Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 20:25:54 -0700 From: Janine Subject: [NJSUSSEX-L] FW: The Movement to New Jersey according to Watson Kirkconnell from "Climbing the Green Tree & Some Other Branches" "In the early decades of the 17th century, English colonists had settled in Virginia, Maryland & New England. (notably Massachusetts, Connecticut & Rhode Island). The Dutch fleet planted settlers at Nieuw Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson and the Swedish king established "Helsingborg" as a community in "New Sweden" on the banks of the Delaware. Murderous attacks by mosquitoes compelled the Swedes to abandon the place and the ghost town was grimly nicknamed "Moskitoborg." From the territory between the Hudson River and the Delaware, the Dutch evicted the Swedes; and by 1664 the superior naval power of England made English authority prevail in all that part of North America. Thus the modern states of "New York" & "New Jersey" began to take form. In 1664, Charles II granted all of these states to his brother, the Duke of York (later JamesII). The western part of New Jersey, long known as West Jersey, was in 1682 confirmed as under Quaker ownership, since William Penn and his associates had paid cash for that territory. It is significant that an 18th century census of West Jersey listed congregations in the following numbers: Quakers 32, Dutch Presbyterians 37, Baptist 11, Epicopalians 9, Dutch & Swedish Lutherans 5. Quakers predominated in Burlington, Gloucester and Salem counties, and Presbyterians in Hunterdon, Morris & Sussex. New Jersey became a royal province in 1702 and in 1738 was given its first governor (Lewis Morris) as distinct from the governor of New York. After two or three generation with a high birth rate and a sharply expanding population in New England, the younger sons of younger sons became ready to move into these newer domains. Some of the great grandsons of John Green I thus migrated from Rhode Island, first to Burlington & Hunterdon counties in central West Jersey and later to Morris and Sussex counties (established 1753) in the northern highlands (see Edgar Jacob Fisher, New Jersey as a Royal Province, New York, 1967, pp 221-2). Samuel Smith's History of the Colony of Nova-Caesaria or New Jersey (1765) speaks significantly of Sussex County, where most of those Greens settled, who became Loyalist: "It being the newest county, and a frontier, is not much improved and has but few inhabitants" The chiefs Greens of the third and fourth generations to settle in West Jersey were John Green III, William Green II and Samuel Green I. Their wills, and those of some of their descendants, will help to clarify the Upper Canadian pedigree."