THE SISTERS WHO RAN THE FARM

STELLA & AMY DENNIS
 

By the early 1900s the farm was in the hands of two of the daughters, Stella M. Dennis (born 1878) and Amy Ruth Dennis (born May 1879). The 1915 New Jersey State Census records them living together, both unmarried, and — remarkably for the time — both listing their occupation in their own hand as “Farmer.” These were not farmers’ wives or daughters listed as keeping house; they were the farmers of record, two sisters working the family land themselves.

 

  IMAGE 3 · CENSUS 

The cropped 1915 New Jersey State Census row showing Amy R. and Stella M. Dennis, each with the occupation “Farmer.”

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Two sisters, listed side by side, each one a “Farmer” in her own right — running the Coursenville land on their own terms.

Amy lived a long, working life. She outlived her sisters, made her home in Hackensack, and stayed on the job well past the usual age — county records note her among a handful of employees over seventy still working, in her case at Bergen Pines Hospital. She died in 1974 at the age of ninety-five and is buried beside her family at Deckertown Union Cemetery, a tangible link between the Dennis family and the ground that is now Angel Valley.
 

Stella’s later years took a harder turn. In time she became a patient at the New Jersey State Hospital at Greystone Park in Morris County, where she remained for many years until her death in 1957. Greystone in that era ran a dedicated pavilion for tuberculosis — a disease that swept through institutions of the day — and family memory holds that Stella was treated there for TB. However her years there unfolded, she remained one of the two sisters who had once, against the grain of her time, called herself a farmer.

ALICE, “ALONG THE GARDEN PATH”

FROM THE DENNIS FARM TO THE NEWARK NEWSROOM
 

A third sister, Alice Dennis, was born on the farm and carried Wantage out into a wider world. She spent forty-six years at the Newark Evening News — a reporter from 1921, then fifteen years as the paper’s fashion editor, and finally its garden editor, writing the beloved Sunday column “Along the Garden Path.” In 1951 she became the first sustaining woman member of the Garden Club of New Jersey, and in 1956 the club honored her for her contributions to gardening. A farm girl from Coursenville became one of New Jersey’s best-known garden writers — and you can imagine the soil she first learned from was this very ground.

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A clipping of Alice Dennis’s Newark Evening News garden column, “Along the Garden Path,” or her byline / photograph.

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ELEANORE AND THE PAPAKATING CAMP FOR GIRLS

THE FOURTH SISTER
 

The fourth daughter was Eleanore G. Dennis, and she may be the most adventurous of them all. Educated in the Sussex County schools and at Seeley’s Select School, Eleanore taught school in Wantage Township for a number of years — and then she founded a summer camp.

She was the director of Papakating Camp, a summer camp for girls in Sussex County that took its name from the Papakating Creek winding through the family’s land. Girls came from across the region — one society column noted a counselor of “swimming and tennis” spending her summer there — to spend their summers on this Wantage ground, a generation before it became Angel Valley. Family memory has always placed the camp here on the farm, and the creek it was named for still runs through it.

In time, ill health obliged Eleanore to go West. She spent her last twenty years in Los Angeles, returning East only on occasional visits, and died at the age of fifty at her sister’s home in East Orange — survived by Amy, Alice, and Stella, the sisters she grew up with on the farm.

“Miss Eleanore G. Dennis, of East Orange, is director of the camp.”

— newspaper society note, Papakating Camp for girls, Sussex County

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The society note naming Eleanore as director of Papakating Camp, and/or her obituary identifying her as a daughter of Samuel Dennis and sister to Amy, Alice, and Stella.

Upload here: your newspaper clippings about Eleanore & the camp

Do you have a photograph, a brochure, or a memory of the Papakating Camp for girls? We’d love to add it to this story. Please reach out through our Contact page.

 

FROM THE DENNIS FARM TO ANGEL VALLEY

1984 — A NEW CHAPTER
 

In time the property passed out of Dennis hands and eventually became bank-owned, the fields growing wild. Then, in 1984, George drove the back roads of Sussex County with his seventy-year-old father, Angelo, looking for land to start a small farm. This 280-acre, unkempt, bank-owned property came on the market — flat fields, a small mountain, woods and wetlands — and it was exactly what they had pictured. They jumped at the chance, and even began the restoration before the sale closed. What had been Dennis country became Angel Valley Farm. Today George works the land alongside his son and grandson — and still, now and then, sits down to soak in the priceless view.

  IMAGE 6 · THEN & NOW 

A 1984-era photo of George and Angelo, or an early photo of the farm being brought back to life — paired with the fields today.

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ABOUT THIS HISTORY

This account draws on the 1860s Sussex County maps of Coursenville; the 1915 New Jersey State Census; the 1930 U.S. Census; period newspaper notices and obituaries for Eleanore, Alice, and Amy Dennis; cemetery records at Deckertown Union Cemetery; and family memory passed down through Angel Valley Farm. Eleanore G. Dennis is identified as a daughter of Samuel Dennis, and as director of the Papakating Camp for girls, in contemporary newspaper records. Genealogical details for the Dennis and VanSyckle families were drawn from public cemetery records.