Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A History of the First Presbyterian Church of Paterson, New Jersey
In 1813 the only church in Paterson was the Old Dutch Church of Totowa. It was built in 1775 and stood on what is now Ryle avenue, south of Matlock street. It was in this church that Presbyterians then residing in Paterson had been accustomed to gather for public worship. Paterson was founded as a city in 1792, and the town was only two years old when Miss Sarah Colt, at the suggestion of her brother, Peter, gathered little children together and formed -a Sabbath School. The records of the Sabbath School were destroyed in the fire in the lecture room in 1886, and for its early history we must rely on tradition handed down from one generation to another. The persistent tradition that a Sabbath School was founded in Paterson in 17 94 is upheld by Henry Clay Trumbull's Yale Lectures on the Sab bath School, where we read: A Sunday School was organized at the home of Mr. Thomas Crenshaw, in Hanover County, Va., in 1786. In January, 1791, at Philadelphia, the first Day or Sunday School Society was formed. In 1791 a Sunday School was started in Boston; in 1793 one was started in New York by Katy Ferguson, a colored woman; in 17 94 one was started in Paterson. Robert Raikes opened the first Sunday School at Gloucester, England, in 1780. The school founded in Paterson by Sarah Colt was thus the first in New Jersey and one of the first in the United States. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
