A Trip Through the Portrait Gallery (3)

Last week, we met Maria Williams. So this week it’s only fitting that we meet:

Someone our Curator Cat finds very inspiring! Just look at that pose!

But behind Frankie, you can see Amos Williams, as seen in about 1870. Amos was the man to build the house we now know as the Harrison House (truthfully, it is the Williams-Harrison House!). Here’s a peek into Amos’s life from the book A Small House in New Jersey:

“No record exists to determine how Amos Williams divided his time in those early years before and during the Civil War. He may have hired a manager to run the shoemaking behind the new house. Since there was a great similarity between the processes of tanning leather throughout the industry in northern New Jersey, we can reconstruct that process as it was carried out by Amos Williams . . . by the early nineteenth century it was a complicated chemical process carried out by skilled workmen.”

So now we have met two of the important founders of the house. Stay tuned for more next week!