African-American settlers of Rutherford
Early black settlers of Rutherford were mainly house servants who were employed by well-to-do white families. If they were not live-in maids, gardeners, or coachmen, then these African-Americans mainly resided close by their employers, in the neighborhoods around Wood Street and Washington Avenue.
An exception to this rule was the example of the Fitzgeralds and the Waltons, African-American families who made their homes on Wheaton Place, in one of Rutherford's most remote and densely wooded sections. These families established themselves in ways not commonly known and certainly not previously recorded in any brief history of Rutherford. The Fitzgeralds and the Waltons were highly regarded in their community. They became the foundation of Rutherford's Black church, Mount Ararat Baptist Church, first envisioned in the early 1890's.
"The section toward Rutherford Avenue was a dense woodland," George B. Mitchell (1872-1966), the well-known water colorist, recalled in 1964. "A fine, old colored couple had a small home in those woods," Mitchell said, referring to an area sometimes called Schermerhorn's woods.
This "couple" was James C. Fitzgerald (1860-1925) and his wife Louisa (nee Price, 1868-1956). They had separately arrived in Rutherford from Virginia shortly before 1890 and were married here on December 16, 1891 at Grace Episcopal Church. They became tenants of George F. Schermerhorn (1835-1923), who owned a number of wooded lots on Wheaton Place, about where Route 3 was built. Fitzgerald was employed at Grace Episcopal Church as its sexton, a job that had been filled until then by dedicated church members. His younger brother, Stephen R. Fitzgerald, was employed as the janitor of Rutherford's Union School in the late 1890's. He later became a Baptist minister in Newark.
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