RITTENHOUSE, Robert W. – (1879-1935) Spend some time in the Frenchtown Cemetery (it's my second home), and you'll surely notice the impressive Rittenhouse monument topped with a marble lady pointing straight up. Robert Rittenhouse's name is on the monument, but his body is not on the premises.
His father, Thomas Bray Rittenhouse, had been born in Kingwood Township before Frenchtown was incorporated. Robert was born in Jersey City and was living with an uncle in Brooklyn as early as 1905. His 1918 draft registration describes him as manager of Warren Leather Goods Co., tall with a medium build, gray eyes and blond hair.
In 1935, Rittenhouse had retired from the leather business and was en route to visit friends in Cuba, when the ocean liner SS Havana went off course by about 15 miles and ran aground on a reef in the Bahamas on Jan. 6. Passengers were loaded into lifeboats to await rescue by the Coast Guard.
During the loading process, Rittenhouse drowned or suffered a stroke – accounts differ. He was the sole fatality. When the Coast Guard arrived, seas were heavy and Rittenhouse's body was cumbersome. So the sailors left it in the boat to be retrieved later. But the lifeboat and the body were never found.
Home in Brooklyn, Rittenhouse's wife Daisy and teenage son Douglas mourned his loss. The Rittenhouse family erected a monument in Frenchtown with the terse notification “Lost at Sea.” Usually that's a euphemism, but in this case it was literal. (Thanks to Neal Simpson who supplied most of this information.)
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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