Devlin, Martin P. (b. Nov. 14,1870; d. Aug. 25,1933). Lawyer and labor leader. Born in Scotland to Irish parents, sixteen-year-old Martin Devlin was a laborer in a shipyard when he immigrated to the United States. He worked in a pottery plant and became president of the National Sanitary Pressers’ Union. A labor organizer by day, Devlin read law at night and was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1898. He became active in Democratic politics and a prominent advocate of progressive causes, including women’s suffrage and commission government. Devlin, like other progressive Democrats, was initially suspicious of Woodrow Wilson’s conservative views when he was nominated for governor. But Wilson quickly cast his lot with the progressive faction of his party and later named Devlin as one of a small circle of advisors who liberalized his political views.
DeVry College of Technology. With national origins dating back to 1931, DeVry first opened in New Jersey in Union in 1969. Recently renamed the DeVry College of Technology and relocated to North Brunswick, it is part of a national network of for-profit technical education institutions. It offers practical business and technical education tailored to employers’ needs. DeVry continues to grow as both a business and educational institution in New Jersey. DeVry went public in 1991 and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and in 1999 was given the authority to grant baccalaureate degrees for its electronics engineering technology program in New Jersey. Currently, the New Jersey campus has more than thirty-nine hundred students.
Dey Mansion. Known as "Washington’s Headquarters,” this Georgian-style house located in Preakness, Passaic County, was built on a 600-acre tract of land circa 1740 by Dirck Dey, a Dutch immigrant. Dey served as a freeholder in what was then Bergen County and in the New Jersey General Assembly from 1748 to 1752. His son, Theunis Dey, served in the New Jersey Assembly and in the Provincial Council; he was a colonel in the local militia during the Revolutionary War. In 1780 the mansion hosted Gen. George Washington, serving as his military headquarters and sheltering him against British kidnap plots. The historic site is now owned and operated as a museum by the Passaic County Department of Parks and Recreation.
Diabase. Diabase is a common intrusive igneous rock composed largely of plagioclase feldspar and pyroxene. A thick intrusion of diabase known as the Palisades Sill is exposed as a ridge along the Hudson River and constitutes the hard, black bedrock of Fort Lee, Hoboken, and Jersey City. Some of the Palisades magma broke through to the surface to flow out as Orange Mountain basalt. Variations in the mineralogy and geochemistry of the Palisades are due to complex in situ crystallization processes that are studied by geologists around the world. The principal source of the Palisades magma was probably previously subducted basaltic crust that melted during the Jurassic breakup of the Pangean supercon-tinent 200 million years ago.
Dialects. New Jersey is a dialect crossroads, and it has been since the time when the Lenape, or Delaware, Indians, occupied the land. The Lenape language belongs to the Algonkian language family, along with the languages of most of the other Eastern Woodland Indians. Within the Lenape language there were two dialects, which corresponded to the Munsee and Unami geographic groupings. The Munsee dialect was spoken in northeastern New Jersey, the middle and lower Hudson River Valley, on western Long Island, and on Staten Island. The Unami dialect was spoken in eastern Pennsylvania, most of Delaware, and southern and central New Jersey. Today, although the Delaware Indians no longer reside in New Jersey, their descendants in Canada still speak the Munsee dialect. The Unami dialect survives among the Oklahoma Delaware.
Dialect differences also developed among the early European settlers. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm noted that the Swedish dialect in the parts of southern New Jersey that had been formerly part of New Sweden "already deviated from the Swedish that is used in the Old Country.” He predicted that the language soon would become "a new tongue” and eventually disappear.
Two dialects developed among the Dutch in New Netherland. "Jersey Dutch” was spoken in northeastern New Jersey and southeastern New York State and "Mohawk Dutch” in the upper Hudson and Mohawk River valleys. There also existed a variant of Jersey Dutch among the Afro-Dutch slaves and free blacks in northern New Jersey. These spoken dialects began to die out in the nineteenth century. The Dutch Reformed Church kept the language alive by continuing to conduct services in Dutch until the mid-nineteenth century. The Dutch who immigrated to Paterson and Prospect Park in the late nineteenth century found it difficult to understand the dialect spoken by the Old Dutch families. By the beginning of the twentieth century, only a few people in Bergen County spoke the Jersey Dutch dialect.
After 1664, with the conquest of New Netherland by England, English became the official language of New Jersey. Soon dialect differences developed, which correspond with the earlier dialect regions among the Lenape Indians. Today, a major dialect boundary between the Northern dialect and the Midland dialect divides New Jersey. These dialect regions extend beyond the political boundaries of New Jersey and are divided into three sub-regions: the Hudson Valley subregion, the Metropolitan New York subregion, and the Delaware Valley subregion. For example, the Northern dialect word for a small stream is a brook, while it is called a run in the Midland dialectregion. A more modern example is the use of the term tomato pie in the Delaware Valley subregion for what is called pizza in the Metropolitan New York subregion.
Immigrant groups who have settled in New Jersey since the early nineteenth century have brought their languages with them. German, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, Spanish, and now Urdu and Gujurati were spoken and continue to be spoken in the homes and on the streets. Each new language has changed and enriched the dialects of New Jersey.
Diamondback terrapin. Maiaciemys terrapin is a small turtle that lives in estuaries from New England to Texas. It is the only turtle specialized for this moderately saline habitat between the ocean and freshwater ponds. Terrapins spend most of their time in the water, coming onto salt-marsh islands infrequently. During the winter they hibernate in the mud at the bottom of bays and creeks. Females are larger than males and can attain a length of eight inches, while males are rarely longer than five inches. Females come ashore from mid-June until mid-July to dig nests in the dunes, where they lay up to twelve eggs (usually nine). The nests are about six inches below the sand surface, above the high tide. The eggs take between sixty and eighty days to hatch, and the young climb out of the nest, hide in the vegetation to avoid being eaten by predators, and then, under the cover of darkness, crawl to the bay and swim away. In the 1800s and early 1900s, terrapins were considered a delicacy, like lobsters, and their populations were seriously exploited. Today terrapins are often injured or killed by boat motors, and females are often killed when they cross roads to find nest sites. Moreover, their nesting habitat is being destroyed; they are disturbed while nesting by people, dogs, and vehicles; and the young and eggs are eaten by predators. The Diamondback Terrapin Conservation Project of the Wetlands Institute in Middle Township works to protect females and eggs during the nesting season.
Diamondback terrapin.
Dickerson, Mahlon (b. Apr. 17, 1770; d. Oct. 5,1853). Lawyer, mine owner, U.S. senator, and governor. Mahlon Dickerson was born in Hanover Neck, Morris County, the son of an iron mine owner with the resources to provide him with a first-rate education. Dickerson graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1789, read law in Morristown, and in 1793 was admitted to the New Jersey bar. By 1797 he was seeking a broader field of endeavor and moved to Philadelphia. There he joined the Jeffersonian-Republican cause, writing for the newspapers and earning not merely a reputation as a shrewd operator but election to local office as well. In 1810 Dickerson returned to New Jersey to assume responsibility for the family’s iron mine in Succasunna. A sophisticated, handsome figure, Dickerson soon entered politics in New Jersey. During the next three decades he held virtually every office in the state; legislator, supreme court justice, governor, U.S. senator, and district court judge; in addition to a term as navy secretary serving Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. A staunch Jeffersonian-Republican, he became an equally staunch Jacksonian Democrat, albeit one whose views on key issues like tariffs and the national bank went against the grain of his party’s ideology.
Elected governor in 1815, Dickerson promoted banking, internal improvements, and public education. He also prodded the legislature to demand protective tariffs from Congress, an issue he would be identified with throughout his long career in politics. Dickerson’s support for road construction did not entail state spending; rather, he urged the creation of private turnpike companies. He also encouraged construction of a canal across the state between the Raritan and Delaware rivers, a project that was completed under private auspices in the 1830s.
Dickerson was governor during the so-called "year without a summer,” 1816. Although he took note of the natural disaster in his annual message, he offered no specific remedies or assistance to the state’s farmers, who were most impacted by the droughts and killing frosts that plagued New Jersey that year.
In 1817 Dickerson was elected to the U.S. Senate, serving sixteen years. In the Senate he was best known for his advocacy of high tariffs. He was a key figure in the Jacksonian political organization in New Jersey, though not as engaged in day-to-day political maneuvering as Whig leader Samuel L. Southard was. As navy secretary Dickerson did not make a distinctive contribution. He was a reasonably effective administrator but undertook no major initiatives.
Dickerson was sixty-eight years of age in 1838 when he retired from the Cabinet. He spent his remaining years occupied primarily with his iron-mining business and as spokesperson for the protectionist American Institute, which elected him its president in 1846. In 1844 Dickerson served as vice president of the state constitutional convention. A supporter of the presidential ambitions of Michigan senator Lewis Cass, Dickerson might have played a role in a Cass administration. Cass, however, lost both the Democratic party’s 1844 nomination to James K. Polk and a close race against Whig Zachary Taylor in 1848.
Dickerson never married. His younger brother Philemon was also a significant New Jersey political figure, serving as governor 1836-1837. In 1840, Mahlon Dickerson accepted a temporary appointment from President Van Buren to a district court seat in New Jersey, in effect holding the position for his brother, who was appointed in the waning days of the Van Buren presidency.
Dickerson, Philemon (b. June 26,1788; d. Dec. 10, 1862). Politician, governor, and jurist. Dickerson was born at Succasunna, a son of Jonathan and Mary Coe Dickerson. His family line stretched back to the great Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. Dickerson graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1812 and a year later was licensed to practice law in Philadelphia. In 1816 he moved to Paterson, where he spent the rest of his life. Like most lawyers in this era, Dickerson was active politically. Following in the steps of his older brother Mahlon, he became a leading Democratic activist and officeholder. As a member of Congress, 18331836, Dickerson loyally supported the Jackso-nian program, including the president’s war against the Bank of the United States. In 1836, when popular Democratic governor Peter D. Vroom decided not to seek reelection, the Jacksonian legislative caucus turned to Dick-erson, who resigned his congressional seat to accept the governorship. His one-year term as governor was turbulent. As the party in power during the depression of 1837, the Jacksonians took the brunt of voter discontent and Dick-erson lost his job. In 1838 he won a bitterly contested race for Congress, but was defeated for reelection in the Whig landslide of 1840.
Later that year, following the death of New Jersey federal district judge William Rossell, Philemon’s brother Mahlon interceded with President Martin Van Buren on Philemon’s behalf for the lucrative post. The appointment was duly made, and Dickerson was seated after a difficult confirmation battle. Philemon Dickerson served on the bench for the rest of his life. He died in Paterson of cancer on December 10, 1862. Married in 1816 to Sidney Stotesbury, he had a daughter and two sons, the second of whom, Edward Nicoll Dickerson, became a prominent New Jersey attorney, scientist, and inventor.
Dickinson, Fairleigh Stanton (b. Aug. 22, 1866; d. June 23, 1948). Businessman and philanthropist. Fairleigh Dickinson was president and founding partner of Becton Dickinson and Company, a medical and surgical equipment company. It was incorporated in East Rutherford in 1907. During World War I the firm produced all-glass syringes, a significant improvement over the metal ones of the day. Dickinson himself was commissioned a lieutenant colonel, working with the Army Medical Corps on supplying surgical instruments. In 1926 he was appointed colonel and in 1940 was put in charge of the medical departments of both the army and navy. He was a major benefactor of Fairleigh Dickinson University, which was named in his honor at its founding in 1942. In 1916 he married Grace Bancroft Smith; their son Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr., was a New Jersey state senator from 1968 to 1972.
Dickinson, Jonathan (b. Apr. 22, 1688; d. Oct. 7, 1747). Clergyman and college president. Jonathan Dickinson was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, to Hezekiah and Abigail Dickinson. He graduated from Yale College in 1706. In 1708 he was called to minister to an independent congregation in Elizabeth Town (Elizabeth), New Jersey. The next year he married Joanna Melyne, the sister of his predecessor, Samuel Melyne. In 1717 Dickinson led his congregation into the Presbytery (later Synod) of Philadelphia, where he established himself as an intellectual leader and New Side minister during the First Great Awakening. In 1745 he withdrew from the Synod of Philadelphia to help form the Synod of New York. He became one of the founders, and in 1747 the first president, of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but he died later that year.
Jonathan Dickinson.
Dickson, William Kennedy Laurie (b. Aug. 3, i860; d. Sept. 28, 1935). Photographer and inventor. At Thomas A. Edison’s West Orange labs, W.K.L. Dickson, an excellent photographer, was in charge of experiments with moving pictures. The Kine-toscope, an early device for viewing motion pictures, was essentially Dickson’s invention. He made many of the earliest films at Edison’s BlackMaria studio in West Orange in 1894-95, and wrote the first history of motion pictures. Dickson also successfully experimented with combining film and recorded sound. He left Edison to found the American Mutoscope Company, a competitor in the movie business. He directed the Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate’s London Office in 1896; the following year, he returned to inventing.
DiFrancesco, Donald T. (b. Nov. 20, 1944). Acting governor, state senator, and lawyer. The longest serving acting governor in New Jersey history, Donald T. DiFrancesco held the position of senate president-acting governor for over eleven months.
Born in Scotch Plains, DiFrancesco is an alumnus of Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, Pennsylvania State University, and Seton Hall University Law School. He was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1969 and served as the municipal prosecutor for Scotch Plains from 1970 to 1975.
DiFrancesco’s career in the New Jersey legislature began in 1975 when he was elected to the General Assembly. The Republican was reelected in 1977 and chose to run for the state senate in a special election in November 1979. He won election and was reelected in six subsequent contests. DiFrancesco quickly established himself within the senate’s Republican party and was chosen minority leader from 1982 to 1984. In 1992, when the Republicans gained control of the senate, DiFrancesco was elected senate president. He held this position until he retired from the senate in 2002, making him one of the longest serving senate presidents in the state’s history.
In the legislature, DiFrancesco counted among his successes the passage of the New Jersey Family Leave Act, the creation of the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund and the establishment of the Garden State Preservation Trust Fund. The senate president also sponsored legislation prohibiting unfunded mandates and extended the property tax rebate program through the Property Taxpayers’ Protection Act.
DiFrancesco’s service as acting governor began on January 31, 2001, when he succeeded Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who resigned her office to take a position in the George W. Bush administration as national director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since New Jersey does not have a lieutenant governor, the line of succession under the state constitution falls to the senate president. Thus, the vacancy caused by Whitman’s resignation created the unique situation in which DiFrancesco served as both senate president and acting governor for all except the final week of her unexpired term. (He was no longer the senate president for this last week of Whitman’s term, and the powers of the governorship passed to the new senate president(s) for that week, as well as to Attorney General Farmer for the period between noon on January 15 and the moment of James Mc-Greevey’s swearing in.)
DiFrancesco made no secret that he intended to run for governor in the 2001 election. The incumbent had the blessing and support of the state’s Republican party, but faced a serious primary challenge from the more conservative Bret Schundler, mayor of Jersey City. Before he formally announced his candidacy, the New York Times ran an investigative series that examined the acting governor’s personal finances and relationship with local real estate developers. While the series indicated that no laws were broken, the damage caused by this expose forced DiFrancesco to withdraw from the primary on April 25, 2001, only three days after he formally kicked off his campaign.
DiFrancesco retired from active politics when his term as senate president expired on January 8, 2002. He is a partner in the law firm DiFrancesco, Bateman, Coley, Yospin, Kunzman, Davis, and Lehrer. He is married to the former Diane Dragovic, and the couple has three daughters.
Diller, Burgoyne (b. Jan. 13,1906; d. Jan. 30, 1965). Painter and sculptor. Raised in Michigan, Burgoyne Diller moved to New York City in 1929 and enrolled at the Art Students’ League where he studied with Jan Matulka and Hans Hofmann. In 1933 he ended his study at the League and had his first one-person exhibition at Contemporary Arts, New York. Diller’s abstract paintings and relief constructions of the mid-i930s contain horizontal and vertical lines in shades of black, white, and primary colors. These works owe a debt to the art of Kasimir Malevich, the Russian Construc-tivists, and the de Stijl movement. In 1935 he took the position of assistant project supervisor of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project mural division in New York. Two years later, he joined the American Abstract Artists organization. After World War II, Diller’s artistic production tapered off; he was appointed a full-time instructor at Brooklyn College in i946 where he continued to teach for the next seventeen years. In 1948 he constructed a studio building in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, where he spen this summers working on his art. He moved permanently to Atlantic Highlands with his wife, Grace, and her daughter, Suzanne, in i956.
Diners. Diners did not start in New Jersey— that honor belongs to Rhode Island, where Walter Scott set up his horse-drawn cart on the streets of Providence in 1872—but only one state can be called the diner capital of the world, and it’s New Jersey. There are about 620 diners in the Garden State, more than in any other. No one in New Jersey lives far from a diner; diners are in fully half of the state’s 566 municipalities.
Why the glut of diners? One reason is that many of the diner companies traditionally were located here; few diners made it beyond the East Coast because of the high cost of trucking or railing them thousands of miles. But there’s something else. New Jersey is the most highway-intensive state. Millions of people drive through the Garden State every day; they’ve got to eat somewhere. There’s also something innately New Jersey about a diner. Diners are colorful and kitschy, and in New Jersey, which Rutgers University professor Michael Rockland calls the roadside pop architecture capital of the world, they have found a home.
Customers can get anything they want, whenever they want it, at a true Jersey diner. But the diner is more than just a place to eat; it is a hangout, a community center, a town hall. The sights and sounds inside a diner are half the allure. Bacon sizzles on the grill; conversation, church choir-hushed in the early morning, gets more animated as the day wears on. Everyone from sanitation workers to the mayor and chief of police to six-figure executives can be found sitting at the counter; the diner may be the most democratic institution on earth.
Boulevard Diner, Forty-first Street and Crescent Boulevard, Camden, c. 1950.
Some great Jersey diners: The Summit Diner, built in 1929, features wood paneling, a self-serve water dispenser, a tiny bathroom, and a sign that reads, "Ladies Invited,” a reference to the 1930s when women were finally "allowed” entry into the male-dominated diner world.
The White Mana, Jersey City, and the White Manna, Hackensack, are similarly named but wildly dissimilar. The first was a fixture at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and is now host to the world’s only twenty-four-hour "diner cam,”while the second is the state’s tiniest and most photogenic diner, with its red-trimmed glass-block and white roof. The Clarksville Diner, with its graceful barrel ceiling, wooden booths, and swivel stools, once on Route 1 in Lawrenceville, is now in Paris, one of a dozen Jersey diners sent overseas. The diner stands outside the headquarters of a Paris TV station, serving not as a diner but as a venue for corporate functions.
The state’s oldest diner is Max’s in Harrison, built in the late 1920s.
Jersey diners have had starring and background roles in many movies and commercials. Boys on the Side and Jersey Girl were shot in the Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights. Scenes from The Purple Rose of Cairo were shot in the old Raritan Diner in South Amboy. Other Jersey diners and corresponding movies: Roadside Diner, Wall (Baby, It’s You); Liberty View Diner, Jersey City (Broadway Danny Rose); Teamsters Diner, Fairfield (Angel Heart).
The most famous diner in the state’s history was Rosie’s. The Little Ferry diner in Little Ferry was renamed Rosie’s after the commercials for Bounty paper towels, featuring Nancy Walker, were filmed there. Rosie’s is now the star attraction at Diner World in Rockford, Michigan.
Best Jersey diner? Near the top of the list is the Harris Diner, East Orange, for just about the best breakfast anywhere—or the one you call home.
