Earliest Orange County family to celebrate 300th anniversary of ancestor's wedding
By JULIE BOYD COLE
Orange County — Hundreds of people from around the North America will gather in Campbell Hall Saturday, Aug. 4 for the 151th annual reunion of descendants of Sarah Wells and William Bull.
They will celebrate the 300th wedding anniversary of the couple, who were the earliest settlers of Orange County and the first couple to marry in Goshen when they wed in 1718.
Sarah Wells was just 16 years old when she traveled by a single-mast sloop from Manhattan to New Windsor in 1712 to settle the inland of Orange County. She was the first European to do so and an indentured servant acting as a land agent for her master when she came.
William Bull arrived a few years later and settled about six miles away. The couple was married until Bull died in about 1755 and had a dozen children.
Their descendants will gather at the Bull Stone House just off the Sarah Wells Trail that William Bull and Sarah Wells built between 1722 and 1735. Bull built many stone houses around the county, including Knox Headquarters in New Windsor that was used during the Revolutionary War.
Unusually, the Bull family has maintained a family genealogy since 1796, the year that 100-year-old Sarah Wells died. On that day, they counted more than 300 descendants. Today, that number has grown to more than 77,000.
The descendants will hold a reenactment of the wedding ceremony of the couple, listen to speakers talk about the couple and hold their annual business meeting, among other events scheduled for the day.
The family of descendants will share a picnic lunch under many tents spread around the lawns of the four-story stone house.
The family first gathered in 1857 to plan erecting a monument on Sarah Wells and William Bull’s grave in the Hamptonburgh Cemetery. They had so much fun in that first gathering that they decided to create the annual reunion and it has continued every year since.
In the early 1920s, the reunion was moved to the Bull Stone House permanently after the family created an association to buy the house out of private ownership from Ebenezer Bull.
More than 300 descendants are expected to attend the reunion this year.