Westfield

The Earliest Inhabitants of Westfield

Thanks to Dr. James P. Johnson and the Westfield Leader for this information.

Before and as a Royal Colony

Visit Westfield, New Jersey, some late afternoon. Note the crush of cars and people at the intersections of Broad Street and Mountain and Central Avenues. Watch mothers hassled by children straining to maneuver station wagons through the crowded corner. Observe tired New York executives, home late from the city because the Jersey Central's 5:34 left Newark at 6:10. They trudge along Broad Street - raincoats slung over their shoulder, briefcases in hand. Heed the local teachers, dentists, lawyers, shop owners, clerks and bankers, as they hurry downtown to do one more errand before night. Caught up in the repetitive pattern of what they are doing, most of these people have forgotten - if they ever knew - that this suburban intersection once formed the center of a Colonial settlement.

Walking Where the Saints have Trod

Stop there some day and listen. Can you hear echoes of a Colonial stage coach clattering down Broad Street on its way to Philadelphia? Look up at the First Presbyterian Church. Can you picture in your mind's eye His Majesty's Redcoats slaughtering cattle in the church meeting house in 1777? Walk up Mountain Avenue to the old cemetery. Read the inscription on Benjamin Scudder's eighteenth-century headstone: "Remember me as you pass by, As you am Now, so once was I ..."

In the Beginning, God Made the Mountains

In the distance rise the Watchung Mountains produced by volcanic activity some 200 million years ago. Beneath your feet is a geologic structure known as the Brunswick Formation, itself 225 million years old.

The land about you has been shaped between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago by the removal, transportation and redistribution of materials by the agents of water and ice through glacial action. Two of the three ice advances affecting New Jersey at that time reached the Westfield area. The first, the Kansas, because of erosion and later glaciation has left no recognizable impact. But the later Wisconsin glacial advance significantly affected Westfield's topography. You can see the retreat of its ice advance and terminal moraine in the low, irregular hills of boulders, gravel and sand in the Brightwood, Indian Forest, Wychwood, Fairview Cemetery and Gallows Hill Road areas.

The remaining parts of the town laying south and east of the terminal moraine are covered with ground moraine soils, composed of unstratified glacial material. This region has an almost flat to gently rolling surface.

The Lenni Lenape Arrived First

The Lenni Lenape Indians, the region's earliest human inhabitants, passed near this intersection several hundred years before Europeans colonized America. Forced by war and famine from their homes in what they called the "north country," the Lenape migrated into the Piedmont.

These "original people" or "men among men" as the Lenape styled themselves, ranged through majestic forests. Living primarily from their hunting, fishing and farming skills, and without the use of the wheel or beast of burden, the Lenape fared well in a a territory abundant with small game. Lenape women grew corn, beans and squash on small plots. Their children gathered grapes, plums, crabapples, huckleberries, nuts and herbs.

Like modern Jerseymen, the Lenni Lenape trekked to the shore in summer. Large numbers of the minsi sub-tribe from the northwestern part of the state traveled down the Minisink Trail. They entered Westfield at the junction of what is now Springfield Avenue and East Broad Street, crossed through town near the corner of Fourth and North Avenues, passed near Edison Junior High School and the Tamaques Park area and went on to Metuchen. Matawan and the Shrewsbury Inlet.

They Lived Where We Now Walk

While in Westfield at various times during their travels, the Lenni Lenape encamped at old Branch Mills near Echo Lake in the Fairview Cemetery area and by Tamaques Park. They added their summer's accumulation of smoked oysters, clams, mussels and a variety of fish to their diet of wild game and crops. When you next pass the old encampments, listen for the Lenape dinner-time shout of pachgandhatteu, our equivalent of "come and get it."

Living in wickoms of arched saplings covered with mats of corn husks, bark or coarse grasses and dressed in deer, elk, bear, beaver, fox or racoon skins, the "original people" let an uncomplicated existence. They entertained themselves by throwing spears through moving hoops and by shooting dice, using bones painted on one side. By hiding an object beneath one of several moccasins, the Lenape also developed a variation of the shell game.

The Lenape worshipped the god Manito and his lesser Manitowuk. They personified plants, animals and heavenly bodies with forms of address: "Grandfather," "Grandmother" and "Mother Corn". They offered sacrifice to "Snow Boy", who brought the snow and ice and to the "Great Horned Serpent," the Manitowuk of rain. The Unami sub-tribe believed that its totem "Grandfather Turtle," called Pkoungo, carried the earth on his back.

The life of these primitive people with their shamans and totems, their myths and home remedies of rattlesnake skin and sassafras roots, could not endure the collision with the Europeans that began in the seventeenth century.

The Life of the 'Original People'

In search of the elusive "northwest passage" in his 80-ton ship, the Half Moon, Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, dropped anchor off Sandy Hook on September 4, 1609. He and his crew gloried in the landscape "pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees." The Lenape who came aboard the Half Moon later that week were, wrote the mate, "seemingly very glad of our coming and brought green Tabacco, and gave us of it for Knives and Beads."

But friendship soon gave way to enmity. Indians in two canoes attached John Coleman's small-boat excursion around Staten Island. Coleman dies from an arrow wound, and the crew of the Half Moon kept to the main vessel when Hudson explored the river which bears his name.

Following Hudson's return to Europe, enterprising Dutchmen chartered the Dutch West India Company, which assumed control of the Dutch outpost on Manhattan Island. By granting patrons extensive plots of land, the West India Company tried to encourage settlement west of the Hudson River. They succeeded in 1655 in forcing the Swedes to relinquish their claims in the Delaware Valley. But down to 1664, the Dutch development of New Jersey was limited to two small villages, the Town of Bergen, now Jersey City, and Hobocan.

The English Rule Began in 1664

In March, 1664, Charles II, King of England, granted his brother, James, the land which stretched from the Connecticut to the Delaware rivers. In late June, 1664, James conveyed to his associates Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley title to the section now called New Jersey. They named the territory between the Hudson and the Delaware for the Isle of Jersey, Carteret's home and one of the last bastions of Royalist strength during the English Civil War.

In April, before he made his grant to the two proprietors, James dispatched Colonel Richard Nicolls, his Deputy Govenor, to the New World to seize his territory from the Dutch in New Amsterdam. Without firing a shot, Nicholas took New Amsterdam - which he renamed New York - on September 7, 1664. That same month, he accepted a petition from a group of English settlers from Long Island to grant them permission to purchase from the Indians lands on the western shores of Newark Bay.

From the Indians, who in 1664 undoubtedly believed they were selling the use of land and not giving full ownership, Daniel Denton, John Bayly and Luke Watson for the Long Islanders purchased a 500,000 - acre tract extending from the Raritan to the Passaic rivers and 30 miles into the wilds. They gave the Indians two coats, two guns, 10 bars of lead, 20 handfuls of powder, 400 fathoms (a fathom equalled the distance from a man's elbow to his little finger tip) of white wampum and 20 fathoms of tracing cloth - a rate of 10 acres for a penny. John Baker, the interpreter who aided in striking the original bargain with the Indians, gained putative possession of the Baker Tract, the lands west of the Minisink Trail, which included part of present-day Westfield and adjacent municipalities.

Westfield Was a Modest Village

Settlement came slowly in the West Fields of Elizabethtown, as the area incorporating the present municipalities of Plainfield, Fanwood, New Providence, Mountainside, Scotch Plains, Garwood, Cranford, Clark, part of Rahway, part of Piscataway and Westfield was known. In 1699 the West Fields were laid out in 171 farm plots of 100 acres each. Thereafter, the majority of the newcomers hailed from Calvinist Connecticut and Long Island. Some located near the present intersection of Broad Street and Central and Mountain Avenues in a tiny community which soon became known as the village of Westfield.

The settlers advanced, and the Lenni Lenape slowly retreated. They had given the white furs in trade, agricultural techniques, a multitude of words: Wateunk, "place to meet and talk, "Watchung, high hill," and chipmunk, tobacco, canoe, Mindowaskin, Raritan, Hoboken, Matawan and hundreds more, in addition to a group of classic American foods: Steamed lobster, clambake, succotash, corn bread and cranberry sauce.

The settlers gave in return: Factory produced "wampum", smallpox, tuberculosis, whiskey and bullets. Sweat baths and shamans could not drive away these enemies. The Indians now had a new word, achguichsowagan, meaning drunkenness. Following resettlement in the Brotherton reservation in Burlington County, the Lenni Lenape migrated to upper New York State, thence to Canada, Wisconsin, Texas and eventually to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

Following the French and Indian War, the settlers in the village of Westfield faced little serious trouble from the Indians. But they soon found that British soldiers could wreak more destruction on their tiny settlement than hand the "uncivilized" Lenni Lenape.

From Trappers to Tradesmen

Long before the American Revolution, the first white settlers in the vicinity of current Westfield came to hunt and trap. Some of them blended the two skills that have shaped the region's development: They knew how to barter, and they knew the value of land. The settlers from Connecticut and New York who moved here after the Elizabethtown Purchase in 1664 laid out their town near the crossroads of two Indian trails. Homes were located along the Indian trail later called Mountain Avenue.