Freehold Township. 38.53-square-mile township in Monmouth County. On October 31,1693, Monmouth was subdivided into Middletown, Shrewsbury, and Freehold. Originally known as Monmouth Court House, Freehold became the county seat and a significant industrial center. Marlboro, Manalapan, Millstone, Upper Freehold, and a considerable part of Ocean County once made up Freehold. It was incorporated as Freehold Township on February 21,1798; the borough separated from the township in 1919.
In the eighteenth century Freehold was mainly a farming community with several small villages that were populated by a large number of artisans. The Battle of Monmouth took place near Englishtown in Manalapan and Freehold Township on June 28,1778. This battle is remembered as the first major offensive of the American forces in the Revolutionary War.
The arrival of the railroad in the nineteenth century established Freehold as a prime center for commercial activity. Today, Freehold has a large population of professionals. It is home to the oldest daytime harness racetrack in the United States and to Freehold Raceway Mall. There are thirteen parks in the township, including Turkey Swamp County Park and Monmouth Battlefield State Park.
The 2000 population of Freehold Township was 31,537 with 87 percent white, 5 percent black, and 5 percent Asian. The median household income was $77,185.
Freehold Young Ladies’ Seminary. Founded in 1844, the seminary was one of the first of its kind to offer a broad educational experience to young women. Amos Richardson, a graduate of Dartmouth, was the seminary’s first principal. He advocated for his students a "solid, practical education to fit them for the duties of life and to qualify them to enjoy the pleasures of a rational, intelligent existence” as well as preparation for higher education. Although students came from as far as Missouri and Alabama, roughly half of the seminary’s students were from Freehold. The last commencement was held in 1897.
Freeman, Grace Margaret (b. Apr. 1,1897; d. Apr. 19,1967). Legislator. Grace Freeman earned a B.S. and an M.A. from Teachers’ College, Columbia University, in 1926, and taught civics and history in the secondary schools of Caldwell and Montclair. After World War II she was elected to the New Jersey assembly, where she served for five years. In 1949, she sponsored New Jersey’s Civil Rights Act, which preceded similar U.S. congressional action by fifteen years. The Freeman bill outlawed all forms of discrimination due to race, creed, national origin, or color in employment, education, housing, public accommodation, and recreational facilities such as hotels, bars, restaurants, theaters, beaches and boardwalks, swimming pools, bathhouses, gymnasiums, bowling alleys, and myriad other places.
Freeman became chair of the Education Committee in the General Assembly, where she sponsored such bills as the repeal of the tax on school athletic meets and plays and the outlawing of switchblades. She personally provided grants to needy students at Montclair State College. Her most important education bill, passed in 1951, established a $15 million bond issue for building programs at state teachers’ colleges.
Freeman was active in many clubs and political organizations, and received some forty awards of recognition from organizations as diverse as the New Jersey Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs. In her will she left her residence to be used as a retirement home for Presbyterian ministers and missionaries, their wives and widows, and $50,000 to benefit the dormitory named for her at Montclair State University.
Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins (b. Oct. 31,1852; d. Mar. 15, 1930). Writer. When Mary E. Wilkins moved to Metuchen in 1902 after marrying Dr. Charles Manning Freeman, a non-practicing doctor who ran a family coal and lumber business, she was already a writer of renown, having published poetry for children and popular stories for adults in such periodicals as Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Monthly. In Metuchen she was a celebrity, even though in her novels The Debtor, "Doc" Gordon, and The Butterfly House she used Metuchen as the setting and satirized the local manners and idiosyncrasies of New Jersey small-town life. She lived in Metuchen for twenty-eight years and wrote eleven more volumes, collaborated on a motion picture, and published many short stories. She was well acquainted with other notable authors of her time, including Mark Twain.
In 1921, Freeman obtained a legal separation from her husband, an alcoholic and drug addict, who had been committed to the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane in Trenton. During the 1920s, she wrote little. In 1925 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the first William Dean Howells Medal for distinguished work in fiction. In 1926 she and Edith Wharton were among the first women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. After Freeman died, in 1930, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City installed new bronze doors with the inscription, "Dedicated to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and the Women Writers of America.”
Freeman’s short stories, particularly "A New England Nun” and "The Revolt of ‘Mother,”’ have been widely anthologized. Critics admire her willingness to experiment with genre, her innovative exploration of topics such as homosexuality, and her ability to portray women as strong-willed individuals.
Free speech. Free speech in New Jersey receives special protection from Article i, paragraph 6, of the state constitution, as supplemented by Article i, paragraph 18, which protects the rights of assembly and petition. Under paragraph 6, every person "may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right.” And "no law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.” The second of these sentences echoes the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits governmental entities from acting in such a way as to deny freedom of speech. The first sentence, however, provides special protections for freedom of expression in New Jersey, unavailable under the federal Constitution, in two significant ways.
First, because the constitutional provision is framed as an affirmative right to speak, rather than as a prohibition on governmental action, it limits certain private entities, such as shopping malls and property owners’ associations, from unreasonably restricting speech on their premises. As the state’s supreme court has reiterated, the more private property owners open their property to public use, the greater their obligation to respect the expressional rights of visitors. This principle was most eloquently articulated by the supreme court in 1971: "Property rights serve human rights____Title to real property cannot include dominion over the destiny of persons the owner permits to come upon the premises.” Pursuant to this principle, in subsequent cases, the court has ruled that privately owned regional and community shopping malls had to allow petitioning and leaflet-ingby advocacy groups pursuant to reasonable regulations.
The second way in which New Jersey provides special protections for freedom of speech lies in the constitutional affirmation of free speech, whereby governmental entities are not only prohibited from abridging speech, but also have an "affirmative obligation to protect speech.”
Frelinghuysen, Frederick Theodore (b. Aug. 4,1817; d. May 20,1885). U.S. senator and secretary of state. Born in Millstone, the son of Frederick Frelinghuysen, Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen graduated from Rutgers College in 1836 and then studied law under the tutelage of his uncle and adoptive father, Theodore Frelinghuysen (the Whig vice presidential candidate in 1844 on the ticket headed by Henry Clay). Frelinghuysen commenced his legal practice in Newark in 1839 and held various local political offices. In 1842 he married Matilda Griswold, with whom he had six children.
A member of a New Jersey political dynasty, Frelinghuysen reluctantly left the Whig party upon its disintegration in the early 1850s and joined the Republicans. He represented New Jersey at the Washington peace conference in February 1861. During the Civil War, he was attorney general of the state. As U.S. senator from 1866 to 1869, Frelinghuysen, a Radical Republican during Reconstruction, favored African American suffrage and the removal from office of President Andrew Johnson. After declining an appointment as minister to Great Britain tendered by President Ulysses S. Grant, Frelinghuysen was again elected to the Senate, where he held a seat from 1871 to 1877. He served on the Electoral Commission of 1877 to resolve the disputed presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. Frel-inghuysen’s bid for reelection was defeated in 1877. President Chester A. Arthur selected Frelinghuysen, a member of the "Stalwart” wing of the Republican party, as secretary of state, in which capacity he remained from 1881 to 1885. Frelinghuysen endorsed a Central American canal, hastily negotiating the ill-fated Frelinghuysen-Zavala Treaty with Nicaragua. He also supported reciprocity agreements with Mexico and Hawaii. Frelinghuysen died in Newark.
Fredrick T. Frelinghuysen.
Frelinghuysen, Theodore (b. Mar. 28,1787; d. Apr. 12,1862). Lawyer, politician, college president, and religious reformer. Theodore Frelinghuysen was born in Millstone, Franklin Township, Somerset County. His father, Frederick Frelinghuysen, was an important politician. His mother, Gertrude Schenck, died when he was a child. Theodore graduated from Princeton in 1804 with high honors, and read law with Richard Stockton in Princeton. He became an attorney in 1808 and relocated to Newark, where he married Charlotte Mercer in 1809. Her father, Archibald Mercer, was a prominent Federalist merchant from Trenton. The Frelinghusens had no children, but adopted a nephew, Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen, who became a politician, diplomat, and secretary of state.
Theodore Frelinghuysen served as a militia captain during the War of 1812, commanding a group of volunteers from Essex County. His unit did not see service during the war, but he organized volunteers in 1814 to work on the fortifications in Brooklyn to protect New York City. Chosen as New Jersey’s attorney general in 1817, he served until 1829, when he resigned to become a U.S. senator. In the 1820s he shifted from Federalism to support President John Quincy Adams and became an Adams presidential elector in 1828 before becoming a Whig in the 1830s.
While in the Senate he became well known for his opposition to the Indian removal policy of President Andrew Jackson, and he unsuccessfully defended the Cherokee. He picked up the nickname of "Christian statesman” because of his attitudes on Indian removal and his support for the suspension of mail delivery on Sundays, which he believed profaned the Christian sabbath. Dutch Reformed by denomination, Frelinghuysen, in both public and private life was a consistent advocate of Protestant values.
By defending the Bank of the United States, Freyling huysen outraged New Jersey Democrats, and lost any chance of another Senate term. Returning to Newark, he was elected the second mayor of the city in 1837, serving two terms before being appointed chancellor of New York University in 1839, a position he retained until his resignation in the summer of 1850.
Theodore Frelinghuysen.
In 1844 the Whigs nominated him for vice president with Henry Clay at the head of the ticket. During the 1844 campaign, Democrats attacked Frelinghuysen as a "Negro lover" because he donated a building lot for the Fourth Presbyterian Church, an African American church in Newark, and for his leadership role in the American Colonization Society. His Protestant moral values raised questions about his nativist leanings with Irish Catholic voters.
In 1850 Frelinghuysen became president of Rutgers College, serving until his death in 1862. His wife died in 1854, and he married Harriet Pumpelly in 1857. He expressed his Protestant values by his service to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1826-1857), and he was vice president of the American Bible Society (18301846) and president (1846-1862). Also, he was actively involved in American Sunday School Union, American Tract Society (president, 1842-1848), and American Temperance Union. He was particularly well known for his temperance activities.
Frelinghuysen, Theodoras Jacobus (b. Nov. 1692; d. c. 1747). Clergyman. Born in Lingen, Germany, the son of Johannes Hen-rich Frelinghaus, a pastor, Theodorus Frel-inghuysen matriculated at the University of Lingen and was ordained in Westphalia to the ministry of the Reformed Dutch Church in 1715. He subsequently held pastorates for a short interval in Belgium. In January 1720 he and Jacobus Schuurman, a schoolmaster friend, immigrated to America, where Frelinghuysen served as minister to several Dutch Reformed churches in the Raritan Valley of central New Jersey until his death.
Loyal to the Heidelberg Catechism, he emphasized pietism, conversion, repentance, strict moral standards, private devotions, excommunication, and church discipline. An eloquent preacher who published numerous sermons, he struggled against indifferentism and empty formalism. His theories conflicted with the orthodox views of Henry Boel and others, who challenged Frelinghuysen’s religious emotionalism and unauthorized practices. As one of the fearless missionaries of the first Great Awakening in America, Frelinghuysen stressed tangible religious experiences. He trained young men for the clergy, often ordaining them without permission. His evangelical fervor and autonomous actions helped to instill an element of local independence for Dutch churches in North America’s middle colonies.
Frelinghuysen married Eva Terhune of Flatbush, Long Island, and fathered seven children. He died in Somerset County.
Frelinghuysen. 23.6-square-mile township in Warren County. Frelinghuysen was named for Theodore Frelinghuysen, U.S. senator and running mate of defeated presidential candidate Henry Clay. Villages include Marksboro, Johnsonburg, Shilo, and Kerrs Corner. In 1848 Frelinghuysen was set off from Hardwick Township. The first settlers were German, Scots-Irish, and English. John-sonburg, one of the oldest settlements in northwest New Jersey, is on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. Originally called Log Gaol (Log Jail), it was the county seat of Sussex (1753-1765), before the inception of Warren County. The township is one of the county’s most sparsely settled areas and relies on its historic atmosphere to attract visitors and new residents, most of whom are employed elsewhere. The first Yellow Frame Presbyterian Church once stood in two counties; the pulpit in Sussex County and the congregation in Warren.
The 2000 census population of 2,083 was 98 percent white. Median household income in 2000 was $72,434. For complete census figures, see chart, 132.
French. Individuals of French extraction have been a significant presence in New Jersey since the seventeenth century. However, in comparison with other ethnic groups with European roots, their numbers were few, as evidenced by the lack of French-inspired names of places and landmarks.
The first wave of French immigration came under the flag of Holland during the mid-1650s. A small number of expatriates and Walloons (Belgians often mistaken for French owing to similarity in language and general geographic origin) joined Dutch merchants to help build the New Netherland colony. These refugees, Protestants known as Huguenots, were renowned as skilled craftsmen, especially for their salt-making expertise. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 (which had safeguarded religious freedom in France) persuaded many of France’s remaining Huguenots to pursue their brand of Calvinistic Christianity in Protestant-centered European countries and in the New World.
By the 1680s, French Huguenot surnames appear in the population rolls of Monmouth County, chiefly around Middletown, but a sizable number of Huguenots eventually settled in Salem County, West Jersey. These pioneers were accepted by the established Presbyterian and Quaker majority, and descendants of Huguenots from this region largely became assimilated through ties of marriage, religious conversion, and social circumstance.
The French presence in New Jersey also included members of the Catholic faith, but these immigrants encountered religious discrimination in English-dominated North America. Among the first documented French Catholics in New Jersey was Robert Van-quellen La Prarire, a resident of Woodbridge who served as a surveyor-general in Middlesex County from 1669 to 1670. Other pockets of French influence established during the eighteenth century included crafters in Mount Holly, servants in Cape May, and farmers around Princeton, Cedar Grove, and Cherry Valley.
France allied itself with American Patriots during the Revolutionary War. French naval forces landed at Sandy Hook in 1778, and in 1781 the French army and navy helped the Continental Army to achieve the decisive victory of the war at Yorktown, Virginia. Another influx of French refugees came to the United States after France itself endured revolution in the late 1780s.
The last significant swell of early French immigration to New Jersey came during the 1800s, when settlers from the French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and San Domingo escaped turmoil to establish homesteads in Elizabethtown, Bottle Hill (Madison), Paterson, and elsewhere. Other social and economic circumstances precipitated immigration from France to the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Assimilation has marked the French experience in New Jersey, but various athletic, cultural, social, and surviving surname memorials of this land have endured.
French and Indian War. Although looked upon in Europe as a side issue to the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), to the American colonists, attacks from the French and their Indian allies were an immediate threat, especially on the northern and western frontiers. New Jersey reluctantly joined the war effort. Gen. Edward Braddock’s defeat in July 1755 in neighboring Pennsylvania and Indian raids in northwestern New Jersey (Sussex County) prompted the colony to greater action. From summer 1755 through 1762, the legislature voted to raise troops (the New Jersey Regiment or "Jersey Blues”), eventually numbering one thousand men, for service on the New York frontier. Colonels Peter Schuyler and John Johnston alternately commanded the regiment.
Misfortune faced the Jersey Blues in early engagements. On August 14, 1756, 140 of the Blues and Colonel Schuyler were captured at Oswego. On July 24, 1757, an entire detachment of New Jersey troops was killed or captured at Sabbath Day Point, on Lake George. And on August 9,1757, at nearby Fort William Henry, 301 New Jerseyans were among those who surrendered; some of these captives were massacred by the Indians as they marched toward Fort Edward. At the disastrous British-American assault on Fort Ticonderoga on July 8,1758, the Blues, held in the rear, suffered only light casualties. From 1759 to 1762 New Jersey troops were stationed at Oswego or at the forts abandoned by the French on Lake Champlain. The Blues accompanied Gen. Jeffrey Amherst’s army, which took Montreal on September 8, 1760.
For protection against Indians at its own borders, New Jersey established a chain of forts in the northwestern part of the colony, each garrisoned by between 150 and 250 men. By 1758, after the Delaware Indians switched allegiance to the British, and the Minisink and Waping Indians sold their land claims in New Jersey, the forts were no longer needed. The colony also furnished army supplies for the war effort and constructed barracks at Trenton, Burlington, New Brunswick, Perth Amboy, and Elizabethtown. To pay for its wartime obligations, the colony issued a total of £347,000 in paper money.
Frenchtown. 1.1-square-mile borough in Hunterdon County. According to a 1759 map, the first European settlement at this locality was called Sunbeam. By 1785 the hamlet located at the juncture of the Delaware River and Nishisackawick Creek was known as Alexandria and contained several mills. In the late 1790s Swiss-born, French-speaking Paul Henri Mallet-Prevost purchased the tract. The settlement that developed around his holdings became known as Frenchtown. Originally part of Alexandria and Kingwood townships, Frenchtown was incorporated as a borough in 1867 and functioned as an agricultural center for surrounding farms. Local industry was based primarily on timber, which provided raw material for sawmills and the manufacture of wood-related products. As area forests were depleted in the early twentieth century, hatcheries and a porcelain manufacturer replaced wood-dependent jobs. The town also functioned as a transportation hub, beginning with ferry service in the eighteenth century. The first Frenchtown bridge across the Delaware was completed in 1844. Rail service to Trenton was instituted in 1853. After a long decline, Frenchtown’s function as an agricultural center ended when rail service was terminated in 1976. Now this attractive river town draws tourists and provides goods and services for suburbanites who live in the area.
In 2000, the population of 1,488 was 96 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $52,109.
