Shrewsbury Historical Society spotlights borough’s storied past

By:  | September 13, 2024 |  |  Shrewsbury

By Ray Schweibert

Finding anyone more passionate and knowledgeable than Don Burden about history in general, and his adopted hometown of Shrewsbury in particular, would be a tough task.

The borough is also unquestionably better off not only for his long tenure in various branches of public service and community involvement, but for his dedication toward promoting and cultivating its impressive past – a mission that started when he and his wife Mary Lea settled in the area after first meeting as students at the history-laden Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

“I was born in Connecticut, my wife was born in New Jersey, and we settled here in 1976 while I was working in publishing,” says Don, who majored in history and English at Gettysburg – later being appointed to the school’s Board of Trustees – while his wife was a biology major. “I worked for McGraw-Hill (headquartered in New York City) for 47 years.

“We just fell in love with the little town. It reminds me quite a bit of the town where I grew up. There’s a lot of history here, a tremendous amount of history.”

In the nearly five decades that he and Mary Lea have lived and raised their family in Shrewsbury, Don Burden served in various sectors of municipal government, starting with the town’s Shade Tree Commission, earning appointment to its Board of Education, and ending with his retirement after eight years as mayor of Shrewsbury from 2010 to 2018.

He has also maintained the title of president of the Shrewsbury Historical Society for the last 25 years, although he took a bit of a circuitous route to becoming a member of the Society’s board about two decades earlier.

“When we first came to town, our neighbor, who was the mayor at the time, said I should get involved with the community,” says Don. “He told me there was an opening on the Shade Tree Commission, so I took it.

“Well, the lady who (later) raised the funds to start our museum had taken down a bunch of trees, and we battled like you would not believe. Our feud ended up getting publicity in the newspapers and everything.”

The lady who Burden butted heads with was J. Louise Jost, a longtime Shrewsbury schoolteacher whose early efforts to heighten community awareness of the borough’s history led to the creation of the Shrewsbury Historical Society in 1972. Jost also spearheaded the drive to build the Shrewsbury Historical Society Museum and Research Center at the Municipal Complex in 1984. The Society celebrated its golden anniversary in 2022, and its home base/museum marked 40 years old this year.

“Ultimately, Louise and I turned out to be the best of friends,” says Don. “I was the executor of her estate (and took over her title as president of the Society when Jost died in 1999). It was just a change of scenery all around. She had a deep interest in history, and was one of those tough old teachers that you couldn’t say no to, so she raised the funds and built the building.

“After our spat with the trees, she conned me into being involved with the Society around 1978, and we just got more involved as time went on. It’s just so rewarding to have someone come into the museum, see something on display and say ‘Oh my God, that was my grandfather’s, that was my uncle’s, we had something like that on our farmhouse!’  You get some wonderful stories.”

Special displays keep things compelling

Shrewsbury will celebrate its 100^th anniversary as a borough in 2026, but its history as a developed community goes much further back than that.

It is one of the oldest developed communities in Monmouth County, dating back to the late 17^th century. And while its early roots were primarily agricultural, the town would later become home to E.C. Hazard and Company, one of the biggest and most modern canning factories of its time – best known for its ketchup production – in the late 19^th century.

“This area was very famous for tomatoes,” says Don. “I think at its peak, in the late 1800s, the Hazard Company employed around 3,000 people. They had a patented formula for canning tomatoes, and also owned the original recipe for Tabasco Sauce before selling it off to the McIlhenny Company near New Orleans. And every so often you’ll see an old bottle that will say ‘original recipes, Hazard, Shrewsbury, NJ.’”

Shrewsbury was home to a member of one of the largest toy-manufacturing families in the nation, the Marx family, whose main plant was in New York City. The town also boasts structures that have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, such as the Allen House, built around 1710, and Christ Church, established in 1702 and rebuilt in 1769. For much of its existence the Allen House served as a tavern and town meeting hall, earning infamy for a bloody raid by the British Army of Continental troops four years into the Revolutionary War, in 1779, that became known as the Allen House Massacre. Christ Church once served as a stopover for the Underground Railroad, which in the mid-19^th century helped enslaved African Americans escape into free states and Canada.

Artifacts from Shrewsbury’s rich history have made their way into the museum, and there are often special displays and a rotating stock of items to keep things fresh and interesting.

“Currently we have a display of antique sewing machines, the oldest dating back to 1846,” says Don. “There’s about 50 of them altogether. Three of the sewing machines came out of the Eisner Building in Red Bank (in the 1870s, Bohemian immigrant Sigmund Eisner became one of the largest and most successful clothing manufacturers in the nation). Eisner had the contract to manufacture World War I and II uniforms, and an exclusive contract to make Boy Scout uniforms.

“We’ve also got a huge collection of dolls, chairs, quilts – we’ve got a lovely collection of Victorian toys. One of our special displays was a wedding dress display (two of the dresses belonged to former female Shrewsbury mayors – Dorothy Blair Manson and Emilia M. Siciliano). Before that we had a major antique tool exhibit, and before that a chair exhibit with about 60 chairs.

“We try to refresh the museum room about every year, year-and-a-half. The schoolkids come, people from the retirement communities come over in a bus and visit, and we have our own little meetings – we’re a pretty active group, all things considered.”

There is also a display of notable men and women at the museum who have called Shrewsbury home over the years. One famous son was Elmer “Ace” Godwin, who was awarded by President George W. Bush a Congressional Gold Medal for his role with the famed Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.

“There’s one of a woman (Esther Wanner Hymer) who lived to be 103 and was very prominent in the League of Nations and United Nations,” says Don. “She took a bus to the Port Authority of New York and transferred on a bus to the United Nations building in New York City three days a week until she was 96.

“As she approached her 100^th birthday, some of the women in town wanted to give her some token of appreciation for all she’d done and asked what she needed. Without batting an eyelash, she said ‘I don’t have enough memory on my computer. I need a new laptop.’”

Cultivating a love for history unconventionally

A genuine love for history seems to be passed down from family members far more frequently than it is gleaned from textbooks. That trend certainly applies to Don Burden, although the interest in history his grandfather sparked in him came in a rather unusual way.

“My grandfather was an undertaker in Halifax, Nova Scotia,” says Don. “He embalmed 84 bodies off the Titanic, because a lot of the retrieved bodies from that accident (which killed nearly 1,500 in 1912) were brought into Halifax, and he was the mortician in charge. That type of history was intriguing to me.”

Burden’s grandfather, Neil Alexander Beaton, was also the mortician in charge of embalming the founder of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and more than 70 victims of an infamous 1917 accident in the Nova Scotia harbor when a French cargo ship laden with explosives collided with a Norwegian ship, killing 1,782.

Don Burden’s friend and fellow historian, Rick Geffken, co-authored the book “The Story of Shrewsbury, Revisited 1965-2015” that serves as not only an appendage to a publication by the late Richard Kraybill, which chronicled the town history from 1664 to 1964, but one that reexamined and reinterpreted through research some of the original book’s content.

“Because Shrewsbury was still pretty much a farming community up until about 1965, guided by major mansions of people from New York who used it as their summer homes, we thought it would be beneficial to update the information to include the town’s transition through it industrial, commercial and current residential status.

“In the 1960s, the land started getting sold off and developers came in – the usual things that happen, mega-mansions sprouting up on properties that used to be farmland. We only have one little farm left, and that’s an old family that keeps about eight horses on it. That’s it.”

The book might serve as a sort of detailed guide to a series of Shrewsbury milestones, as its Historical Society turned 50 two years ago, the town’s century mark as a borough is two years from now, and its museum/ research center turns 40 this year.

“We’re trying to tie it all together,” says Don. “The town will be 100 years old in two years, so we’ll be planning a big celebration at that time and we’re hoping folks use the Historical Society Museum to see the memorabilia of Shrewsbury.”

Shrewsbury Historical Society Museum
419 Sycamore Avenue, Shrewsbury
732-530-7974 or 732-747-3635
ShrewsburyHistoricalSocietyNJ.org
Museum hours by appointment