By Richard D. Smith | Posted Feb. 14, 2025
Hurricane Ida metaphorically helped lift a centuries-old cottage from the Washington Well Farm on Rt. 518 in the Skillman section of Montgomery Township to deliver it about a mile upstream to the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM) grounds on Hollow Road.
The powerful Rock Brook flood waters of the 2021 storm damaged the 1750 Dutch Farmhouse — which is now listed for sale — and brought attention to a small one-story cottage. It turns out the cottage is linked to Montgomery’s considerable Black heritage.
Workers deconstructed the cottage panel-by-panel and brick-by-brick to move the structure in January to its new home on the museum grounds on Hollow Road.
Eric Braverman, who owned the historic farm at the time of the flood, invited Montgomery Township officials and community group leaders to tour the 8-acre Washington Well Farm property to learn more about its history — perhaps to facilitate its restoration.
Among the visitors were John B. Buck and Bruce Daniels, founding SSAAM board members.
Having lived in the Skillman-Sourlands region most of his life, Daniels was aware of the farm’s legendary moment during the Revolutionary War.
But, he recently admitted, “until after Ida, I didn’t know much about the cottage and its history.”
Namely it had once been a humble, shingle-covered cottage that served as the dwelling of enslaved African Americans laboring on the farm.
A page from Joost Duryee’s will of the Washington Well Farm in Montgomery, dated 1794. It lists the following “property:” 1 Negro man, [value] £49 ; 1 Negro girl, £30; 1 Negro girl, £21; 1 Negro girl, £15; 1 Negro boy, £10’; 1 Dutch Bible £; 1 tea kettle; 1 cradle, 1 woolen wheel & reel, and 1 lantern. The numbers behind the enslaved people are not ages, but price tags.
Washington Well Farm was among destinations previewed in a May 7, 1972, New York Times article titled “Tour of Historic Homes Highlights Montgomery Township Bicentennial.”
In addition to its 15-room main house, The Times noted, the property “contains the famous [drinking] well ... the Duryee family cemetery,” and a “split-shingled slave quarters …” (The article added that a daughter of the Dailey family, then the farm’s owners, was using the small building as an artist’s studio.)
Washington Well Farm was also previewed in a pamphlet for the Hopewell Museum Open House Tour in September 19, 1959. In addition to the farmhouse with seven fireplaces, it describes a "perfectly lovely old slave quarters, across from the house, which looks as though it had been around a long while." See excerpt below.
In September 2021, some stakeholders were concerned that restoration priority would be given to the sprawling main farmhouse and old barn. If so, the cottage might be razed, leaving the property in a dumpster, a landfill its final destination.
Inspired to preserve the structure and its history, SSAAM developed a plan to acquire it for relocation on the museum’s grounds at 189 Hollow Road in the Sourland Mountains region of Skillman.
Washington Well Farm - December 2024
SSAAM found an old handmade boot embedded in the fireplace/chimney masonry. "Apparently this was placed there as a tradition to ward off evil spirits and to bring the structure good luck," says Bruce Daniels of SSAAM.
SSAAM had been founded in 2016 by lifelong area residents Beverly Mills and Elaine Buck. Its collection of artifacts and information were installed in the restored Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopalian Church, which dates from 1899. (The church served as a scene backdrop during production of the new Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” The Montgomery News, January 2025, p. 3)
Also on the property is the Reasoner/True Farm House, part of an African American-owned farmstead.
In 2018, Mills and Buck’s long research on the Stoutsburg-Sourlands community was published in their book “If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey.”
That year, the Mt. Zion AME church was added to the NJ State Register of Historic Places and in 2021 to the National Register of Historic Places.
Advertisement
The Washington Well Farm cottage promises to be an invaluable addition to buildings directly associated with local African American history, furthering SSAAM’s mission of preserving and propagating that history.
“These are responsibilities we take very seriously,” said board president Catherine Fulmer-Hogan, during a recent group discussion with The Montgomery News.
Fulmer-Hogan, a finance and administration professional, also serves on the boards of the Hopewell Museum and Hope Rises Up, an advocacy organization for marginalized groups. The Sourlands is home to five generations of her family.
The 1794 inventory of Joost Duryee’s property (used to settle his legal estate after his death and now in the NJ State Archives manuscript collection) lists a Negro man, three Negro girls and a Negro boy. A scientific dendrochronology examination — which compares tree ring patterns in wood to a database of examples known by their years — dated the cottage’s main supporting frames to at least 1860, when chattel slavery still persisted in New Jersey.
There was much paperwork to be done and logistics to be planned. (Here, the past work experience of SSAAM board member Daniels as facilities director and project manager at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton proved quite useful.)
Finally, on November 6, 2023, the lending bank that had assumed ownership of Washington Well Farm sold the cottage to SSAAM for a token $10 payment.
Then the real work began.
Layer after layer of late 20th Century materials were carefully stripped away by the craftsmen of Restoration Technologies of New Jersey LLC, of Belvidere, NJ. After nearly three weeks of hand labor the building was stripped down to its 19th century, possibly 18th century structural skeleton and cooking fireplace. The sills, posts, and beams had been cut using hand tools.
These historic structural members were photographed, labeled, disassembled, and transported to storage. One day they will be reassembled as the structural skeleton of a historic renovation that will be used to help tell the story of slavery in New Jersey.
The process was painstaking. The cottage itself was beset with post-flood mold. It was also discovered to have been invaded years earlier by termites. The damage to the wood prevented a London laboratory specializing in dendrochronology from getting the ten clear samplings of tree growth ring traces it prefers to have. A reading with certainty could only be made from one, but it did give the 1860 result.
Elric Endersby, president of the Jersey Barn Company and an expert on mid-Atlantic 17th, 18th and 19th century structures, was a volunteer adviser, helping examine the cottage. He also recommended the British dendrochronology lab and, as the dismantling and transporting contractor, Restoration Technologies of Belvedere, NJ. (It was something of a homecoming for Endersby: His company’s office once occupied a refurbished stall of the farm’s spacious Dutch-style barn.)
As small as the cottage was, moving it in one piece was impractical. Structural examinations had provided an unhappy revelation: The building never had a true foundation. It would have to be completely taken apart.
But by using advanced scanning technology, SSAAM was able to create a detailed three-dimensional computer imaging of the cottage, accurately documenting each component. This would allow the building to be disassembled, stored in a warehouse, and eventually reassembled on the SSAAM property.
Last September, three years after Washington Well Farm and environs were inundated by the Hurricane Ida floods, the humble structure, in carefully cataloged pieces, was disassembled by Restoration Technologies and trucked to its warehouse (where the firm is generously storing it without charge to help support this SSAAM project).
Daniels said that he hopes the cottage might be reassembled at SSAAM and opened to the public in 2026, but this presently an estimate.
However, he added, “We are planning an archaeological investigation of the footprint of the building [at Washington Well Farm]. And we continue to study the wills and inventories of the descendants of Joost Duryee, to solidify nearly two centuries of oral history.”
Workers found an intact apothecary bottle lying on the dirt under the rotting floor boards. The structure had no formal foundation. It was supported by a few rocks placed here and there.
SSAAM treasurer Stephanie Adkins added this and other projects are not supported by local taxes but funded via state and federal grants. These have included major grants from Somerset County Historic Preservation; the NJ Historic Trust; the 1772 Foundation; and the Somerset County Open Space, Recreation, Farmland and Historic Preservation Trust Fund.
Plus, there’s the generosity of a wide range of private foundations and individual donors. “All backgrounds are contributing to the effort,” she said.
Adkins, who is an executive vice president and chief lending officer of the Bank of Princeton, also emphasized that SSAAM is financially healthy. It has built up its endowment while avoiding projects which, although intriguing, could overextend it fiscally. “The past several years we’ve focused on this,” she said.
Advertisement
SSAAM executive director Anita Williams Galiano, who works in international supply chain management at Johnson & Johnson, concluded: “The work we continue to do is to put history in the context of everyday people. They did heroic things to build communities from nothing.”
Williams Galiano also serves on the Hopewell Valley school board and has a multi-generational family background in education.
The growing community of historic buildings at the Stoutsburg Sourlands African American Museum can give further structure — figuratively and literally — to the museum’s work.
Commentaires