LAWRENCE: Township Archives gain Mershon collection

By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
   A family Bible dated 1762 with faded inscriptions, two women’s bonnets, a plaque given to F.W. Mershon by the employees of the Mershon Co., and many boxes of books on New Jersey history and the Mershon family.
   Those items are among the memorabilia and artifacts that make up the Mershon Collection, which has found a new home in the Lawrence Township Archives. The archives room is located in the Lawrence Headquarters Branch of the Mercer County Library System.
   ”We are glad to have the Mershon Collection,” said Dennis Waters, the Lawrence Township Historian. “The Mershon family was one of the founding families (of Lawrence Township). There is a lot of material that is quite relevant to Lawrence Township history in the collection.”
   The first settlers in the area that comprises Lawrence Township — then known as Maidenhead Township — arrived in the 1680s. Within a few years, there were enough inhabitants living in the area that Maidenhead Township was created in 1697.
   The Mershon family, which settled in Lawrence around 1700, had housed its collection at the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville since the 1930s. The Association of the Descendants of Henry Mershon Inc., which is informally known as the Mershon Association, was organized in 1923 in Trenton, said Clare Mershon, the association’s president.
   But the Mershon Association was asked to find another location to store its collection because the church needs the room for more office space. After pondering its options — moving the collection to other historical societies — the group decided on the Lawrence Township Archives, said Mr. Mershon, who lives in Oregon.
   ”We selected the Lawrence Township Archive because of our early family history in the Lawrenceville area,” Mr. Mershon said. “Also, they agreed to keep our Mershon Collection together. (Some of the) other places we investigated were interested in our oldest documents, but not all of our collection.”
   Among the potential repositories were the Historical Society of Princeton, the Princeton University library, the Hopewell Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, the New Jersey Historical Society, the New England Genealogical Society and the Huguenot Historical Society.
   Mr. Waters said he had been aware of the Mershon Collection for a few years, and he “had in the back of my mind” that if the Presbyterian Church did not want to house the collection, then the archives would offer to keep it.
   In the meantime, Mr. Waters was invited to be the guest speaker at the Mershon Association’s annual meeting for 2012. He agreed, and through some “casual correspondence” with Mr. Mershon, he learned the church was seeking a new location for the collection.
   ”I wrote to Mr. Mershon and asked whether the association would consider the Lawrence Township Archives,” Mr. Waters said. “Mr. Mershon was excited about the prospect, and we made arrangements to go over the items. I went to the church and looked them over.”
   ”It is an important collection and it has been part of the ‘family’ for 80 years. It’s like sending your baby off into the world. You want to make sure it is well taken care of,” Mr. Waters said of the Mershon Collection.
   According to Mr. Mershon, the extended Mershon family’s common ancestor is Henry Mershon II, who lived from 1672 to 1738. He came to New York from Normandy, France, as a 13-year-old boy with his father, Henri Marchand, in 1685. They were French Huguenots, or Protestants, who were forced to flee France or risk being prosecuted as heretics by the Catholics, he said.
   ”The father and son came to America to investigate if it would be a suitable place to bring the rest of their family,” he said. “The father left his son with friends to return by ship to France, presumably to bring the rest of the family. The father and the rest of the family were never heard from again, leaving Henry II as an orphan.”
   Henry Mershon II changed the spelling of the last name from “Marchand” to the way it sounded in English, which is “Mershon,” he said. About 1700, Henry Mershon II moved his family from Newtown, Long Island — which is the Elmhurst section of Queens, N.Y., today — to Maidenhead.
   The Mershon family was part of a migration of other families from Newtown to the Maidenhead and Hopewell areas of West Jersey when it opened for settlement in the 1690s, Mr. Mershon said.
   The Mershon family’s connection to the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville dates to 1710, when Henry Mershon II was one of 36 recipients of a deed for the original church land.
   Henry Mershon III purchased a 144-acre farm surrounding the church in 1755. Between 1801 and 1983, Mershon descendants deeded land to the church to expand the church property to its present size, Mr. Mershon said. Additional land was sold to The Lawrenceville School and much of it is now part of the school’s golf course.
   Of course, the family continued to grow. Henry Mershon II had 10 children, who in turn had more than 60 children. Today, the Mershon genealogy database has the names of more than 34,000 Mershon descendants and their spouses from 1685 to the present, Mr. Mershon said.