Old Bergen Church Cemetery
Cornelius Van Vorst
1822–1906 · Twelfth mayor of Jersey City
Cornelius Van Vorst (1822–1906)
Cornelius Van Vorst (1822–1906) was the twelfth mayor of Jersey City, serving from 1860 to 1862. He was an eighth-generation descendant of the seventeenth-century superintendent of the Pavonia colony.
Cornelius and his family founded and laid out the street grid for Van Vorst Township, which was incorporated in 1841 and dissolved when it was annexed by Jersey City in 1851. The family constructed two mansions on the property — the Van Vorst Mansion and the Barrow Mansion — between 1835 and 1837. For many years only a lawn separated the two.
In 1897, St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church bought the Barrow Mansion for use as a parish house, and in 1898 built a church on the former lawn between the two mansions. In 1984, the Barrow Mansion Development Corporation was founded to renovate the mansion, and now operates it as a community center.
The Van Vorst stone in the cemetery
In 1848, the population of Jersey City was 3,602. A mere twelve years later, in 1860, it had begun to swell to 29,226. In amazing fashion, we can see a city’s infrastructure and population being born within a single generation.
Cornelius Van Vorst also donated the land for a town square park that is now known as Van Vorst Park.