Josiah Huntoon (1813-1891) was born in Montpelier, Vermont and moved to New York City at age 15. By 1835 set up a business roasting and grinding coffee, which didn’t survive a financial panic. While in New York, in 1836, he met and married Ariadne Bowlsby and the couple moved to her family in Parsippany, Morris County, New Jersey. Josiah Huntoon became a teacher. The Bowlsby family was involved in anti-slavery activism and Josiah likely built on earlier experience in his life to also support join in supporting this cause. In 1841 he moved his growing family to Paterson, New Jersey but Ariadne died soon after. In 1846 he married Sarah Doremus, a cousin of his first wife, and the family grew to eleven children by the end of the 1860s.
In Paterson, Josiah Huntoon achieved prominence and success in the coffee/spice trade. Between 1849 and 1855 he built his home and steam-powered Excelsior Coffee/Spice Mill at Broadway and Bridge Street, a location that became known as “Huntoon’s Corner.” His technological advances were recognized by the publication Scientific American in 1859. The article states the annual output of the steam-driven mill was approximately 250,000 lbs of coffee and that 10-12 people were employed.11 Huntoon was also an organizer and director of the First National Bank and Paterson Savings Institution. He was active politically at the local level, serving on the Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders and on the city’s Board of Education.
Josiah Huntoon supported causes that brought him into connection with Underground Railroad activists. He was active in the abolitionist and temperance movements. Temperance, abolition, banking, and politics brought Huntoon into connection with others who also have Underground Railroad connection. His national political perspective evolved from Whig to Republican and he was prominent in the development of the Republican party in Paterson and Passaic County.13 His obituary in The Press, published on June 11, 1891, stated: He was ever a friend of the colored man, and with the late Henry M. Low and others was engaged in running the “underground railroad,” by means of which escaping slaves from the South were succored in Paterson on their journey toward freedom.”
Two of the Huntoon children told their descendants of the Underground Railroad experience in their family home at Huntoon’s Corner. The elder child, Ada Clark, (1849-1933) told her great-grandson Eric Lenander to have remembered “bringing blankets and food” to fugitives hiding in the house cellar.” The youngest Huntoon child, Louis (1869-1847), who was born after the events occurred, interviewed his mother and wrote down Josiah’s biography and his associations with Underground Railroad activity that she dictated at the time of Huntoon’s death in 1891. These recollections also include the use of the basement in the Huntoon home as a hiding place.