Bedle, Joseph Dorsett (b. Jan. 5,1831;d. Oct. 21, 1894). Governor and lawyer. Joseph Bedle was born in Middletown Point (now Matawan), the son of Thomas Bedle, a merchant, justice of the peace, and judge of the Court of Common Pleas for Monmouth County, and Hannah Dorsett. After working two years in a general country store, the younger Bedle studied for about one and a half years in the Trenton law office of William L. Dayton, a former U.S. senator and, in 1856, the first Republican vice presidential candidate.
Following one winter at the law school in Ballston Spa, New York, and another in a Poughkeepsie law office, Bedle was admitted as an attorney and counselor in New York State. Additional study with Henry S. Little, who was to become a member of the Democratic "State House Ring," was followed by admission to the New Jersey bar in 1853. During the next two years Bedle practiced law in Mid-dletown Point; he moved to Freehold in 1855 and became a counselor in 1856. Five years later he married Althea F. Randolph, the niece of Democratic governor Theodore F. Randolph (1869-1872).
In 1865, at the age of thirty-four, Bedle became the second youngest justice in the state supreme court’s history, and Gov. Joel Parker appointed him to the largest circuit (Hudson, Bergen, Passaic). Shortly thereafter, Bedle moved his residence to Jersey City, next to that of Leon Abbett, who later served two terms as Democratic governor (1884-1887; 1890-1893). Before the end of Bedle’s term as justice (1871), the State House Ring planned to nominate him for governor, but Abbett persuaded Parker to run (successfully) for a second nonconsecutive term. In 1872 Bedle was reappointed to the bench.
The 1874 Democratic convention unanimously selected Bedle as its gubernatorial nominee to oppose Republican George A. Halsey of Newark. By then, Bedle’s charges to the grand jury in Hudson’s Court of Oyer and Terminer had led to the indictment and conviction in his courtroom of the Republican ring controlling Jersey City. He was elected by the second greatest state majority until that time.
Bedle’s vigorous attacks on special legislation and his plans for economy and home rule marked his inaugural address of 1875. Ratification of the state’s constitutional amendment in November 1875 restricted special laws. The percentage of enactments that were special laws fell from 84 percent during Parker’s term to only 15 percent during Bedle’s administration. The total enactments declined from 1,864 laws under Parker to 833 under Bedle. Not until 1961 would fewer statutes be enacted during a single session (145) than during Bedle’s last year in office (156).
Attention to the railroads was notable in Bedle’s administration. In January 1876 he complained that "the revenue received by the State from Railroad Companies is not near as large as it should be.” But during the great 1877 railroad strike he called up all companies of the state’s National Guard to protect the trains and the new crews of two railroads.
After his term ended, Bedle served as legal counsel for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad and became a director of many large corporations. He declined judge-ships (three times) and presidential nominations as minister to Russia and Austria. During the last year of his life he served on the state’s constitutional commission of 1894.
Applegate, John Stilwell. Early Courts and Lawyers of Monmouth County.
Bedminster. 26.7-square-mile township in Somerset County. Formed in 1749 by royal charter from the Northern Precinct and incorporated on February 21, 1798, Bedminster was settled by Dutch, German, and Scots-Irish in about 1710 and named after a village in England. It remained exclusively agricultural until the 1890s, when the railroad reached Peapack, bringing a flood of wealthy Manhattanites who built their palatial homes amid the beauty of the Somerset Hills. Pot-tersville, named after Searing Potter, owner of the mills to which the place owed its existence, Lamington, Burnt Mill, Greater Cross Roads, Lesser Cross Roads (now Bedminster), and Pluckemin are the township’s villages. Pluck-emin, probably named after a town in Scotland, was the site of the Continental Army’s artillery park during the winter of 1778-1779. British captain William Leslie, son of a Scottish earl, wounded at the 1777 Battle of Princeton, is buried in the Presbyterian Church’s graveyard. Nearby is The Hills, a prodigious development of nearly four thousand townhouses and condominiums at the foot of the Watchung Mountains. Rolling hills, large estates, horse farms (the U.S. Equestrian Center is here), and substantial single-family dwellings mark the township.
The 2000 population of 8,302 was 90 percent white. In 2000, the median household income was $71,550.
Bees. Bees, flying insects of the super family Apoidae, which includes wasps, feed on nectar and pollen from flowers, and live in solitary nests or in societies that share the same nest. Hundreds of bee species are found in New Jersey, the most notable being the large hairy bee known as the bumblebee.
The honeybee, the official state insect, is an introduced species brought by early settlers in the seventeenth century to produce honey. Honeybees are also the most important pollinators of plants. In 2000 there were one thousand beekeepers who kept ten thousand bee colonies in New Jersey. The value of crops pollinated by bees exceeds $140 million. Honeybees are subject to infection by various disease pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Other parasites and predators will also attack honeybees; in recent years, two parasitic mites, the tracheal mite and the Varroa mite, have killed a large number of bee colonies across North America, including many in New Jersey.
Beirne, Joseph A. (b. Feb. 16, 1911;d. Sept. 2, 1974). Telephone worker and labor leader. Joseph Beirne was born in Jersey City to Michael and Annie Beirne. He became a utility worker at Western Electric Company in Jersey City before finishing high school, and in 1933 he married Anne Mary Abahaze with whom he raised three children. In time Beirne climbed to the leadership of the National Federation of Telephone Workers, a coalition of independent unions in the telephone industry. After the weak organization was defeated in a 1947 strike against AT&T that brought federal intervention, Beirne was prominent in the federation’s reorganization as the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1949.
Beirne was elected the first president of the CWA, an office he occupied for twenty-seven years. The leader of the rapidly growing CWA maintained a high public profile. He was active in the liberal wing of the Democratic party and wrote books envisioning labor’s place in an automated environment that protected workers’ interests. At the same time, he led his union in two more dramatic strikes against AT&T, in 1968 and 1971, which led to improved wage packages for workers. In June 1974 Beirne retired, having welded America’s telephone workers into one of the nation’s strongest labor unions.
Belarusians. Belarusians first immigrated in large numbers to New Jersey in the nineteenth century and settled in cities such as Jersey City, Hoboken, and Passaic and farming communities such as Vineland. Although there is no accurate information— most Belarusians were entered into census rolls as "Russian”—it is estimated that more than 50,000 New Jerseyans are of Belarusian descent.
Life in New Jersey for the early Belaru-sian immigrants centeredaroundtheir church and social clubs, such as the Russian National Society of Mutual Aid. A second wave of Belarusians, many of them professionals, took up residence in New Jersey after World War II. The Belarusian-Community Center, located in South Fork, serves the Belarusian population, as do churches affiliated with the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.
Belcher, Jonathan (b. Jan. 8, 1682;d. Aug. 31, 1757). Colonial governor. Born into a wealthy and politically important family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher graduated from Harvard in 1699 and married Mary Partridge (d. 1736), the daughter of New Hampshire’s lieutenant governor, in 1705. He traveled back and forth to London for thirty years and in 1729 was appointed governor of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Belcher, unable to handle the liberty-loving colonists, retired in 1741. While in England he became friendly with a group of Quakers, who, in 1747, supported his appointment to succeed Lewis Morris as governor of New Jersey. In September 1748 he arrived in Burlington, where he soon married Mrs. Louise Teale, a London widow.
A Puritan New Englander, Belcher thought New Jersey lacked religion and culture. A friend of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, he supported the Great Awakening and the creation of a college in New Jersey. Wrangling between local Quakers and Anglicans put the latter project in suspension until "New Light” Presbyterians, unhappy with the religious orientation of the "Old Light” Yale College, held a lottery to raise funds. Belcher offered his own collection of 374 books and some portraits to start the library, and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) was formed. The new school wanted to name its building after Belcher, but he declined and suggested instead that it be named after the royal house of Nassau.
As governor, Belcher confronted riots in Newark and the Elizabeth area over land tenure questions that interfered with the court system. The incidents did not sit well with the board of trade. In addition, from 1749 to 1752 the colonial legislature balked at appropriating funds. By 1754 the French and Indian War loomed, and New Jersey was asked to assist in blocking French fortification of Lake Erie. There was later talk of buttressing the Delaware River with a series of forts. Belcher was caught between the East Jersey proprietors and local landowners, the council and assembly. In the end he was unable to satisfy the contending factions. War brought additional disagreements, and his health declined until his death of palsy in 1757.
Belcher Mosaic Glass Company.Charles Belcher had begun making ornamental window glass in Newark by 1858. On August 12, 1884, Henry F. Belcher (whether a son or a brother is not known) received a patent on a new technique to make stained-glass windows, which he called "metallo mosaics.” The mosaic process involved sandwiching pieces of colored glass between two layers of asbestos and then pouring a molten lead alloy into the sandwich. The result was a distinctive kind of window consisting of thousands of small, triangular pieces of glass. The business, which had been located in Newark, disappeared after 1890.
Bennets Mills, Belleville.
Belcher-Ogden Mansion. This eighteenth-century house in Elizabeth is named for two New Jersey governors who lived there. The 1722 smaller kitchen section was the home of John Ogden, one of Elizabeth town’s original settlers. Jonathan Belcher (1681-1757), royal governor of the colony from 1747 to 1757, moved into the house in 1751 and lived there until his death. He enlarged it with a two-and-a-half-story, five-bay section built of brick laid in Flemish checker bond and decorated in high Georgian style.
Belleville. 3.34-square-mile township in Essex County. Originally the Second River section of Newark, Belleville was settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century and was the scene of a Revolutionary War skirmish in 1777. It was part of Bloomfield from 1812 to 1839. The first steam engine in America was built in Belleville for John Stevens in 1798. The Soho Copper Rolling Mill was an important early industry, as was the quarrying of brown-stone. One of the first Chinese communities on the East Coast was established there to work in the Passaic Steam Laundry. Theodore Weld and the Grimke sisters also lived in Belleville for a time, making it an abolitionist headquarters. Since 1927, the section of Branch Brook Park bordering the Second River has been famous for its cherry blossoms, and a cherry blossom festival is held annually.
Industries currently operating in Belleville include water purification systems, pharmaceuticals, and adhesives and polyurethanes. A cancer research facility recently opened.
In 2000 the population of 35,928 was 69 percent white, 11 percent Asian, 5 percent black, and 24 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median household income in 2000 was $48,576. For complete census figures, see chart, 129.
Bellewood Park. Owned by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, Bellewood Park was an amusement park that operated from 1903 to 1916 near the village of Pattenburg. It was built to promote passenger travel on a primarily coal-hauling rail line that ran from Jersey City to Allentown, Pennsylvania. The beautiful rolling hills of Hunterdon County provided an ideal setting for numerous park attractions like the steam-driven roller coaster, beer garden, and dining and dancing pavilions. Diverse groups and individuals from as far as New York enjoyed the facilities. Some locals, unhappy with the drinking and dancing, increasingly pressured officials to curtail park activities. This pressure, coupled with changing socioeconomic conditions, contributed to the park’s closing in 1916.
Bell Labs. Bell Telephone Laboratories has long been regarded as one of the preeminent industrial research laboratories in the world. American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) formed Bell Labs in 1925 from what had been the Engineering Department of the Western Electric Company, an AT&T subsidiary. Although it was based in New York until the early 1960s, Bell Labs had several facilities in New Jersey almost from the first, including radio research stations in Whippany and Holmdel. From Whippany came the first experimental television broadcast in the United States (1927). In Holmdel, scientist Karl Jansky invented a new discipline, radio astronomy (1932).
Bell Labs opened its first large New Jersey facility in November 1941, when 140 scientists, engineers, and support personnel moved into a new research campus in the Murray Hill section of New Providence. Most of the work done there over the next few years was war-related, but immediately after 1945, Murray Hill became the center of Bell Labs’ work in solid-state physics and electronics. The most prominent of many achievements was the invention of the transistor in December 1947 by Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley. Most of the development work that turned the transistor from a laboratory curiosity to the fundamental device of modern technology took place in Murray Hill, as did symposia in 1951 and 1952 in which Bell Labs shared the invention with other interested companies. Other ideas that came from research at Murray Hill included the laser, communications satellites, and solar cells.
AT&T enlarged Murray Hill several times. By 1959 the campus housed 4,200 employees, and was both the headquarters of Bell Labs and the largest industrial research center in the United States. Besides the fundamental research that brought it fame, Murray Hill housed development efforts—from customer dialing of long-distance calls to improved transmission techniques to touch-tone service—that kept the U.S. telephone system the best in the world.
Bell Labs undertook a wide range of government research projects throughout the cold war, including communications systems for early-warning antimissile systems and the development of advanced radar and missile tracking systems. Much of this work took place at expanded facilities in Whippany. Some work begun for the military, such as the development of computer modems in 1954, later had wide civilian use.
In 1962, Bell Labs opened a new major facility in Holmdel. By the 1970s Holmdel housed over six thousand employees largely dedicated to research on telephone switching systems. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson invented the Unix computer operating system, the underlying language of the Internet, at Holmdel.
With the breakup of the Bell System monopoly in 1984, Bell Labs became officially AT&T Bell Laboratories and gradually focused its efforts on providing the technological innovations needed to keep AT&T at the forefront of the now competitive telecommunications equipment and long-distance industries. And with the spin-off of AT&T’s manufacturing businesses such as Lucent Technologies in 1996, Bell Labs itself split into a new AT&T Labs, based in Middletown and Florham Park, and the research and development arm of Lucent, which retained the Bell Labs name.
Bellmawr. 3.03-square-mile borough in Camden County. Incorporated in 1926, Bellmawr was once part of Union Township and then Centre Township. The borough was originally part of a large estate that John Hugg established in the latter part of the seventeenth century near the intersection of Big and Little Timber creeks. "Guinea Town,” a black settlement, grew up here about 1750, around the homes belonging to former slaves of the Hugg family, but it was largely abandoned after the Civil War.
The name of Bellmawr, known as Heddings in the post-Civil War period, is associated with the Bell family, which owned a large portion of the Hugg estate and was famous for breeding Percherons, fine draught horses.
In 1941, Bellmawr Park, a village of five hundred units within the borough, was built by the federal government and based on the Camden Plan, a program financed by the Federal Works Agency for union members working for the defense industry. Residents neither rented nor owned their homes but bought stock in the nonprofit mutual company that owned the project.
Bellmawr is today in the heart of a major road network and houses a large industrial park within its borders. Privately owned Bellmawr Lake, opened in 1957, is still a popular attraction.
In 2000 the total population of the predominantly residential community was 11,262. Ninety-three percent of the population was white. The median household income in 2000 was $44,653. For complete census figures, see chart, 129.
Bellows, George Wesley (b. Aug. 12,1882; d. Jan. 8, 1925). Painter. George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio, to George and Anna Smith Bellows. He attended Ohio State University where he fostered his interest in art by illustrating the university yearbook. In 1904 Bellows left OSU to study at the New York School of Art. On September 23,1910, he married Emma Louise Story of Montclair, New Jersey. The couple had two daughters.
Bellows was associated with the Ashcan school. His paintings depict modern urban scenes in the American realist style. He made several study trips to New Jersey, which resulted in large-scale paintings, including three works depicting polo matches in Lakewood.
Belmar. Borough in Monmouth County, consisting of 1.02 square miles of land and 0.67 square miles of water. Originally visited by Lenape Indians and first settled by Europeans around 1700, Belmar lies between the Atlantic Ocean and the Shark River. In its early days the area was occupied mainly by farmers and fishermen.
In 1872 a group of businessmen from New York and Philadelphia, who felt that Ocean Grove was getting too crowded, organized the Ocean Beach Association and incorporated on March 13, 1873. The new resort, called Ocean Beach, was divided into desirable building lots that quickly sold for summer cottages and hotels. In 1889, after a bitter debate, the name was officially changed to Belmar. There were several additions of land, most notably in 1907, 1910, and 1927. Previously part of Wall Township, Belmar first incorporated with independent borough in 1890 and reincorporated in 1897.
During the twentieth century, Belmar gradually developed as a year-round residential community but continues to lure thousands of summer visitors. The many attractions include beaches, a boardwalk, Silver Lake, and the Belmar Marina.
In 2000, the population of 6,045 was 92 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $44,896. For complete census figures, see chart, 130.
George Wesley Bellows, Polo at Lakewood, 1913. Oil on canvas, 441/4 x 631/2 in.
Flowerbed at Silver Lake, Belmar, 1940.
Belvidere. 1.3-square-mile town and seat of Warren County government. Located where Pequest Creek meets the Delaware River, Belvidere was the site of Fort Reading, part of a line of defensive fortifications used during the French and Indian War. Maj. Robert Hoops, who supplied the Continental Army during the American Revolution, later planned a village north of the Pequest. The property to the south, named Belvidere for the beautiful view, was first owned by Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and then Garret Wall, a state senator. Wall deeded parcels for public use, including a square that became a park. Belvidere was separated from Oxford Township and incorporated in 1845.
Early in the nineteenth century the town’s location made it a center for transportation and manufacturing as the Pequest provided waterpower for sawmills and gristmills; in the twentieth century the Pequest became the source of electric power for other uses. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Delaware River and several railroads connected Belvidere to markets in Trenton and Philadelphia. Lumber and flour mills were later replaced by woodworking and welding companies. As automobiles displaced trains, the town became largely residential. Today it is known for the Victorian architecture that has given it a place on the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
The 2000 population of 2,771 was 98 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $52,792. For complete census figures, see chart, 130.
