Film Overview

The Bond Force Legacy is a feature-length historical documentary that chronicles the lives of the Bonds and the Forces along with the history of Centerville, New Jersey, now known as Roseland.

The Bonds and the Forces were two families from Roseland and Livingston, New Jersey, who lived in The Bond Force House from the late 1700s until the last of the line that inhabited the house died in the late 20th Century. With hundreds of historical photographs, interviews with neighbors, two re-enactments and one live action sequence, the film centers on four major events in the lives of the Bonds and the Forces.

First, the film explores the impact of bigamy on the Force family, including the family's excommunication from the Livingston Baptist Church in May of 1882. Excommunication was necessary once it came to light that not only had Jonathan Force III married a woman 20 years his junior, but he did so despite the fact that he already had a wife and two young children in the neighboring town.

Second, the film explores the infamous divorce and separate maintenance proceedings brought in the early 1920s by Irene White Force less than one year after she married Jonathan's son, Frank Bond Force. In those proceedings, Irene claimed that she was being starved by Frank and literally frozen out of The Bond Force House.

Third, the film looks at how Frank treated Irene's son, Frances White, who worked at The Bond Force House as a teenager and who already was an adult when Frank and Irene married in 1920. Shortly after Irene married Frank, Frank had his stepson arrested for assault.

The film closes with a look at the bequest that Anna Bond Force, the only daughter of Jonathan Force III and Dorinda Bond Force, left to the town of Roseland when she died in 1963 at the age of 95. Today, that bequest survives in a nine-acre park called Bond Force Park -