[GEN0006]
[NOTE: copyright may not have expired]
Saturday, February 24, 1923    Newark Evening News

Many Boundary Disputes Settled by Old Records
   Kept by Third Generation of Firm of Surveyors
   
Kept Safely in a concrete vault, twelve feet long and ten feet wide in
a home in Butler is a collection of old deeds, maps, lines and
measurements accumulated in the carrying on of a surveying business
that now has come down to the third generation of the same family.
Dozens of the old deeds have never been filed, and in the absence of
other records, they have furnished the data by which many disputes
over boundary lines have been settled.

   The collection was started by Benjamin Roome, who founded the
surveying business in 1816 and in his time surveyed vastg tracts of
land for the Board of Proprietors.  When he died in 1894 the old
papers were passed on to his son, William Roome, whose greatest
professional work was the survey and purchase for the East Jersey
Water Company of all the land in the Pequannnnock watershed, now owned
by the city of Newark.  Mr. Roome died December 20 of last year, but
his dearest wish was that his family would carry on the business and
retain possesion of the valuable old recorrds kept in the vault in his
home.  The business is now being conducted by his daughter, Mrs. Ella
Room Lamscha, and her sone-in-law, Newell C. Harrison, nephew of
former Freeholder Amos Harrison of Essex County.

The oldest of the deeds is the one that was drawn on May 6, 1712, in
the eleventh year of the reigh of Queen Anne and Conveyed whate
appeared to be a considerable tract from Paulus Vanderbeck in
Pequannock Township, near the junction of the Pequannock and Passaic
rivers, known now as Two Bridges, to Elias Smith of Essex County for
[Pounds]200.  The land appeard to be part of a tract granted to
Antohony Brockhoff.  This deed was done on sheepskin and the original
writing is indistict.  It hadbeen almost all done over since coming
into Mr. Roome's possession.

    Parchment Deed Drawn in 1721.

  Another old deed, drawn on parchment, is well written.  It was drawn
October 24, 1721, in the seventh year of the reign of King George, and
transferred a large tract (the exact extent is not clear) from Gerrit
Jacobus and his wife of Pequannock to Martin Berry of the county of
Hunterdon for [200 pounds]].  This tract was a part of that granted to
Anthony Brockhoff and Arent Schuyler patent dated 1696, and adjoined
aparently the property named in the other deed.

   Also in the collection is a parchment deed drawn September 6, 1792,
transferring for [200 pounds], six shillings a tract of approximately
1000 acres in Pequeannock from A.C. Ashfield to Joris Ryerson of New
York.  The tract was a part of what is known as the Ashfield tract,
lying in Popton Plains and vicinity.

   Among the old maps in one of the Greenwood Lake section and a line
known as the Greenwood Lake line, which is the north boundary of the
Ringwood Company's property.  this line,, said Mr. Harrison, was
originally run by General Day, Washington's surveyor.

One controversy settled by consulting the Roome records was the one
between the town of Boonton and Morris County about seven years ago.
the dispute arose over the width of Myrtle avenue, Boonton, which was
a country road.  Search was made of old records at Morristown, Trenton
and New Brunswick without effect.  Mr. Roome decided the question by
having the original deed.

   The Roomes, father and son, played an important part in the
development of North Jersey, for a large part of the territory was
surveyed by them.  Benjamin Roome's most important work, of course was
that done for the Board of Proprietors.  He later became commissioner
for the Rutherford estates in Passaic and sussex counties.  He was
also assessoor for Pequannock Township both before and after its
separation, the last time holding the office for twenty years, or from
1852 to 1872.  He was a Whig and then a Republican.  When he died in
1894 he was ninety-five.

   William Roome, however, did not start out in life as a surveyor.
Born May 1, 1834, in Bloomingdale, now Butler, he left home in 1852 at
the age of eighteen to become a clerk in a POaterson grocery store.
After a short time he moved on to Newark and worked in the lumber
business with a Mr. Van Wagenen.  At this he spent four years.  going
in the spring of 1856 to Minnesota to visit the country and prospect,
as he often said.  Returning in the autum, he re-engaged in the lumber
business., this time with the ld firm of W. R. & M. sayre of Newark.
In the spring of 1863 he again went to Minnesota, this time to
Plainview.  Two years later he was married there to Miss Sarah
Josephine Burton and brought his bride back to New Jersey on a wedding
trip.

   In September, 1865, they returned to the West, stopping in Agency
City, Ia.  for the winter and going in the spring back to Plainview,
where he became book-keeper and general superintendent in a store.
His daughter, Mrs. Lamsha, was born ther.

   He often told of his experience during an Indian uprising there,
during which the leaders were taken captive and imprisoned in a school
house.  Another story was of a 300-mile ride on horseback he made from
Council Bluffs to his home after receiving word of the illness of his
wife by means of prairie schooner, and how he escaped death in a
blizzrd by following a rope streched from the barns of a farm to a
farm house.

   It was in 1872 that he returned to New Jersey to take up surveying,
going into business with his father, who at the age of seventy-three
was still at work.  He surveyed with his father and aafter him the
thousands of acres of the Rutherford estates (the Ward Proprietors) in
Sussex County.  He surveyed all the land in the vicinity of oakland,
known as Rotten Pond and now as le Grand Lake, for the late Jacob
S. Rogers, the locomotive builder.  For Peter Cooper and former Mayor
Abram S. Hewitt of New York he surveyed all the ore land now owned by
the Hewitt family and the Ringwood Company in Ringwood Borough.  A par
t of this land i s now included in the Wanaque water shed.  He
surveyed the well-known Stetson property in the Ramapo hills and he
gave the name of Kinnelon to the fvast estate of the late F.S. Kinney,
from which the new borough of Kinnelon took its name.
   
  Mr.  roome continued in business with his fathe from 1872 to 1878,
and then alone until 1904, when his son-in-law, the late Richard
H. Lamscha became his partner.

   Mr. Roome was interested in genealogy and was the author of a
pamphlet on early days and early surveys in Eastern New Jersey.