Every family that traces its roots deep into American soil eventually arrives at a first crossing — a name attached to a ship, a year, a port of arrival. For the Strongs, that name is Elder John Strong, and the ship is the Hopewell. His descendants would spread across the towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and generations later the Strong line would join, by marriage, with a family whose service reached back to the Revolution itself. This chapter follows two of those founding threads — the Strongs from their arrival in 1635, and the Lanes of New Jersey, whose daughter Eleanor Jane carried her father's patriot legacy into the Strong household of upstate New York.
Elder John Strong
The Strong line in America begins with Elder John Strong, a tanner by trade, who was born about 1610 in Chard, Somerset, England. In 1635 he sailed to the New World aboard the Hopewell, accompanied by his first wife, Margery Deane, daughter of William Deane. It is through this marriage, and their son John Strong Jr., born before 1634 in Chard, that the family here descends.
Margery did not long survive the crossing. She died about 1635, and a second child born to the couple lived only two months, dying that same year in Hingham, Massachusetts. That year John married again, taking as his second wife Abigail Ford, daughter of Thomas Ford and Elizabeth Chard Cooke. Abigail had been baptized on 8 October 1619 in Bridport, Dorset, and had come to America in 1630 aboard the Mary & John with her own family. She and John had a large family of sixteen children, born across three decades and three colonies — from Thomas about 1636 in Hingham through Jerijah in December 1665 in Northampton — a spread of births that traces the family's own migrations through Hingham, Taunton, Windsor, and finally Northampton.
Those movements can be followed closely in the surviving land and civil records. John Strong first received a grant at Hingham on 18 September 1635, five acres on North Street near Ship Street in the Plymouth Colony, and was made a freeman there on 9 March 1636/37. By 1638 he had settled at Taunton, holding a house lot on Dean Street west of the John Dean house; he became a freeman of Plymouth Colony on 4 December 1638 and served as the town's first constable in 1638 and 1639, and as a juror in 1645. In February 1647 he acquired land at Windsor, Connecticut — a purchase, made jointly with Thomas Ford, that included a house, outbuildings, yards, orchards, and gardens totaling about two acres, along with nearly two more acres of meadow at the foot of the hill. He was made a freeman of Connecticut on 15 May 1654.
It was at Northampton, Massachusetts, that John Strong's standing reached its height. He was ordained and made Elder of the church in 1663 — the title by which he is remembered. There he assembled considerable holdings, buying several parcels from John Webb in October 1660 and receiving grants from the town, among them a tan yard on King Street Brook. That yard, a quarter acre in size, was central to his working life: the town directed by vote that all hides be brought to him to be tanned at his own price, a mark of the trust his neighbors placed in his honesty. His home lot, purchased from John Webb at the corner of Main and South Streets, remained in the family for 103 years. In his later years he began passing his lands to his sons, giving the tan yard and half of a Manham Meadow lot to his son Ebenezer in December 1688.
Abigail Ford died on 16 July 1688 in Northampton, and John outlived her by more than a decade, dying on 14 April 1699 in the same town. The two are buried together in the Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton.
Matthias Lane, Revolutionary War Soldier
Five generations of Strong descent would pass before the family line crossed with that of the Lanes — and that crossing brought with it a direct link to the founding of the nation. Matthias Lane was born on 19 May 1759 in Freehold, Monmouth County, New Jersey, and was baptized soon after, on 24 June 1759, in the Dutch Reformed Church of Freehold and Middletown. He was the son of Matthias Lane, born before 1712, and Catherine Polhemus — the Polhemus name an old and established one among the Dutch settlers of Monmouth County. Matthias grew up within a close network of families bound by the Reformed faith, by farming, and by shared descent.
In January 1777, not yet eighteen, Matthias enlisted in the cause of independence. His service — recorded decades later in Revolutionary War pension file S.23297 — was that of a private, or trooper, in a company of light dragoons, mounted militia raised in Monmouth County to guard the New Jersey coast. His was state militia duty rather than Continental Line service, a distinction that would later shape both the scrutiny his claim received and the difficulty of documenting it.
The pattern of his service was typical of the New Jersey coastal defense units. He entered the ranks in the spring after the British took New York City, serving roughly every other month — out in the field through the spring, summer, and fall, home through the winters — with the total credited service aggregating to the two years required under the Pension Act of 1832. His duties were to guard the Monmouth shoreline against Tory raids launched from Staten Island and Long Island, protecting horses, cattle, sheep, and property from being carried off to the enemy. His company ranged among Freehold, Tinton Falls, Middletown, Shrewsbury, Long Branch, Manasquan, and the Highlands, with headquarters at Tinton Falls, Middletown, and Freehold. Over the course of his service he served under Captains Conover, Randolph, William Remsen, and Jacob Covenhoven, and under Colonels Daniel Hendrickson and Asher Holmes, with General David Forman in overall command — officers all documented in the historical record of the New Jersey militia.
Two episodes stood out in his own account. While under Captain Remsen, his unit marched from Monmouth County through Allentown and Trenton, crossed the Delaware to Bristol, and there met Congress retreating from Philadelphia; pressed into service as an escort, the company guarded Congress back through Trenton, Easton, Moravian Town, and Reading before being dismissed and returning to guard the shores. He was also present at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778: arriving at Monmouth Court House to find his company already moved on, he fell in temporarily with Colonel Morgan's Riflemen and was drawn up in line of battle near John Richmond's mill, though on account of General Charles Lee's disobedience of orders his unit did not engage. That he made no claim to combat there is telling — a restraint that speaks to the honesty of his testimony.
That testimony was hard-won. When Matthias first applied under the Act of 7 June 1832 — appearing in open court at Farmersville on 8 March 1833, aged seventy-four — the Pension Office returned his papers on 30 July 1833, objecting that his claim rested on "traditionary evidence" without direct affidavits or documentary discharge papers, though such papers were rarely issued to militiamen. His neighbors Francis E. Baillet and Ezra B. Strong had certified that he was reputed and believed to have been a soldier of the Revolution, and his nephew Timothy Lane — a deacon of the Baptist church at Farmersville — swore that he had known his uncle for thirty years and had heard from the now-deceased Joseph Mofford that the two had served together. Timothy also attested to a difficulty that the Pension Office would come to weigh: within a few years Matthias had grown very infirm and blind, seldom leaving his house, and had in great measure lost his memory.
The objections were resolved through Matthias's own persistence. Not knowing whether any of his old comrades still lived, he sent his son to New Jersey, who found two of them. Lewis Covenhoven, aged eighty-one, a sergeant in the same company, and Joseph Van Cleaf, aged seventy-three, a private, both swore before a Monmouth County justice on 10 September 1833 that they had known Matthias in the service, had seen him frequently at their headquarters and on their marches along the coast, and that he had always performed his monthly tours of duty well as a good soldier. Covenhoven even recalled Matthias among the men sent to escort Congress. In a supplemental affidavit of 25 November 1833, Matthias openly acknowledged that age, sickness, and loss of memory prevented him from swearing to the precise length of each engagement, deferring to what his comrades had confirmed — a candor that only strengthened his case.
The claim was approved. Certified by Secretary of War Lewis Cass on 18 January 1834, Matthias was granted a pension of one hundred dollars a year for life, payable semi-annually and effective from 4 March 1831. The record even preserves a small later episode of his poverty and vulnerability: a letter from one E. S. Stewart asking on the old man's behalf whether he was entitled to bounty land, and warning that a "professed pension agent" had written offering information for a fee of five dollars — the kind of speculation to which poor pensioners were frequently prey.
Matthias's life traced the westward push of the post-Revolutionary frontier. He remained in Monmouth County through 1794, then moved north into New York — to Canajoharie by 1790, Charlestown in Montgomery County by 1800, Sullivan in Madison County by 1810, Cayuga County by 1820, and at last to Farmersville in Cattaraugus County by 1830, where he was numbered among the early settlers of that raw frontier country. The history of Cattaraugus County remembers him plainly: "Lane, Matthias, early settler, pensioner, died 1850 Farmersville." He died in 1850 in Freedom, Cattaraugus County, having lived ninety-one years, and was buried at Farmersville.
His wife's name has not survived, but the children who did are partly known: a son Charles, born in 1798; a son William, born in 1799; a daughter Catherine, born in 1800; and a daughter, Eleanor Jane, born about 1796. It was through Eleanor Jane that the Lane and Strong lines were joined.
The Bridge to the Strongs
Eleanor Jane Lane married Ezra Brewster Strong Sr., and it was Ezra — as "Ezra B. Strong," neighbor to Matthias in Farmersville — who stepped forward in the Cattaraugus County courtroom in 1833 to vouch for the old soldier's character. That signature is the quiet hinge of this chapter: the Strong descendant of Elder John, who had come over on the Hopewell, standing as witness for the Revolutionary veteran whose daughter he had married.
With Elder John Strong's arrival in 1635, Matthias Lane's coastal service in the war for independence, and their two lines drawing together in the frontier town of Farmersville, the family's American beginnings are set — the fuller story of Ezra Brewster Strong Sr. and Eleanor Jane Lane belongs to the chapter that follows.