More on General Bloomfield

The next year Gen. Bloomfield paid the town a visit with a military escort, in formal recognition of the honor done him. The civil township, however, was not erected until 1812, when it included the territory from the crest of the mountain to the Passaic River.

The Bloomfields were of the old colony of Woodbridge. Moses Bloomfield, M.D., the father of Gen. Bloomfield, was "an influential member of the Legislature, and of the Provincial Congress before the Revolution."

Joseph Bloomfield was captain in the Third Regiment of the New Jersey Regulars in 1776. The regiment, commanded by Col. Elias Dayton, was sent that year to support the Northern army in Canada, but it was diverted from Albany to the Mohawk valley. Capt. Bloomeld brought Lady Johnston, of Johnstown Hall, as a prisoner to Albany. The regiment went on to the German Flats and to Fort Stanwix (Rome, N.Y.), to which place Capt. Bloomfield returned from Albany, bringing the news of the Declaration of Independence. He was made major in December, 1776, and was present in the battles of Brandywine and Monmouth, and resigned his commission in 1778 to accept the clerkship of the Assembly. In 1783 he was attorney-general of the State, and was re-elected to that office in 1788. In 1794 he was general of militia, and took part in the suppression of the "whiskey insurrection" in Pennsylvania. He was Governor and also chancellor of New Jersey in 1801, and from 1803 to 1812. In the war of 1812 he was appointed a brigadier-general. He died in 1825, and was buried in Burlington, where he had resided for many years.