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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
NEW JERSEY'S position as a main corridor of eastern United States
has broadly affected her political, social, economic, and cultural
history. Lying between two metropolises, New York and Philadelphia, the
State from early times has been the highway and often the stopping place
for hordes of people of many races, religions, and cultures.
This location has brought both embarrassment and blessing. Governor
Woodrow Wilson, who thought of New Jersey as "a sort of laboratory in
which the best blood is prepared for other communities to thrive upon,"
gave the key to the State's history when he remarked in 1911 that "we
have always been inconvenienced by New York on the one hand and
Philadelphia on the other . . ." He called the State "the fighting center of
the most important social questions of our time" and explained that "the
whole suburban question . . . the whole question of the regulation of corporations and the right attitude of all trades, their formation and conduct
... center in New Jersey more than any other single State of the Union."
The first white man to see, and possibly to land on, the New Jersey
shore is believed to have been the Florentine navigator, Giovanni da Verrazano, sailing in the employ of the French Crown. In 1524 he is said to
have anchored his vessel off Sandy Hook and with a small boat explored
upper New York Bay as far as, or almost as far as, the New Jersey shore.
Almost a century later, in 1609, Henry Hudson, employed by Holland,
sailed the Half into New York Bay, dispatched a sounding party as
far as Newark Bay and then sailed up the Hudson River. Within a few
years the Dutch sent out trading expeditions and established a post at Manhattan, the base for the invasion of New Jersey. The first known outpost
west of the Hudson River was the trading station of Bergen, founded in
1618 by colonists from the island. Five years later Captain Cornelius
Jacobsen Mey, who had sailed into the Delaware River in 1614, set up
Fort Nassau on the east bank of the river, near the present site of Gloucester. Mey's name survives in Cape May.
Actual settlement of the unnamed New Jersey section of New Netherland was slow. Accordingly, the West India Company offered the feudal
title of patroon and a grant of land to any member who would establish a
specific number of settlers. In 1629 the company granted to the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, Michael Pauw (Pauuw), a tract on the shore opposite Manhattan where his agent, Cornelius Van Vorst, began to develop an
estate called Pavonia. At the same time two other patroons, Godyn and
Blommaert, shared a grant on both sides of Delaware Bay. Both attempts
were futile, and Indian raids in 1643 drove all whites across to Manhattan
from the Jersey side. By 1645 the only Dutch survival was the Van
Vorst estate in Pavonia which had become the farm of the West India
Company.
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