April Meeting

The one-hundred-forty-eighth anniversary meeting of the Union County Historical Society was held in the Garden Restaurant on April 2, with more than thirty persons in attendance. During the course of the dinner various matters were discussed, and a report was given of the Society’s activities through the past twelve months.

The program for the day was given by our member Joanne Rajoppi, who spoke about the times and troubles of the women left to take care of things at home after the men had gone to the Civil War. She has written a new book about those women, based on her research and family information.

Artifacts

A recent addition to our collection of artifacts has been a trowel. Not just any old trowel, but one with a Society history. It appears to have been an ordinary bricklayer’s trowel, but now silver-plated with a diamond-shaped plate added to its upper surface.

An inscription states that this trowel was used by then-mayor John F. Kenah to lay the cornerstone of the new Alexander Hamilton Junior High School on Tuesday, April 23, 1924. Built on the corner of Cherry Street and Westfield Avenue, this was the second junior high built in Elizabeth, with the downtown Grover Cleveland Junior High having been the first.

March Meeting

The March meeting of the Society was held in the Hanson House on the fifth day of that month. Among the small amount of business transacted was a certificate of life membership given to Victor A. Bary and several announcements and a few comments from the floor.

The program for the day was given by Dean Poulsen, who entertained us with a number of songs from the period of the World War, of one hundred years ago. Along with an explanation of how some songs came to be written were his slide shows of words and music with the “bouncing ball” that enabled our members to sing along with his keyboard accompaniment.

A very popular song was Irving Berlin’s “Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning,” with a slide showing the composer himself actually singing the song, dressed in a World War uniform. The song had been part of a camp show, “Yip, Yip, Yaphank.”

Pictures From Our Files

“Twas the eighteenth of April in ’75” and Paul Revere waited for the agreed signal from the Old North Church to start his ride of warning that the British were coming, and on the nineteenth of April the Battles of Lexington and Concord started the American Revolution. The news spread quickly throughout the Colonies, and in Elizabethtown, New Jersey Abraham Clark received the news with interest.

Born February 15, 1726, Abraham Clark grew up in the family homestead on his father’s farm in an area that many years later became Roselle, New Jersey. As a youth he studied surveying and law, and became well-respected by neighbors as “the poor man’s counselor” for his ability to settle disputes. In 1776 he was sent to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a representative from New Jersey, and he voted for the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

Pictured above is his farm house as it stood on the road to Wheatsheaf around 1880. Owned then by members of the Crane family, it was completely destroyed by fire in 1900. Only a few nails and the front door key are known to still exist. In 1873, a large portion of the farmland was advertised for sale for $7,000. The area along Chestnut Street now contains houses and side streets.

In 1940, a replica Memorial Clark House was erected on a portion of that land at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut, about a thousand feet from the original location. Based on this photograph and the memories of people once familiar with the house, it was built in memory of Abraham Clark and as a meeting place for the Sons of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the American Revolution, and it contains a small museum.

For more than twenty years this house has been part of the Union County program known as “Four Centuries in a Week” and has been visited by hundreds.

Over The Back Pence

Joanne Rajoppi is getting to be quite an author, as she has now written three books about her family in the days of the Civil War.

This time the office staff beat the snows of a late winter storm by moving up a day their scheduled activities. Coming on the exact 129th anniversary of the famous “Blizzard of ’88,” this new storm tied up all travel.