North Jersey. 

First to be considered is Holiday Inn Totowa’s 

unique “Doc’s Lounge” that creates an ambience 

of a year-round Halloween Party in the midst of 

a rainforest. Featuring top live banks and DJs, 

Doc’s has become a favorite of travelers, local 

residents and business people alike who seek an 

imaginative escape from their everyday 

existence. Even more than its trend-setting 

lounge, however, the hotel itself has become a 

focal point. Whether business travelers from 

near and far, local businesses and organizations 

seeking ideal meeting accommodations or 

thousands of people drawn to the are for 

weddings and other events held at the Holiday 

Inn and nearby catering establishments such as 

the Bethwood, New Jersey’s foremost corporate 

banquet and conference center. 

Holiday Inn Totowa boasts over three 

hundred rooms with the latest in amenities for 

the modern traveler including data ports with 

high speed Internet access, as well as full 

business desks and ergonomic chairs so the 

traveler can conduct business from his or her 

room without missing a beat. 

For business or pleasure travelers, the 

location is ideal with easy access to Routes 3 and 

23, the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey 

Turnpike, I-80, TransHudson crossing, Newark 

International Airport, and the greatest 

concentration of businesses anywhere. 

All work and no play is not the best 

prescription for business travelers. Those 

staying at the Holiday Inn Totowa can play up a 

storm at the nearby Meadowlands Sports 

Complex, which boats the NHL champion New 

Jersey Devils, the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, as well 

as one of the best horseracing venues in the 

country at the Meadowlands Racetrack. For 

those who like excitement of a different type, 

you may visit the many shopping venues from 

the Willowbrook Mall to the unique outlet 

shops in nearby Secaucus. Plus it is a clinch to 

get to the entertainment and cultural capital of 

the work in New York City or high stakes 

Atlantic City. 

Whether for a business conference, a first 

class wedding or a class reunion, Holiday Inn 

Totowa has become the first choice for the 

perfect place to stay. 

HOLIDAY INN 

TOTOWA 


THOMAS 

ELECTRONICS, 

INC. 

Established in 1948 in Passaic, New Jersey, 

Thomas Electronics has produced more than 12 

million picture tubes advancing from its early 

10-inch round design to 25-inch diagonal, 

rectangular screens. 

In 1960, H. A. Ketchum, who previously had 

been with International Latex Corporation, 

acquired the firm. Two years later, production of 

CRTs for television was discontinued. Instead, 

the company’s activities were focused on such 

non-entertainment CRT fields as avionics, radar, 

medical imaging and test instruments for space 

exploration, military and civilian aviation 

purposes. Ketchum is still active in the company 

although his sons, David and Douglas Ketchum 

are responsible for ongoing management of 

the firm. 

With rapid growth in the early 1960s, the 

company relocated to a larger, modern facility in 

Wayne, New Jersey. The company operates two 

other plants in New York State and Europe. At 

each location, ongoing Research & 

Development activities have resulted in further 

advances in CRT applications. The highest 

standards of quality and professionalism are 

maintained throughout the company. 

Currently, Thomas Electronics CRTs are 

utilized in a broad array of applications including: 

• Avionics: Thomas CRTs is utilized in both 

commercial and military operations 

including flight management systems, Heads 

Up Displays and Head Mounted Displays. 

Jetliners, fighter aircraft, helicopters and the 

space shuttles incorporate Thomas CRTs. 

• Radar: Air traffic control and shipboard radar 

systems are built around Thomas CRTs. They 

require specific high brightness and rugged 

construction, and Thomas CRTs are in use by 

this nation’s FAA as well as by European and 

Asian countries for airport towers and air 

traffic control centers. 

• Simulation: Projection CRTs and headmounted 

CRTs are used to create Virtual 

Reality for training systems to simulate realworld 

situations. 

• Medical Imaging: Thomas Electronics is 

pursuing new markets for very high 

resolution, high contrast CRTs in capturing 

and storing X-rays and other diagnostic 

techniques at hospitals and clinics. 

• Photo Imaging: Photography is also 

increasingly captured, stored and processed 

electronically. Thomas Electronics CRTs are 

used in film development centers, computer 

graphics equipment and film recorders. 

• Test Equipment: Oscilloscopes use CRTs to 

display electronic signals, and Thomas CRTs 

are used to analyze high frequencies in 

aircraft and communication test equipment. 

Thomas Electronics serves a broad and 

diverse market with more than five thousand 

different models. The company’s active 

and dedicated research efforts are a testament 

to commitment to the future and to its 

integrated partnership with customers in Passaic 

County and around the world. You may visit 

Thomas Electronics on the Internet at 

www.thomaselectronics.com. 


The complex environment of information 

technology in today’s highly competitive world 

has become a critical business element in 

the survival of corporations throughout all 

parts of the glove. Effective senior level 

management today understands the significance 

in connecting business with information 

technology and in that regard also 

acknowledges that they often need to rely upon 

expertise from outside their organization. To 

that end, corporations turn more and more 

to world class consulting organizations like 

MPL Systems Inc. 

Founded in 1974 by Michael P. Lavorgna, 

MPL Systems Inc. was literally started from a 

home office in Totowa. The company was 

created to deliver solutions to companies of 

all sizes and to build and maintain long-term 

client relationships. Today, MPL Systems is 

one hundred percent woman-owned and 

endeavors to maintain a diverse workforce. 

Driven today by company President and CEO, 

Kelly Lavorgna, the company has become 

focused toward delivering IT solutions that 

address today’s business objectives. In the 

current economy, attracting and retaining clients 

and engendering loyalty are essential. With the 

convergence of voice, data and video, 

corporations are faced with great challenges and 

it is therefore crucial that today’s solutions 

encompass state-of-the-art technology while 

focusing on client’s objectives of reducing costs, 

increasing productivity and improving customer 

service. From the company’s inception, it 

was recognized that the key to success stems 

from building a team of employees that are 

dedicated to providing consistent best-in-class 

customer service. 

Today, MPL offers a broad range of network 

services and specializes in delivering scalable, 

value-add solutions to Fortune 1000 companies 

as well as many local- and family-owned 

businesses. The company has provided 

solutions to scores of small to mid-sized 

companies on the Eastern seaboard as well as 

Passaic County for three decades. 

MPL 

SYSTEMS 

INC. 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR 


Edward A. Smyk is the Passaic County Historian. In 1987, he was presented with the New Jersey Local Historians’ Award of 

Distinction by the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Historical Society, and the League of Historical Societies of New 

Jersey. He has been affiliated with the Passaic County Historical Society since 1962. In 1997, he was elected an Honorary Life Trustee 

of the society. 

ABOUT THE COVER 

Paterson from Monument Heights by Henri LeJune, 1906. A gift to the Passaic County Historical Society by Charles Coene, 1967. 


About the Author 


Edward A. Smyk is the Passaic County Historian. In 1987, he was presented 

with the New Jersey Local Historians’ Award of Distinction by the New Jersey 

Historical Commission, the New Jersey Historical Society, and the League of 

Historical Societies of New Jersey. He has been affiliated with the Passaic 

County Historical Society since 1962. In 1997, he was elected an Honorary 

Life Trustee of the society. 

ISBN 0-9654999-4-4 

Cover: Paterson from Monument Heights, by Henri LeJune, 1906. 

Gift to the Passaic County Historical Society by Charles Coene, 1967.

Historic Passaic County

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