Historic New Bridge Landing encompasses Native American settlement, colonial settlement, Revolutionary War fighting, twentieth-century recreation, and historic preservation at the narrows of the Hackensack River. The site was associated with the indigenous Hackensacks and Tappans, and the Hackensack sachem Tantaqua and his kin inhabited the surrounding land, partly known as Tantaqua’s Plain. After the construction of the new bridge in 1745, it remained the nearest span across the Hackensack River to Newark Bay because the wide marshes and meadowland to the south could not feasibly be bridged, and New Bridge became a bustling hamlet where river boats carried goods to New York and overland traffic passed. A schoolhouse, tavern, and the home of Abraham Van Buskirk stood on the east side of the river. Van Buskirk, whose family traced its American roots to the seventeenth century emigration of Laurens Andriessen Van Buskirk from Holstein, Denmark, to New Netherlands, was born on or about 1735 and owned here a dwelling house, grist mill, and outbuildings on the Hackensack River valued at £ 2000 New York currency during the American Revolution. He practiced medicine, received a commission as surgeon in the Bergen County Militia in early 1776, and was the son-in-law of militia colonel Theunis Dey, but his sympathies were Loyalist rather than Revolutionary. He offered to raise a battalion for the British and on 16 November 1776 became lieutenant colonel commandant of the 4th Battalion, New Jersey Volunteers, leading Bergen County’s foremost Loyalist unit in action in Bergen County and elsewhere during the war. Because he was judged guilty of treason against the new State of New Jersey, all his property here and elsewhere in the county was confiscated and sold. At the war’s end he settled in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and he passed away in Sherburne in 1779 at age 64. Owing to its strategic location near Manhattan, which the British Army occupied for most of the war, the site became associated with 11 engagements during the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783. In the earliest twentieth century, riverfront property opposite the Steuben House in what is now Brett Park became a white-sand beach resort area; John D. and Sarah Cole sold that property to Harry A. Bensen on June 15, 1911, and by 1936 he had erected nine riverside cabins or summer cottages and at least two large garages or shelters there. After the post-World War Two construction boom, the single-lane bridge became obsolete, and although Bergen County proposed a four-lane highway that would have obliterated New Bridge and the Historic Von Steuben House, land donated by the Bergen County Historical Society allowed traffic to be rerouted onto newly constructed New Bridge Road, which opened in 1956. In 1971 the park was officially named for longtime resident and Teaneck mayor Clarence W. Brett, and today the area forms an integral part of Historic New Bridge Landing as preserved green space and a historic and scenic fragment of the Jersey Dutch countryside.

Photo: Bill Coughlin

Photo: Bill Coughlin

Photo: Bill Coughlin