Smythe, Frederick To Somerset County (New Jersey)

Smythe, Frederick (b. c. 1732; d. 1815).Jurist and Loyalist. A native of England, Frederick Smythe served as the chief justice of New Jersey from 1764 to 1776, while concurrently a member of the council (1765 to 1776). In 1773, he served on a commission assigned to investigate the burning of the schooner Gaspee by a group of Rhode Island Whigs (June 1772), and two years later he failed in an attempt to indict a group of Cumberland County citizens for the destruction of a cargo of British East India Company tea in the town of Greenwich on December 22,1774. He moved to New York in 1776; in 1778, Smythe was appointed to assist the peace commission led by Frederick Howard, the earl of Carlisle. He remained in New York until just before the British evacuation of that city in November 1783. Following the Revolution, Smythe lived in Philadelphia where he married Margaret Oswald (March 21, 1784) and was employed as a business agent by British merchants from Norwich and Yarmouth.

Snow’s Clam Cannery. In 1920, Fred Snow founded the F. H. Snow’s Canning Company in Pine Point, Maine. Its leading product was Snow’s Clam Chowder, which was based on an old family recipe. The company was sold to Borden, Inc., in 1959. Snow’s continued to operate in Maine until Borden moved it to Cape May, in 1990. Cape May is the leading fishing port in New Jersey, and one of the largest on the East Coast; New Jersey itself is the leading supplier of surf clams and quahogs in the world. Bor-den also acquired the seafood firm of Doxsee and merged it with Snow’s Seafood Corporation. The combined firm of Snow’s/Doxsee was acquired by Castleberry’s Food Company in 1994. The combined company, now named Castleberry/Snow’s Brands, Inc., consists of three major subsidiaries, each with strong regional products: Castleberry’s, Snow’s/Doxsee, and Bunker Hill Foods. Snow’s/Doxsee today has a 74,000-square-foot plant in Cape May, where the company manufactures clam chowder, corn chowder, canned clams, clam juice, and seafood sauces. Its products are distributed under the brand names Snow’s, Doxsee, and Ocean Harvest. Besides manufacturing, Snow’s/Doxsee also owns a fleet of five clamming vessels.

Soccer. Early versions of soccer, transported from Britain, appeared in college intramural contests in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. On November 6, 1869, Princeton University came to Rutgers University to play a football game according to customs established at Rutgers. Although this event is widely regarded as the first game of American football, the rules described a game that was much closer to soccer. Rutgers won, six to four, setting up a soccer rivalry and inspiring interest in the game among other colleges. In 1873 Rutgers, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale universities created the American Intercollegiate Football Association. This was a soccer organization, but Harvard University played a game closer to British rugby, and its version of football prevailed at the university level. Soccer, formalized in 1863 through rules set by the Football Association in Britain, had become a major sport in countries around the world by the 1880s. In the United States, however, it was confined to recent European immigrants on the East Coast.

British immigrants formed a soccer group, the American Football Association (AFA), in Newark in 1884. The AFA organized an international match, the United States against Canada, on November 28, 1885, at Clark Field in East Newark, then part of Kearny. Kearny became a center of American soccer, thanks to the Clark Thread Company’s attraction of Scottish immigrants to its mills. The AFA’s first champion team, sponsored by Clark, was the ONT, for Our New Thread.

The United States Football Association, a national governing body for soccer, was formed in 1913. It was affiliated with the world governing body, Federation Internationale de Football Associations (FIFA). As violence disgraced American football early in the twentieth century, soccer returned to the universities, and Princeton became a major power in the sport during the 1920s.

The American Soccer League (ASL), formed in 1933, was a semipro league that maintained America’s tradition of soccer as an ethnic, East Coast game. Teams like the Elizabeth Sport Club, the Newark Sport Club, and the Hoboken Football Club often played at Farcher’s Grove in Union, one of the oldest lighted soccer fields in America. The ASL’s dominant team was the Kearny Scots, who won five consecutive championships from 1937 through 1941. With other top amateur teams, the Kearny Scots went on to play in the New Jersey Champions League. After World War II, collegiate soccer increased in popularity, but professional soccer continued to falter, possibly due to its identity as a working-class, immigrant pastime.

Since the 1960s soccer has built a following among elementary and high school players, and as a participant sport for women. The North American Soccer League (NASL), a professional league of seventeen franchises, was formed in 1968. In 1975 the New York Cosmos of that league signed the Brazilian soccer star Pele (Edson Arantes do Nascimento), and he attracted fans from all strata of society to games in Giants Stadium in the Meadow-lands. Although the NASL went bankrupt in 1985, the United States had proved its interest in soccer to FIFA, and it was awarded the honor of hosting the 1994 World Cup, which was contested in various locations, including the Meadowlands. A new United States professional soccer league, Major League Soccer, began its first season in 1996 with Tab Ramos of Kearny, the son of a soccer-playing Uruguayan father, as midfielder for the New York/New Jersey MetroStars. New Jersey also has several minor league soccer teams, including the New Jersey Stallions, the North Jersey Imperials, the South Jersey Barrons, and the Central Jersey Riptides.

Social Gospel. The Social Gospel was the basis of a reform movement among the Protestant churches that informed and inspired many social reforms during the Progressive Era. Their "Social Creed” denounced all forms of economic exploitation and became, in the words of a Methodist historian, "the conscience statement of American Protestantism on social issues.”In New Jersey, as elsewhere in the country, the reaction of the Protestant congregations was mixed. In 1908 the New Jersey Methodist Conference embraced the Social Creed, and scores of young seminary-trained clergy preached against child labor, slum conditions, and other forms of social injustice. The Camden Methodist Missionary Society founded Goodwill Industries to provide work for the physically handicapped. Methodists and Presbyterians set up centers for migrant workers in Burlington and Cumberland counties, and urban congregations in New Jersey supported the Salvation Army. The theology of the Social Gospel was associated with modernism, however, and Protestant leaders in the state tended to emphasize salvation over social service. During the Progressive Era the worldly energies of the church were much more absorbed by the temperance movement than by other types of social reform.

Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures. In 1791, based on the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe, a group of investors formed the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures. Known as the SUM, its purpose was to be America’s "national manufactory,” engaged in producing many different products through "labor-saving mills and machines” in New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. Over $130,000 was quickly raised for stock and on November 22, 1791, New Jersey granted the SUM a charter. Thirteen directors were chosen, including the SUM’s first governor, William Duer, a notorious speculator whose activities helped plunge the fledgling nation into a financial panic by March 1792. At least $50,000 in SUM capital disappeared and Duer was jailed.

Nevertheless, Hamilton and the directors met at the Great Falls in Paterson on July 4, 1792, and resolved to locate there. Purchasing over seven hundred acres, they began digging a raceway, under the direction of Pierre L’Enfant, who envisioned a magnificent city named Paterson, complete with a Roman aqueduct. In February 1793, Peter Colt, a more practical businessman, replaced L’Enfant, whose plans had proved extravagant. Colt succeeded in producing cotton cloth in the Bull Mill, powered by oxen, since L’Enfant’s plan for tapping the river was unworkable. By January 1794, the first raceway was completed and in June the cotton mill opened, but financial problems doomed the project. Colt left in 1796 and the SUM existed for the next decade, leasing land and water power to a few mill operators, but never again manufacturing anything.

In 1807 a second raceway was cut, and as early as 1808 Colt’s son Roswell began buying up shares of the society, soon controlling it. In 1814, he became governor of the SUM, a position held by Colt family members until 1886. Roswell Colt built the SUM into the dominant institution in Paterson, controlling vast real estate holdings and leasing mill power along the river, which it had successfully harnessed with completion of a third raceway in 1827.

In 1886, control of Passaic River water rights led to purchase of the SUM by a syndicate of New York investors, led by John R. Bartlett; the syndicate focused on supplying water to growing cities including Newark, Jersey City, and even New York. Paterson’s own Garret Hobart brokered the sale and helped gain control of the entire Passaic River watershed. The SUM was now one of many companies controlled by what in 1894 became the New Jersey General Security Company. These companies built the water supply systems of Newark and Jersey City, and later evolved into the Passaic Valley Water Commission and North Jersey District Water Supply Commission. In 1912, the SUM began siphoning off some of this water to power a hydroelectric plant at the base of the Great Falls. By this time, the state had begun to assert control over its water and the huge water monopolies began to dissolve. By 1930, the SUM was one of only two companies left and had begun to lose money. In 1945 the Security Company dissolved and the remaining assets of the SUM were sold to the city of Paterson.

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.Chartered in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), or Venerable Society, was founded by Thomas Bray following his 1695 investigation of religious conditions in the American colonies. He conceived the SPG to address the woeful lack of both clergy and books. Bray’s system of lending libraries was an essential aspect of a missionary strategy aimed at evangelizing African slaves and Native Americans as well as providing churches and schools for expatriate English Anglicans in America. Burlington and Woodbridge had the largest SPG parochial libraries in New Jersey, but the first SPG-supported clergyman in the state was Samuel Seabury, Jr., rector of Christ Church, New Brunswick (1754-1757). Seabury’s enthusiastic parishioners voted him an annual stipend of forty pounds to supplement the SPG’s fifty pounds. Their confidence proved well placed, for following American independence Seabury was to become the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

Soil. The term soil traditionally has had somewhat different connotations for engineers, soil scientists, ecologists, farmers, and gardeners. Soil is considered to be the uppermost portion of the Earth’s crust. A vertical cut through the soil will show various layers (or horizons) with their own properties, which collectively make up the soilprofile. A soil profile includes the topsoil, subsoil, and the underlying parent material. Soil results from the interactions of at least five factors: parent material, relief, biotic elements, climate, and time. Features of a soil profile include the number of horizons, their color, texture, structure, composition, thickness, and geologic material, among others.

The soil pattern in New Jersey is varied, a condition resulting from many kinds of geologic materials and other factors. Over seventy geologic formations have been recognized within the state. Further, the sweep of land north of a line extending from Perth Amboy to Morristown and Belvidere has been glaciated; pockets of old till are also found south of this line. Glacial activities have had a dominant influence on producing many kinds of soil.

In the mountainous terrain of northern New Jersey, the soil may be only a few inches thick, but in the rolling flat sectors it may be five or more feet deep. Many sectors of the state have soils with poor drainage, including muck and peat deposits. The Inner Coastal Plain of New Jersey has some of the most desirable agricultural soils in America. On the other hand, the Pine Barrens sector has strikingly poor sandy soils.

Major Soils of New Jersey

Somerdale. 1.4-square-mile borough in the heart of Camden County. A farming community when part of Clementon Township, before its incorporation as a separate community in 1929, the borough was created following an intense fight over the township’s failure to undertake certain road and school improvements.

Somerdale’s urbanization began after World War I and was spurred by the automobile and the ensuing development of a highway infrastructure. It is bisected by the busy White Horse Pike, a major north-south corridor in the county. Somerdale still offers affordable housing. Although the borough has a small tax base (the manufacturing sector has only a few small companies), high senior citizen ratio, and large number of older homes, its attraction may rely on its proximity to the Echelon Mall, Voorhees; PATCO High-Speed Line to Philadelphia; and a modern hospital facility. Somerdale is home to the American importer Bimota Motorcycle Company of Italy and the borough’s convenient location has also resulted in the recent opening within its borders of a new bank branch and national department store.

The year 2000 population, representing a 5 percent loss since the previous census, was 5,192, of which 75 percent was white and 18 percent black. The median household income in 2000 was $46,898.

Somerset County. 304.99-square-mile county comprised of twenty-one municipalities located in the heartland of New Jersey. The county seat is Somerville. The Raritan River flows east across this county’s narrow waist separating hilly uplands in the north from red shale plains in the south.

Because the interior of East Jersey had not yet been surveyed, Somerset was set off from Middlesex County in 1688 with indefinite boundaries running "northwest into the hills” and southwest "to the uttermost line of the province.” It was an attempt by Scotsmen, who made up a majority of the East Jersey Board of Proprietors, to ensure that a goodly portion of this most desirable territory would be available for settlement by their countrymen.

Anticipated Scots migration did not materialize, however, and boundaries as drawn proved impractical. New lines were set up in 1710, 1714, and, again, in 1741 before Somerset took on a form resembling what it is today. Plains in the south were settled largely by Dutch relocating from New Amsterdam and the hills predominately by English speakers advancing inland from Woodbridge, Piscataway, and Elizabethtown. Numerous Huguenots, Scots-Irish, and Palatine Germans also settled here, in addition to Irish indentured servants and, especially among the Dutch, African slaves. The 1790 census found Somerset exceeded only by Bergen County, the other heavily Dutch county, in the number of slaves: 1,810 out of a total county population of 12,296, almost 15 percent.

Redrawing of Somerset County boundaries was completed with the removal of territories that included portions of New Brunswick (1838) and Princeton (1850). Both towns had grown up straddling the main road from New York to Philadelphia that formed Somerset’s southeast boundary.

With the exception of New Brunswick and Princeton, Somerset was essentially a scattering of rural villages until towns began to evolve in the nineteenth century under the stimulus of the railroads. The Delaware and Raritan Canal, opened in 1834, spurred the development of Rocky Hill, Griggs town, East Millstone, and South Bound Brook, but the waterway had far less impact than the railroad completed to Somerville in 1842 and extended to Easton in 1852. Coal brought from Pennsylvania by the Central Railroad of New Jersey gave rise to industry, notably woolen mills in Rar-itan, Somerville, and Bound Brook. Commuters from New York City spurred residential development in North Plainfield, Bound Brook, and Somerville well into the twentieth century.

Other railroads fanning out from New York fostered very different kinds of growth in northern and southern Somerset County. The Delaware and Bound Brook Railroad (later the Reading Railroad), built across the southern part of the county following passage of the General Railroad Act of 1873, quickly eclipsed a rival, the Mercer and Somerset Railroad, but towns expected to grow up along its route did not materialize. Instead, the access it gave to urban markets proved an important stimulus to the dairy farming for which Somerset County became noted.

The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad was opened to Bernardsville in 1872 and continued to Gladstone in 1890. It became primarily a commuter line, stimulating home building in Lyons, Basking Ridge, and Bernardsville and, far more importantly, it drew wealthy New Yorkers with a mind to build grand country estates to the picturesque Somerset Hills. The "Mountain Colony” as it was known, with golf courses, polo grounds, hunt clubs, and race meets became a fabled summer playground of the super rich.

Somerset is still the wealthiest county in New Jersey and ranks sixth in the nation for personal income.

Industrial development continued along the coal-carrying railroads, the Central Railroad of New Jersey and its rival the Lehigh, into the twentieth century. A modern factory built on the Millstone River in 1912 by the H.W. Johns-Manville Company became the largest asbestos plant in the world. The jobs created by the plant attracted thousands of Eastern European immigrants and an entire new town, Manville, grew up around it.

At the same time across the Raritan River the manufacture of dye-stuffs, begun during World War I by Calco Chemical Co., was taken over by American Cyanamid Co. and expanded into a giant chemical complex. These two plants became Somerset County’s largest employers, each with thousands of workers. During World War II both operated around the clock as did numerous smaller factories and two huge military supply depots; one on the Lehigh at South Somerville, the other on the Reading at Belle Mead. The resulting influx of war workers sent the county population soaring and created acute housing shortages that helped fuel a postwar boom in new suburbs around older towns. The i960 census counted 143,913 people, almost double the 1940 count of 74,390.

Highways had by then supplanted railroads as agents of change, and Somerset, in the heart of the state, became crisscrossed by major new arteries. A north-south "Million Dollar Highway” (later Route 202/206) connecting Morristown to Trenton through the Somerset Hills was begun in i92i. A three-lane "scenic highway” (Route 22) from Raritan all the way to Hillside was completed by i929 and extended west to Clinton in i939. Route 202 from Somerville to Flemington was opened in i934.

These highways made Somerset a prime location for corporate campuses. The first to arrive was Ortho Pharmaceutical in i946 followed by Mack Motors in i95i, and Ethicon and RCA in i956. Large-scale highway commercialism also got an early start: Somerset Shopping Center, New Jersey’s first, opened on the Somerville traffic circle in i956.

Suburban sprawl continued to spread westward across Somerset County through the twentieth century, its advance accelerated by decades of national prosperity and two federal interstates: I-287 opened in 1966, and I-78 in i968. An ever widening swath of development in the New York-Philadelphia corridor and court-ordered re-zoning, which allowed higher housing densities, further accelerated the transition.

As farms gave way to housing, commercial and business interests competed for sites convenient to intersections and interchanges. One parcel bounded by I-287, Route 202/206, and Route 22 became the most coveted property in the northeast. Thirty-seven developers vied for the chance to exploit the potential of this "Golden Triangle” in the 1970s.

The prize went to Hahn and Co. and Bridge-water Commons, a regional shopping mall with 200 stores catering to upscale buyers, opened in 1984. After thirteen years spent in obtaining approvals and construction the mall was an overnight success. Bridgewater Commons also fulfilled expectations that it would be a catalyst for further growth. High-rise office buildings, a major hotel, and an expansion of the mall added up to 10,000 cars a day on nearby highways. The surrounding towns, Bridgewater, Somerville, and Raritan, decided in 1996 to form a Regional Center Partnership. The Regional Center Partnership encompasses 11 square miles in the heart of Somerset County containing 25,000 residents and 40,000 jobs, and seeks to deal with traffic congestion and forestall a hodgepodge of further growth.

A booming national economy spurred growth in the rest of Somerset County as well. It is a midpoint in the East Coast megalopolis with one-fourth of the United States population within a 250-mile radius and therefore a magnet for both business and industry. The largest employers in the 1990s were AT&T, Chubb, Johnson & Johnson, Aventis, Metlife, and Pharmacia.

By century’s end the county’s population had again doubled, reaching 297,490 in 2000. Seventy-nine percent of these residents were white, 8 percent were black, and 8 percent were Asian. The median household income according to the 2000 census was $76,933.