Slavery’s legacy is written all over North Jersey, if you know where to look – NorthJersey.com

New Jersey residents might like to think that, as Northerners, we don’t share the South’s brutal slave history.

We would be wrong. 

“New Jersey was known as the ‘slave state of the North,’ ” said Elaine Buck, who co-founded the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Hopewell with Beverly Mills in 2018.

The legacy of slavery is hidden in plain sight all over the map, in family names like Berkeley, Carteret, Beverwyck, Morris, Livingston and Schuyler, whose wealth and power was founded, in part, on slave labor.  

In 1800, there were about 12,000 slaves in the state. By 1830, New Jersey was home to more than two-thirds of the entire slave population of the North.

Bergen County was the state’s slaveholding center. Scholars estimate that by the late 1700s, enslaved people made up about 20% of Bergen’s population and 40% of its labor force. 

Its economy thrived thanks to the unpaid Black laborers who worked its plantations, small farms, urban workshops, mines and especially its ports.

New Jersey slaveholders didn’t give up this bounty lightly; the state was the last in the North to outlaw slavery. Even when legislation was finally passed in 1804, “freed” slaves were required to serve lengthy apprenticeships, which weren’t much different from slavery, according to the Princeton and Slavery Project.

The last 16 enslaved people in New Jersey were not freed until 1866, when the state reluctantly ratified the 13th Amendment.

Susan Shutte, a historian at Ringwood State Park, where slave labor was used in the mines, forges and manor house, says visitors are often “gobsmacked” to learn about New Jersey’s slave history.

One reason for our ignorance is that the state’s legacy is often airbrushed in schools due to Southern influence on the textbook industry and a scarcity of hard data, said Mills.

RELATED:Slavery, soul food and the power of Black women

Another is that little of their history was recorded by slaves themselves, who were denied access to education and the means to read and write. Instead, their history was documented through the tax records, deeds and property lists of wealthy white landowners. Supporting abolition was so dangerous that the underground railroad and other activities were conducted in utmost secrecy and strictly by word of mouth.  

The relentless pace of development in New Jersey has also obscured Black history. In their book, “If These Stones Could Talk,” Mills and Buck document their 2006 struggle to save an African American burial ground from being obliterated by a homeowner trying to expand his driveway.

Theirs was a rare success. Most of New Jersey’s slave sites have been paved over and awareness of what’s underneath is fading.

Miraculously, there are still a handful left to remind us of the integral role enslaved people played in founding our country and forging the Garden State’s economy. 

Forgetting is easier than facing the reality of the systemic dehumanization of enslaved Americans, said Buck, but it’s important to preserve physical reminders.

“Just because something happened long ago and was not in your family doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with you,” she said. “Look at Nazi Germany. We have to face very, very, very hard truths. Putting blinders on does not make it go away.”

Zabriskie tenant slave house, Dunkerhook Road, Paramus 

Few duffers on the Paramus Golf Course, students at Bergen Community College, or diners headed to Biaggio’s Restaurant realize that, not very long ago, the land under their feet was farmland worked by generations of slaves.

At 263 Dunkerhook Road, a house formerly occupied by those slaves, one vestige of that history still stands.

Built in 1802, the house has belonged to former history teacher Ted Manvell and his wife, JoAnn, for 31 years. 

It is the last of six structures that housed people owned by Albrecht Zabriskie, who owned vast tracts of farmland he’d purchased or been given by Native Americans. In 2004, one of the slave house near Manvell’s was demolished to make way for two 5,500 square-foot homes; in 2011, the stone slave house next door, which was on the national historic register, was leveled to make way for two more McMansions. The mayor of Paramus, Richard LaBarbiera,  owns a new home on the former farm.

NJ:At Rutgers University, a new effort is underway to confront ties to slavery

In 1804, when revisions to the state constitution emancipated slaves over 25, the Zabriskie slaves stayed on as tenant farmers. 

The area’s tenant farmers seeded a Black community known as Dunkerhook, a corruption of “Dark Corner” in Dutch. Manvell said the name probably referred to the sharp angles in the road to Paterson, shaded by golden poplars, as well as the Black population. Some of the poplars still stand.

The Dunkerhook community was anchored by an African Methodist Zionist church. By the time it mysteriously burned down in 1930, most descendants of the Black tenant farmers had left the area; many for Hackensack and the AME church there. 

The last of the Zabriskie tenant farmers, a man named Bennett, moved to Paterson in 1901 to start a harness shop.

In 2011, when Manvell was fighting to save the Zabriskie slave house at 273 Dunderhook, he met Bennett’s descendants, who had been researching their roots. Manvell showed them a copy of a Zabriskie will from 1830 that listed family property.

Five Bennetts were listed, along with their ages and values, including a name they recognized as their great-grandmother’s. 

Manvell said that, in the will, an elderly man was listed as having the same value as a mule. 

He gave the descendants pieces of brownstone foundation and a hand-hewn beam.

“They were so excited to have something from their forebear, who had probably helped build the house, after splitting the lumber and cutting the stone from the sandstone quarry down the road,” Manvell said.

Hilton-Holden House, Jersey City, Underground Railroad safe house

New Jersey’s location just above the Mason-Dixon Line, and between the port cities of Philadelphia and New York, made the state a key thoroughfare for the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses for fugitive slaves. 

Harriet Tubman, who helped an estimated 70 people escape the South, financed their journeys by working as a cook and domestic in Cape May. Her birthplace in slave territory on Maryland’s Eastern Shore was just a nighttime paddle across Delaware Bay from Cape May. Another important railroad conductor was New Jersey’s William Still.

Many owners of older homes and inns claim a connection to the railroad, but proof is hard to come by. Slavery was popular in New Jersey and abolitionists could pay a steep price. In 1830, Major Pangborn, the editor of the Evening Journal, for which Jersey City’s Journal Square is named, was reportedly stoned after giving a speech supporting abolition. After the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1851, it became a crime to harbor escaped slaves. 

With its direct access to New York City, Jersey City was an important transfer point. Abolitionists hired ferry and coal boats to take escapees across the Hudson, where some continued on to Canada.

79 Clifton Place in the Paulus Hook section of Jersey City was an important safe house, said Cynthia Harris, the former head of the New Jersey history room at the Jersey City Free Public Library. The 18-room house, still a private home, was built by passionate abolitionist David Le Cain Holden, a banker and amateur astronomer, in 1854. He and his cousin Edward Holden, who lived with him, used the rooftop observatory, still visible from the street, to signal when it was safe for escaped slaves to enter. 

 An article from the May 5, 1939, Jersey Mirror newspaper reads, “It was nothing sensational to find up to 25 or more Negroes sleeping in the cellar of his home.” 

Blacksmith Shop, Ringwood Manor State Park, Ringwood

Mining was one of the lucrative businesses in North Jersey that exploited slave labor. 

The Schuyler copper mine, for example, now a collection of collapsing underground shafts in a wooden patch in North Arlington, was one of the first in the country and relied extensively on enslaved laborers. It was owned by relatives of Eliza Schuyler, wife of Alexander Hamilton, who met the future Secretary of the Treasury at her aunt’s house in Morristown. The discovery of copper veins on the Schuyler farm was made by an enslaved man from West Africa, which has a mining tradition, in the early 1700s. Legend had it that he was rewarded with a new suit.

The back-breaking work of extracting iron ore from the Ramapo Mountains in what is now Ringwood State Park was often done by enslaved people, according to park historian Susan Shutte. Slaves manned the furnaces and forges of the ironworks on the property, and its grist and saw mills. Their numbers peaked during the  Colonial period, when they helped forge the Continental Army’s camp ovens, tools and hardware. They even helped make the boom system powering the “great chain” at West Point which blocked British passage of the Hudson. 

The blacksmith house  is one of the few structures remaining from the Colonial period. Contrary to how they were portrayed, enslaved men and women were usually quite skilled not only in domestic chores but crafts such as barrel-making, carting, shoemaking, carpentry, and blacksmithing.

After the Revolution, the property was purchased by Martin Ryerson, who owned several mines in the area.

RACE IN AMERICA:A reporter’s personal story of growing up Black in America

Slave labor was used to keep the Ryerson household running, too.

A census record from 1830 lists “2 black enslaved males and 1 black enslaved female, 2 freed black males and 1 free black female ages 10 – 23 and 1 free black female age 10 – 23.”

New Jersey’s 1804 emancipation law freed slaves older than 25, but they were tied to lengthy apprenticeships.

Freed Slave House, Claremont Avenue, Montclair

Montclair, then called Cranetown, was founded in the late 1600s by Israel Crane. In the 1800s, his descendent Major Nathaniel Crane, a Revolutionary War hero, owned large tracts of land that ran from Valley Road to the top of Claremont Avenue. The bucolic setting was often featured in the work of resident George Inness, a prominent landscape painter of the Hudson River School. Some of these paintings are on permanent display at the Montclair Art Museum, a block away from the former farmland.

When Nathan Crane died in 1836, his will included an unusual behest. He gave his blind slave, James Howe, his freedom; his “five best acres”; a mill property in Caldwell, (now the Crane’s Mill development); and a ferry business in the Meadowlands, said Frank Godlewski, a historic preservation commissioner and historian with the New Jersey chapter of the Afro-American History and Genealogical Society. 

No one knows why Crane, who never married, didn’t give his best land to his nieces and nephews. There is some speculation that Howe was Crane’s biological child.

But more likely it was a purely humanitarian gesture. Crane was an abolitionist and the gift gave him a chance to “foster black business and landowning at a time when it wasn’t possible for Black people to own property,” Godlewski said. 

Crane’s great-niece Mary Crane, who also never married, was a noted abolitionist who harbored escaped slaves in her home on the site of the current Caggiano funeral home on Grove Street.

The tiny clapboard house at 364 Claremont Ave. that Howe lived in as a slave dates from the 1600s and is the oldest building in Montclair. It is dwarfed by the neoclassical mansion on the corner of North Mountain Avenue built by the Welsh-Wiggins family of Welsh Farms dairy products in 1901 after a Howe descendent sold them the property. Blanton Welsh, an owner of the company, became interested in the history of the tiny house next door and paid for its renovation.   

MLK in Montclair:Martin Luther King Jr. visited MHS in 1966. The moment was nearly lost to history

The freed slave house was sold by Howe’s descendents in the 1950s to the Van Dyk family, who run a nursing home on an adjacent property.

In 2008, Godlewski led a successful effort to landmark the freed slave house, and the Montclair Historical Society offered to move it behind the Crane homestead, now their headquarters on Orange Road. (The Crane house itself was moved in 1968 from Glenridge Ave., where the family Y now stands.)

Godlewski and others objected to the optics of moving the house of a freed slave behind the home of its former master and interpreting it as a slave house. Today it is still owned by the Van Dyk family and inhabited by a renter. 

In the 1850s, James Howe’s descendant Henry Howe sold part of his Montclair poultry farm to create Llewylyn Park, founded as an abolitionist community from land in West Orange and Montclair. Thomas Edison was one of its most famous residents.

Howe Street in Montclair, near the West Orange border, was once the entrance to the farm. 

Remains of Meadowlands slave market

The Meadowlands, now home to the football Giants and Jets and the American Dream mall, was once the site of a notorious market where slave traders bought captive Africans who had been stolen from slave ships.

The slave market was hidden in 5,500 acres of lush cedar forest. The surrounding land, now a maze of marshes and development occupied by the towns of Lyndhurst, North Arlington, Rutherford, Kearny, Newark and Harrison, was subdivided into plantations stretching as far north as Hackensack. 

Named New Barbados after the wealthy slaveowners who came from the British-owned Caribbean island, the settlement boomed after the Colonial government offered bounties of 60 acres of free land for each slave imported.

“That’s why New Jersey is called the Garden State,” said Godlewski, who is writing a book called “Pirates, Slaves and the Meadowlands Fire.” “The area jump-started the New World’s economy through the free labor provided by enslaved Africans.”

Because of its location on a water route from the port of Perth Amboy, where the slave ships arrived, the dense forest became a hideout for pirates who stole slave ships along with their human cargo. They brought kidnapped Africans to the Meadowlands to be sold into slavery. The market thrived, especially after the slave trade was outlawed in New York in the 1760s.

Though at first the governors promoted New Barbados’ slave trade, they were eventually forced to confront the pirates’ violent criminal activity. In 1791, sheriffs burned the forest down. Sixty pirates were caught and hanged and many others died in the fire.  

At low tide, the blackened stumps of the cedar trees are still visible to commuters heading to or from New York City on the trains that traverse the Meadowlands.  

Email: jmartin@gannettnj.com

Twitter: @TheWriteJulia