PARSONAGE LAND.

49

facts above given, we incline to the opinion that the Society took organic form sometime during the year 1719.

Among the inducements held out to the settlers by the Proprietors of East Jersey, was the offer of two hundred acres of land for the support of public worship in each parish. A warrant for the survey of 200 acres and meadow for a parsonage was granted to the Newark settlers October 23, 1676. The actual survey, however, does not appear to have been made till twenty years later, April 10, 1696, when, besides the two hundred thus appropriated, three acres were assigned for a burial-place, three for a market-place, and six for a trainingplace, the last being on the present site of the First Park in Newark. We shall have occasion hereafter to notice the contentions to which these parsonage lands gave rise, and the measures adopted from time to time to protect them from plunder. How soon the Mountain Society set up its claim to a portion of them we do not know. Such a claim was very likely to have been among the first thoughts of the new congregation.

However this may be, the mountaineers were not indifferent to their supposed duty of making permanent provision for the ministry. Their first act as an ecclesiastical body, of which we have any knowledge, was the buying of land for the minister's use. They were manifestly unwilling to leave

50

THE GARDNER PURCHASE.

so important a matter to any issues connected with their rights in the property of the Old Society.

The land purchased of Thomas Gardner in 1719, being "the sixth year of the reign of our sovereign Lord, George, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland King, defender of the faith," &c., the deed informs us was sold "for divers good causes and considerations, me thereunto moving, but more especially for and in consideration of the sum of £25 current money of New York.” It was "to be and remain for the use and benefit of a dissenting* ministry, such as shall be called to that work by the grantees before-named, and their associates from time to time." It is described as "scituate, lying and being in the bounds and limits of Newark aforesaid, on the east side of a

* So called by English usage till the colonies became independent. The Puritans in America were in no just sense dissenters. They secured here that "freedom to worship God" for which they left the fatherland. In New Jersey, religious liberty was explicitly guaranteed by the Proprietors. When the latter, in 1702, surrenered their civil jurisdiction to the crown, an attempt was made by Lord Cornbury, the governor, to subject the people to the forms of the Church of England. "The Prayer Book was ordered to be read, the sacraments to be administered only by persons episcopally ordained; and all ministers, without ordination of that sort, were required to report themselves to the Bishop of London. A bill for the maintenance of the Church in the Jerseys was defeated solely through the unflinching perseverance of a Baptist and a Quaker-Richard Hartshorne and Andrew Browne." Webster's Hist. Pres. Church., p. 88.

FIRST MEETING-HOUSE.

51

brook commonly called and known by the name of Parow's Brook.* Beginning at said brook near a bridge by the road that leads to the mountain, thence running easterly as the road runs, so far as that a south-westerly line cross the said lot (it being twelve chains in breadth) shall include twenty acres of land, English measure: bounded southerly with Joseph Harrison, westerly with said Parow's Brook, northerly with said mountain road, and easterly with my own land." This locates it east of the Willow Hall Market, south of, and including, the present park.

A meeting-house was the next demand. This was the central object of interest in every community of the Puritans.† If no Dwight had ever composed for their use the precious hymn

"I love thy kingdom, Lord,

The house of thine abode,"

they were quite familiar with the inspired original

* Named from PERRO, one of the Indians who negotiated in the sale of the lands. See Robert Treat's testimony, Bill in Chancery, p. 118.

A joint letter sent in 1684 to the Proprietors in Scotland, by David Barclay, Arthur Forbes, and Gawen Laurie, says: "The people being mostly New England men, do mostly incline to their way; and in every town there is a meeting-house, where they worship publicly every week. They have no public law in the country for maintaining public teachers, but the towns that have them make way within themselves to maintain them." Stearns, p. 78.

from which its touching sentiments were drawn. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning"-were words that echoed the warmest feelings of many a settler's bosom.

If the reader has ever worshipped in any of the primitive sanctuaries of the far West or South, he will have no difficulty in limning for himself a pretty correct portrait of the rude and lowly edifice. The site selected for it was on the highway leading to the mountain, a few rods east from where the First Church now stands. Time has not spared for us the name of the architect and the particulars of the contract, as it has of the sanctuaries since built on nearly the same spot.

The town records of Newark, though occupied much with ecclesiastical matters, have nothing to say of the Mountain Society. They are indeed silent upon the building of the second house of worship in Newark, which is supposed to have been erected between April, 1714, and August, 1716, where a vacancy in the records occurs. Had we the details of that work, which took place just before the Society here was formed, we might obtain some probable clew to the men engaged upon the building here.

The mountain congregation, however, were not entirely dependent upon the Bezaleels and Hirams of the old Society.

Samuel Pierson was a carpenter, and his sons

HANDS THAT HELPED.

53

Joseph, Samuel, James, Daniel, and Caleb,-all of them now arrived at manhood, for the father was fifty-six years old-must have had some knowledge of the trade. He was a good man, who had a care for the spiritual, as well as for the material edifice, as appears from the testimonial placed upon his headstone ten years afterward. We surmise that the holy structure went up under his superintendence, though the use of the broad-axe, the saw, and the auger, may have been left to younger hands. Doubtless there were others of the craft connected with the work. Many a right hand lent its cunning. And many a rough hand, accustomed more to the labors of forest and field than to those of the carpenter's bench, lent to the enterprise its manly strength. Samuel Harrison's saw-mill, which did good service for the parsonage twenty-eight years later, was not yet in operation, and planing-mills, sash-and-blind factories and the like, were institutions still more distant in the future. But our men of the wilderness were men trained to expedients. The want and the will brought the ways and the means. One by one, the straight shafts of the forest fell before the axe and were fitted to their places. From week to week the progress of the meeting-house was a principal topic of conversation, and when at last, on a little knoll in the midst of the travelled road, which on either side retired like the parting Jordan making way for the Ark, the