About this time, 1674, Col. Lewis Morris, first of the name in America, which he had reached by way of the Barbadoes, began that series of large land purchases (nearly 4000 acres in all), in the vicinity of Tinton (properly Tintern) Falls, the development of which was to play such a large part in the immediate future of Monmouth, and to lead to much larger, and less favorable, consequences in the more remote years, through the establishment in our midst of the sinister and pestilential figure of Governor Lewis Morris (Born about 1671), nephew and heir of Colonel Lewis Morris, but of an entirely different stripe.

In some sort of partnership, or working agreements, with James Grover, Henry Leonard, and others, including, I believe, Thomas Moore, a prominent shipbuilder of Southold, Long Island (ancestor through a daughter of all the Gybersons of Monmouth and Burlington), Colonel Morris set about the erection of iron-works on a large scale. The beneficial effects of this enterprise were at once felt, in improved roads, in the employment of many men and teams for a cash wage, and in the general increase in trade and shipping that large exploitations always bring to small communities.

(The whole history of the bog-ore and mineral-paint industry in Monnmouth and Burlington counties is a most interesting and romantic one, and deservces a volume to itself.)