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Box 6, unprocessed and nearly
intact to its original storage condition
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Although their name may not be as familiar as the Fords’,
the Cobbs of Morristown were a prominent local family and had an equally
influential role in the development and history of Morris County. As contemporaries
of the Fords (for whom the Ford Mansion is named), the Cobbs had a hand in
regional economic and business matters.
This summer, I have had the pleasure of going through the Cobb Collection. I
have spent most of my time taking notes on the documents’ contents and
rehousing them in archive-friendly, acid-free folders. The collection is one of
the park’s lesser-known holdings and contains personal, legal and business
documents created by or related to the Cobb family dating back to the
pre-Revolutionary period. The collection was originally given to the park by
Andrew Lemuel Cobb Jr. (c. 1895-1967), a descendant of the Cobbs who continued
to live locally until his death, and includes over forty boxes of approximately
one hundred documents each. Although the park has had the collection for over
forty years, its sheer size has made cataloging its full contents difficult.
My original goal was to create a finding aid for the
collection, but doing so will have to be a collaborative effort; I have been
able to go through only eleven of forty-plus boxes so far! Hopefully, the work
that I have done will make the collection more accessible to other researchers
and will also serve as a start for what I hope will someday be a complete catalog of the collection.
Most of the documents in the collection were originated
by Lemuel Cobb (1762-1831) and his son, Andrew Bell Cobb (1804-1873). Both
Cobbs worked as lawyers and surveyors and eventually served as justices of the
peace for the Morris County Court of Common Pleas. The younger Cobb also acted
as Parsippany’s postmaster and was elected to the New Jersey State Senate.
The nature of the Cobbs’ vocation means that many of
the documents I have gone through are less than thrilling. There are many land
deeds, mortgages, bonds, accounts, surveys, receipts and IOUs, or “notes.” Most
of these are unexciting but some do include mentions of or correspondence with
notable historical figures including Supreme Court Justice James Wilson and
Governors William Livingston and Isaac Williamson. Aaron Ogden, the third
governor of New Jersey did a lot of business with Lemuel Cobb and I also found
a quit claim signed by Philip Schuyler, senator and father-in-law of founding
father Alexander Hamilton.
One of the boxes includes letters to Andrew B.
Cobb’s first wife, Elizabeth Farrand Kirkpatrick Cobb, which I found comparatively
more entertaining than business documents. As a postal enthusiast, I enjoyed
looking at all of the stamps and different postmarks that appear on the
letters. Elizabeth Cobb’s correspondence also provides insight into
contemporary daily life and social activities, which she and her relatives
recount in their letters. Along with the letters, she also saved an invitation
to a ball celebrating “Washington’s Birthnight” (very exciting, I’m sure) and there
is also mention of an illegitimate child (gasp!) in one of the letters. Elizabeth
Cobb’s letters also helped illustrate the contrast between early
nineteenth-century life and life today, and not only through personal accounts
of quotidian happenings. One of the letters to Elizabeth from Andrew was sent
from the Dunning Hotel at the corner of Washington and Cortlandt Streets in New
York; that site would eventually become the location of the World Trade Center.
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One of three
checks found in the Cobb Collection
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In addition to the mundane, the Cobb collection also
includes some novel material. There are several sets of military discharge
papers, an arrest warrant and three checks written in 1831. I also found some
hand-copied verses from the Book of Genesis, a number of court summonses, a
scrapbook, and a partial diagram of the planets.
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A bill of sale for
the purchase of a mother and two children
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The collection also occasionally veers into the
humorous. Among the more light-hearted documents are three short letters from
William Robb addressed to Mr. Cobb, Mrs. Cobb and then Mr. Cobb again in April,
May and June of 1797 requesting “one qt of sidar [sic] spirits.” Poor Mr. Robb apparently waited a long time to get a
drink. Another that I found entertaining was an affidavit of a deposition in a
case that came before Lemuel Cobb as a justice of the peace, in which the
complainant accused her neighbors of repeatedly sneaking through her fence to
steal her chickens.
In addition to documenting land transactions, the
Cobb Collection also documents the transaction of humans, an unfortunate aspect
of nineteenth-century life in Morris County that should not be overlooked. As
an affluent businessman with extensive land holdings, Lemuel Cobb bought and
sold slaves, including children. Bills of sale document his purchase of nine slaves,
including children as young as nine months and two years old. And although Cobb
treated enslaved people as commodities, it is important to remember that they
were not passive objects but real people subjected to horrific treatment by
other humans who sometimes bravely resisted their circumstances. A 1798 bill of
sale records Lemuel Cobb paying £22 for a three-year-old female child from
Elisabeth Righter; some twenty-odd years later, an affidavit recounts how that
very same girl, Hagar, ran away in 1821.
Although tedious at times, my time with the Cobb
Collection has also been at turns amusing, enlightening and affecting. I can
only imagine what other diamonds in the rough are waiting to be found in the
rest of the forty boxes.
This blog post by Phoebe Duke, Hamilton College.
