Newark, New Jersey: Not Milford, and Not a "New Ark"

Newark, New Jersey, was nearly Milford: most founders came from Milford, Connecticut, but the name came from England, via their minister. The Rev. Abraham Pierson is believed to have been ordained at Newark-on-Trent, and the town on the Passaic ended up with that town’s name.

Settlers from Connecticut

The founders arrived by boat in May 1666, from Milford, Guilford and Branford in Connecticut, and from New Haven. John W. Barber and Henry Howe tell the story in their 1844 Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey. Before they could land on the Passaic River, the Hackensack people met them and blocked the way until they were paid for the land. The price, as Barber and Howe give it, came to 130 pounds in New England money, 12 blankets and 12 guns.

At first nobody had settled on a name. Frank J. Urquhart, writing the city’s history in 1913, says the earliest group “spoke of the community as Milford, or New Milford,” because most of them came from Milford. “That name was never really adopted by the town.” One of the first entries in the town’s Minute Book, from October 30, 1666, just calls it “Our Town upon Passaick River.”

The minister’s English town

Then Pierson arrived with the group from Branford. Urquhart says he was born in Yorkshire, went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and “is believed to have been ordained to preach before leaving England, at Newark-on-Trent.” By June 1667, the Minute Book has the town down as Newark.

Barber and Howe put it this way: Pierson “is said to have been ‘episcopally ordained,’ at Newark, in South Britain, and to have named this town after that of his ordination.” Urquhart goes a bit further. “It is practically certain,” he writes, that Pierson “himself had a large part in the selection of the name.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal list agrees on the source. Newark, it says, was “named from the town in England.”

What about the “New Ark”?

You may have run into the idea that the name is really “New Ark.” Urquhart took that on directly. Theories that the name was built out of “New Work, or New Ark,” he wrote, “have no foundation in any authenticated writings of the time.”

Here’s the thing: the spelling did show up. In February 1669, the Minute Book gives the name as “New Ark,” which Urquhart calls “probably a quip of the town clerk’s pen.” After that, he says, the form turned up now and then until after the Revolution, in an age when people “often did not spell the same word twice alike.” So the “New Ark” you might spot in an old document is real. It’s just not where the name came from.

How the Connecticut families got there

The move itself started with a recruiting drive. Barber and Howe say the first English settlement on that side of the Hudson was Elizabeth, begun in 1664. When Governor Philip Carteret arrived the next year, he sent agents into New England to advertise the proprietors’ terms and invite settlers. Early in 1666, Guilford, Branford and Milford sent scouts to look the country over, and the families followed that spring.

The name kept traveling after that. Gannett lists a village in Wayne County, New York, “named by early settlers from the city in New Jersey.” So a town in England named a town in New Jersey, which named a town in New York.

Sources & further reading

• Frank J. Urquhart, A History of the City of Newark, New Jersey, vol. 1 (1913), p. 79 and ch. VII. Pierson’s Yorkshire birth, Cambridge degree and ordination “at Newark-on-Trent” (p. 79); “Milford, or New Milford”; the Minute Book’s “Our Town upon Passaick River” (October 30, 1666) and “Newark” (June 1667); “practically certain” Pierson helped pick the name; the “New Work, or New Ark” theories, the February 1669 “New Ark” spelling and its occasional later use (ch. VII).
• John W. Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey (1844), pp. 173-176. Elizabethtown as the first English settlement west of the Hudson, Carteret’s agents in New England, the May 1666 arrival from Connecticut, the Hackensack people blocking the landing, the price of the land, and Pierson “said to have been ‘episcopally ordained,’ at Newark, in South Britain.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS Bulletin 258, 1905), p. 222. Newark, New Jersey, “named from the town in England,” and Newark, New York, named after the New Jersey city.
• GNIS feature 878762 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Newark.