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Edmund W. Allen Born August 14, 1788 |
THE ALLEN HOUSE The Monmouth County Historical Association maintains five historic
houses in Monmouth George Allen was born in about 1619 in England. He married in about 1645 in Massachusetts to a woman named Hannah. After their marriage, George and Hannah made their home at Sandwich in the New Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts (now within Barnstable County, Massachusetts). Although the available land records indicate that George and Hannah purchased land in 1670 in that portion of the Province of East Jersey that was later formed into Monmouth County, New Jersey, they apparently never moved there. The majority of their children, however, eventually moved to New Jersey, settling in either Burlington County, or in the vicinity of Shrewsbury in Monmouth County. George and Hannah Allen had 12 children. The Allen House property was first built on between 1670 and 1688 by Judah Allen, the second child of George and Hannah. This original structure, however, is no longer standing, and its location is unknown. In the early 1700s, the property passed into the hands of New York City merchant Richard Stillwell, who built the main part of the still standing structure around 1740 to be his second home. In 1814, the Allen House was purchased by Dr. |
County.
The Allen House is on the corner of Broad Street and Sycamore Avenue
in Shrewsbury. It is across the street from the Quaker meeting house
and diagonally across from Christ Church. (The Quaker meeting house was
the first Quaker meeting in NJ and was built in 1672. Christ Church
is an Episcopal church founded in 1702 and served as a barrack in the
Revolutionary War.)
Edmund
Allen, Capt. Jack's grandfather. It is tempting to place Dr. Allen's
heritage in the same family that originally built the Allen House but
there were many Allen families of different origins in Monmouth County
by that time. According to one genealogy search, (http://www.cowaro.com/Genealogy/Surname_file/Allen.html#LB_00),
Dr. Allen was the great grandson of Jedediah Allen. Jedediah's father
was Ralph Allen, born in Sandwich, MA and married to Esther Swift. There
were, however, two Ralph Allen's living in Sandwich MA in the first half
of the 1600's. ( See http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jacmac/allen.htm
) One was Dr. Allen's great great grandfather and the other was the brother
of George Allen who bought several shares of the Monmouth Patent.
Dr. Allen ran both his medical practice and a pharmacy on the ground
floor of the building until his death in 1867. He is buried in the Christ
Church cemetery across the street. Dr. Edmund Allen's daughter, Hannah,
married John Patterson White around 1840. Hannah and John White were
the great grandparents of Florence Riddle White Altreuter.