Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh (22 February 1735/6 – 30 October 1790) was an American Dutch Reformed clergyman, colonial and state legislator, and educator. Hardenbergh was a founder of Queen's College—now Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey—in 1766, and was later appointed as the college's first president.

Hardenbergh was descended from a Dutch family that settled New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and was prominent in New York colonial affairs. He prepared for ministry at the home of the Reverend John Frelinghuysen, a prominent Dutch Reformed minister near Somerville, New Jersey. After being ordained, Hardenbergh was called to serve congregations in New Jersey's Raritan River valley, and later in Ulster County, New York. During the 1760s, Hardenbergh was influential in the establishment of Queen's College, the eighth of nine colleges established during the colonial period. After his efforts to lobby Britain's King George III and New Jersey's royal governor, William Franklin to permit the establishment of a Dutch Reformed-affiliated college, Queen's College was chartered in 1766. During the American Revolution, Hardenbergh served as a delegate for New Jersey's Provincial Congress which ratified the Declaration of Independence and to frame the state's first constitution (1776). He subsequently served several successive one-year terms in New Jersey's General Assembly. In 1785, Hardenbergh was appointed as the first president of Queen's College, a post he would hold from 1786 to his death in 1790.

Life and career

Early life and education

Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh was born on 22 February 1735/36 at Rosendale near Kingston, Ulster County, New York in the Hudson River Valley. He was the son of Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh (1706–1786) and Maria DuBois (1705/06–1790). His brother was Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh, Jr (1729–1799), who owned Sojourner Truth. His parents had married in Kingston on 6 December 1728 and seven children were born to the marriage of which Jacob was the fourth. His father, who later served with distinction as a field officer under Washington in the Continental Army, served in New York's Colonial Assembly. Frelinghuysen instructed Hardenbergh from his home, preserved as the Old Dutch Parsonage in Somerville, New Jersey.

Hardenbergh was the grandson of Johannes Hardenbergh, a wealthy landowner and prominent figure in New York colonial government, who was the owner of the colony's Hardenbergh Patent (1709), an immense tract of land that covered approximately 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km2) of the Catskill Mountains in what is now Sullivan, Ulster and Delaware counties in New York. He was likely named for his great-grandfather, Jacob Rutsen, whose daughter Catherine was the second wife of his paternal grandfather. However, the Kingston Academy was not established until 1773. Kingston did, however, have a small school with a Dutch schoolmaster founded in 1722 by the Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonality of the Town of Kingston—an organization chartered by colonial governor Thomas Dongan to provide for the free education of Kingston's children. In his late teens, he travelled to Somerset County, New Jersey to receive religious and theological instruction from the Reverend John Frelinghuysen, who was serving Dutch Reformed congregations in the Raritan valley of central New Jersey.

John Frelinghuysen died in 1754, and at the age of twenty, Hardenbergh married Frelinghuysen's widow, Dinah Van Bergh (c.1723–1807) on 18 March 1756 at Raritan, New Jersey. She had two children with Frelinghuysen before his death. Hardenbergh proposed as Dinah was strongly considering returning to the Netherlands with her two children. Hardenbergh's step-son, Frederick Frelinghuysen (1753–1804), served in the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, state legislature, and was elected a United States Senator. He also served as a military officer in the Revolution and in the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) when he attained the rank of major general.

Career as a minister

thumb|right|Hardenbergh lived in the [[Old Dutch Parsonage in Somerville for over 40 years, first as a theology student, then as local clergy, and while president of Queen's College.]]

Hardenbergh studied theology under the Reverend John Frelinghuysen, a Reformed clergyman who served several congregations located in the valley of the Raritan River in Somerset County, New Jersey, at the village of Raritan, Bedminster, Millstone, Neshanic, North Branch, and New Brunswick. These congregations had been served by Frelinghuysen's father, the Reverend Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691–1749), who rose to prominence during the First Great Awakening. The First Great Awakening was an evangelical revival in the 1730s and 1740s that revitalized Christian beliefs in Protestant Europe and the North American colonies through powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ. Frelinghuysen had adapted the theological developments of the Puritan divines to preach a style of Reformed pietism, a revivalistic style of Calvinism. His son, John, preached and instructed his students in the same style.

With John Frelinghuysen's unexpected death in 1754, Hardenbergh, as his last theological student, assumed the pulpits of five congregations in central New Jersey served by his teacher. In 1757, Hardenbergh received a license to preach from the Coetus and was formally called by these congregations in May 1758. The church was not rebuilt until 1788. This session ordered the arrest of the New Jersey colony's last royal governor, William Franklin, and began to transition the state from a crown colony into an independent state. The Provincial Congress subsequently ratified the Declaration of Independence and framed the first Constitution of the State of New Jersey (1776). Hardenbergh served several one-year terms in New Jersey's General Assembly.

Death and legacy

Hardenbergh died on 30 October 1790 of tuberculosis in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was interred in the churchyard of the First Reformed Church in New Brunswick. The inscription on his grave was written by the Reverend John Henry Livingston and exhorts mourners to "go walk in his virtuous footsteps; and when you have finished the work assigned you, you shall rest with him in eternal peace."

Hardenbergh's great-great-grandson, architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (1847–1918) was hired by the trustees of Rutgers College to design three buildings for the campus—Geology Hall (1871–72), Kirkpatrick Chapel (1873), an addition to the grammar school (now Alexander Johnston Hall)—and to design Suydam Hall (demolished) on the former campus of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, before a career designing large hotels and buildings in New York City. In Kirkpatrick Chapel, the large stained-glass window in the chancel above the altar, titled "Jesus, the Teacher of the Ages", was donated to the college by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh after the renovation of the chapel in 1916 and dedicated to his great-great-grandfather. This window is one of four in the chapel designed and crafted in the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933).

His grandson, Cornelius Low Hardenbergh, served as the mayor of New Brunswick, New Jersey from 1829 to 1838. Cornelius's son, Augustus Albert Hardenbergh, served two separate terms as a United States Congressman from New Jersey, 1875 to 1879 and 1881 to 1883.

His great-grandson, Cornelius Abraham Jansen Hardenbergh (1826-1893), twice served as the Town Supervisor of Shawangunk, New York, from 1861 to 1867 and 1876 to 1882, then served in the New York State Assembly from 1885 to 1886. His second great-nephew, Jacob Hardenbergh, served as a New York State Senator from 1870 to 1872.

Hardenbergh Hall, a building on Rutgers University's College Avenue Campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was named in his honour. It provides classroom space in its lower floors, and undergraduate student housing for 330 students on its six upper floors. It is one of three residence halls known as the "River Halls" or "River Dorms" (the others being Frelinghuysen Hall and Campbell Hall) built in 1956 overlooking the Raritan River and located between New Brunswick's George Street and New Jersey Route 18.

References

Notes

Citations

Further reading

  • Demarest, William H. S. A History of Rutgers College, 1766–1924 (1924), popular history
  • McCormick, Richard P. Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (1966), scholarly history
  • Robson, David W. "Hardenbergh, Jacob Rutsen" American National Biography (1999) short scholarly article.
  • Robson, David W. Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution (1985).

Primary sources

  • Studdiford, Peter. A Funeral Sermon on the Death of Reverend Jacob R. Hardenbergh, D.D., President of Queens College and Pastor of the Dutch Church in new Brunswick. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: s.n., 1791), pamphlet.
  • Dinah Van Bergh's translated Diary