To the editor:
My Piscataway daughters returned from a recent visit to the Van Dyke Exhibit at the South Brunswick Library in Monmouth Junction with the exclamation: "That exhibit is awesome. It is all about us."
It truly is.
More importantly the exhibit is about a very large tract of open land, adjacent to Pigeon Swamp State Park, containing an early 1700s house with slave sleeping quarters, a Van Dyke family cemetery and a separate graveyard for their slaves. The property is listed as one of the most endangered historic sites still remaining in New Jersey.
A developer currently has an option to buy it. The Eastern Villages Association, an association of concerned citizens, has been trying very hard for the past several years to prevent this development and to preserve this property as open land. Some progress has been reported.
I do hope they succeed in their endeavor.
Yesterday, my eldest daughter and her youngest son took me, as an 85th birthday present, to see this exhibit and to visit the farm where I spent 20 years of my youth. I am not at all sure I like the idea of Van Dykes being slave owners or having segregated cemeteries on their property, but history does have a way of catching up with us.
Living conditions were pretty primitive back then. It was not until 1925 when my mother and father moved their young family from Jamesburg to this farm that it first got running water and electricity.
My father’s people came to New Netherlands from Holland in 1652 and the property of which we speak first came into the Van Dyke family in 1688. By then this was a British colony. The land remained in the family until 1954 when sold to the Puldas.
Getting back to that Van Dyke exhibit, I understand that it was pretty much the product of EVA volunteers of which Bill Klimowicz, Elaine Livingston, James Shackleford, and Jean Dvorak were prime movers with the very able assistance of the township’s brilliant researcher and historian, Ceil Leedom. The Van Dykes are extremely grateful for all they have done to preserve our family history and that of this most important area. The exhibit is indeed fabulous. Awesome is quite appropriate.
Arthur W. Van Dyke
Mountainside
