There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

1. How We Got to Where We Are

1 1 How We Got to Where We Are What was it like, some twelve thousand years ago, when the ancestors of the Lenape Indians arrived in the land that, hundreds of generations later, was named New Jersey? Did these Stone Age people have watercraft that enabled them to travel over the river that we call the Delaware? Did they walk down the Hudson Valley? Did they come as a clan, with men, women, and children, or was it a party of male hunters following the track of game? One can imagine these people, the descendants of the Asians who crossed over to North America from Siberia, making their way cautiously but hopefully into our land of pine forests and lakes. However they arrived, they were the first human beings to settle here. The arrival of Europeans can be dated to Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian in the employ of the king of France who explored the Atlantic coastline of North America in the ship La Dauphine in 1524, followed in 1609 by Henry Hudson, an Englishman hired by the Dutch, whose ship the Half Moon explored the Delaware and Hudson rivers. Following Hudson , the Dutch established their New Netherland colony, headquartered on Manhattan Island. In 1664, fifty-five years after Henry Hudson, the New Netherland colony was conquered by the British. Back in England, the Duke of York, brother to the king, took a map of the former Dutch territory and selected a stretch of land between the Hudson River and the Delaware River, which he gave the name “New Jersey.” The duke conveyed this land in a deed to two of his nobleman friends, Sir John Carteret and John Lord Berkeley, on June 24, 1664, which is as good a date as any to celebrate New Jersey’s birthday. Carteret, incidentally, owned property on the isle of Jersey in the English Channel, where he had sheltered the king during the English Civil War. The name “New Jersey” was probably meant as a compliment to Sir John. 2 There’s More to New Jersey . . . So a political entity named New Jersey began in the seventeenth century and has endured through the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and now into the twenty-first century. Certain themes have characterized New Jersey during much of that time. The most obvious characteristic about New Jersey today, its population density, is not one of those enduring themes. We may have more people per square mile (1,138) than any other state and most other nations, including India and China. But this is a relatively new phenomenon dating from the post–World War II era when the federal highway system opened up the state for in-migration. Another relatively recent phenomenon is the state’s wealth. The latest federal statistics show that New Jersey has the highest per capita income of any state, and if we were peeled off from the United States and made a separate country (not entirely a bad idea, in my view), we would be the wealthiest nation in the world. The rest of the United States would come in second, followed in third place by Luxembourg. What has characterized New Jersey down the centuries are the following: Diversity Our state has an astonishing diversity. Geographers marvel at how many different types of landscape exist in our small area, including wetlands, mountains, coastal plains, and pine barrens. We have over twenty-six hundred species of flora—more than many larger states. A higher proportion of New Jersey is covered by forest (40 percent) than many other states, including California and Alaska. There are more horses per square mile here than in any other state in the nation; or if you were a horse you would say that there are fewer square miles per you than any other state. The same diversity characterizes the human population of our state. In the colonial era, the population included Native Americans, Dutch, Finns, Swedes, Africans, English, and Scots. This diversity continued after the Revolution. In the early 1800s, came the Irish and the Germans; after the Civil War, came the Italians and the eastern Europeans. Today we are still a center for immigrants. The 2000 census shows that the foreign- How We Got to Where We Are 3 born in New Jersey constitute 18 percent of our population—the third highest in the nation, after California and New York, and about as high as it...