The photograph was taken on a cold February day in 1941. Three chimneys rose above the long roof of the house near Pattenburg. Its clapboard siding, deep foundation and narrow windows spoke of a building changed and enlarged as families lived in it. The name attached to it was the Clifford–Williamson Homestead.
At the time, a team working for the Historic American Buildings Survey was documenting early American buildings before their stories disappeared. The surveyors drew the homestead and its outbuildings and researched deeds, family recollections and the service record of a Revolutionary War veteran who had lived there.
A house that grew with its family
The 1941 survey dated the earliest construction to 1760 or earlier. It described a two-and-a-half-story timber-framed house above a stone cellar, with clay filling between parts of the frame, interior plaster walls and masonry chimneys built into the gable ends. Later generations expanded the house westward and added a south wing. The exterior was subsequently covered in clapboards, replacing an earlier stucco finish.
The survey proposed George Clifford, who died in 1757, as a possible original builder; it associated subsequent work with James Clifford and Lieutenant John Clifford. The oldest building attribution was not proven by a surviving construction contract or deed. What is beyond doubt is that the house became the residence of a documented Revolutionary War veteran, and that its ownership can be followed through nineteenth-century records.
A lieutenant's memories of the Revolution
John Clifford was born January 10, 1749, in Bethlehem Township, Hunterdon County, according to the date he recalled from his father's Bible. When he applied for a Revolutionary War pension in 1832, he gave a detailed account of his service as a New Jersey militia lieutenant.
John remembered his march toward New York in 1776 and the Battle of Long Island; the retreat through New Jersey; the extraordinary work of gathering boats along the Delaware for the American army's crossing; and shorter militia tours through central New Jersey in subsequent years. His account also places him near the Battle of Monmouth and on patrols watching British movements along roads that joined Millstone, Newark, Elizabethtown and Springfield.
Those recollections are preserved in the survey through extracts from John's own pension declaration. They are John Clifford's memories—not evidence that Colonel Joseph Beavers, who lived in the same wider region, joined John on those specific tours.
The colonel's letter
In May 1777, an officer's administrative difficulty preserved a surprising link to the Beavers family. Colonel Joseph Beavers, commanding Hunterdon County's Second Battalion, wrote to Governor William Livingston because militia officers were awaiting commissions that had not arrived. With his letter went a list of officers chosen by their companies. In Captain Jacob Karhart's company, the list named John Clifford as first lieutenant and John Farley as second lieutenant. A later transcription printed the colonel's certification beneath their names.
For descendants of Joseph Beavers, that listing gives John's wartime story a more immediate place in our family history. The two men's service intersected within the same militia command. A later pension summary of Jacob Gearhart's son independently recalled his father serving in Beavers's regiment with John Clifford as a lieutenant.
The association extended beyond the war in another set of records. In 1790, the administration of Edward Clifford's estate in Bethlehem Township was assigned to a John Clifford, Joseph Beavers, and John Martin; an 1811 estate account names Beavers and Clifford again. These legal records place a John Clifford beside the colonel in county affairs, although we have not yet independently confirmed that the administrator was the same John who served as lieutenant.
The connection is significant on its own. It does not prove a blood relationship between the colonel and the family who occupied this house. That question still depends on identifying the earlier generations of the Cliffords in Hunterdon County.
The family's ownership, on paper
John returned to Bethlehem Township in the 1790s and remained there until his death in 1842. An April 8, 1845 deed names Charles Clifford, Enoch Clifford, and Kitchen Hartpence among those conveying a farm of approximately 130 acres to Peter Williamson. The survey treats that transaction as part of the house's surviving chain of title and identifies John's children and their descendants through other records.
The residence continued through the Williamson family. In 1878, Peter Williamson's will passed the homestead to his son Joseph. The family retained an association with the place into the early twentieth century. By 1941, when the building was photographed, it belonged to the Fabers, who preserved the house in good condition.
What the house tells us about the Cliffords
Our separate family research follows another early Hunterdon County household: Colonel Joseph Beavers and the family of George Clifford of Bethlehem Township. George's 1757 will names a daughter Anne who had a son George, and Joseph Beavers witnessed the will and its codicil. That evidence makes Anne Clifford a promising candidate for the mother of Joseph's son George Beavers, born that same year.
The 1941 architectural survey connects the name George Clifford to this house and also notes a George Clifford appearing in Hopewell township records from 1738 to 1751. Yet the survey states that Lieutenant John Clifford's parentage had not been determined. Its short building summary calls him a grandson of the earlier George, while the detailed genealogical discussion acknowledges the missing link. The house cannot be assigned to Anne Clifford's childhood, or presented as a documented Beavers family property, on that basis alone.
Across the Atlantic, a Yorkshire parish register records a George, son of James Clifford of Ainderby, baptized in September 1712. Another records George Clifford marrying Elizabeth Bowman in 1734. Those are valuable original records, but the further step—identifying the English George with the 1757 New Jersey testator whose wife was Mary—remains a historical reconstruction.
What survives in the photograph
The house in the photograph does not look like an emblem. It looks lived in: snow at the field's edge, a cellar door close to the ground, a porch that changed with the years. That may be why the picture matters. For the families who knew this place, the Revolution and early New Jersey history happened alongside ordinary repairs, gardens, meals and children growing up.
A government survey, recorded before many other such buildings disappeared, allows us to see a place from the world of those earlier generations. It also leaves us with better questions: who first built the walls, how the Cliffords were related, and whether a family once divided by an ocean can be followed back across it.
Sources and image credits
- Library of Congress, Clifford–Williamson House, Pattenburg, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, Historic American Buildings Survey NJ-698: 7 photographs, 14 measured drawings and written history. Source of both illustrations on this page.
- HABS NJ-698, historical and descriptive data, pp. 1–6, including John Clifford's pension extract, early builder attribution, 1845 deed, later title and Hopewell discussion. The survey is a 1941 reconstruction of eighteenth-century history, not an original colonial deed.
- Hunterdon County Historical Society photograph catalog, p. 52: item P Px477, west elevation photographed February 26, 1941 by George Neuschafer.
- New Jersey Wills, 1751–1760, p. 61, abstract of George Clifford's will, 8 November 1757, proved 12 December, Liber G p. 169.
- Hunterdon County Historical Society, Hunterdon Historical Newsletter, Fall 1977, pp. 6–7. John Clifford biography, transcription of Colonel Beavers's 10 May 1777 letter and its officer list. The original letter is not reproduced as a facsimile here.
- New Jersey Wills, 1786–1790, entry for Edward Clifford, Bethlehem Township, 1790, including administrators Joseph Beavers, John Clifford and John Martin and an 1811 estate account. Liber 30, p. 315.
- “The Kingwood Farm of Jacob Gearhart” and appended 1939 Pension Office summary, Jacob Gearhart's pension S.3392, naming John Clifford as lieutenant under the same militia captain.
The photographs show the condition documented in 1941. Neither the survey nor the 1757 will abstract alone proves that Anne Clifford, George Beavers's proposed mother, lived in this house.