Stockton. 0.61-square-mile borough in Hunterdon County. Once part of Delaware Township, in 1898 the community was incorporated as a borough.
In 1711 the first commercial ferry on the Delaware River operated from Stockton, but ferry service ended when the Centre Bridge was opened in 1814. The Delaware and Raritan Canal Feeder skirted the town and the Belvidere-Delaware Railroad arrived in the early 1850s. Today both the canal and the railroad are popular recreational trails. Constructed about i7io as a private residence, the Stockton Inn was expanded in the 1830s and has operated as a hotel and restaurant since 1832. The inn was immortalized in the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart song, "There’s a Small Hotel.”
In the nineteenth century, Stockton had stone quarries, with its products shipped via the Delaware and Raritan Canal Feeder and the Delaware River. In 1794, John Prall purchased the Prallsville Mills, operating a gristmill, linseed oil mill, and sawmill. In the Brookville section, the foundry of Hiram Deats produced stoves, kettles, school desks, and the famous Deats plow, invented by Hiram’s father, John, in 1828.
Today Stockton is primarily a residential community. In 2000 the population of 560 was 99 percent white. The median household income was $51,406 according to the 2000 census.
Stockton College Marine Science and Environmental Field Station. This teaching and research field station, owned and operated by the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, is situated on the Nacote Creek in Port Republic amid eight acres of undisturbed land. The field station provides marine science, environmental science, and biology students with an invaluable natural laboratory. It contains several laboratories and four research vessels. Acquired in i993 from a former Stockton professor, the field station was opened in i996 after being overhauled with the assistance of a National Science Foundation grant. The Stockton Coastal Research Center is also headquartered on the premises.
Stockton sandstone. This reddish and brown colored sandstone, which derives its name from the town of Stockton on the Delaware River in Hunterdon County, was widely used in buildings. Stockton had several quarries and was a major supplier of the sandstone. The stone was considered both beautiful and durable. Nassau Hall, for example, a historic building at Princeton University, was built in i756 from Stockton sandstone. Sandstone is formed by the consolidation and compaction of sand, which is held together by natural cement—commonly silica, iron oxide, or calcium carbonate. Sandstone, along with shale, are common rocks of the Newark Basin, which occupies the Piedmont Region in New Jersey. These Triassic deposits are 180200 million years old. Buildings built from Stockton sandstone are deteriorating because acid rain dissolves the natural cement. As a result, the sandstone disintegrates.
Stokes, Edward Caspar (b. Dec. 22, 1860; d. Nov. 4, 1942). Assemblyman, state senator, and governor. Edward C. Stokes attended public schools in Millville and later the Friends School in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated second in his class from Brown University in 1883. A banker and a railroad executive, Stokes entered politics as a protege of Sen. William Sewell, the powerful Republican boss of Camden County.
In the legislature Stokes gained a reputation as a conservative and a staunch partisan who would nevertheless compromise when it seemed reasonable to do so. As an assemblyman, Stokes introduced the law that required employers to pay wages in cash instead of credits at the company store. Later in the senate he fought the infamous racetrack gambling bills and served as president of that body in the 1895 session. In 1901 Gov. Foster M. Voorhees appointed him clerk of the court of chancery, where he served until he became governor in 1905.
Stokes received the Republican nomination for governor in September 1904, at the flowering of the "New Idea” movement and in the midst of a bitter struggle for the equal taxation of railroad property in the state’s municipalities. In February the progressive Republican mayor of Jersey City, Mark Fagan, sent Gov. Franklin Murphy an open letter that charged the party as "subservient to corporate greed and injustice.”The Democrats nominated Charles C. Black, a member of the state tax board and an advocate of equal taxation. Attacked as the "accredited representative of the Pennsylvania Railroad,” Stokes at the head of the state ticket seemed to defy the progressive wing of his party. He nonetheless won a substantial victory that November and took office as a Republican-dominated legislature sat to consider the report of a tax commission appointed the previous year by Governor Murphy.
The tax law that Stokes signed in i905 was a compromise measure: it increased the railroads’ tax liability substantially, but it did not tax their primary assets as the reformers wanted. Yet the law went considerably further toward equal taxation than either Stokes or the Republican legislators would have gone without the prodding of Mark Fagan, George Record, and the other New Idea Republicans. Stokes’s role in these early progressive struggles typified the posture of the state Republican leadership. In i905 Essex County Assemblyman Everett Celby delivered an eloquent plea to the legislature to limit utility franchises to twenty-five years, a direct threat to the powerfully connected Public Service Corporation. Stokes, like his predecessor Murphy, in the face of widespread public support for the bill, appointed a commission that recommended a compromise measure, which the legislature passed in 1906. By signing the measure Stokes could credit his administration with equal taxation and franchise reform, both significant progressive achievements. In reality, Stokes was more of a conservative guardian at the gates of reform whose influence tended to check the efforts of the New Idea movement.
Stokes also signed the Bishops Law providing stiffer penalties for the Sunday sale of liquor, a direct primary law, and strongly supported a civil service commission. But his greatest legacy lay in his creation of water and forest commissions to oversee the state’s natural resources. By the time he left office the state had purchased more than i0,500 acres of woodland, and today Stokes State Forest is named in his honor.
Stokes, Edwin Harris (b. June 22,1824; d. Feb. 17, 1900). Real estate developer and photographer. Edwin Harris Stokes left his native Moorestown in i840 and made a fortune in real estate while a leading daguerreotypist in Trenton in the i850s, primarily at 27 East State Street (1854-1860). Toward the end of the decade, he also produced ambrotypes, including one, now at the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Historical Society, of young Alfred B. Jones (1857-1869). Although this ambrotype does not suggest any stylistic innovations, the focus, lighting, and pose are comparable to the best produced in this decade. Although Stokes continued making photographs, including lantern slides (still in a family collection), for personal use, he retired from commercial photography when he married Permelia S. Wood (daughter of former Trenton mayor Joseph Wood) in i860; he acquired Woodlawn, the oldest house in Trenton, from his father-in-law in i86i. Edwin and Permelia had six children. Stokes became a financier, director of the Mechanics National Bank and the Trenton Savings Fund Society, a school trustee, and an active member of the New Jersey Historical Society. His large private library (disposition unknown) was described as the "delight of enthusiastic book-lovers.” Stokes, according to a biographer, was "beloved by all who knew him.” Stokes’s home, Woodlawn (first called Kingsbury and later Bloomsbury), was built in 1720 by William Trent, who founded the city, and is now the Trent House museum. Edward A. Stokes, a lawyer and poet, donated the mansion to the city in 1929.
Stoll, Norman Rudolph (b. Dec. 4, 1892; d. Dec. 30, 1976). Parasitologist and epidemiologist. Norman R. Stoll received a Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1923. As a specialist in parasitical diseases, Stoll conducted epidemiological studies on human hookworm infections in Puerto Rico, China, Panama, and West Africa. Stoll developed a quantitative method, which bears his name, to count worm eggs in the feces; this procedure has been adopted worldwide. In his 1947 paper "This Wormy World”—probably the most quoted work in human parasitology— Stoll brought to light the tremendous problem of worms in humans.
In i927 he became a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Princeton. Here Stoll described "self-cure and protection,” the first demonstration that mammalian hosts (sheep) might develop immunity against gastrointestinal nematodes. Stoll remained in Princeton until 1950, except during World War II, when he served as lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. He was the author or coauthor of more than i43 research papers and monographs. As chairman of the editorial committee of the Journal of Parasitology (1938-1943), he was famous for his dictum "saying more in fewer words.” In 1946 he served as president of the American Society of Parasitologists. In i950 he moved to New York to conduct research at Rockefeller University, and worked there until his death.
Stone, Lucy (b. Aug. 13, 1818; d. Oct. 18, 1893). Abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and lecturer. Born to a large farming family in Brookfield, Massachusetts, Lucy Stone bristled against the repressive atmosphere of her patriarchal home. Passionate about pursuing her education, she was attracted to both feminist and abolitionist causes prior to her arrival at Oberlin College in 1843. There she sharpened her rhetorical skills and, upon graduation, became a celebrated lecturer with the American Anti-Slavery Society, frequently drawing audiences of thousands and enduring both scorn and ridicule for her courageous public activism. In 1850, she participated in the first national Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In 1855, the fiercely independent Stone married fellow abolitionist Henry Blackwell. Their wedding drew press attention because of Stone’s unorthodox refusal to promise wifely obedience, her insistence on retaining her birth name, and the couple’s coauthored condemnation of contemporary marriage laws.
Stone’s role in New Jersey history began in April 1857 with her purchase of a small cottage on Hurlbut Street in Orange, a move occasioned by Blackwell’s acceptance of a position with the New York publishing firm of Augustus Moore. The couple’s daughter, future suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell, was born in the house on September i4, i857. The site became famous as the scene of Stone’s nationally publicized protest against "taxation without representation,” a colorful incident in the emerging women’s rights movement. In January 1858, Stone returned her unpaid tax bill to city officials because "women suffer taxation and yet have no representation.” The city responded by seizing several of her household goods, including her daughter’s cradle, and selling them at public auction to raise the requisite funds.
Lucy Stone, c. 1840-1860.
Stone lived in New Jersey from 1857 until 1869, moving from Orange to West Bloomfield (now Montclair) and finally to the Roseville section of Newark. Politically inactive for much of the period owing to the demands of raising her young daughter and a failed pregnancy, she resumed her involvement immediately following the Civil War. These were critical years for the suffrage campaign, as longtime feminist leaders like Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony struggled over tactical, strategic, and policy issues. Stone achieved prominence as the leader of the American Woman Suffrage Association and an outspoken opponent of the Stanton-Anthony wing of the movement. Prior to moving to Boston in i869, she laid the groundwork for state suffrage activity: she petitioned the state legislature for woman suffrage and reform of married women’s property rights; participated in the founding convention of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association and served as the group’s first president; published a pamphlet entitled "Reasons Why the Women of New Jersey Should Vote”; and attempted (unsuccessfully) to exercise the franchise by showing up at the Roseville (Newark) polls.
Stone remained active in the suffrage movement for the next twenty years. Historians believe one of her most important contributions was financing and publishing one of the most influential and long-lived women’s rights publications in U.S. history, the Woman’s Journal.
Stone, Witmer (b. Sept. 22,1866; d. May 23, 1939). Naturalist. Witmer Stone, one of New Jersey’s early conservationists, earned a reputation as one of the most preeminent ornithologists, botanists, and all-around naturalists of the Delaware Valley region. He was a founder of Delaware Valley Ornithological Club (1890), vice president (1914-1920) and president (i920-i923) of American Ornithologists’ Union, and author of Bird Studies at Old Cape May: An Ornithology of Coastal New Jersey (1937), a classic regional ornithological text that is still in print. He also wrote The Plants of Southern New Jersey with Especial Reference to the Flora of the Pine Barrens (1911), Birds of New Jersey: Their Nests and Eggs (1908), Mammals of New Jersey (1908), and Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey (1894).
Stone Harbor. 1.41-square-mile borough in Cape May County. Stone Harbor is a summer resort community occupying the lower third of an island known as Seven Mile Beach Island. A year-round population of approximately one thousand swells to more than 25,000 in the summer months.
Stone Harbor’s development began when the South Jersey Realty Company acquired the land in the late 1800s. In April 1914 it became incorporated as a borough with a mayor-council form of government. Pristine beaches of fine-grained white sand attracted investors who desired a quiet vacation place away from the city pressures. The Risley Brothers, owners of the South Jersey Realty Company, carefully laid out the land in a geometric pattern with streets running east and west and avenues north and south. Ocean bathing and boating in the bay added to the value of the land as the community continued to grow.
Primarily zoned for single-family residences, there is a limited commercial area with a few small motels, select retail establishments, and some multiple-housing units. The Wetlands Institute occupies 6,000 acres of protected salt marsh. Recreation is family oriented and includes a motion picture multiplex, playgrounds, tennis courts, basketball courts, and football and baseball fields, with beaches as the main attraction. What once was strictly a community of summer cottages with few amenities, Stone Harbor is now filled with second homes constructed for year-round occupancy and visited by owners almost every weekend. The 2000 census figures showed a population of 1,128 that was 99 percent white. The median household income was $51,471 (2000).
Stow Creek. 18.4-square-mile township in Cumberland County, lying along the Salem County border. Stow Creek was one of the six original townships that formed Cumberland County, when the county was divided from Salem County in 1748. The boundaries of Stow Creek were altered four more times and the spelling changed from "Stoe” to "Stow” before the township’s present configuration was achieved in 1934.
Jericho, a hamlet on the southeast side of Stow Creek, was named for gristmills and sawmills established at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Another hamlet, Roadstown, was originally a stop on a 1770s stagecoach line to Philadelphia. The famous Ware chair, a rush-seated ladder-back chair much coveted today by collectors, was first made here, circa 1790, by Maskell Ware.
Historically, the sandy loam of the soil encouraged the production of fruit and vegetables, and marl beds along the Stow Creek produced fertilizer. Eventoday, more thanhalf the land is used for farming, while close to 40 percent is residential, with the rest of the land vacant.In 2000, the population of 1,429 was 93 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $52,500. For complete census figures, see chart, 137.
Stratemeyer, Edward L. (b. Oct. 4, 1862; d. May 10, 1930). Author and businessman. Born in Elizabeth to German immigrants Henry Stratemeyer and Anna Siegel, Edward Stratemeyer wrote constantly as a boy. Following a public school education, he worked in his father’s tobacco store while writing juvenile fiction. He married Magdalene Van Camp on March 25, 1891. Stratemeyer incorporated as the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1910. In his lifetime, he used more than one hundred pen names and created the twentieth century’s most popular series in children’s fiction, including the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew.
After his death his children, Harriet and Edna, took over the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Stratford. 1.6-square-mile borough in central Camden County. In 1889 the newly formed Rural Land Development Company sold building lots in a development they named Stratford in honor of Stratford-on-Avon, England. In 1907 Stratford got its own post office and, in 1925, incorporated as a separate entity from Clementon Township. The development of the Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railroad brought many visitors who found the community attractive; eventually, twenty trains stopped daily. The village was the site of the old White Horse Hotel, a former stage stop that gave its name to the White Horse Pike, which crosses it. In addition, two other major arteries, Warwick and Laurel roads, run through the borough. Signey Run, Quaker Run, and the north branch of the Big Timber Creek are also found here.
Ephraim Tomlinson III, whose nearby milling business was responsible for the community of Laurel Springs, built a large brick mansion on Laurel Road in 1844; it became a maternity hospital after World War I and later was the home of the Stratford Military Academy. Significant growth occurred after 1969 by the opening of the PATCO High-Speed Line connecting the suburbs to Philadelphia.
The year 2000 population of 7,271 was 89 percent white and 7 percent black. The median household income in 2000 was $50,977.
Stratton, Charles C. (b. Mar. 6,1796; d. Mar. 30,1859). Farmer, soldier, and governor. Charles C. Stratton, who was born in Swedes-boro, Gloucester County, was the son of James Stratton and Mary Creighton. His father was a judge and a physician who served at the Battle of Princeton as an assistant surgeon, and his mother, a native of Haddonfield, participated as a nurse in the Revolution. The son received a common school education, attending the academy that was the forerunner of the Swedesboro public school. He attended Queens College (later Rutgers University) and graduated in 1814. He spent the next seven years in agriculture.
Stratton served in the General Assembly in 1821 and 1823 and from 1828 to 1829. Between 1829 and 1836, he was a Gloucester County freeholder. He was elected as a Whig to Congress in 1836 and was reelected once. On March 18, 1844, the inhabitants of his county named Stratton one of their two delegates to the state constitutional convention. He became an active member of the important committee on the legislative department and demonstrated his strong faith in democracy by opposing the suggestion that paupers be excluded from voting. Stratton protested governmental ownership of internal improvements with equal ardor.
On September 10,1844, the Whig state convention nominated Stratton to run for governor in the first direct gubernatorial election, which he won by a large majority; he took office on January 21,1845. Immediately, Stratton assumed the responsibility for guiding the state’s transition under the new constitution and reminded the legislature that "the circumstances under which we are assembled … mark the commencement of a new era in the political history of the State.”The fundamental law of 1844, he continued, required the State Senate and General Assembly to enact laws carrying out its principles and to modify existing statutes that conflicted with its provisions. Stratton suggested, therefore, that the time to condense the laws of the state had arrived, noting that the last revision had taken place twenty-five years earlier. During the legislative session of the next year, an ad hoc commission reported about 120 revised laws, which the state published in 1847.
Stratton was also influential in both aiding the establishment of the first state mental hospital and attempting to strengthen the state militia. In 1845, he appointed three commissioners to contract for the erection of a hospital and to superintend its construction. Stratton had to fight for adequate funding to complete the project. After receiving a requisition for Mexican War troops from President James K. Polk the next year, he addressed "the defective and prostrate condition of the militia system of the state,” which had failed to raise the necessary one regiment of volunteers. The governor appealed to the legislature to adopt "some simple mode of ascertaining the number of militia” so that New Jersey could receive its proper share of arms and equipment from the federal government.
On January 18, 1848, Stratton left office to devote his last years to farming in Swedesboro. He married Sarah Taggart of Philadelphia on February 1, 1854. The couple had no children. Because of ill health, Stratton lived in Europe from 1857 to 1858, when he returned home to Swedesboro where he died.
Streep, Meryl (b. June 22, 1949). Actor. Meryl Streep, considered one of the finest and most versatile actors of her generation, was born in Summit and grew up in Bernardsville. After graduating from Bernards High school, she attended Vassar College and Yale Drama School, where she acted in many student productions. She began her career on the New York stage, notably at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, and took memorable supporting parts in films such as Julia (1977), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Kramerversus Kramer (1979), her first Academy Award win. Streep has been nominated for Oscars a record thirteen times, and won the best actress award in 1982 for Sophie’s Choice. Other acclaimed roles were in Holocaust (TV miniseries, 1978), Silkwood (1983), A Cry in the Dark (1988), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Adaptation (2002), and The Hours (2002). She and her husband, artist Don Gummer, have four children.
Col. Ruth Cheney Streeter, first director of the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserves.
Streeter, Ruth Cheney (b. Oct. 2,1895; d. Sept. 30,1990). Military officer and community leader. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Ruth Cheney Streeter attended boarding school in France and then graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1918. She married Thomas W. Streeter, a lawyer and investment banker; in 1922 they moved to Morristown where they raised four children. Streeter obtained a commercial pilot’s license in 1942 but was rejected as too old to fly military transport planes; instead, she obtained an appointment to head the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserves. She retired after the war with the rank of full colonel and resumed her role as a community leader in Morristown. She was an elected member of the New Jersey 1947 Constitutional Convention. She worked for historic preservation, including the development of the Patriot’s Path and Historic Speedwell, and headed Morristown’s Civil Defense Program from 1952 until 1962.
