The first inhabitants of Absecon Island were the Lenni Lenape Indians who believed that you could no more own land than own the sky or the sunshine. The first European to hold an actual deed to what would become Atlantic City was an Englishman named Thomas Budd in the 1670s. His property on the mainland was valued at 40 cents an acre, the land over by the beach was worth only four cents and acre. Unlike others who would follow him, Thomas Budd was not a developer. Nothing much happened on Absecon Island for over a hundred years except when hunters arrived to take a few birds.
Jeremiah Leeds erected the first permanent structure on the island in 1785 and set about planting corn and rye and grazing cattle. By 1850 there were still only seven homesteads on Absecon Island, all but one a descendent from Leeds Plantation. About that time Jonathan Pitney, a prominent physician, and Richard Osborne, a Philadelphia engineer, got the idea that the salt air might be a health boon to the denizens of sooty Philadelphia. They launched the Camden-Atlantic City Railroad and on July 5, 1854 the first train chugged onto the island after a 150-minute trip.
Osborne got to name the new town and Pitney named the grid of streets so the streets running parallel to the ocean would be called after the earth’s great bodies of water and the cross streets would be named after the existing states. The first hotel, the Belloe House, was already in business by the time that first train arrived and massive block-hogging hotels would soon follow.
But these new hotel owners were having a problem they never encountered back in Philadelphia. There was sand all over the hotel carpets and passenger cars on the trains. Alexander Boardman (could that have been his real name?) got to thinking about the problem and he proposed creating an eight-foot wide wooden walkway from the beach to the town. The world’s first boardwalk was laid in 1870; it was taken up and stored every winter. Today’s Boardwalk, placed in a herringbone pattern of two-by-fours made of Bethabara hardwood from Brazil and Longleaf Yellow Southern Pine, of today is 60 feet wide, and 6 miles long.
By 1900 there was electricity in town and trolleys and rolling chairs on the Boardwalk amusement piers stretching ever further into the Atlantic Ocean. The population was 27,000 - a far cry from fifty years earlier. The name “Atlantic City” had the same magic that “Disney” now has. Our walking tour will try to find some remnants of that age scattered among the multi-billion dollar casinos that began arriving in 1976 with the mission of restoring the glitz of “America’s Favorite Playground”...
Thomas Farnsworth, an English Quaker, was the first to settle on this bluff overlooking the Delaware River in 1682. With Crosswicks Creek flowing into the Delaware River at this point the location was destined to be a transportation center and the man to exploit it was Joseph Borden. At this location in the early 1700s Borden meshed together a packet line on the Delaware River from Philadelphia with a stagecoach line across New Jersey to Perth Amboy where travelers then caught a ferry to New York City.
As the critical link on the route between New York and Philadelphia most every figure of importance in early America passed through Bordentown at one time or another. And more than a few decided to stay. One was Thomas Paine, dubbed the “Father of the American Revolution” for his influential writings and another was Francis Hopkinson, signer of the Declaration of Independence. The town earned an odd footnote during the Revolution when patriots dumped kegs stuffed with gunpowder into the Delaware River with hopes that the current would float them into the midst of the British fleet anchored in Philadelphia and then explode. Only one of the primitive mines detonated and caused no damage but the British overreaction, firing aimlessly into the night at a non-existent enemy, caused them much ridicule. In retaliation for “The Battle of the Kegs” the British sent 800 soldiers to Bordentown, one of three occasions during the war when they occupied the town.
Another historic figure who chose to live in Bordentown was Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon and exiled King of Spain and Naples. He bought about 1,500 acres north of town that he developed into a baronial estate. While residing in “New Spain” he was offered the throne of Mexico but turned it down over his preference for a country gentlemen’s lifestyle.
The first steam locomotive in New Jersey operated on the outskirts of Bordentown in the 1830s and the town benefited from an influx of workers employed on the Delaware and Raritan Canal and in the developing railroad shops. When the Pennsylvania Railroad took over both the canal and the railroad in the 1870s, however, it removed the shops and restricted freight on the canal so it wouldn’t compete with its trains. Bordentown reverted to a sleepy burg.
Similarly a century later, the interstate highway system bypassed Bordentown as well. So we’ll have to exit the turnpike to begin our walking tour and set the way-back machine for about 150 years...
What do you do if you are a 30-year old Oxford, England-educated minister and you sail across the Atlantic Ocean to practice your religious beliefs in the way you desire and you discover the new Richard Hancock kicked off settlement in this area in 1686 when he built a sawmill along the Cohansey River. When a wooden bridge spanned the river in 1716 the community got a name - Cohansey Bridge. Not that it triggered a land rush or anything. When Cumberland County was formed in 1748 and Cohansey Bridge was selected as the seat of the new county government there were about 15 houses in the village. By the time of the American Revolution thirty years later the community would now be called Bridge Town and it sported a population of around 200.
The Cumberland Nail & Iron Works that started in 1814 gave birth to Bridgeton as an industrial town. By the Civil War glass furnaces and iron forges were humming and processed foods were being shipped by rail to Camden and steamboat to Philadelphia. Bridgeton was among the most prosperous towns in the state of New Jersey. By the 1800s the wealth began showing itself in elegant mansions in fashionable neighborhoods and Bridgeton emerged as an important center for education.
Much remains from those heady times and in the 1980s the Bridgeton Historic District became the state’s largest with over 2,000 qualifying buildings. Our explorations of that bounty will begin on the grounds of the pioneering Cumberland Nail & Iron Works, which have been reclaimed into a leafy parkland of more than 1,000 acres...
This shoreline was settled by two groups of English Quakers in 1677, one from Yorkshire and the other from London. High Street (the traditional English name for a town's main street) was laid out with lots to the east for the Yorkshiremen and lots to the west for the men of London. A gristmill and a sawmill were quickly established and by 1681 the Colonial Assembly had designated the fledgling settlement as the capital of the province of West New Jersey and the official port of entry. By the mid-1700s Burlington ranked with New York, Philadelphia and Boston as one of the busiest ports in the country.
As a Colonial political center, Burlington attracted many political figures. During the American Revolution, in stark contrast to, and defiance of, his famous father, William Franklin was Royal Governor and the most intractable of Tory Royalists, until his arrest. Today's riverfront residential area is called Green Bank and was his estate. As the shipping trade waned through the 1800s that riverfront reverted from industry back to its natural beauty and began attracting Philadelphians as a summer resort.
Burlington saw it share of industrial development through the years. The first iron plow made in America was crafted in 1797 by Burlington resident Charles Newbold. More than a quarter-million mulberry trees were planted in 1838 to jump-start a silk industry - a spring cold snap the next year short-circuited the enterprise. James Birch was a world-renowned carriage builder in the days before the automobile. But no great industry or employer emerged to energize modern development in Burlington. The county seat followed the population inland to Mount Holly in 1793 and much of the town west of the railroad tracks that split Broad Street in 1834 maintains the feel of a Colonial port.
Our walking tour will begin on the banks of the Delaware River and then follow the patterned brick sidewalks frequented by American luminaries from Benjamin Franklin to Ulysses S. Grant...
In 1681, William Cooper, a Quaker, and his family settled on 300 acres in a wooded area near the mouth of the present Coopers Creek. Cooper named his estate Pyne Point and later established one of the earliest ferries to Philadelphia. For much of the next 150 years that was Camden's identity - the shoving off point to cross the Delaware River to get to the largest and most important city in America. The main east to west streets - Cooper, Federal, Market, Mickle - were developed aslong, broad avenues leading to the ferry boats.
Camden, the name of the Earl of Camden was first attached a real estate deal in the 1773 and became official in 1828, began to establish its own identity with the establishment of the county in 1844. The town was designated the county seat. Camden's legacy as a major manufacturing center began with a humble pen nib. Cornish Quaker, Richard Esterbrook, a stationer by trade, saw in Britain a move from hand-cut quill pens to steel nibs and recruited five craftsmen from Birmingham, England to come to Camden and set up operations in 1856. The United States Steel Pen Manufacturing Company, later changed to the Esterbrook Steel Pen Manufacturing Company, was the first steel pen manufacturer in the United States.
Camden's signature industry began in 1869 when Joseph Campbell and Abram Anderson began packing fancy peas and Jersey tomatoes. When an employee, chemist John T. Dorrance, developed a process for condensing soup in the 1890s. Dorrance came to work for $7.50 a week. By 1914 he was president of the company and his fortune of $117,000,000 would become one of the country's largest. The Campbell's Soup Plant was by far the largest maker of canned soups in the world. The plant totaled 42 buildings across 8 blocks. Watertanks with cans painted as replicas of the iconic red and white soup cans marked the waterfront.
All are gone now, leveled in the name of redevelopment. Camden's tentative waterfront rebirth began with an aquarium and now include concert venues, the reestablishment of a water ferry to Philadelphia, and the battleship New Jersey, the Battleship New Jersey, the country's most decorated warship, and other family-friendly attractions. More than two million people a year visit the Camden waterfront. This is where our walking tour will start as we seek out some architectural treasures that remain from the days when Camden fancied itself "The Biggest Little City in the World"...
In 1620, the same year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, Dutch Sea captain Cornelius Jacobsen Mey sailed into the Delaware Bay aboard his ship “Blijde Boodschap (Good Tidings).” Mey and his crew surveyed the Delaware River and traded for furs with the local Indians. He also named the prominent peninsula at the southern tip of what would become New Jersey after himself. Decades later the spelling would be changed to Cape May.
Wealthy Philadelphians began building summer getaways around Cape May in 1761 and it became the first seashore resort in America. By the early 1800s the largest hotels in the world were being built along the wide, white Cape May sand beaches. Presidents James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce vacationed here. Abraham Lincoln was a visitor before being elected 16th President of the United States.
On November 9, 1878, at seven o’clock in the morning, fire broke out in a hotel attic near the center of town. Winds at over 50 miles per hour allowed the fire to jump over roads from one block to the next. The fire department did not have enough water – as a bucket brigade stretching from the ocean to the water was their main supply. Sadly a request for more funds to buy more fire-fighting equipment had been denied only a few months earlier.
The fire (hereafter referred to as the “Great Fire”) raged for over eleven hours. When dawn broke the following day, 44 acres of downtown Cape May were destroyed. Although other resorts at the time were built in a more modern fashion – Cape May officials decided to rebuild in the same traditional Victorian style of the hotels that the fire had destroyed. This decision has reverberated ever since - Cape May has the greatest number of picturesque Victorian structures in America and in 1976 the entire town was officially designated a National Historic Landmark City, one of only five in the nation.
Our tour will start at the Mid-Atlantic Center For The Arts at 1048 Washington Street, site of the Emilen Physick Estate, five blocks north of the Cape May’s commercial center.
This was the first permanent English settlement in New Jersey and Governor Sir Philip Carteret made it the first capital of the colony for a brief time. Carteret named his capital in honor of the wife of his cousin, Sir George Carteret. The Proprietors of East Jersey transferred the capital to Perth Amboy in 1686, thinking that village was destined for greater things than Elizabethtown.
The town scarcely had time to notice the slight. With frontage on Newark Bay and State Island Sound, Elizabethtown early on tied its fortunes to the transportation industry. Ships of 30 and 40 tons were sailing up the Elizabeth River as far as Broad Street and soon home-built ships were pursuing whales migrating off the Jersey coast.
The American Revolution affected Elizabeth more than most New Jersey towns. The British on nearby Staten Island made repeated incursions against area farms and the village itself. But it would be that close proximity to New York City that provided the impetus for Elizabeth’s transformation into an important industrial city. A group of New Yorkers invested in the Elizabeth waterfront in the 1830s and influenced the creation of the Elizabeth and Somerville Railroad that brought the wealth of the state’s interior to its docks.
Manufacturers began to set up shop in Elizabeth, none more important than the I.M. Singer Company. At its busiest, some 10,000 people were employed making sewing machines, a concern that anchored the business community until 1982. New Jersey’s first automobile assembly line would be in Elizabeth. The first submarine was constructed here. And, for that matter, so was the first ice cream soda.
Our exploration of New Jersey’s longest English history will concentrate in the Midtown Historic District and we will start at the town’s most important crossroads...
On October 23, 1682, when he took up a tract of 400 acres, Francis Collins became the first settler within the boundaries of what is today Haddonfield. An English Quaker and a bricklayer by trade, Collins soon built his house, “Mountwell,” but things didn’t really get rolling until 20-year old Elizabeth Haddon arrived in 1701 to establish her father’s claims here. John Haddon was a wealthy businessman from London, a Quaker and friend of William Penn; in 1698 he purchased land in West New Jersey.
In 1702, Elizabeth married John Estaugh, a young Quaker missionary of some renown. In 1713 they built a beautiful brick mansion on what is now Wood Lane. This date of 1713 has been marked by several celebrations in this century as the “founding” date of Haddonfield. As the furthest point inland of navigation on the Cooper River, Haddonfield flourished throughout the 18th century; by the Revolution it was the largest village in the area.
When the Industrial Revolution arrived in the 1800s, Haddonfield mostly took a pass, evolving into a center of distribution of goods to its neighboring regions than as a base for any kind of manufacturing. There were scattered exceptions, most notably in the pottery business (Potter Street) and some tanneries (Tanner Street). But by and large Haddonfield left the heavy industry to the manufacturing centers in Camden and Philadelphia.
The 1900s brought greater development, as Haddonfield evolved from an agricultural village to a fully developed suburban community. Residents recognized early on the value of preserving a village atmosphere. The Haddonfield Historical Society was founded in 1914; its historic district was the second in New Jersey after Cape May.
We will concentrate our walking tour on King’s Highway, the main road through the British colonies that was built wide enough for the King of England. That generous road never needed to be widened to accommodate automobiles or trollies or parking and the result is a shaded “main street” under 200 year old trees as impressive as any in the region...
The Dutch rowed across the Hudson River from New Amsterdam and established the first community here in 1642. It is remembered for America’s first brewery that was set up in those last days before English rule but not much else. It was mostly just tidal marshes and swampland.
It was the estate of an Englishman named William Bayard who originally was with the revolutionary cause but reverted back to the Loyalists after New York fell in 1776. His property was seized by the new Americans after the Revolutionary War and put up for auction. Bidding was not spirited but it cost Colonel John Stevens 18,360 pounds sterling for 564 acres. Stevens set about developing the waterfront for what he saw as a resort for New Yorkers. The rich and famous did make their way here and eventually America’s first yacht club was founded in Hoboken.
But real estate was not his main game. Stevens would shortly be developing one of the world’s first steamboats and the first to sail on the open ocean and serve as a ferry on the Hudson River. In 1825 he built an early steam locomotive. Before his death in 1838, Stevens founded The Hoboken Land Improvement Company, which during the mid- and late-19th century was managed by his heirs and laid out a regular system of streets, blocks and lots, and constructed housing.
Soon Hoboken morphed from a community of beer gardens and nature walks to a manufacturing center and a busy port. The dock workers gave Hoboken a legacy of grit and toughness, immortalized in the Hollywood classic, On the Waterfront, that spent a month filming on location here. It was said that some blocks contained 50 saloons.
But Hoboken’s identity was about to make another 180-degree turn. Ferry service stopped in 1966. The big manufacturers of tea and coffee and slide rulers all left. Everyone of them. Developers moved in with deep pockets and discovered Hoboken’s wealth of old buildings, none too high, four-and five-stories at the tallest. There were brownstones and Victorian public buildings and old piers and factories waiting to be torn down or re-developed. Hoboken was at the forefront of gentrification.
The result is that our walking tour of the town, only a dense one mile square, will be mostly a residential walk, although for the most part it didn’t start out that way...
In 1741 a small band of Moravian missionaries representing the Unitas Fratrum, founded in 1457 by followers of John Hus and now recognized as the oldest organized Protestant denomination in the world, walked into the wilderness and began a settlement on the banks of the Lehigh River near the Monocacy Creek in Pennsylvania. From the start it was to be a planned community in which property, privacy and personal relationships were to be subordinated to a common effort to achieve a spiritual ideal. On Christmas Eve of that first year the Moravians’ patron, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf of Saxony, Germany, visited the new settlement. Over dinner, the Count christened the community “Bethlehem” to commemorate his visit.
The self-sufficient community wasted no time in building industry - more than three dozen trades and mills were in operation within five years. Goods from Bethlehem were known throughout the American colonies. Soon the Moravians were exporting people as well - communities were founded in Salem, North Carolina and in New England. Samuel Green, a deputy surveyor, was the first settler in these parts back in 1738. He often entertained Moravian missionaries traveling between Bethlehem and New York and became a follower himself. In his sixties in 1868 he sold 1,000 acres of “Greensland” for 1,000 British pounds. Peter Worbass came over from Bethlehem the next year to direct the new community.
By 1775 a formal plan was devised with buildings and streets and water sources for the new village and on February 8, 1775 the name of one of America’s first planned communities was changed from Greenland to Hope by the drawing of lots. The population of the devout Moravian community reached a peak of 147 in the 1790s but the settlement, depleted by a smallpox epidemic in 1799 and plagued by financial debts allowing to the Mother Church in Germany was forced to sell off its property for $48,000 in gold. On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1808, after a final service, the remaining Moravians moved back to Bethlehem.
After the Moravians left their farming community carried on in much the same fashion and grew a bit but the railroad never came and major roads were routed in different directions. As farmers died away, there was no one to replace them. When a major fire scorched much of the village in 1918, time stopped altogether.
Moravian buildings, Germanic in origin, were sturdy structures constructed of limestone blocks and among the most impressive buildings constructed in pre-Revolutionary America. The buildings were economical as well as handsome - cut stone was used only on the cornerstones and around window and door openings. Their profiles are identifiable by steeply pitched roofs. Red brick or stone arches over windows and doors signal the Moravian hand. More than a dozen remain today and our walking tour will ferret them out, setting off from a small parking lot a few steps from the center of the village...
The first English settlers showed up in this area at a crossroads identified today as Ridgedale Avenue and Kings Road. The makings of a town were taking shape by 1740 and the residents called it “Bottle Hill.” It could be the only Bottle Hill in America today but in 1834, by the margin of one vote, the town opted to join the scores of other towns named after President James Madison.
In 1856 the first greenhouses were built in Madison and soon long-stemmed roses were shipping to markets around the east. By the end of the 1800s there were more than fifty commercial greenhouses growing millions of roses, more than anywhere in the country. Madison was now known as “Rose City.”
Outside the greenhouses there were plenty of spectacular gardens on posh estates where wealthy New Yorkers were coming to live. Fifteen miles due west of Times Square, Madison was primed to be a commuter town on the expanding railroad lines.
Today the rose growers are all gone but the town retains plenty of its past in a downtown designated a Commercial Historic District where Madison has been touched by the wealth that surrounded it. Our walking tour will begin where so many visitors first experience Madison - at the train depot...
In 1776 a foursome of enterprising Quakers from Burlington calling themselves the Union Estates Company picked up 24,000 acres of prime wilderness here with plans to build some lumber mills. To that end they constructed a dam to create Union Mill Pond and began cutting timber. Not much happened in the way of development until 1795 when Joseph Buck, a veteran of the Revolutionary War under George Washington saw the potential for a town at the headwaters of the Maurice River.
Buck laid out a plan for about 20 blocks of a new town on the east bank of the Maurice River and commenced to selling lots. Business was not brisk, even though the town was certified as Millville - for those lumber mills - in 1801. By the time he died in 1803 there were still fewer than 20 houses built in Joseph Buck’s dream town.
Much of New Jersey in underlain by fine-grained silica that is some of the world’s best material for making glass and around Millville much of that sand is near the surface. In 1806 James Lee, an Irish immigrant became the first to take advantage of that geographic oddity when he built the town’s first glass factory on the Maurice River. Lee was less of a pioneer, however, than a promoter. He had been making glass in Port Elizabeth since 1799 and he didn’t stay in Millville long either. By 1814 he had sold the glassworks and was off to a sawmill in Bridgeton and shortly thereafter out to the new lands opening in Ohio.
The legacy of glassmaking he started in Milltown endured, however and the town became the center of commercial glassmaking in the United States. By the 1880s the town’s population was pushing 8,000 and in 1883 Theodore C. Wheaton settled in town and began making pharmaceutical glassware. His family would eventually control 41 factories producing glassware and ceramics. It would be glass that would make Joseph Buck’s dream of a thriving town on the banks of the Maurice River come to pass.
And that is where our walking tour will begin, in a park dedicated to the town’s founder. The glass factories are mostly gone now but Millville is summoning the magic wrought by heat and sand to revitalize its streetscape once again as the Glasstown Arts District...
In 1682, when a wagon road from Burlington to Salem was carved out along a ridge, Quakers found their way here. John Rodman purchased 500 acres of land in 1686 and the western half of today’s town became known as Rodmantown. The eastern portion was called Chestertown, although there was no vibrant unifying force to apply much definition to the scattered settlements in the vicinity. One hundred and fifty years later there were still scarcely 50 dwellings in town. It had by that time, however, acquired the name “Moorestown,” named in honor of the village’s first tavern owner. Thomas Moore purchased 33 acres of land in 1732 opposite the Friends Meeting House (established in 1700) and subsequently subdivided his land for private homes and business sites.
From its inception Moorestown was always a town of homes and small shops rather than an industrial community. There were a few mills nearby and a small tanning industry and a thriving nursery and fruit trade but nothing that substantially altered the residential ambience. Early on Moorestown developed a history of attracting the rich and famous. Samuel Leeds Allen, inventor of the Flexible Flyer sled, was one of the first. His house was later bought by Eldridge Johnson, who was manufacturing Victrolas in Camden for his company that would become RCA.
In recent times Moorestown became the hamlet of choice for high-voltage Philadelphia Eagles football stars, Donovan McNabb and Terrell Owens among them. In 2005 Money magazine announced what residents had known for 150 years: Moorestown was the best place to live in America.
The historic district is stuffed with over 350 qualifying properties but we’ll concentrate our explorations along Main Street, beginning in a building that has first served the town 200 years ago...
The distinctive bump of Mount Holly in an otherwise flat landscape soars 183 feet in altitude above the Rancocas Creek that flows to the east. Quakers began settling around the hill, indeed covered by holly trees, in the late 1870s. For the next 50 years there were land swaps and jockeying for farmland around the twisting, slow-moving waters of the Rancocas. That all changed in 1723 when Edward Gaskill and his sons hand dug a mill race connecting two loops of the meandering creek to power a grist mill. An ironworks followed and more industry and the foundation for a town became well established. There were enough bridges spanning the Rancocas - more bridges than houses one wag suggested - that the settlement was named Bridgetown (it would not become known as Mount Holly until 1931).
By the American Revolution there were over 200 houses in town and it was important enough for George Washington to use as a decoy in luring Hessian troops from Bordentown on December 23, 1776 to help make his surprise attack on Trenton three days later a success. Hessian commanders and 2,000 troops tangled for three fruitless days in an artillery duel with 600 Colonials, mostly untrained men and boys, on Iron Works Hill. A few years later the town was pressed into duty as the capital of New Jersey when the state legislature was forced to meet here for two months in 1779.
In 1796, when the original county seat at Burlington grew tired and poorly situated for the growth of the region, bustling Mount Holly was a natural choice for the new county capital. A half century later when the Burlington and Mount Holly Railroad rolled into town there were five mills, a woolen factory, nine stores, a bank, two newspapers and a boarding school for a population approaching 4,000.
Mount Holly has been diligent about preserving its history - even the original firehouse, little more than a shack, of America’s oldest continuously operated volunteer fire company is on display on the town streets. Our walking tour will begin in the municipal parking lot where there are plenty of namesake holly trees and a 300-year old log cabin that was found in a rather surprising place...
By the time the name “New Brunswick” (named in honor of English King George I, the Duke of Brunswick) appeared in court records in 1724, this settlement on the southern bank of the Raritan River had already gone through two names - Prigmore’s Swamp and Indian’s Ferry (that was John Indian's ferry). This is the deepest penetration boats can easily make on the tidal Raritan River and New Brunswick soon developed as a trading town and agricultural port.
During the American Revolution the town was occupied for seven months by British general Sir William Howe, although “hosted” might be a better word for it. George Washington openly complained about the lack of local support he received “from the Jerseys” for his campaigns around New Brunswick. Help did come, however from the town rivermen whose boats feasted on British vessels around New York harbor.
The coming of the railroad harpooned the Raritan River as a vital shipping lane and from 1850 out the city switched over to manufacturing. A steady stream of modern conveniences poured out of New Brunswick brick factories - carriages and new rubber products and the first harmonicas in America. Most notably, in 1886 the Johnson brothers began making medicinal plasters to aid in the recovery from surgery in New Brunswick. They would shortly be joined in the pharmaceutical battles by the arrival of E.R. Squibb and Sons.
The factories attracted European immigrants, especially Hungarians and Germans, and they worked hard and played hard. The city’s saloons once enjoyed such steady business that temperance reformers declared, “It would be an injustice to the devil to condemn him to live in New Brunswick.”
The city has been an enthusiastic embracer of urban renewal and many vestiges of those days are gone. But buildings still reman from the 1800s and even the 1700s. Although they aren’t concentrated on the streetscape we will encounter them on our walking tour without using up too much shoe leather and we’ll begin where thousands coming to New Brunswick do every day, at the train station...
In the 1660s Robert Treat found things getting a little too loosey-goosey in his once strictly religious New Haven Colony in Connecticut. It took him five years of searching the early American wilderness to find property on the west bank of the Passaic River. In 1666 he gave gunpowder, one hundred bars of lead, twenty axes, twenty coats, guns, pistols, swords, kettles, blankets, knives, beer, and ten pairs of breeches to the Hackensack Indians for the land that would be called “New Ark” or “New Work.” History is a bit muddy on the naming of Newark.
Treat’s new utopian community would remain under strict religious control for almost 70 years. The original New England Puritans were scoffed at as party animals by these settlers. As a consequence the hamlet attracted few settlers. In 1733 Colonel Josiah Ogden, a well-respected member of the village, was sanctioned for gathering his wheat on a Sunday to save it from an impending storm which launched a permanent rift in the church. But a true break with the religious hierarchy in Newark town would not come until the advent of trade and commerce after the American Revolution. The stirrings of Newark’s future as an American industrial powerhouse began simply enough with the leather trade and rudimentary jewelry-making in the early 1800s. the future arrived in 1815 in the form of a Massachusetts transplant named Seth Boyden. Boyden’s tinkering with leather-making processes resulted in the discovery of patent leather. Soon most of America’s leather was being shipped from Newark, 90% of it by 1870. Boyden then turned his attention to iron and invented a way to shape it by producing malleable iron. About the same time advance in transportation brought the coal fields of Pennsylvania to Newark via the Morris Canal in 1831 and the first railroads a few years later. Newark was off to the races; in 1836 it incorporated as a city.
It was said, with only slight exaggeration, that every kind of product sold in the United States was manufactured in Newark. Financially, Newark became the second-largest insurance company in America. The population soared from 136,508 in 1880 to 347,000 by 1910. It would eventually peak at 450,000. The intersection of Broad and Market streets, where Robert Treat had built a cabin 250 years earlier, was called the busiest in the country.
The last half of the 20th century, however, brought all the plagues of big city life to Newark, magnified several-fold. City planners had envisioned a growing metropolis that would swallow surrounding towns and keep the city coffers flush with tax money. It didn’t happen. Manufacturing jobs disappeared with nothing to replace them. Urban renewal and housing shortages exacerbated racial tensions between residents. While Newark is still New Jersey’s largest city with a population of 280,000 the number of people it has lost is greater than the population of nearly every other town in the state. Newark, however, has not been immune to the renaissance that has enveloped America’s cities. In the past dozen years the downtown has sprouted a performing arts center, a baseball stadium, a major league hockey arena and several historic buildings have received multi-million dollar facelifts. Our walking tour of today’s Newark will begin with a toe in the past where business was transacted back in 1667...
Religious camp meetings, often led by Methodists, can find their roots in America as far back as 1799 but the movement really exploded after the Civil War. In the 1860s East Coast beaches were not vacation havens but generally regarded as bug-infested wastelands. At the time only four residents were living between Long Pond and Goose Pond, now known as Wesley Lake and Fletcher Lake respectively. Only a single sand road penetrated the dense forest, scarcely wide enough for a horse and buggy to squeeze through. So when the Reverend William B. Osborn of Farmingdale went scouring the Jersey shore for a place for a new camp meeting in 1869 he found abundant cheap land here (his 11-acre deed would cost $50) - and precious few mosquitoes. One other thing he was looking for was pine trees in which to build the camp for the annual prayer meeting.
With easy access from Philadelphia and New York City via the New York and Long Branch Railroad, the Ocean Grove camp meeting proved an immediate hit. The 1874 meeting attracted 40,000 people. Records indicate that in 1877 alone, 710,000 tickets were sold for the Ocean Grove-Asbury Park train station. In a generation the town went from a population of four to a fully developed community that was known as the “Queen of the Victorian Methodist Camp Meetings.”
The Camp Meeting Association owns all the land in town and leases it to homeowners and businesses for 99-year renewable terms. Until 1981, when it was folded into Neptune Township, the Association also wrote the rules of Ocean Grove. Among its requirements were strict blue laws prohibiting business and banning all driving on the streets on Sundays. This certainly put a crimp on the summer exodus from the cities that was inundating the shore in the age of the automobile. The town crept sleepily along without much change from its founding a century before. The result is that Ocean Grove now boasts the greatest number of Victorian structures in New Jersey.
Our walking tour will begin where the founders prayed in February 1869, although hopefully not in knee-high snow as covered the ground when Reverend Osborn first visited...
As the first Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington, Alexander Hamilton knew that industry held the key to the nation’s future prosperity. And he knew just where to get young America’s future started - on the Passaic River that was rushing restlessly through a rocky gorge and down a 70-foot cataract. He lobbied for the creation of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (S.U.M) and the New Jersey legislature voted the company perpetual exemption from county and township taxes to encourage the building of canals and mills. On November 22, 1791 Governor William Paterson signed the company charter and after investigating proposals from sites in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania a siting engineer declared the Passaic falls offered “the best situation in the world.” A grand new industrial city was ready for take-off. At the time, 1792, there were about ten houses in the area.
A French Army engineer, Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant was retained to create this new industrial vision and he sketched detailed plans of broad boulevards and busy canals but he soon left and went south where his plans would take hold in another new city that would take the name of a certain first President of the United States. Peter Colt, who was treasurer of the State of Connecticut, took over S.U.M. and his energies started the first mills turning in Paterson (Hamilton demurred when it was suggested the new town be named after him).
Colt’s steady hand was critical to the young development of the young town and the family that followed him would shape its future. Son Roswell L. Colt became the head of S.U.M in 1814 and controlled its fortunes until he died in 1856. His brother John got into the cotton business in 1814 in Paterson and in the 1820s began making cotton duck for sailing ships by doubling and twisting cotton yarn. He was the first in the world to successfully substitute cotton for flax in the making of sail duck and it was soon in use on all American vessels. Samuel Colt came from Hartford to manufacture pistols in the 1830s. He did not succeed and would have to return home to make the six-shooter “that tamed the West” Christopher Colt would use his old factory to create the first silk in Paterson. That did better, so much so that after John Ryle arrived from England to helm the looms Paterson transformed into the “Silk City.”
Alexander Hamilton’s vision of a great industrial beehive would, in fact, come true and Paterson would become the third largest city in New Jersey. Of course, old industrial cities have not fared well in recent years. But the urban renewal bug that infested many similar cities has never taken hold in Paterson. Many of the hulking red brick factories from the 1800s are still in place and the elaborate Beaux Arts and Art Deco buildings their wealth spawned are there too. Instead of being torn down the old buildings have been adapted by entrepreneurs looking to turn a buck so at street level the urban explorer sees a panoply of utilitarian downtown storefronts. To truly see the wonder of the streetscape it is literally necessary to “look up, Paterson” but our walking tour will begin by looking down, looking down at the wonder of the Great Falls of the Passaic River, just as Alexander Hamilton did 220-odd years ago...
The original settlers, Quakers mostly, came to this verdant stretch of West Jersey in the late 1600s to be planters. The settlement was called Stony Brook after the small stream that defined two sides of the town but was named Prince-Town in 1724 in honor of Prince William of Orange and Nassau. The main road from New York to Philadelphia came right through town, located approximately half-way between the key cities (45 miles to NYC and 40 to Philly) and Princeton evolved into an important coaching center. Some days as many as 15 coaches would start off each way on Nassau Street, the main thoroughfare.
In 1756 the College of New Jersey arrived from Newark and set up shop in the newly constructed Nassau Hall, the largest academic building in the colonies. After that, save for a few critical days during the American Revolution, the history of Princeton the town has been the history of the school. There was a brief flurry of industrial activity when the Camden and Amboy Railroad showed up in 1834 and the Delaware and Raritan Canal was dug nearby in the 1830s but by the end of the 19th century when the school officially became Princeton University the two would be marching practically in lockstep. Manufacturing is not permitted in the borough and as early as 1883 Major E. M. Woodward & John F. Hageman wrote presciently in History of Burlington and Mercer Counties, New Jersey, with Biographical Sketches of Many of Their Pioneers and Prominent Men: “Far distant be the day when the pure, bright atmosphere of Princeton shall be darkened and tainted with the smoky, dirty exhalations of a manufacturing city.”
So we will concentrate our explorations around Princeton University and begin right at the main gate. But we won’t go in straight away since as we’ll learn, we weren’t always welcome...
The Spring Lake Beach Improvement Company organized shortly after the New York & Long Branch Railroad reached the area in 1873. At the time, the area consisted of a handful of farms and the scattered shacks of local fishermen. The group purchased 285 acres of land from Formon Osborn in 1875 which had near its center a small lake fed by pure spring water just a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean.
The developers set about building the luxurious Monmouth House hotel on the oceanfront and summer visitors began work on their own places. At about the same time the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was breaking down and as the fair buildings were dismantled the deep-pocketed Spring Lake pioneers had lumber and fixtures shipped by rail and steamer to their building sites. In some cases entire Centennial buildings - the Missouri State Building (Ocean Road) and the Portugese Government Pavillion (a guest house on Atlantic Avenue for over 100 years) for instance - ended up in Spring Lake. Even the main comfort station was shipped to Spring Lake where it became the Lake House Hotel in 1877 with 92 rooms, large dining parlors and a bowling alley. It was demolished in 1904 and was replaced by a public park.
In 1892 four of the fledgling seashore developments were welded into the town of Spring Lake. Many of the wealthy summer visitors came from prosperous Irish businessmen from New York and Philadelphia, so many that the town came to be known as the “Irish Riviera.” But the massive hotels were costly to run and more Jersey shore communities were competing for summer beach-goers and Spring Lake evolved into a town of a few thousand year-round residents and boutique inns.
Today Spring Lake boast the longest non-commercial boardwalk on the Jersey shore - more than two miles - and home lots characterized by grassy lawns and shade trees. Many of those lots house multi-million dollar mansions. Our walking tour will pass by quite a few, tour the downtown business district and look in on some of the surviving Victorian inns and hotels and we will begin with the last remaining dowager from Spring Lake’s Gilded Age...
The early English settlers found plenty of ways to make a living in this area in the 1700s - there were abundant woodlands for lumber and charcoal, the sea yielded fish and whales and there was bog ore to process into iron. At the head of navigation on the Goose Creek River, a small village formed here. It was “Tom’s River” by the time of the American Revolution and the village had fifteen houses.
Toms River, behind a long barrier island, was a haven for privateers feasting on British shipping in the War for Independence, but it gained prominence by an incident that occurred just after the cessation of hostilities. A band of Tories, seeking saltworks, surprised Captain Joshua Huddy on March 24, 1782 as he defended a protective blockhouse. The blockhouse and the entire town were burned to the ground and Huddy hanged on April 12, apparently in retribution for his having killed a Tory leader.
Angry patriots were incensed at what they considered an illegal execution and demanded the surrender of Loyalist captain Richard Lippincott, the leader of the hanging party. When the band refused to produce him another British captain was selected by lot by the Americans to die. The sacrifice was 20-year old Sir Charles Asgill. Back in England, Lady Asgill sailed to France to plead for the life of her only son, and indeed Congress finally ordered him released. While America was embroiled in its first International imbroglio that was mucking up peace talks to end the Revolution, the good folks in Toms River were left to figure out how to rebuild their town from ashes.
But rebuild they did and Toms River was for awhile known as an important port until a major storm in the early 1800s sealed off the Cranberry Inlet and blocked access to the ocean. By the middle of the 1800s the town could boast of no more than 50 houses. In 1850 Toms River was selected as the county seat for newly created Ocean County and the government set up shop about the same time as the railroads began bringing wealthy vacationers to town.
Toms River began serving as a retirement center and resort and bedroom community as its economy became retail and professional-based. In the 1950s, with the completion of the Garden State Parkway, Toms River went on steroids. The new commuters swelled the population from 7,000 in 1950 to 90,000 in the year 2000. One thing the new homesteaders brought with them were good young baseball players. In the 1990s Toms River East Little League went to the Little League World Series three times and in 1998 captured the title with a 12-9 win over Japan, carrying the Toms River name around the world.
Our walking tour will begin by the water near where Captain Huddy gave his life to protect some salt so many years ago...
The first settlement which would become Trenton was established by Quakers in 1679, in the region then called the Falls of the Delaware, led by Mahlon Stacy from Handsworth, Sheffield in England. Quakers were being persecuted in England at this time and North America provided the perfect opportunity to exercise their religious freedom.
By 1719, the town adopted the name “Trent-towne”, after William Trent, one of its leading landholders who purchased much of the surrounding land from Stacy’s family. This name later was shortened to “Trenton”.
During the American Revolution, the city was the site of George Washington's first military victory. On December 26, 1776, Washington and his army, after crossing the icy Delaware River to Trenton, defeated the Hessian troops garrisoned there. The stunning sight of prisoners being paraded out of town not only gained the Americans highly elusive respect and rejuvenated morale but proved that Washington was the man who could successfully lead this revolt. After the war, Trenton was briefly the national capital of the United States in November and December of 1784. The city was considered as a permanent capital for the new country, but the southern states favored a location south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Trenton was a major manufacturing center in the late 1800s and early 1900s; one relic of that era is the slogan “Trenton Makes, the World Takes” displayed on the Lower Free Bridge just north of the Trenton-Morrisville Toll Bridge (the “Trenton Makes Bridge”). The city adopted the slogan in the 1920s to represent Trenton’s then-leading role as a major manufacturing center for steel, rubber, wire, rope, linoleum and ceramics.
Our walking tour will begin outside the second oldest state house in continuous use in the United States...
Everything about Vineland was the vision of one man - Charles Kline Landis. Landis was a Philadelphian trained as a lawyer who helped found the town of Hammonton on the Camden and Atlantic Railroad in 1857 when he was only 24 years old. Hammonton flourished rapidly and Landis next set his sights on creating his own town, an ideal utopian of a town. It would be a place of verdant fields of fruits and vegetables, a land of vines.
He searched much of New Jersey and heard about a new rail line connecting Millville to Glassboro. Rail service was a key to his plans both the transport newcomers to this town (there weren’t many roads in South Jersey at the the time) and also to send all that produce out to market. He talked his way into acquiring 16,000 acres of primarily swampland from Richard Wood for no money down and no interest for three years. The cost was $7.00 an acre and Wood would get a cut as the land was sold by Landis.
And land would come from Landis with strings aplenty attached. First, a house had to be constructed within one year. At least 2 1/2 acres of land must be cleared and cultivated each year. Speculators need not apply. Landis plotted out his land around the rail line with farms and orchards around one square mile in the center that would harbor development for factories, shops, homes, schools, churches and halls for recreation. The streets in this core would be laid out in a perfect grid of right angles and wide - the primary roads would be 100 feet wide. The names of Plum and Almond and Peach and Pear that Landis created still survive today
Landis put 20- and 50-acre tracts for sale at from $15 to $30 per acre, payable within four years. To advertise his lots he placed ads in the biggest New York and Boston and Philadelphia newspapers. When he discovered the soil was especially suited for growing grapes he started America’s first Italian-language newspaper to attract grape growers.
Vineland may have been his utopia but that wasn’t enough for the restless Landis. He would move on to develop the town of Sea Isle City at the shore and created Landisville which he saw as the hub of a new state county. That vision never came to pass but we will explore what became of his great experiment of Vineland and we will concentrate on Landis Avenue, which the founder staked out next to the railroad to be an extra-wide, tree-lined avenue along the lines of the Champs-Elysee in Paris...
By 1715 the Quaker community had outgrown its initial settlement and a new site was selected inland where the King’s Highway bridged Woodbury Creek. By the time of the Revolutionary War, Woodbury had emerged as a hamlet of considerable importance with the rebel cause garnering strong support among Woodbury settlers. Its close proximity by water to Philadelphia ensured many troop movements through the tiny town; it was alternately occupied by military forces on both sides.
Thaddeus Kosciuszko fortified the bluff above the Delaware River with nine-foot high earthen walls embedded with an abatis (sharpened tree branches) during the war. Fort Mercer - named for Scottish Brigadier General Hugh Mercer, who died at Princeton - was garrisoned by Colonel Christopher Greene and 400 of his fellow Rhode Islanders with 14 cannons and worked in tandem with Fort Mifflin across the river to form a considerable detriment to any force planning a water approach on the Colonial capital of Philadelphia. After using a land route from the south and west to take Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, it immediately became imperative to open the Delaware River to keep supplies to the British Army flowing.
The inevitable attack on Fort Mercer was not a month in coming, in the guise of 1,200 Hessian troops approaching from the north. Greene refused a demand of surrender and repulsed two German advances up the steep slopes. The fire from the American defenders was withering and the Hessian ranks were thinned by nearly half before leaving the Red Bank Battlefield. A few weeks later, however, the British stormed Fort Mifflin and rather than face the overpowering force now across the river, the Americans destroyed Fort Mercer as they surrendered Philadelphia completely to the British.
Woodbury continued to prosper after the War of Independence and on into the 19th century. The oldest and largest city in Gloucester County, it became the official county seat in the 1790s, erecting a brick courthouse. Woodbury was originally formed as a Borough on March 27, 1854, within Deptford Township, based on the results of a referendum held on March 22, 1854. On January 2, 1871, Woodbury was reincorporated as a city, based on the results of a referendum held that day.
By 1890 Woodbury was in the midst of its greatest vitality and had a population of 3,930. The patent medicine business of George Green was the primary economic engine but Woodbury boasted glass works, bottle plants, and steam mills as well. Our walking tour will begin in the shadow of the Green factory, the source of profits that would spawn building projects on both the East and West coast...