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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 2003
Newark was settled in 1666 by Capt. Robert Treat and 30 families from New Haven and the vicinity. The village on the Passaic was the result of five years' search for a site where these former Connecticut citizens could obtain self-government and religious freedom.
In his haste to develop the territory, Governor Philip Carteret had promised to eliminate the Indian title to the settlement. His neglect in this detail brought the colonists face to face with angry Hackensack Indians almost as soon as they had disembarked. Complete peace was established in 1667 when the settlers purchased a tract extending from the Passaic River westward to the Watchung Mountains.
The source of the name Newark remains buried with the original setlers. It has recently been disproved that the inspiration came from Newark-on-Trent, the supposed English home of the Reverend Abraham Pierson, pastor of the first church. Scholars have therefore returned to the older interpretation that the name was originally the Biblical New Ark or New Work, meaning a new project.
Whatever the origin of its name, Newark was unmistakably founded as a theocracy with the Puritan Congregational Church securely in control of village affairs. The church quickly erected a barrier around the religious freedom won by emigrating from New Haven. Church membership was a prerequisite to owning land, holding public office and voting. The church maintained such strict supervision over personal and public life that early Newark was more Puritan than much of New England itself.
The severity of ecclesiastical rule discouraged new settlers. Like many other religious communities, Newark grew slowly within a narrow arc prescribed by its Puritan leaders. They established a school in 1676, laid out military training grounds and encouraged gristmills, tanneries and small shops which made the little community self-sustaining.
The Puritan hegemony was first openly challenged in 1687. The Rev. Abraham Pierson Jr., who succeeded his father as the town pastor, clashed with the conservatives. Five years later they coldly permitted him to retire and return to Connecticut, where he became the first president of Yale College.
It took another generation, however, in which more liberal Englishmen settled in Newark, to break the religious monopoly of Old First Church. About 1733 Col. Josiah Ogden, a pillar of this organization, which had become Presbyterian in 1719, gathered in his wheat on the Sabbath rather than let it be ruined by the rain. He stoutly defended himself before the outraged membership and finally withdrew from the church. Ogden then joined with the local Church of England missionaries and founded Trinity Church.
Despite this rupture, Newark moved through the eighteenth century as a Puritan town, with a Puritan interest in education and commerce and a Puritan horror of secular art and pleasure. In 1748 the College of New Jersey, afterward Princeton University, moved from Elizabethtown to Newark with the Rev. Aaron Burr Sr., pastor of Old First Church, as president. The college remained until 1756, when it was transferred to Princeton. In the same period forges and foundries began to work the products of nearby iron mines. Before the time of the Revolution, Newark was of sufficient commercial importance to warrant the building of roads connecting with ferries to New York.
The war itself divided Newark into Tories who gave ample aid to Lord Cornwallis and other British commanders who encamped here, and Revolutionaries whose cooperation won the praise of Colonial generals. Washington used Newark as a supply base on his retreat across the State in 1776. In addition to a number of raids and skirmishes in the center of the village, two battles and a skirmish were fought at Springfield, part of which was then Newark.
The value of trade and manufacture was one of the lessons learned by the city from the Revolution. Factories increased. In about 1790 Moses Combs founded the shoe industry and a few years later one-third of Newark's working population was engaged in some form of the leather trade. The impetus came from an abundant stand of hemlock trees on the nearby Orange Mountains, which provided bark for tanning.
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