Family Farming

Here, in the heart of Hopewell’s Stony Brook valley, the soils are deep and fertile, perfect for raising crops and livestock. Following the displacement of the Native American Lenape people living here around the turn of the 18th century, European families moved on to this land, cleared away the trees and farmed for all they were worth, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, for several generations. The names of these families – Baldwin, Blackwell, Drake, Hart, Hunt, Lewis, Titus, to list just a few – remain with us today, often denoting streams and streets, buildings and businesses, and sometimes in the form of living, breathing descendants.

The landscape in these parts now may seem to be all corporate campuses and housing tracts stitched together with ever bigger and faster highways. But lurking here and there are many subtle hold-overs from history and countless connections to the earlier farming families: property lines and field boundaries, old roadways and water courses, and the occasional farmhouse and agricultural building.

Across the street – a route that dates from around 1700 – stands a well-preserved farm dwelling and barn. Erected not long after the American Revolution, these buildings are typical of the many modest Hopewell area farms that sustained the local economy deep into the mid-20th century. The farm nucleus is a local historic landmark, formally designated by Hopewell Township and known as the Enos Titus Farmstead.

Enos Titus (1768-1840) was a 5th-generation American. His Titus forebears wound up living and farming in this area after emigrating to Massachusetts from England in 1635, moving to Long Island around 1650 and then on to Hopewell around 1710-20. A farmer and blacksmith, Enos bought land from his brother Samuel in 1802 and erected this house soon after. In 1818, Enos moved onto a larger farm but lost it six years later due to foreclosure. Farming could be a challenging livelihood at the best of times.

A respected church elder, Enos Titus is buried in the Pennington Presbyterian churchyard. His son, Charles, lived and worked as the village blacksmith in Pennington. His grandson, also Charles, built the store at the northwest corner of Main and Delaware in Pennington about 1880, where he became the village’s leading merchant for several decades.