Bound Brook. 1.7-square-mile borough in Somerset County. The land on which Bound Brook now stands was purchased from the Lenape tribe for £100 worth of goods in 1681. At the time of the American Revolution, when troops under Gen. George Washington camped in the municipality, Bound Brook was home to only thirty-five families. The construction of five railroad lines in the nineteenth century allowed Bound Brook industries to prosper, and the population swelled to 2,600 by 1898. Incorporated as a borough in 1891, Bound Brook is now a predominantly residential community with a central shopping district located near the train station and brook. In September 1999, fourteen-foot flood-waters, spawned by Hurricane Floyd, damaged 148 businesses and more than 200 homes, causing $70 million worth of damage. Called "a cataclysmic event” by New Jersey’s governor Christie Whitman, the flood left hundreds displaced and two people dead before its waters receded.
In 2000 the town’s 10,155 residents were 83 percent white, 9 percent other, and 35 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The 2000 median household income was $46,858. For complete census figures, see chart, 130.
Bourke-White, Margaret (b. June 14,1904; d. Aug. 27, 1971). Photojournalist. Named one of the ten most prominent women in the United States in 1936, Margaret Bourke-White spent her childhood in Bound Brook, where she graduated from high school. Her photographs of industry, people, and history in the making around the world filled the pages of Fortune and Life magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s, when Parkinson’s disease forced her retirement. Her photographic work in New Jersey included a series on Frank "Boss”Hague, Jersey City’s mayor, which appeared in Life on February 1,1938. Bourke-White also produced ten books, three coauthored by her second husband, Erskine Caldwell. Her most influential book, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), is about southern tenant farmers.
Boutelle, DeWitt Clinton (b. Apr.26, 1820; d. Nov. 5, 1884). Painter. DeWitt Clinton Boutelle, named for the father of the Erie Canal, was born in Troy, New York, and painted portraits and landscapes in New York City as early as the 1840s. He had no formal art education, but came under the influence of Asher Brown Durand and Thomas Cole. During his career he painted along the Hudson River, in the Catskills, in New Jersey, and on the Susquehanna River, depicting the press of European civilization against the wilderness, usually represented by a Native American. The Indian Hunter of 1843, typical of his work, shows a native atop a hill surveying an Anglo-Saxon settlement in aval-ley. In 1848 and 1849 Boutelle lived in Basking Ridge, where he sketched natural landscapes, including Winter on the Passaic, which were later exhibited.
Margaret Bourke-White (attributed), Margaret Bourke-White atop the Chrysler Building, New York, 1931.
He spent the second half of his life in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1853 and a member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1862. Boutelle is best known for finishing one painted set in Cole’s series The Voyage of Life.
Boxing. Fighting sports in colonial New Jersey were largely imported by British soldiers and sailors. One of the earliest accounts of a match in America dates from 1749, when two seamen in Perth Amboy boxed outside a tavern, one of them suffering fatal injuries. As street life and a working class developed in New York City in the early 1800s, bare-knuckle boxing became a spectator sport, often featuring the favored fighters of rival ethnic groups and neighborhood gangs. Boxers would cross the Hudson River to hold their matches in still-rural New Jersey, where they could avoid the authorities. The first prizefight on record in New Jersey was fought near Belleville in 1821 between "The American Phenomenon,” Jim Sanford, and Ned Hammond, an Englishman; a sheriff’s posse broke it up. A bout in Weehawken in 1835 ended in a melee, prompting the New Jersey legislature to ban "the degrading practice of prize fighting” a month later. It was the nation’s first anti boxing legislation.
Despite the official prohibition, boxing continued surreptitiously. The adoption of the Marquis of Queensbury rules in the late 1800s (padded gloves, three-minute rounds, a ten-second count before a knockout was declared) led to a less gory, more respectable fight game. Legal "sparring exhibitions” gained a wide audience, and boxers learned their craft in local gymnasiums. In 1894, Thomas A. Edison’s laboratory in West Orange was the site of the first sporting event recorded on film, an exhibition bout won by heavyweight champion "Gentleman Jim” Corbett.
Prizefighting was legalized in 1918 and placed under the supervision of a state athletic board. In 1921 heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey knocked out French challenger Georges Carpentier in Jersey City. Promoted by the legendary Tex Rickard, the fight was the first heavyweight bout to be broadcast on radio and the first to earn a million-dollar gate. Jersey City, Paterson, Trenton, Atlantic City, and Newark (the site of middleweight title bouts in 1930 and 1948) were important cities for arena matches. Champions emerged from New Jersey’s ethnic neighborhoods: Irish Americans Freddie Cochrane and James Braddock (heavyweight champion from 1935 to 1937), Italian Americans Tony Zale and "Two-Ton” Tony Galento, and African Americans Ike Williams and Jersey Joe Walcott (heavyweight champion from 1951 to 1952 and later state athletic commissioner). More recent New Jersey-born boxers have included Chuck "the Bayonne Bleeder” Wepner, "Marvelous” Marvin Hagler, and Bobby Czyz.
Television and urban decay were blamed for declining attendance at matches during the 1950s. However, the arrival of gambling casinos in Atlantic City in 1978 lured multimillion-dollar prizefights back to New Jersey. Heavyweight champions Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and Lennox Lewis have all defended their titles at Atlantic City, and through the 1990s only Las Vegas was the site of more professional boxing bouts. Revelations of mob influence, as well as suspected rigging of boxers’ rankings, have periodically bruised the sport’s reputation. In 1985, the State Commission of Investigation urged that boxing be banned because of the scandals and the medical danger. Its recommendation was turned down, but the state established a new Athletic Control Board and instituted fitness rules for boxers that are recognized as the strictest in the nation.
Boxwood Hall. Built c. 1750 by Elizabethtown mayor Samuel Woodruff, Boxwood Hall is associated with numerous persons and events of the Revolutionary War and early Republic. Just before the Revolution, Alexander Hamilton boarded at Boxwood Hall while attending school in Elizabethtown. From 1772 to 1795 it was the home of American statesman Elias Boudinot, who delivered a eulogy for James Caldwell, slain pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, from its steps in 1781. In 1782-1783 Boudinot served as president of the Continental Congress when it ratified the treaty of peace with England. On April 20,1789, BoxwoodHall hostedGeorge Washington as he departed New Jersey for his presidential inauguration in New York City. Jonathan Dayton, a member of the New Jersey delegation to the Constitutional Convention and later Speaker of the House and a U.S. senator, lived in the house from 1795 to 1824.
In 1941 Boxwood Hall was deeded to the state. It was designated a National Historic Landmark and a New Jersey State Historic Site in 1972. The New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry maintains and operates the property.
Boyden, Seth (b. Nov. 17, 1788; d. Mar. 31, 1870). Inventor. Boyden was a native of Foxborough, Massachusetts. His father, also called Seth, a farmer and the proprietor of a forge and machine shop, invented a leather-splitting machine and received many awards for contributing to advances in agriculture. Tradition has it that Boyden’s maternal grandfather, Uriah Atherton, had cast the first cannon in America. Boyden’s younger brother, Uriah, was an inventor as well and eventually worked as an engineer for the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, developing the firm’s hydraulic works in Manchester, New Hampshire. Boyden had little formal education. Even so, in his youth he became an adept mechanic and was held in high regard as a repairer of timepieces and guns. By the time Boyden was twenty-one, he had designed machines for making nails and cutting files.
In 1813 Boyden left Fox borough for Newark, taking a leather-splitting machine with him and providing sheepskins and leather to bookbinders in the city. In the following years he drew on his mechanical and creative background to take advantage of opportunities created by increasing industrialization in Newark. After studying how Europeans made ornamental leather, Boyden, in 1819, established the first factory in the United States for making patent leather. His first year’s sales amounted to $4,500; five years later they had more than doubled to $9,700. He then focused on the manufacture of malleable cast iron. In 1828 the Franklin Institute gave him an award for its production, and three years later he secured the first patent for the material. He then sold his patent leather factory and turned his attention to the commercial production of malleable iron.
Boyden continued his multifaceted career as a manufacturer and businessman by making locomotives, though he built only three. He then turned his attention to stationary steam engines and perfected a method whereby steam was used more efficiently. In 1850 Boyden produced "Russia” sheet-iron. Later in life, he invented a hat-forming machine, and in 1868 he published an article on atmospheric electricity. In addition, Boyden developed oroide, an alloy comprised of copper, zinc, and tin used in imitation gold jewelry. Curiously enough, this endeavor followed an unsuccessful venture to the California gold fields that had recently been discovered by New Jersey native James W. Marshall. In other very different areas, Boyden was instrumental in developing the well-known Hilton strawberry, made the first daguerreotype in the United States, and helped Samuel F. B. Morse perfect the telegraph.
DeWitt Clinton Boutelle, Waterfall, 19th century. Oil on canvas, 12 1/4 x 10 1/4 in.
Seth Boyden.
Seth Boyden died in Irvington, New Jersey. His eulogist, the Rev. A. A. Thayer, observed that Boyden’s discoveries had lightened the labors of nearly every family in the country and that people everywhere felt the touch of his genius even though they may not have known him. Echoing those who held Boyden in high esteem, Thomas A. Edison once remarked that Boyden was one of America’s greatest inventors. In 1890 Boyden’s friends erected a monument in his remembrance in Newark’s Washington Park, andthirty-five years later his admirers added a new bronze tablet to the site.
Boyer, Charles Shimer (b. May 23,1869;d. Nov. 10, 1936). Industrialist and historian. Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Charles Boyer worked in the family-owned B. F. Boyer Worsted Mill in Camden, New Jersey, before becoming company president. He combined elastic thread with woolen cloth to invent a new fabric (a forerunner of spandex), and sold his patents and mill in 1926 to the Jantzen swimwear company. By the 1920s Boyer was devoting much of his time to recording and preserving Camden history. He wrote more than a dozen pamphlets, monographs, and books, including the five-volume Annals of Camden (1920-1926) and Early Forges and Furnaces of New Jersey (1931). Boyer served as longtime president of the Camden County Historical Society and with his wife, Anna DeRousse Boyer, donated much of the society’s rare books and collections. He died in Moorestown.
Boy Scouts of America. In the late nineteenth century, as England and the United States became more urban and industrial, concerns arose in both countries about youth gangs in the cities and "lost masculinity”— the increase in desk jobs for men and the expansion of possible roles for women that the new economic order was bringing about. In England Lord Robert Baden-Powell, a Boer War hero concerned about the preparation of young men for the military, started the British Boy Scouts. In the United States, Canadian Ernest Thompson Seton began a group emphasizing the "woodcraft” skills of the American Indians, and Daniel Carter Beard started a group called the Sons of Daniel Boone. These movements coalesced in 1910, when Boy Scout groups were created in the United States. Several of these were in New Jersey. By 1916 the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) had a charter from Congress and the organization was spreading rapidly.
Camping was a part of the Scout movement from the beginning. In 1911 an experimental camp was created at Dudley Island in Sussex County, and by 1917 a permanent site, Camp Glen Gray, had been established at Lake Vreeland. Campgrounds created in the state’s northern mountains during the following years have mostly disappeared as the state’s population has expanded.
The national headquarters of the BSA, originally located in New York City, was moved to New Brunswick in 1954. In 1979 it moved to Irving, Texas, reflecting the shift of the organization’s center to the South and West. In the 1990s the organization faced a number of suits by atheists, gays, and girls, who were all excluded from membership. The BSA insisted that as a private group it had the right to control its own membership. The New Jersey Supreme Court rejected this view, but the United States Supreme Court upheld it on appeal in BSA v. Dale (2000). In response some school districts in the state have refused to permit the Scouts to use their facilities.
The number of Scouts, from Cubs to Eagles, has varied over time. In 2002 there were seven Boy Scout councils in the state: Burlington County, Northern New Jersey, Patriot’s Path, Southern New Jersey, Jersey Shore, Mon-mouth, and Central New Jersey. The total membership in New Jersey was 67,255.
Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. This controversial decision from the U.S. Supreme Court involved the efforts of a Rutgers graduate, James Dale, to gain reinstatement to the Boy Scouts after that organization expelled him from his position as an assistant scoutmaster because of Dale’s admitted homosexual orientation. Dale had gained a unanimous vote in his favor from the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1999. That court ruled that Dale’s exclusion solely because of sexual orientation violated the New Jersey Law against Discrimination (LAD). By a vote of five to four the high court reversed. Chief Justice William Rehnquist held that as a private voluntary organization, the Boy Scouts possessed a First Amendment right of "expressive association” that protected it from being forced to "accept a member it does not desire.” The dissent emphasized that Dale was expelled for sexual orientation, not sexual conduct, and New Jersey law forbids discrimination based upon sexual orientation. Moreover, the minority argued, the majority erred by simply accepting the Boy Scouts’ contention without any further inquiry or analysis by the court. Such conduct, wrote Justice John Stevens in dissent, "is even more astonishing in the First Amendment area.”
Brackett, Cyrus Fogg (b. Jun. 25,1833; d. Jan. 29, 1915). Physicist and physician. Born on a farm in Parson field, Maine, Cyrus Brackett graduated from Bowdoin College (i859)and the Bowdoin Medical School (1863). In 1873 Brackett assumed the new chair in physics at Princeton University, named in Joseph Henry’s honor. While at Princeton, he founded the University’s electrical engineering department. Through his work, he formed close associations with Thomas A. Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. He is credited with installing the first telephone line in Princeton, and his lecture room was the first classroom in America with electric lighting.
Braddock, James J. (b. Dec. 6, 1905;d. Nov. 29, 1974). Heavyweight boxer. James Braddock grew up in North Bergen and was amateur light heavyweight champion of New Jersey before turning professional at age twenty-one. After a series of defeats and injuries, Braddock gave up prizefighting in 1933 to work as a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks. He came back the next year, however, and three surprise victories in a row made him a contender. His fifteen-round defeat of Max Baer on June 13, 1935, gave him the heavyweight title and is ranked among the greatest upsets in boxing; Damon Runyon nicknamed him "Cinderella Man.” Braddock lost his crown to Joe Louis in 1937. He died in North Bergen in 1974.
Bradford, Cornelia Foster (b. Dec.4, 1847; d. Jan. 15, 1935). Social worker and reformer. The daughter of Benjamin and Mary Amory Bradford, whose New York State residences were stopping places for slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad, Cornelia Bradford was raised to believe that people were their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. As a young woman, she was deeply affected by the plight of iron miners near Chester, New Jersey, where her father was pastor of the Congregational Church. Later she taught and lectured on history, literature, and travel while attending European universities and visiting England’s new settlement houses. When she returned to the United States, Bradford became an associate of Jane Addams at Hull-House in Chicago. Arriving in Jersey City in December 1893, Bradford established New Jersey’s first settlement house on Grand Street in Jersey City; Whittier House was named after the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
Cornelia Foster Bradford.
Whittier House rapidly became a success, particularly among immigrants, who would outnumber the native-born in Jersey City before 1900. Bradford’s brother Amory, a noted Congregational minister in Montclair, provided financial assistance and later summer outings for children. Whittier House opened the first playground in Jersey City, sponsored classes, and started clubs, including the first women’s club in Jersey City, and established the first free kindergarten. Bradford’s legal aid society, the "poor man’s lawyer,”was based on English models.
Bradford helped lead New Jersey to major reforms. Her 1904 exploration of conditions in glass factories in southern New Jersey led to the formation of the Child Protective League, an attempt to pass a child labor bill, and the establishment of a watchdog child labor agency. Whittier House residents played key roles in the passing of a state tenement housing code. Bradford’s New Jersey Association of Neighborhood Workers, created in March 1905, served as a clearinghouse for legislative lobbyists for the ten-hour workday for women, a juvenile court system, and woman suffrage.
Whittier House Settlement, directed by Cornelia Bradford, sponsored many reforming groups, including the Hudson County Tuberculosis Association, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the North American Civic League, and the New Jersey State Bureau of Immigration. In 1912 Bradford served on Jersey City’s Board of Education.
Bradford was honored at celebrations marking Whittier House’s twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries, and in 1923 was awarded an honorary M.A. by the New Jersey College for Women, now Douglass College.
