Louis Verhaegen

The Scudder Memorial is “a tall, squared limestone monument capped by a globe. At the front of the monument is a relief panel depicting six figures: a dominant, central male figure who appears to be of European descent, and five subordinate figures intended to represent natives of India.”(1) The dominant central male figure in the relief (shown below) is the Reverend John Scudder, MD, who was born in Freehold, New Jersey, in 1793. Scudder was the grandson of Colonel Nathaniel Scudder, who represented New Jersey in the Second Continental Congress and died in the Battle of Monmouth.

Scudder, a minister of the Reformed Dutch Church in America, began missionary work in India in 1819. He and his wife Harriet had seven sons and two daughters, all of whom likewise carried out missionary work there. Scudder died at the Cape of Good Hope in 1855.

Louis Verhaegen, a little-known New York sculptor, was chosen by the Reformed Dutch Church to create the memorial to Scudder. Initially placed at the New Brunswick Seminary in front of Herzog Hall in 1861, it was moved a year later to the cemetery of the First Reformed Church, where it remains today.(2)

(1,2) Meredith Bzdak, Public Sculpture in New Jersey: Monuments to Collective Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), p.25.

(Fall 2006)

Scudder Memorial (detail)

Scudder Memorial, c.1860, relief on limestone monument, First Reformed Church Cemetery, New Brunswick (Middlesex County). Photograph © Douglas Petersen.