PIEDMONT DRIVE

There's something familiar about the places where the LaMonte-Mason-Kern families settled. You'll see it in the background of photos from Bound Brook in New Jersey, Romney in West Virginia, and Wheatlands near Berryville, Virginia.

First Watchung Mountain behind Codrington Park in Bound Brook, New Jersey

It's fortuitous for Bound Brook that these wealthy families who could have moved anywhere chose to live in the foothills of the Appalachian piedmont. For, without their settlement in the Raritan Valley below First Watchung Mountain, our town would be without the Memorial Library, Codrington Park, LaMonte Field, the Greenbrook Academy, LaMonte School, Washington Campground, and Washington School (now BBHS). Neighborhoods west of Vossellar Avenue and north of Maple Avenue, LaMonte subdivisions one-and-all, would have developed differently or not at all.

Estimated former LaMonte family land in Bound Brook, New Jersey

In the early twentieth century, as the pre-electric Evergreen mansion above West High Street aged, George Mason LaMonte built a new estate on the family's pasturage in the northeast part of town. There Piedmont Farm still stands, hidden behind a forest of massive oaks and firs appropriately filled with a committee of black vultures, supervisors of the completion of events set in motion three hundred years ago by the buying and selling of black Africans.

Main entrance to Piedmont Farm, Bound Brook, New Jersey

EVERGREEN AVENUE

First Watchung Mountain north of Evergreen Avenue

The little road between St. Johns Place and Thompson Avenue was named for the Evergreens, the LaMonte family mansion that once lorded over High Street on a rise of land at the southeastern end of the avenue. One might assume that the name, like that of many other West End streets, was imported from the Virginia estates of Bound Brook's former first family. In this case one would be wrong.


"The tract of land in which is the borough of Bound Brook was purchased from the Indians in May, 1681.... Thomas Codrington, one of the original purchasers, received as his share of the land 877 acres, lying between the Middle brook and what is now Vosseller avenue, fronting on the Raritan River and running back to the Blue hills. Here he built a house in 1683, which was the first dwelling house in Bound Brook and in Somerset County. The present residency of the Hon. George LaMonte is on the exact site of the original house of Codrington.... The house was built on a slight elevation of ground, sloping on all sides, which tradition says was an Indian mound where the Raritan tribe buried their dead.... In the spring of 1854 Daniel Talmage took down the entire buliding erected by Codrington...and built an entirely new house adjoining on the south. The present name of this old homestead, "The Evergreens," was given by Daniel Talmage who also set out the beautiful arbor vitae hedge." (from Davis TE, First Houses of Bound Brook, Washington Campground Association 1893)

The Evergreens, the original LaMonte family home in Bound Brook, New Jersey

But don't go looking for the Evergreens today. Caroline LaMonte donated the rambling mansion to the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey in 1922, specifying that it be used to house aging citizens. Thus it became known as Old Ladies Hill until razed in the 1990s for the townhouses of Gilly's Landing. 

Gilly's Landing at the former site of the Evergreens

NEW HAMPSHIRE LANE AND ROMNEY ROAD

This little lane isn't the old road up to New England and the intersecting road isn't a nod to recent politicians so what are their namesakes? 







When Bound Brook's Westerly Gardens was platted in 1912  George LaMonte the elder had just died. His daughter Caroline apparently ceded the street naming to her recently widowed mother who was inspired by her family of origin. 


"The break up of the LaMonte farm for residential purposes began in 1912 when Miss Caroline B. LaMonte launched the project known as Westerly Gardens. The involved the building of about 35 one family dwelling houses, with roads and other improvements, in a block between Talmadge avenue and Second street. It also included the Nurses Home and the beginning of a social welfare program which still continues to expand and has been the model for other communities in this state." (Bound Brook Chronicle No.16, 1950)



Rebecca Kern LaMonte had been born and raised in a neat brick home in Romney, the seat of Hampshire County in the western highlands of Virginia. 

The Kern's House in Romney, WV is now an American Legion post

Being a major post for provisions on the road from the Ohio Valley to Confederate strongholds in the Shenandoah Valley, Romney changed hands at least ten times in the early Civil War. It was finally ceded along with all of Hampshire County to the newly formed state of West Virginia in 1863, becoming the first town of the first county in the state.

WHEATLAND AVENUE

Stucco duplex typical of  Westerly Gardens

If this street seems incongruous with the corn-growing Raritan bottomlands, it's because the name was transplanted up from the rich farmlands of the Potomac headwaters by the descendants of a prominent early Virginia family. 



Major Seth Mason was a distinguished veteran of the War of 1812 who, after the war, built Wheatlands, a white-columned stone estate that would become the center of the African trade for the emerging wheat farms of the surrounding Shenandoah Valley. 

Auction block in the front lawn of historic Wheatland, Clarke County, VA

Major Mason's granddaughter Rebecca Kern spent summers on the sprawling plantation before marrying a northern headmaster and relocating to Bound Brook, New Jersey after the Civil War. The aging Mrs. LaMonte would recall the places of her childhood when naming the new streets of the family's Westerly Gardens subdivision. It's a good thing her grandfather didn't name the manor for his secondary crops. Slaveland Lane wouldn't have survived civil rights. Tobaccoland Alley? Let's not go there! 

LAMONTE AVENUE

Kindergarteners making their way to LaMonte School know without a glance to turn at the cut-through road between the flood prone southside and the rise of land to the north. These children of immigrant families have no inkling that LaMonte Avenue was paved by slave labor.

George A. LaMonte's road to New Jersey was more circuitous than his namesake avenue. Just before the U.S. Civil War, when trade between north and south was still prosperous, he traveled the Shenandoah Valley Turnpike from his native upstate New York for his first teaching job at the Academy at Winchester. Before long a spirited belle and fellow new teacher named Rebecca Thweatt Mason Kern caught more than Master LaMonte's eye. In 1858 she became Mrs. George A. LaMonte at her family estate in the Virginia highlands west of Kernstown. 



Then disaster struck in the form of the Union army, driving George and his pregnant wife first farther south to the last capital of the Confederacy in Danville and then north with their newborn son George Mason LaMonte. The Kern-Mason-Thweatt families would soon realize the value of a Yankee son-in-law, for the LaMontes were able to convert the accumulated family wealth from trade in tobacco and slaves into northern currency. George was appointed president of the newly formed First National Bank of New York (now Citibank). He then purchased the old Talmadge Farm on the west end of a sleepy village thirty miles from the city soon to be incorporated as Bound Brook, New Jersey. Before long he developed and started manufacturing the safety paper that Rebecca, a prolific writer and saver of letters, used to return the wealth back to her families of origin in reconstructionist Virginia. 


"In 1871 he (George LaMonte) established the manufacturing of the "national safety paper" used for the protection of checks and similar financial documents and which soon came into general use in the banking world." (Bound Brook Chronicle 10/24/1913)


Bound Brook became an immigrant town in the late 1800s to staff the LaMonte woolen mill along the Raritan River. The family donated land and funds for a new elementary school and neighboring immigration house (now Green Brook Academy) for the growing Italian and Polish community, establishing a pattern of settlement by train from New York that grew with the influx of chemical, asbestos, and plastics factories between the World Wars and that continues with today's Hispanic diaspora.