I always enjoy reading Bill Truran’s history articles.
If you don’t mind, I would like to elaborate on his mention of the GAR Post in Sussex Borough.
The Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR, was a fraternal organization of Union Civil War veterans chartered by Congress in 1866. It was much like the American Legion and VFW are today.
It was a major political force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1878, Maj. Gen. Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, a Wantage native, announced his intention of forming a GAR post in Deckertown.
He named the post after his friend, neighbor and former subordinate officer Maj. Edwin Francis Cooke. Maj. Cooke survived the war and followed Gen. Kilpatrick to Chile when he was appointed as minister. Maj. Cooke died in Chile of natural causes.
The first meeting of interested men was held in the Opera House (Hornbeck Hall) and received a charter as GAR Post #16. At the first meeting, it was decided that subsequent meetings would be held in Newton.
That is the last we hear of the Maj. Edwin Cooke Post #16 other than a note that the Cooke Post served as escorts to the guests at “Kilpatrick’s Charge Re-enactment” on the general’s farm in Wantage in 1878.
Gen. Kilpatrick died three years later, in 1881.
False starts like this were not uncommon in the GAR. In 1891, another effort to form a post in Deckertown resulted in the Chaplain Alanson Haines Post #116, which records show as active until at least 1914.
This post met at the space also occupied by the Odd Fellows, also in Hornbeck Hall. The Rev. Haines served as a chaplain in the war, was a Hamburg native, and was pastor of the North Hardyston Presbyterian Church and founder and pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Hamburg. He was also the son of former New Jersey Gov. Daniel Haines.
The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW) was established in 1881 and chartered by Congress in 1954 as the legal successor to the GAR.
Its Gen. Philip Kearny Post #20 and Gen. George Armstrong Custer Camp #17 have a project to identify and memorialize the meeting sites of the former GAR posts.
Thanks to the Sussex-Wantage Historical Society and the Sussex Borough mayor and council, we will soon be placing a memorial sign for both GAR Posts 16 and 116 in the park on Main Street just across from the former Hornbeck Hall building.
Peter Lindsay
Wantage