The History of Carson Road and Carson Road Woods

by Sheila M. Ager

October 24 , 2002

The following is an abstract for the Carson Road Website of a longer, documented history of the land which made possible the creation, in 2001, of Carson Road Woods by Delaware and Raritan Greenway, with help and contributions from neighbors and other, more distant, supporters of land preservation. The author and her husband are the current residents of Carson Road who have lived on the road longest. They moved to Carson Road as almost newly-weds to the only house they have ever bought and lived in.

The history of Carson Road Woods and the area in which it lies covers more than three hundred years, from the latter part of the seventeenth century into the present twenty-first century. The road and Woods lie in what was once the English province of West Jersey, taken from the Dutch during the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 1600’s. Before 1664 the area was part of New Netherland, with its center, New Amsterdam, now New York City. King Charles II granted his new lands in America to his brother James, Duke of York, who in turn gave proprietary rights to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, governor of the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, from which island the future state of New Jersey derived its name. Two proprietors necessitated a division of the land lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers into two parts, created as East and West Jersey in 1676, but not formally divided until a survey in 1687 established the Province Line Division, a demarcation which, with a bit or wandering here and there, eventually became the present Province Line Road, part of its route separating Lawrence and Princeton Townships. The announcement of the Division Line formally opened West Jersey to European settlement, most of the newcomers traveling from what is now Long Island to Princeton, Lawrenceville, and Trenton along the Indian trail from the Raritan to the falls of the Delaware above Trenton, the section from Princeton to Lawrenceville to Trenton now Route 206.

As could be expected, many of the first settlers were of Dutch origin – the Vancleves, the Giulicks who became Gulicks, the op Dykes (Updikes), the Conwenhovens (Conovers) and so on. But there were other nationalities, too; English, French, Swedish, any one from Northwestern Europe willing to endure the harshness of settlement in a continent largely unknown to them. The spelling of all names was phonetic and in many cases erratic, the same persons spelling their surname several ways. But in addition to the Anglicization of some names, other names took shape from the way they were pronounced, the French “Marchand,” for example, becoming “Mershon.”

Two of the names mentioned in the previous paragraph were central to the development of the future Carson Road: Vancleve and Mershon. Henry Marchand (Henry Mershon II) came from Long Island about 1700, and John Vancleve or Van Cleave (1700-1772), came from Long Island, too, arriving sometime before 1759, by which time he was the town’s tax assessor. The two men are buried close together in the oldest part of Princeton Cemetery’s “Old Graveyard,” founded in 1757.

The acreage that Mershon purchased covered six acres in East Jersey and the rest, adjoining, in West Jersey. The property ran south from Route 206 to land that in time would border Carson Road Woods. Vancleve’s acreage was purchased from a member of the Price family who started buying extensive holdings about 1696 in the area that would become Carson Road Woods. Part of the Vancleve farm was combined with the land of what was once Carson Farm, sort of nestled between Vancleve and former Mershon property, to become Carson Road Woods. The Carson farmland was sold to Charles Carson of West Windsor Township in 1885 by Jesse Atchley, who had bought from Abel Reed and Nathaniel Furman. Abel Reed had bought his part of the land from one of the Prices, and Nathaniel had acquired his from his father Josiah and……

For those with greater interest in Carson Road Woods, an article will soon, it is hoped, appear in the Lawrence Ledger. For more details, as they say, buy a copy.