Hartshorne Era

The Navesink Military Reservation was established by the War Department in 1942 with the acquisition of three parcels of land that had remained mostly in the Hartshorne family since the beginning of European settlement in the late 17th Century. By that time the Nave Sincks, a sub-tribe of the Lenape Native Americans, had occupied the southeastern Raritan Bayshore and the Highlands during the Eastern Woodlands period (approximately 1000 BC to 1600 AD), and they and other Native Americans may have occupied it earlier. The Nave Sincks fished and harvested shellfish along the shore, hunted game and gathered food in the lower and upper woods, and grew maize, beans, sunflowers and other plants in the fertile soils along creeks.10 The prominence of the Navesink Highlands at the confluence of three rivers caught the attention of the early European explorers. Giovanni Verrazano in 1524 noted the “little mountain by the sea” before sailing into the Hudson River narrows that now bear his name. Robert Juet, Henry Hudson’s first mate on the Half Moon in 1609, noted that “the Land is very pleasant and high, and bold to fall.” When shipmates landed on the Raritan Bay’s “Souther shoare,” Juet reported that they “saw great store of Men, Women, and Children, who gave them Tobacco at their coming on land. So they went up into the Woods, and saw a great store of goodly Oakes, and some Currants.

Several months after the English took over New Amsterdam in 1664, Richard Nicolls, the Governor of New York, issued the Monmouth Patent, or Navesink Patent. Richard Hartshorne (1) (1641-1722), an English Quaker born in Leicestershire, bought land on Sandy Hook Bay in 1669-1670 and afterwards acquired much of the eastern Highlands, including the land area that is now Hartshorne Woods Park, and Sandy Hook. In 1674 he executed a deed with the Nave Sincks to confirm his ownership. The Navesink Highlands area became known to Hartshorne and other settlers as Portland Point, later simplified as Portland.

Richard Hartshorne (1) deeded in several transactions his Highlands and Sandy Hook properties starting in 1703 to his son William Hartshorne (1678/9-1748/9). A 1710-1720 Hartshorne Survey shows parcels totaling 2,410 acres, with the northeast parcel noted as “Sandy Hook Contains in Lands and Cedar Swamp about 800 Acres,” and two Highlands parcels noted as lying between “The Edge of the Bay Along under The High Land” and the “Neversinks River” (See Historic Image 33). (H33. William Lawrence, 1710-1720 Hartshorne Survey Map, Hartshorne Family Papers, MCHA.)

The 1710-1720 Hartshorne Survey notes the eastern Highlands parcel, which included the land that became the Navesink Military Reservation, as “William Hartshorne’s Land Within Fence Contains 812 8/10 acres.” A sketch in the southwest corner of this parcel shows the “William Hartshorne House,” which became known as Portland. On “The High Land” in the northeast area of this parcel, a conical structure noted as “The Beacon” suggests that by at least 1720 colonists were using the elevation of the Highlands as a site for a navigation marker or signal. In the 1740s during the War of Austrian Succession, colonists devised a signaling system on the Highlands with an oil fire at night and a raised ball during the day to signal the approach of enemy French ships.

https://www.monmouthcountyparks.com/Documents/135/PortlandPlacePhase1.pdf

https://www.co.monmouth.nj.us/documents/132/parks_11_20.pdf