A Huguenot on the Hackensack is the first full-length study of
David Demarest, an early European settler of northeastern New
Jersey and progenitor of a large and locally influential family.
The book examines Demarest's life, the legacy of his family, and
the wider "Jersey Dutch" community in which the family played a
prominent part. The book looks beneath accumulated layers of legend
and older historical interpretations to formulate a new and more
realistic (and more interesting) account of Demarest's life and
legacy. Demarest, a Huguenot (French Protestant), was born about
1620 in the French province of Picardy. He first appears in history
with the record of his marriage to Marie Sohier in Middleburg, the
Netherlands, in 1643. After marriage and the start of a family, his
life unfolded in four sojourns of about a decade or a bit more:
Middleburg, 1643 to about 1651; Mannheim, Germany, from about 1651
to 1663; Staten Island and New Harlem, 1663-78, and finally the
French Patent along the Hackensack River in New Jersey, 1678 to his
death in 1693. New evidence and new interpretations provide a
picture of Demarest as an ambitious and upwardly mobile
entrepreneur with an unusual talent for balancing risk and
opportunity, and a dedicated churchman and community leader under
both Dutch and English rule. The book next considers the Demarests
in the eighteenth century, when the family rose to prominence in
Bergen County, played important roles in the Reformed Church in
Hackensack and Schraalenburgh, and began to spread out to other
parts of the country. Recapitulating Demarest's own career as an
entrepreneur and land developer, some of his descendants settled
parts of central Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Kentucky. Many
of those who remained in New Jersey were active in public affairs
and the Revolutionary War. By the end of the nineteenth century,
enormous changes in Bergen County, including the spread of
railroads and the transition from a farming economy to a suburban
one, spelled the beginning of the end for the cohesiveness and
influence of old, locally prominent Jersey Dutch families such as
the Demarests. With further economic and demographic changes
following World War II, such families were subsumed into the
general population. The book concludes with an assessment of the
Demarest family's American experience, looks at how pioneer
students of Demarest family history shaped and interpreted his life
and legacy against the background of changes in American society in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and suggests
what might yet be learned about Demarest through genetic evidence
and the increasing availability of digitized records. Demarest's
life and legacy are of interest not just to the large number of his
descendants and the numerous descendants of other Jersey Dutch
families, but more broadly to those interested in regional history,
New Netherland, and American social history.
General
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