Marshall, James Wilson (b. Oct. 8, 1810; d. Aug. 10, 1885). Carpenter, wheelwright, and discoverer of gold in California. James Wilson Marshall was born in Mercer, formerly Hunterdon, County, the son of Sarah and Philip Marshall, a coachmaker. In 1834 Marshall headed west, looking for adventure and wealth. By 1848 he was in California at Sutter’s Fort, where he directed the building of a sawmill. As construction came to an end, Marshall found gold in the millrace, creating a stampede in the area. Ultimately, his claims to the gold were rejected.
Martine, James E. (b. Aug. 25,1850; d. Feb. 26, 1925). U.S. senator. James E. Martine was the first member of the Senate from an eastern state to have obtained his seat through a direct vote of the people. His election in 1911 provided the backdrop for newly elected governor Woodrow Wilson’s dramatic defiance of the political bosses in New Jersey, and his later rise to the presidency. In 1910, at the urging of progressive Democrats, Martine allowed his name to be entered in the state primary election for the U.S. Senate. A maverick, Martine had run for Congress several times without success, and was known as "the farmer orator.” The primary election was part of a package of recently enacted election reforms and was nonbinding and considered meaningless by Democrats, as the Republicans were expected to retain control of the legislature. In November Martine won the primary, Wilson the governorship, and the Democrats a majority in both houses of the legislature. With the Democrats in a position to select the next U.S. Senator, James Smith, Jr., the boss of the state party, who was largely responsible for Wilson’s gubernatorial nomination, declared his candidacy. Wilson urged the legislators to keep faith with the voters by selecting Martine. The Martine affair became a bitter struggle between Wilson and Smith for control of the state organization. By securing Martine’s election, Wilson defied the bosses, took control of the Democratic party in New Jersey, and became, in the words of one Democratic newspaper editor, "the most hopeful figure in American politics.”
Martland, Harrison Stanford (b. Sept. 10, 1883; d. May 1, 1954). Physician. Son of Dr. William Harrison and Ida Carlyle Bucklish Martland, Harrison Stanford Mart-land was born in Newark. He received a B.S. from Western Maryland College in 1901, an M.D. from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1905, interned at New York City Hospital (1905-1907), and served as an assistant pathologist at the Russell Sage Institute (1907-1908). Martland married Myra Ferdon in 1910 and they had two children.
A pathologist at Newark City Hospital from 1909 to 1953, Martland’s interest in occupational intoxications began in 1917 with benzene poisonings in Newark’s artificial leather industry. His international reputation came from decades of meticulous studies of radiation injury among New Jersey radium workers. He documented anemias, osteonecrosis, osteogenic sarcomas and other malignancies caused by internally deposited radioactive materials, including the latent period between exposure and objective injuries. By 1925 he had established how the human body absorbs, stores, metabolizes and is harmed by radioactive alkaline earths, work still cited and never successfully challenged. In 1927-1928 he described the "punch drunk” syndrome among prizefighters. A pioneer in forensic medicine and opponent of the lay coroner system, he was from 1935 until his death a professor of forensic medicine at New York University.
Maso, Sal (b. July 25, 1900; d. Jan. 21, 1971). Labor and civic leader. Sal Maso was born in New York City, the son of Salvatore and Amelia Margiotta Maso. After two years at a teachers’ college, Maso went to work in Albany, New York, as a metal lather. He joined the Wood, Wire, and Metal Lathers International Union (WWMLIU) in 1926. He moved to Paterson and transferred to a WWMLIU local there. Maso served as vice president and president of the New Jersey State Building and Construction Trades Council; president of the United Building and Construction Trades Council of Paterson; president of the Passaic County Central Labor Union; and as a member of the Paterson board of education and the New Jersey Governor’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. He was elected vice president of the WWMLIU in 1939. When union president Lloyd A. Mashburn died on December 7,1963, Maso was selected to fill out his term. In the union election in 1964, Maso was elected president and held that office until he retired in 1970. Maso died the next year in Paterson.
Mason, John Landis (b. 1832; d. Feb. 26, 1902). Inventor. John Landis Mason was born in Vineland. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he established a metals shop and conceived the idea of a glass container that would preserve perishable foods. In 1858 he patented his"improved jar.”Porcelain-lined threads at the top enabled a metal cap to be screwed on, forming an airtight seal. Mason formed a business manufacturing the jar tops, while glass shops made the jars themselves; the first one was blown outside Batsto. The Mason jar proved widely popular with farm families to store preserves through the winter. Mason moved to New Brunswick in 1873, where he also patented a life raft and soap dish. John Landis Mason died in New York City.
Mason fruit jar.
Masters, Sybilla Righton (b. date unknown; d. Aug. 23, 1720). Inventor. Sybilla Righton Masters obtained what was probably the first patent (although under her husband’s name) granted an American colonist. She was the daughter of a Quaker merchant and plantation owner in Burlington Township. Masters went to London and obtained British patents for a method of reducing corn to cornmeal by stamping, instead of the usual process of grinding, using horsepower and waterpower (1715), and, later, for a method of working straw for hats and bonnets (1716).
Matawan. 2.26-square-mile borough in Monmouth County. Matawan was settled in 1686, largely by Scots who called the area New Aberdeen. At different times part of Middle-town, Raritan, and Matawan (now Aberdeen) townships, it was incorporated as a borough in 1895.
Matawan was earlier known as Middletown Point due to its role as an important shipping port where large sloops once navigated to the town center via Matawan Creek. That waterway, which began silting by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, has now shrunk to a tiny stream. Numerous mercantile interests and small industrial plants formed a business district around Main Street. They supported Monmouth County’s first bank, the Farmers and Merchants National Bank, established in 1830. Matawan’s business interests financially backed the New York and Long Branch Railroad to encourage the line to establish its route through the town. This action facilitated greater industrial growth, notably in the manufacture of pottery and tile, located here at the southerly reach of the extensive clay deposits surrounding Raritan Bay. Matawan’s Main Street commercial stem shares the thoroughfare with a number of notable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses; together they comprise a local historic district. One, the Burrowes Mansion, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is occupied as a historic house museum.
In 2000 the population of 8,910 was 82 percent white, 7 percent black, and 8 percent Asian. The median household income was $63,594.
Maurice River. 93.4-square-mile township, the largest municipality in size in Cumberland County. Maurice River was one of six original townships to form Cumberland County in 1748, when Cumberland broke off from Salem County. It incorporated as a township fifty years later, and its boundaries were altered six more times before achieving their final configuration in 1891. River and township take their names from The Prince Maurice, a Dutch ship sunk near the mouth of the river in the late seventeenth century.
Seventy percent of the township lies within the Pinelands National Preserve, which provides a home to rare flora and fauna, including the bald eagle. The Maurice River forms its western boundary; the Delaware Bay is on the south. Its four rivers, the Maurice, the Menantico, the Manumuskin, and the Muskee Creek, are included in the Federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Program. The township is the home of East Point Lighthouse, erected in 1849, the second oldest lighthouse remaining in the state and the last one on the Jersey side of the Delaware Bay. Villages within the municipality are Hesstown, Delmont, Heislerville, Dorchester, Mauricetown, and Port Elizabeth, which was the center of the West Indies trade until the early nineteenth century.
The 2000 population of 6,928 was 59 percent white and 33 percent black. In 2000 the median family income was $43,182.
John Neagle, Portrait of Peter Maverick, 1826. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 x 23 1/4 in.
Maverick, Peter (b. Oct. 22, 1780; d. June 7, 1831). Engraver. Peter Maverick was raised in Manhattan, where he apprenticed with his father Peter Rushton Maverick. The younger Maverick worked as an engraver in New York until 1809, when he purchased a farm on Belleville Road (now Broadway) in Newark. He maintained an active shop in Newark, producing bookplates, banknotes, maps, and magazine and book illustrations. He trained several apprentices, including artist Asher Brown Durand. Durand was Maverick’s apprentice from 1812 until 1817, and his partner from 1817 to 1820. After the dissolution of this partnership, Maverick moved his business back to Manhattan, where he died in 1831.
Maxim, Hudson (b. Feb. 3,1853; d. May 6, 1927). Scientist and inventor. Called by his friend Thomas Edison "the most versatile man in America,” Hudson Maxim is best known for the invention of "Maximite,” a high explosive used in naval guns, developed in his laboratory at Hopatcong. He was also a prolific writer on subjects ranging from the philosophy of language to national defense. One of the largest landowners on Lake Hopatcong in the early twentieth century, Maxim was opposed to its use as a public water supply. When the Morris Canal Company, which owned the dam and a large tract of land at the outlet of the lake, abandoned the canal, he fought to have the dam retained and the lake dedicated as a state park. In 1925 what he called "The Queen of All New Jersey Lakes” became public property. Hudson Maxim died in Hopatcong.
The Maxwell House Building two years prior to its closing, Hoboken, 1990.
Maxwell, William (b. 1733; d. Nov. 4, 1796). Revolutionary War general. William Maxwell was the son of John and Ann Maxwell. In 1747 the family emigrated from northern Ireland and settled on a farm near present-day Phillipsburg. Maxwell served as an officer in the New Jersey Regiment (New Jersey Blues) in the military campaigns in New York from 1758 to 1760, and from 1761 to 1773 he was a civilian commissary to the British army on the frontier. At the start of the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was a member of the New Jersey Provincial Congress and a colonel of the Second New Jersey Regiment, which was taken into Continental service on November 7, 1775. For most of 1776 Maxwell’s regiment served in the expedition against Canada. On October 23,1776, Congress elected Maxwell brigadier general. For three and a half years thereafter Maxwell commanded the New Jersey Brigade. During much of the war Maxwell and his brigade provided a protecting screen to the army’s New Jersey encampments, often fighting skirmishes, and also guarding the northeast coastal sector of New Jersey. Preliminary to the battle of Brandywine, Maxwell commanded a special corps of light infantry in holding actions against the advancing British army. He also fought at Germantown, Monmouth, Connecticut Farms, and Springfield, and, in late summer and fall 1779 he and his brigade participated in the Sullivan expedition against the Iroquois Indians. In June 1780 Maxwell resigned his commission, for reasons unclear but relating to a rift between him and his senior officers. Maxwell’s stubbornness and his thick Scottish brogue set him apart from other officers, yet Gen. George Washington recognized Maxwell as one of his most dependable generals. After the war, Maxwell returned to farming and served one term in the New Jersey state legislature. He never married.
Maxwell House Coffee. Created by Joel Cheek, a partner in a Nashville, Tennessee, wholesale grocery firm, this coffee was so popular with guests at the nearby Maxwell House Hotel that it became known by that name. Produced by the Nashville Coffee and Manufacturing Company—later the Cheek and Neal Coffee Company (i903)—the brand was praised as "Good to the Last Drop” after it was served to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Cheek and Neal was purchased in 1928 by the Postum Company, which later changed its name to General Foods Corporation. Maxwell House is now part of Kraft Foods. It maintained a factory in Hoboken from i939 until 1992, which at the time of its construction was the world’s largest coffee plant.
May, Cornelius Jacobsen (fl. early fifteenth century). Explorer. Captain Cornelius Jacobsen May (Mey in Dutch), from Hoorn in Holland, was a very experienced East Asia and New Netherland explorer. He first sailed to the Hudson River in 1614. In 1620 he explored the Delaware River area in the service of a private company in search of trading rights. In 1624, shortly after the establishment of the West India Company, May returned as captain of the ship Niew Nederland with a group of prospective settlers. They were recruited from French-speaking Dutch immigrants, at the time called Walloons. Small trading colonies were established at the Connecticut River (Fort Good Hope), the North Hudson River (Fort Orange), Governor’s Island, and the Delaware River. The latter, Fort Wilhelmus, was the first such settlement in what is now New Jersey. It did not last long, however. During 1624 and 1625, May also served as the second governor of New Netherland. Cape May and Mays Landing are named after him.
Mayer, Alfred Marshall (b. Nov. 13, 1836; d. July 13,1897). Physicist. Alfred Marshall Mayer was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where he attended Saint Mary’s College. An article on carbonic acid brought him to the attention of Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who became Mayer’s mentor in the pursuit of pure science. At twenty Mayer was a professor of physics and chemistry at the University of Maryland. After study under the physicist Henri Regnault at the University of Paris from 1863 to 1865, he became a professor of physics at Pennsylvania College (1865-1867), professor of physics and astronomy at Lehigh University (1867-1871), and professor of physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken (1871-1897), where he wrote the bulk of over one hundred scholarly articles and standard college texts on acoustics, electricity, electro-magnetic phenomena, and optics. Best known for pioneering work in acoustics, Mayer, along with Rudolf Koenig, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Lord Reyleigh, was the first to devise methods to measure the intensity of sound by non-electrical means. Mayer coined the term "pendulum vibration,” and his pioneering experiments with ticking clocks in soundproofed rooms showed that a sound could be obliterated with a second, lower frequency sound. Thus, he was the first to discover the phenomena of "masking” in acoustics. Alfred Marshall Mayer died in South Orange.
May v. Cooperman. This 1985 case concerned an attempt by the legislature to require one minute of silence in all public schools at the start of each school day "for quiet and private contemplation or introspection.” The governor’s veto of the statute was overridden by the legislature. The attorney general declined to defend the statute, claiming that it was unconstitutional. Challenged in federal court, that statute was indeed found unconstitutional by the federal district court in 1983, on the grounds that 1) the basic intent of the statute was religious rather than secular; 2) it both advanced and inhibited religion; and 3) it fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. Two years later, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision, but emphasized the statute’s lack of a valid secular purpose, rather than the second and third parts of the holding. By 1986, the president of the New Jersey senate, Carmen Orechio, and Alan Karcher, the Speaker of the assembly, both of whom had vigorously defended the statute, no longer held those positions. The legislature declined further appeal of the case; as a result, New Jersey has no required minute of silence in its public schools.
Maywood. 1.3-square-mile borough in Bergen County. Settled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the area was known as West Hackensack until it became part of Midland Township in 1871. A year later landowners named the new railroad depot Maywood and formed land associations to lay out streets and sell lots. The Panic of 1873 doomed the first development efforts until Gustav L. Jaeger and Henry Lindenmeyer planned a residential village in the early 1880s. Maywood incorporated as a borough with 260 residents in 1894 and developed as a residential community with a little industry. By 1923, it had six chemical plants and 1,618 residents.
During the post-World War II suburban boom, Maywood benefited from its accessibility to New York City and its proximity to the Bergen Mall and Garden State Plaza shopping centers in nearby Paramus. Its population increased from 4,052 in 1940 to 11,087 in 1970. Maywood remains a residential community with some industrial and commercial development along Route 17, and a legacy of toxic contamination from its earlier chemical industry. In 2000, the population of 9,523 was 85 percent white and 12 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median
Meadowlands, Hackensack. The Hackensack Meadowlands are a large marshland of about twenty-eight square miles in the southern part of the Hackensack River Valley in northeastern New Jersey. Most of the area is now a tidal marsh that is only several inches above high tide. It represents the remnant of Glacial Lake Hackensack, which was located in the area north of Staten Island, west of the Palisades, and east of the Watchung Mountains.
This ancient lake formed during the waning stages of the most recent glacial advance of continental glaciation (the Wisconsinan). This stage began about eighty thousand years ago and reached its maximum extent about twenty thousand years ago. As the lake receded, clay and silt deposits were left behind to depths of as much as 300 feet over the underlying bedrock of sandstone and mudstone. A thin veneer of organic material (decayed plant material) overlies the clay and silt deposits to a depth of about 10 feet, but is as much as 50 feet in some places. The most recent deposit in many parts of the Meadows is artificial fill (trash and rubbish), which overlies the natural deposits of clay, silt, and organic material.
Some of the early European settlers in the Meadows were British merchants from Barbados, so during the 1700s the area was known as New Barbados. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cedar forests covered about a third to a half of the Meadows, while salt hay was cut by farmers twice a year in the nonforested portions. Brick-making based on the locally abundant clay deposits was an important industry from 1870 to about the 1950s. Woodcliff Lake in the upper Hackensack River basin was constructed in 1905 for water supply purposes. A commensurate decrease in downstream fresh-water flows led to an increase in the salt content in the tidally affected areas. The dominant vegetation in the Meadows is now the common reed (Phragmites) that can grow 5-15 feet high in very dense clusters.
Filling of wetlands in the Meadowlands began with the earliest settlers, who tried to farm by building dikes and drains. The filling, especially with refuse disposal, accelerated in the mid-igoos as the population grew in the surrounding areas. By 1969 over 2,500 acres were already being used or were planned for land-filling. About five thousand tons of refuse per day were coming into the Meadowlands from 118 municipalities.
This degree of unregulated waste disposal in conjunction with haphazard zoning and the growing need for development space led the New Jersey State Legislature in 1969 to enact the Hackensack Meadowlands Reclamation and Development Act. A geopolitical district was created that consisted of parts of fourteen municipalities in Bergen and Hudson counties. The Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission that was created in the i969 act has regional planning and zoning authority within the thirty-one-square-mile district (about the same size as Manhattan Island). Since its inception, the commission has facilitated the construction of millions of square feet of office, commercial, and distribution center facilities by private investors, in addition to the acquisition and preservation of existing wetlands as permanent open space. Plans for active and passive recreational opportunities in the district are also well under way.
Meadowlands Racetrack. Opened in September 1976, Meadowlands Racetrack quickly established itself as the preeminent harness-racing track in North America. It solidified that standing when it lured harness racing’s premier event, the Hambletonian, to New Jersey from Illinois in i98i. The Meadowlands offered horse racing’s first $i million race, the Meadowlands Pace, and the first $2 million race, the Woodrow Wilson, in 1980. In addition to its eight-month harness meet, the track offers thoroughbred racing in the fall. Located in the Meadowlands Sports Complex just off Route 3 in East Rutherford, it is owned and operated by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority.
Meadowlands Sports Complex. Occupying a 750-acre site in East Rutherford, the Meadowlands Sports Complex comprises Giants Stadium, the Continental Airlines Arena, and the Meadowlands Racetrack. The idea for a complex, proposed in i967, was taken up by Governor William Cahill. In i97i the legislature created the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA), which oversees the site. Ground was broken the following year. In 1973 Governor-elect Brendan Byrne negotiated a thirty-year lease with the Giants.
Giants Stadium, which seats over eighty thousand, is home to the Giants and Jets of the National Football League and the MetroStars of Major League Soccer. The Giants played their first game there on October io, 1976, and the Jets followed on September 6, 1984. The Meadowlands Racetrack, which opened on September 6, i977, seats approximately forty thousand. It features both harness and thoroughbred racing. The Continental Airlines Arena, initially named after Governor Byrne (Governor Christie Whitman’s administration later sold the naming rights), seats approximately twenty thousand. It is home to the Devils of the National Hockey League, the Nets of the National Basketball Association, the Gladiators of the Arena Football League, the Storm of the National Lacrosse League, and the Seton Hall Pirates, a college-level men’sbasketball team. The arena opened in 1981 with six sold-out Bruce Springsteen concerts. The Devils and Nets have expressed a desire to leave it, possibly for a proposed site in Newark.
Aerial view of Giants Stadium, Meadowlands Sports Complex, East Rutherford.
Meadows. Meadows are lands dominated by herbaceous plants. In New Jersey, natural meadows occur where drainage is poor. Salt marsh cordgrass and salt hay dominate meadows along tidal rivers and inlets. Freshwater meadows mark the beds of extinct glacial lakes. (Examples are Great Piece Meadows, Troy Meadows, Black Meadow in the bed of Glacial Lake Passaic, and the Hackensack Meadowlands in the bed of Glacial Lake Hack-ensack.) Draining and dumping solid wastes have altered the hydrology and vegetation of many of these from herbaceous marshes to hardwood- or reedgrass-dominated swamps.
Meadows Foundation. This volunteer organization acquires, refurbishes, and maintains historical sites in the Somerset section of Franklin Township. Renovated sites include the Symen Van Wickle House (c. 1722); the Wyckoff-Garretson House (c. 1709); the Blackwells Mills Canal House (c. i835); the Franklin Inn and Used Book Store (c. 1734; briefly headquarters of British general Charles Cornwallis); the Hageman Farm (early 1800s); and the Van Liew-Suydam House (late 1700s). Privately funded, the foundation hosts living history, cultural, and recreational events, including reenactments, lectures, concert series, book fairs, art exhibits, canoe races, and festivals.
