Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Richard WALN
Richard Waln, eldest son of Nicholas and Mary (Shoemaker) Waln, was born about 1737, died May 23, 1809. He was engaged in mercantile pursuits in Philadelphia and acquired considerable wealth. He removed in 1774 to Monmouth county, New Jersey, where he purchased a large tract of land near the Burlington county line, adjacent to the village of Crosswicks, where he built his mansion, a large frame dwelling, still standing. A recent historical sketch of that part of New Jersey says of his purchase, "This entire section of the State was
purchased from the Lahwah Indians, many years ago, by a man of the name of Waln, for a barrel of cider and a few beads." "The grotesqueness of this statement", writes a more careful historian, "will be appreciated by all students of New Jersey history. For an hundred years prior to Waln's advent in New Jersey, the Indians of that Colony had very little land to dispose of, for cider, beads or articles of great intrinsic value."
Richard Waln named his place Walnford, a name it bears to this day. Here he lived during the Revolutionary period, and sometime after its close returned to Philadelphia, where he continued to reside until his death, Walnford being his summer home. He married, December 4, 1760, Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph Armitt, a Philadelphia merchant, but of an old Burlington county, New Jersey, family, from which descended Henry Armitt Brown, the eloquent orator and able lawyer of Philadelphia a generation ago. Mrs. Elizabeth (Armitt) Waln died in 1790.
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