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ALLENTOWN: Documents from 1877 store shed light on Robbinsville’s beginnings

By Joanne Degnan, Staff Writer
   ALLENTOWN — Laura Steward saves everything, and for that Rutgers University archivists are grateful.
   The 94-year-old Allentown resident retrieved dozens of brittle 19th-century ledgers, daybooks and public record registers from her husband’s family’s general store in Robbinsville before it was razed in the 1970s. Then she stored the books in numerous places at her South Main Street home for nearly 40 years because she couldn’t bear to throw them away.
   ”I had them out back in the barn for years,” Mrs. Steward tells a visitor. “Then I had them upstairs under a bed for the longest time, and then I brought them down here,” she says, gesturing to her long dining room table where 27 oversized leather and cloth books, some held together with string, were waiting for an archivist from Rutgers University Libraries on Oct. 13.
   ”I never throw anything out,” Mrs. Steward says with a mischievous smile. “You never know when you might need it.”
   Ron Becker, the head of Special Collections at Rutgers University Libraries, says he’s thrilled about getting the volumes, which provide valuable information for local genealogists and social history researchers studying what life was like for ordinary people in the post-Civil War era.
   ”I’m always excited about things like this,” Mr. Becker says. “These are important because it’s really the only way we can see how ordinary people lived. In this case, this being a family business, it also re-creates the whole history of Robbinsville. You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of names of people in these books, what they’re buying, and how they’re interacting with the world about them.”
   When Edmund Baker Yard opened his general store and post office in early 1877 on Main Street in Robbinsville, Ulysses S. Grant was still president, Thomas Edison was busy inventing a crank-turned phonograph, and the killer of Wild Bill Hickok was on the way to the gallows in the Dakota Territory.
   The E.B. Yard General Store, as it was originally called, stood next to the now abandoned Camden & Amboy railroad tracks on Main Street and was catty-corner to Ernie’s Tavern, Mrs. Steward says. It was the town center 100 years before Town Center began to rise from the cornfields down the road.
   ”My husband grew up in that store,” Mrs. Steward says. “He was the first grandson of E.B. Yard. He said when he was a little boy he had the run of the store and there were these cases there filled with penny candy,” she says with a laugh that leaves no doubt the story ends with sticky fingers.
   ”His grandfather didn’t know, of course,” she says.
   As was typical in the late 19th century, Robbinsville’s general store also served as the town hall, post office and meeting place where people gathered by pickle barrels to read the newspaper, play checkers and chat with their neighbors. The first floor would have been stacked floor to ceiling with the store’s inventory, which arrived by train, and customers used the wicker baskets piled in heaps on the front porch to do their shopping.
   ”Part of that building sat on railroad property,” Mrs. Steward says. “They paid $1 a year to the railroad company.”
   The store’s daybooks recorded all customers’ daily purchases and the amount charged for these items, such as food, fabric, candles, medicine, coffee, tea, spices and tobacco. The larger, heavy ledger books recorded the running accounts of individual customers, the date of each transaction, how much was paid, and how much was still owed.
   ”I found my own grandfather’s name in here on my mother’s side,” Mrs. Steward says pointing to one of pages where the entries were written with a dip pen in exquisitely stylized penmanship. “It says here he came in and bought some tobacco.”
   Mixed in with the store’s 27 daybooks and ledgers were also registers of all the births, marriages and deaths in Robbinsville between 1860 and 1877. Those books were sent to the NJ State Archives last summer because government records are state property, says Allentown historian John Fabiano, who has been helping Mrs. Steward sort her old books, family documents and photographs.
   Mr. Becker noted that “governments basically worked out of stores in those days,” so it isn’t unusual to find a town’s birth, marriage and death registers in the same place as a general store’s business books.
   What makes it odd in this case, however, is that the birth, marriage and death records predate the store, making it a bit of a mystery as to how the public records from the earlier time period ended up in E.B. Yard’s attic. A book by Francis Bazley Lee, “Genealogical and Personal Memorial of Mercer County New Jersey,” published in 1907, says E.B. Yard’s store opened in 1877, and the store’s oldest ledger dating from the same year seems to support that.
   Mrs. Steward says E.B. Yard was a devout Baptist and staunch Republican. Political and family connections probably worked in his favor to get him named Robbinsville’s postmaster in 1877. His grandfather, John Yard, was the first postmaster of neighboring Yardville, which was named for him.
   ”If you were a Republican you got the post office,” Mrs. Steward says with a smile.
   In March of 1877, E.B. Yard married Clara Howell, a teacher at one of the five one-room schoolhouses in the area. One of the Yards’ three daughters, Mabel, married Edward Atkinson Steward. The Stewards’ son, Edmund, named for his grandfather, married Laura Steward in 1940.
   ”E.B. Yard had died by the time I came into the family,” Mrs. Steward recalls. “But I remember Clara. She came to my wedding. She was very deaf and we used to have to talk to her through a trumpet.”
   Mrs. Steward brings out another one of E.B. Yard’s books from the living room — this one is not going to Rutgers — and its eclectic contents read like the 19th-century version of a modern blog. The leather-bound journal contains E.B.’s handwritten love poems to Clara, his thoughts on current events, vocabulary words and definitions, and even a bit of 19th-century religious humor. (Why is the Baptist church like a beaver’s hut? Because there is only one entrance and it’s under water!)
   Standing among the boxes of books, papers and photographs in the living room, Mrs. Steward’s daughter, Barbara S. Diblin of New Egypt, explains that she’s been trying to help her mother organize her historic memorabilia.
   ”I’m always saying, ‘What is this? Can we throw this out, Mom?’” Ms. Diblin says. “We need to organize this stuff somehow. If it’s important enough to keep, then we have to know where to find it.”
   Mrs. Steward agrees. “It’s true. I can’t remember where I put all these things,” she says sheepishly.
   Part of this weeding-out effort led to the decision to try to find a new home for the E.B. Yard General Store ledgers and daybooks. Mrs. Steward says she first tried to give the historic books to Robbinsville, but was told the town had no place to store them. That’s when Mr. Fabiano put Mrs. Steward in touch with Rutgers University Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives.
   Mr. Becker says all of the E.B. Yard ledgers and daybooks will be cataloged in an international database so that genealogists and researchers will be aware of this resource’s existence in the Rutgers Libraries.
   Both Mrs. Steward and Ms. Diblin say they’re glad the books will now be in a safer, climate-controlled place where students, researchers and members of the public will have access to them.
   ”It’s nice know the family history and everything, but you really can’t keep everything,” Ms. Diblin says.