In 2020, Goline “Dory” Vanderhoof, a native of Plainfield, took up genealogical research as a hobby while pandemic quarantine kept him from his regular job. Vanderhoof, a descendant of some of the earliest Dutch settlers of northern New Jersey, compiled detailed research on the history of both his family and the region. In the process, he came across something startling: Vanderhoof’s ancestors, the Doremus family that had settled and farmed much of the land that makes up modern Cedar Grove, were slave owners. They lent some of their enslaved people to relatives in what is now Verona, where Vanderhoof’s research found more slave owners.
To date, Vanderhoof’s research has identified seven individuals as slave owners in our area, including a man often recognized as a founder of Verona’s pre-Civil War economy, Dr. Christian Bone. Vanderhoof has also identified 14 individuals who were enslaved. However, there would almost certainly have been more because only enslaved males over 25 were taxed and because of the ease and frequency of tax evasion. (His research points to more than 50 enslaved Africans living in Cedar Grove in 1800, which then had a population of about 200.)
The popular view is that slavery was a uniquely Southern sin. But records like Vanderhoof’s and others show that New Jersey’s early history is littered with evidence of racially based chattel slavery, which did not end in the state until 1866. An 1804 law mandated that enslaved people be freed 21 to 25 years later–but only if they had been born after the law’s passage. Those born before would remain in servitude for their entire lives.
The Middle Colonies like New Jersey did not share the plantation economy that defined the South. Rather, the Anglo-Dutch settlers of the area of modern Verona used enslaved African-Americans as supplementary labor for various tasks. Small-scale farmsteads and other ventures were worked by both slavers and slaves. On Vanderhoof’s family’s property, enslaved people were almost certainly used to cut down old growth forests to make way for farmland. They also may have been buried there.
“The Cedar Grove and Verona colonial settlements relied on enslaved Africans for labor in the clearing of the land and the operation of the farms and mills,” says Vanderhoof, now a resident of Canada. Dr. Bone, a Hessian immigrant, owned slaves and almost certainly used their forced labor to dam the Peckman River near the current waterfall in Verona Park. Bone operated a milling business at the site using enslaved people. A millstone once used in the production of flour at Bone’s mill is prominently displayed in the center of town near H.B. Whitehorne Middle School, although there is no sign that identifies its historical significance or its relation to slavery.
Verona’s enslaved people do not seem to have stayed in Verona after their manumission. Many former slaves were unable to find work in the towns where they had been forced to labor for years. Instead, they went to more urban communities in places like Newark, Elizabeth, and Rahway, where they had to work as servants to the wealthy in spite of a great number of them being highly skilled in trades such as blacksmithing, masonry, and carpentry.
Vanderhoof’s research began with his ancestors’ farm records, which had been carefully preserved over the centuries. He worked with professors at Montclair State University and Rutgers University to corroborate those records and put them in greater historical context. The specific resources used included tax ratables, which were records of properties and their value; the Black Loyalist Directory, which recorded people who fled their enslavers and those who joined British regiments during the Revolutionary War; the Essex County records of black births; and transfers of enslaved people in wills.
Speaking about the research, Dr. Christopher Tamburro, a Verona High School history teacher, expressed his belief that “it helps to give us a better understanding of our modern environment, how we got to where we are and it’s important to note that these violent, inhumane practices were happening all around.”
Tamburro, who also serves on the Town Council as mayor of Verona, hopes that Vandehoof’s revelations “help to shed light on some of this legacy that exists in town to potentially allow us to recognize that as a municipality and to include things like historical markers so we can continue education on this topic since we don’t want this to be an object of interest and concern for a few days. We want to be talking about it for as long as Verona is around so we can continue to address it.”
George Donnelly graduated Verona High School with the Class of 2023. This story was part of his senior Capstone project.
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