The Old Stone House Team is united to Save Our History. By Saving the Old Stone House we retain a living document of the history of South Orange and the region.
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South Orange Middle School Poem From
Amber Alston
This House Called Stone
More than just a house called stone
Your history is etched in your bone
For hundreds of years you’ve housed families from beginning to end
But your fame still has yet to begin
Hidden, covered and turned away
Time has shuttered your glory days
Notable name have surrounded you and grounded you
Making sure your heart is beating forever more
What will happen to you in your old age?
Knocking down out of rage
Or
May it be a family’s knocking at your door?
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| Although the house is believed to have predated 1680 maps, the Stone House by the Stone House Brook is significant for the period 1866 to 1916 for its fifty-year association with the productive career of William Augustus Brewer, Jr., who is significant in the past of South Orange, New Jersey, for this period, for community planning and development, politics/government, and education, and because it possesses integrity of design, materials, setting, workmanship.
As Trustee and two-time President of the Village of South Orange, Commissioner of Assessments, head of the Safety and Order Commission, Commissioner of Drainage, Chairman of the Board of Education, and Secretary and President of the South Orange Library, Brewer spearheaded, often against significant opposition, remarkable improvements in South Orange which ranked him “was one of the pioneers” in the movement which led to the development of South Orange as a place of suburban residence.
This building is the last remaining building associated with the life of William Brewer.
Stone House by Stone House Brook is also significant for historic archaeology for the period 1747 to 1850, as having yielded, or may be likely to yield, information for the period between circa 1747 and 1850 in South Orange, New Jersey.
A Phase I/II archaeological survey has identified an eighteenth/nineteenth-century trash scatter covering 400 square feet adjacent to the kitchen door and a late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century trash midden of about 600 square feet located 20 feet east of the house.
These have yielded a rich array of cultural material relating to the occupation of the site by the Pierson, Condit, and Lindsley families (ca. 1747-1850, who were prominent in the development and establishment of South Orange in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. |