Category: History

This Memorial Day, we remember John Abraham Van Riper, who fought for our country’s freedom in the Revolutionary War as a member of the local Essex County militia. He is thought to have enlarged the Van Riper House after the war, leaving a date stone with his and his wife Leah’s initials over its back door.

In late 1776, George Washington’s army retreated from Fort Lee following an invasion of New Jersey by Lord Cornwallis’ British troops. They crossed the Passaic River at Acquackanonk on November 21, where Exit 11A on Route 21 is now. The following day, they retreated down River Road to Newark, where they would have passed the Van Riper House. British and Hessian troops followed a few days later, likely also passing our historic landmark.

This makes the Van Riper House Nutley’s closest tie to the Revolution, a direct witness to the fight for independence. About 244 years later, it still stands as a silent reminder of our country’s birth.

Sourced from: https://www.revolutionarywarnewjersey.com/
Stryker, W. S., New Jersey Historical Records Survey Project. (1872). Official register of the officers and men of New Jersey in the revolutionary war. Trenton, N.J.: W.T. Nicholson & co., printers. Page 804

Many people don’t know this, but the Van Riper House wasn’t originally built by the Van Ripers. As far as we know, a house was built on the current site by the Bradbury family in 1708. John Bradbury, from England, built the first mill on the Third River in 1698 or earlier. It was located almost exactly where Route 3 crosses River Road (big yellow circle below).

Sometime around 1708 or earlier, he used his accumulated wealth from the gristmill to build a stone house on a knoll along the newly-constructed River Road. As an aside, River Road is Nutley’s oldest road, laid out officially on March 26, 1707. See below for a copy of that “road return” mentioning John “Broadbury” being annoyed that Essex County road men were going to mess with the nice hedges he had planted when they worked on the road. To be continued… -DI

Sources & Further Reading
History of Passaic and its Environs, by William W. Scott, 1922 (pp 637-638): https://archive.org/details/historyofpassaic01scot/page/n6

Essex County Road Books A&B (1698-1804) https://www.familysearch.org/search/film/008217641…

After Juriaen Thomassen from Ripen settled down with his wife Reyckje in the growing village of Bergen (now Jersey City), he was party to a contract that would significantly shape the future of what we know know as Clifton, New Jersey.

On March 28, 1679, a group of Dutch settlers purchased what was known as “Acquackanonk” (ah-QUACK-ah-nonk) from the Lenni Lenape Indians, located around what is now the Main Avenue Bridge in Passaic.

However, the transfer of Native land rights did not count under English law. This was relevant because the English had granted some rights to English settlers in the same area, and that conflicted with the Dutch settlers’ goals.

So, Juriaen Tomassen and 13 other heads of Dutch households negotiated and purchased from the Proprietors of East Jersey the land encompassed by a line drawn from where the Third River enters the Passaic to what is now the location of Montclair State University (“the first mountain”), then following the Passaic back to the beginning. This was memorialized in the Acquackanonk Patent, granted on March 15, 1684. The Dutch then began splitting up the tract into various lots shown on the maps below.

That area became Acquackanonk Township in 1693. After land was parceled out into Paterson, Little Falls, and Passaic, Acquackanonk became the City of Clifton on April 26, 1917.

Sources & further reading:
Lambert Castle
Passaic County
Gerrit Gerritszen van Wagenen
Acquackanonk Township, New Jersey
New York Public Library Digital Archives
THE STORY OF NEW JERSEY’S CIVIL BOUNDARIES

While we gear up for the next chapter in the Van Riper House’s history, we’d like to begin by telling its story. A good place to start would be in 1663, when Juriaen Tomassen (surname is patronymic, meaning “Thomas’ son”) arrived in New Netherland aboard T’Bonta Koe (“The Spotted Cow”) from the the city of Ripen, now the oldest city modern-day Denmark under the name of Ribe.

On May 25, 1667, young Juriaen married Reyckje Harmens Coerten in the Old Bergen Dutch Reformed Church in Bergen, a small, 6-year-old village that would later develop into Jersey City. The record image above shows that this was just the fourth marriage in what was New Jersey’s first permanently chartered municipality. Stay tuned for the next chapter of the Van Riper House story…

Sources & further reading:
http://wp.ripernet.com/descendants-of-juriaen-tomassen-van…/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribe
https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/…/a-tour-of-new-net…/
Holland Society of New York; New York, New York; Bergen, Hudson Co, NJ, Kakait, Book 59