 1641 - 1722 (80 years)
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| Name |
Richard Hartshorne |
| Born |
24 Oct 1641 |
Leicestershire, England  [1, 2] |
| Gender |
Male |
| Residence |
Feb 1672 |
Middletown, Monmouth County, New Jersey, USA [3] |
- He was visited by George Fox prior to Fox's trip to Gravesend.
|
| Died |
03 May 1722 [4] |
| Notes |
- From "This Old Monmouth of Ours"
RICHARD HARTSHORNE (3), son of William (1), was the founder of the family in America, on whose coasts he landed in September 1669. He proceeded almost immediately to Monmouth County, New Jersey, where he acquired, prior to May 24, 1670, his first real-estate holdings at Waycake, on the Bay Shore. Here he settled and here he continued to live for upward of thirty years. Then he removed to the village of Middle- town, where, for twenty years more, he resided in a house that he had built for himself there, in 1702 or 1703. This house is still standing, although so changed by alterations made about thirty years ago as to bear little resemblance to the orieinal structure. It was built on Middletown Lot No. 25, which had been apportioned to William Goulding (or Golden) in the drawing of 1867, and is said to have been the first of its type erected in New Jersey - a type so well adapted to the rural require- ments of that day that it became very popular and served as a pattern, often copied for the next two hundred years.
Richard Hartshorne became one of the largest land-holders in the county, acquiring, from time to time, large acreages (about 800 in 1676, in various parcels), until he held about 4000 acres, including nearly all the present Highlands, as well as the Hook.
About the time he removed to Middletown (1703) he transferred to his son William the properties of the Highlands and the Hook. For some years after making Middletown his permanent residence, Richard Harts- horne continued to spend the summer months at the Waycake place.
The period in which he lived as a troublous, a disputatious, and a contentious one, a period vexed by the encroachments and exactions of the Lords Proprietors and, subsequently, by those of the Crown and of the Royal Governors. Men the most peaceable were forced into quarrels and controversies, for there was no middle-ground between tame sub- mission and manly resistance. To the rapacity of the governing powers were added all the countless burdens and disputes and perplexities incident of necessity to the founding of an infant settlement in a forest peopled by savages.
Thus it was that Richard Harts- horne, himself a Friend and a man of peace, yet found himself, from superioreducation, from material interests, and from the trust and confidence reposed in and thrust upon him by his neighbors, ever in the forefront of conflict. And in these conflicts he did not hesitate, when occasion demanded it, to jeopard even his liberty itself.
Associating himself with his friend, Captain John Bowne, and working in close harmony with him, Richard Hartshorne, who possessed a rare combination of common-sense and far-sighted idealism, becoming one of the prime factors in molding and shaping the policies of our county in Its infant years. Speaker of the House of Assembly, of which body he was a member for twenty years, Town-Clerk, Sheriff-designate, Com- missioner of Highways, practitioner before our courts (although it is doubtful if he had been formally bred to the Bar), Judge of the Court of Sessions, and Member of the Governor's Council, his pursuits were too multifarious and his activities too multitudinous to be even glanced
at here.
In fidelity, in dignity, and in honor, for more than fifty years, Richard Hartshorne walked among the people with whom he had come to dwell, and dying, left behind him a reputation of sterling worth that lives yet today.
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| Person ID |
I753 |
Temp Applegate Tree |
| Last Modified |
11 Oct 2018 |
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| Sources |
- [S60] 13.
- [S45] 279.
- [S14] 23.
Mentions a visit by George Fox in this year at this location prior to Fox's vist to Gravesend.
- [S45] 282.
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