Phil Parker, age 10, of Willingboro, N.J., for his question:
HOW DID NEW JERSEY RECEIVE ITS NAME?
New Jersey entered the Union of the United States on De c. 18, 1787, as the third of the original 13 states. The area had been named more than 100 years before by James, the Duke of York (who later became King James II). His agents named the territory between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers after the island of Jersey in the English Channel.
Originally, the region was the home of Indians known as the Delaware or Leni Lenape.
The area was claimed by both the Dutch and the English when they began to found colonies on the coast of North America in the early 17th Century. The Dutch settled at Fort Nassau (present day Glouster City) in 1624 and at Pavonia (now part of Jersey City) in 1630. Swedish settlements on the Delaware were taken over by the Dutch in 1655.
New Jersey was still sparsely settled n 1664 when King Charles II of England granted all the area to his brother, the Duke of York, who had it named New Jersey. He kicked out the Dutch.
James assigned New Jersey to two close friends, Sir George Carteret and John, Lord Berkeley. These two men actually named the territory when they assumed governmental control.
In 1674, Berkeley sold his half interest to a consortium of Quakers. Boundaries had to be established between Quaker property and the Carteret property and this resulted in a division into East and West Jersey.
Carteret's estate of East Jersey was auctioned off after his death in 1681. Acquired by William Penn and associates, it was soon subdivided amid conflicting claims. West Jersey, also a Quaker province, had similar problems over land grants.
In 1702, East and West Jersey were united as the royal province of New Jersey. By that time its population was made up of people from the British Isles, Holland, Belgium, France and Germany, as well as slaves from Africa and the West Indies.
New Jerseys last royal governor was William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin.
Sentiment in the province was divided over the revolutionary cause, but New Jersey gradually moved into the patriot camp after 1774. On July 2, 1776, the provincial
congress approved a state constitution. The first state governor was a man named William Livingston, who remained in office until his death in 1790.
Because of a continuing controversy with New York over transportation rights on the Hudson River and over the use of New York Harbor, New Jersey favored a new federal constitution that would protect the rights of the smaller states.
At the Constitutional Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1787, the New Jersey delegates led small state efforts that resulted in the adoption of equal representation in the United States Senate.
The state of New Jersey remained primarily agricultural into the 1820s. Manufacturing became important after 1840 when Patterson, already a textile center, began manufacturing armaments and locomotives.