Cranbury: A New Jersey Town from the Colonial Era to the Present 9780813553580

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chambers, John Whiteclay. Cranbury : a New Jersey town from the colonial era to the present / John Whiteclay Chambers II. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-5287-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5358-0 (e-book) 1. Cranbury (N.J. : Township) — History. I. Title. F144.C78C47 2012 974.9'41 — dc23 2011035599 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ć ĕėĔďĊĈę Ĕċ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ đĆēĉĒĆėĐĘ, ĎēĈ. Copyright © 2012 by Cranbury Landmarks, Inc. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Designed and typeset by Andrew Katz Manufactured in the United States of America

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Preface

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Colonial Cranbury, 1697 – 1783

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The Making of a Classic Nineteenth-Century Village, 1784 – 1865

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A New Township and an Expanding Market, 1866 – 1899

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ęčėĊĊ ċĔĚė ċĎěĊ ĘĎĝ ĘĊěĊē ĊĎČčę ēĎēĊ



Remembering the Turn of the Century: A Town in Transition, 1900 – 1929

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Depression, War, and Recovery, 1930 – 1959

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Meeting New Challenges, 1960 – 1979

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Saving a Historic Village, Preserving Its Farmland, 1980 – 1999

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Confronting the Twenty-first Century, 2000 – 2011

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Cranbury, “One of America’s Most Beautiful Small Towns”

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Afterword by William L. Bunting Jr.

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Sources and Suggested Reading

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Index

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ĕėĊċĆĈĊ •••••

The historic town of Cranbury is situated near major highways in the rich farmland of southern Middlesex County in central New Jersey. It is one of the oldest towns in the state, with the first recorded settlement by English colonists in 1697 and evidence of Indian sites there long before that. For more than three hundred years, the forces emanating from transit routes and fertile farmland have shaped Cranbury, whose history is both unique and representative of developments in New Jersey and the nation. The town’s story is also a hopeful one of citizen activism on behalf of the historic preservation of the village and its adjoining farmland. Unlike many old, rural towns that became transformed through suburbanization in the twentieth century, Cranbury retained its picturesque, small-town image and much of its rural character. It was also innovative in linking historic preservation of the village with the maintenance of adjoining farmsteads. How this has come about — how Cranbury preserved much of its nineteenth-century character while accommodating twentieth-century forces of economic growth — provides one of the most important themes of this book. Cranbury, which has preserved the best of the past while astutely meeting the challenges of the present, provides an inspiration for active, intelligent civic participation and a model for enlightened development. Main Street in Cranbury still resembles the America of a Norman Rockwell painting. Arriving through farmers’ fields on rural, two-lane roads or a nearby highway, visitors discover a tree-shaded village of white, clapboard houses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most with dark wooden shutters, many with front porches and some with white picket fences. In 1723, Benjamin Franklin, then a seventeenyear-old printer’s apprentice from Boston, walked through Cranbury



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ċĎČ. ΅. A portion of the Mural of Historic Cranbury, painting by Lee Stang Harr, 1983. The full mural is on display in the post office in Cranbury. (Courtesy of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

on his way to becoming an editor and newspaper publisher in Philadelphia. Currently at the entrance to the town, a small, hanging sign depicts the famous, young Presbyterian missionary David Brainerd addressing the Indians under a great elm tree here in 1745. Later, the organizer of American Methodism, Bishop Francis Asbury, preached several times in Cranbury between 1772 and 1790. Main Street today is a mix of houses and small, locally owned stores and restaurants, one or two stories high, most of them built in the nineteenth century. Uphill from the lake, dam, and old mill site sits a former tavern and inn, the Cranbury Inn, now a restaurant and bar, which traces its origins back to the late 1700s. Nearby stands the First Presbyterian Church, established in Cranbury in 1740. Farther along are more old houses, including one on the site of an earlier home where, during the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette and Colonel Alexander Hamilton stayed and General George Washington made his headquarters on the way to the Battle of Monmouth in 1778. Two decades later, Vice President Aaron Burr changed horse and carriage in Cranbury on his flight south as a result of his lethal duel with Hamilton. In the twenty-first century, much of the quaint hamlet with its surrounding farms seems like the mythical Brigadoon, a place where time stands still.



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The fact that Cranbury remained “the best preserved 19th century village in Middlesex County,” as stated in the successful 1979 application for including the town on the state and national historic registers, and one of the best in the state, helped assure its addition to those two registers. A small, rural village still bordered, at least on its west side, by a vista of largely undisturbed farmland and old farmsteads, Cranbury embodies the hopes and aspirations of the nation back in the mid-nineteenth century. As the application explained, “Optimism, faith, and reasoned growth are part of what Cranbury represented and continues to represent. It is this assemblage of buildings — historically and architecturally — which makes Cranbury an attractive entity unique from any other contemporary villages. It is this identity which sets Cranbury apart from its nearby surroundings of look-alike suburbs and modern commercial developments creating a significant historical village.” Yet, in recent years, this charming, picturesque town, nestled within the open farmland that comprises much of its thirteen and a half square miles, has been confronted with the wave of development that seems

ċĎČ. Ά. “Harold O’Neil’s Store,” on North Main Street, Cranbury. Watercolor painting by Don Jo Swanagan, 1982. (Courtesy of Virginia H. Swanagan)

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to be relentlessly pushing suburban subdivisions and businesses into the farmlands of New Jersey. Running through the eastern side of the township are U.S. Route 130 and the New Jersey Turnpike, the latter one of the most heavily traveled roadways in America. Half a dozen miles to the west lies Princeton’s booming Route 1 corridor with its office parks, malls, and corporate campuses. Despite its location, the village has remained a historic treasure. Its residents have banded together to preserve the charmingly quaint village and the farmland that helped sustain it for more than three centuries. Part of the town’s significance as a historic rural village is the result of its relatively undisturbed relationship with old farms and farmsteads. While accepting gradual and carefully controlled growth and development, the residents of Cranbury have been able to keep the village, much of its farmland, and most of the roads that lead to and through it, free, for the most part, from massive, look-alike subdivisions and the clutter of billboards, gas stations, auto dealers, franchise eateries, and strip malls that are so often a part of suburban sprawl. With its active involvement since the 1970s in preserving its historic village and subsequently its historic farmland, Cranbury has been at the cutting edge of the historic preservation movement in America. That movement began its most dynamic growth with the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 to identify and protect cultural properties of local, state, and national historical significance. Cranbury’s Historic District, with its more than two hundred buildings, was added to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places in 1979 and to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Subsequently recognizing the intrinsic, historic connection between the rural village and its farmland, the town, in the decades around its tercentennial in 1997, preserved nearly three thousand agricultural acres, nearly two-thirds of its qualified farmland. Consequently, Cranbury’s story is not only about the course of New Jersey and American history but also about preserving the best of the past and applying it to enhance the quality of life in the present. A number of planners and conservationists have seen it as a model, applicable to other towns as well. Cranbury has used its past as well as the expertise, techniques, and resources of the present to avoid much of the sameness of appearance that afflicts so many modern communities. In its successes, it has built upon that history to create a sense of connectedness



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and to encourage and utilize a civic-mindedness that has enabled the community to face the challenges of the present and the future. Its historic character provides Cranbury with a unique sense of place, but, like its stately oak trees, the town’s history is rooted in the development of New Jersey and America. It is a story from the past, both distant and recent, that offers us a model and a hope for the future.

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ēĆęĎěĊ ĆĒĊėĎĈĆēĘ Long before Europeans came to New Jersey and settled in the area now known as Cranbury, the first people to occupy the region were Native Americans calling themselves the Lenape (Len-AH-pay). Two Indian trails, running north and south, converged at what is today the village of Cranbury near a freshwater stream, Cranbury Brook, a tributary of the Millstone River. Excavations by archeologists reveal stone implements and other evidence of human activity within the limits of the current township, dating back perhaps several thousand years. In central New Jersey, members of the Unami tribe of the Lenape, whose totem was the turtle, located their semipermanent campsites, perhaps like those in Cranbury, near streams or lakes for fresh water, fish, and game. In adjoining woods and meadows, women gathered edible or medicinal plants, berries, nuts, and tubers; men hunted birds, small game, deer, and bear. The Lenape cleared land, built lodges from saplings, bark, and mats and planted gardens for corn, beans, and other vegetables. Since the Indians lived most of their life outdoors, the seasons were familiar to them, but what was least expected and most disruptive was the arrival of a different people from across the sea.



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ęčĊ ĊĚėĔĕĊĆēĘ ĆėėĎěĊ The first Europeans to settle in the general region were the Dutch, who in 1624 established New Netherland, as a province, centered in Manhattan. Slow to colonize the area in what is now New Jersey, they did not establish a village there, in what is now Jersey City, until 1660. The Dutch viewed the area in northern New Jersey as a wilderness and engaged in a number of violent conflicts with the Indians. When the English seized the Dutch colony in 1664, they saw it as an inviting and profitable land. Paying attention to the concerns of the Native Americans, who became known as Delawares, they succeeded in ending the hostilities that had plagued relations between the Dutch and the Lenape for nearly two decades in the land the English renamed New Jersey. Having grasped a vast new domain from the Dutch in 1664, Charles II, the king of England, granted it to his younger brother, James, the duke of York. But James, after keeping New York as his own, soon gave away New Jersey to two loyal courtiers, Sir George Carteret and John Lord Berkeley. As proprietors, the two were expected to finance and manage the settlement of the new colony. They, in turn, anticipated obtaining considerable revenue from that source. Appalled at James’s action in so cavalierly dispensing with New Jersey, Colonel Richard Nicolls, English conqueror of New Netherland and subsequently military governor, wrote angrily that the duke had given away the most “improvable part” of the former Dutch colony.¹ New Jersey was divided in 1674 into East Jersey, which went to Carteret, and West Jersey, to Berkeley. Both of these proprietors, and their successors, encouraged the development of their provinces. In return for grants of land, they imposed on the colonists annual fees or rents called “quit rents,” which they expected would provide income for themselves and their heirs in perpetuity. But the settlers objected to paying such feudal obligations for land they believed they had purchased outright, and many vigorously resisted the proprietors’ attempts to collect the annual quit rents. The colony was also plagued for years with confusion and disagreement over land titles and ownership rights. Early settlers purchased land from a variety of sources. Sellers included legitimate agents of overlapping authorities, such as Military Governor Nicolls and Proprietors Carteret and Berkeley, as well as unscrupulous swindlers who sold



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property without authority and under false pretenses to unsuspecting settlers. Many colonists and other landowners reinforced their claim by also purchasing the same property from local Native Americans. When Berkeley, Carteret, and their successors tried to collect annual quit rents, they were confronted with rancor and even rebellion by settlers, whom the proprietors considered “tenants” but who believed themselves to be legal landowners with full and clear right to their property. Hoping to attract settlers already established in North America, the proprietors had, in addition to offering land, also provided a fairly liberal form of government, which included a general assembly chosen by adult male property owners, trial by jury, and freedom of religion, at least to all Protestants. Lured by such enticements, most of the early colonists coming to New Jersey arrived from Long Island and New England. After the first wave of colonists settled along the Passaic and Raritan Rivers, a second wave moved farther south. Middlesex County was established by the legislature on March 7, 1683. Many of these early English settlers with New England backgrounds centered their communities around the Congregational or Presbyterian church and the town meeting. There were also Baptist settlements such as those in Piscataway and Middletown and small numbers of Dutch and French Calvinists (the latter called “Huguenots”). Many of the Dutch settlers from Manhattan brought Africans as slaves with them. This spectrum of peoples provided the roots of diversity, which would become one of the hallmarks of New Jersey. East and West Jersey each had its separate owners, government, laws, and capitals, Perth Amboy and Burlington, respectively. Berkeley had sold his proprietary rights in West Jersey to fellow Quakers, members of an egalitarian, pacifist, Protestant faith. When Carteret died in debt, his widow, Lady Elizabeth Carteret, in 1682 sold the rights to East Jersey to a group of twelve investors from Scotland, England, and Ireland. Each investor quickly split his shares, resulting in what became known as the “twenty-four proprietors of East New Jersey.” As a result of differences in proprietors and in settlers, while West Jersey became identified with English Quakers, East Jersey, including Cranbury, soon became primarily identified with English, Scottish, Dutch, and French Calvinists. Continued contentiousness between the colonists and the proprietors over quit rents and land titles led the proprietors of both East and West Jersey to relinquish their right to govern, and in 1702, the Crown merged

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the two provinces and appointed a royal governor. Although now united, New Jersey continued to maintain the two provincial capitals, with the assembly meeting alternately in Perth Amboy and Burlington. The creation of the royal colony did little to settle the factious disputes between landowners and proprietors, and the protests periodically erupted into rioting.

ċĔĚēĉĎēČ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ, ΅Ί΍΋ Cranbury is one of New Jersey’s oldest towns, dating its founding back to 1697 in East Jersey. The origin of the English name of the town and the brook is unknown, but for more than a century, both were generally spelled “Cranberry,” leading to speculation, without any documentary evidence, that the name might have derived from cranberries that may have grown in the marshy land along the brook. Europeans probably arrived in the area as early as the 1680s, when the English owners in London began to encourage settlement deep in the interior of the new colony. Most of these initial European Cranburians came from other settlements in New Jersey, New York, or New England. Many of them sought better land along with milder climate. Cranbury dates the town’s history back to 1697, because a deed recorded in early 1698 stated that there were already at least one European settler and several structures on a site by Cranbury Brook.² As in much of Cranbury’s history, the first recorded European settlement there in 1697 was probably related to travel routes as much as the rich soil of its attractive farmland. Middlesex County had become a vital north-south route across the narrow waist of New Jersey, between the capitals of East and West Jersey and the cities of New York and Philadelphia. With the establishment of Perth Amboy, the proprietors in 1683 had begun planning a highway for “land commerce” between the two provincial capitals, Perth Amboy in East Jersey and Burlington in West Jersey and, equally as important, between the two major markets in New York and the new city of Philadelphia. This new road followed an old Indian path, the Crosswicksung Trail. Because its development began under Deputy Governor Gawen Lawrie, that highway became known as Lawrie’s Road, and it was designated by the proprietors as the Great Post Road over which the mail would be carried.



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In 1686, John Inian, an entrepreneur, established a ferry across the Raritan River from Piscataway to the south bank, which led to the founding of New Brunswick. He subsequently helped widen and improve an old Dutch route based on the Indians’ Assunpink Trail into the so-called Upper Road, eventually going from Elizabeth to New Brunswick, Princeton, and Trenton. Another former Indian trail that was eventually turned into a roadway, known first as the Lower Road and later as George’s Road, led south from New Brunswick to Cranbury and then on to Burlington.³ At about the halfway mark, both Lawrie’s Road and George’s Road met at the north bank of Cranbury Brook, and then combined into a single roadway heading south to Burlington and the Delaware River. At the time, small creeks, like Cranbury Brook, were simply forded or in the early period spanned by felling logs across the stream, sometimes with a railing as a guide along one side. Most early bridges in colonial New Jersey were built locally with timber and planks on top as flooring for carts and wagons. Presumably these techniques were applied to Cranbury Brook as well. The first written evidence of European settlement in what became Cranbury, as noted earlier, is a recorded deed of sale of land along “Cranberry brook,” which indicates that a European settler, Anthony Ashmore, was already residing there. In the deed dated March 1, 1698, Josiah Pricket (or Prickett, as it was spelled in some other documents), a butcher from Burlington, sold his property occupied by Ashmore in what is today Cranbury. The purchaser was John Harrison, an entrepreneur from Flushing, Long Island, who had begun buying land in the central part of East Jersey in the 1690s and soon became a major landowner in Middlesex County. Written by a clerk in the East Jersey Proprietors Office in Perth Amboy in a leather-bound ledger that reposes today in the vault of the state archives in Trenton, the verbatim recording of the March 1, 1698, deed is in seventeenth-century script and without punctuation. It reveals that there was already at least one English settler, Ashmore, and several structures established on the banks of “Cranberry brook.” It reads in part: To All Christian People to whom these presents shall Come Greeting Know yee that JJosiah [sic] Pricket of Burlington in ye province of West New Jersey .  .  . in Consideration of ye Sume of twenty & five Pounds

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Current silver money of ye province . . . payd by John Harrison of Flushing . . . Long Island . . . Confirm and Deliver unto ye John Harrison . . . all my Improvements or settlement lately by me made at a place Called Cranberry brook whereon anthony ashmore now dwells as well [as] all ye houses outhouses fences fencing . . . as well [as] all ye Labour & Improvements don[e] on ye sd [said] setlement before ye anthony ashmore possessed ye same.⁴

As the recorded deed indicates, there had already been structures and other improvements made on the land along Cranbury Brook before Anthony Ashmore (and perhaps Pricket himself ) lived there. From other sources, we know that Ashmore was an indentured servant, an apprentice carpenter finishing a nine-year contract, who had been hired by Pricket and who would shortly complete his indenture and acquire land of his own elsewhere.⁵ For Pricket’s property in Cranbury, Harrison paid 25 pounds sterling, English silver money. Since the deed affirmed that Ashmore already occupied the land and that there were already houses, outbuildings, fences, and possibly other “improvements” on the property at the end of the winter of 1697 – 1698, Cranbury dates its official origin back to 1697. John Harrison’s purpose in buying the land in Cranbury from Pricket in March 1698 was to maintain an inn for travelers along the roads being improved between both New Brunswick and Perth Amboy on the Raritan River and Burlington on the Delaware. In keeping with official British policy in New Jersey of being attentive to the Indians’ concerns and avoiding the hostilities that had plagued the Dutch, Harrison also purchased the land from the local Indian chiefs. It is also possible that the Indians had sought some compensation or that, given the extensive contestation over land titles and quit rents, he was seeking to reinforce his claim to full ownership of the property. In any event, in April 1698, Governor Jeremiah Basse granted Harrison authority for “making an Indian purchase [of the land] there for ye more quiet Enjoyment & .  .  . your more comfortable maintenance of a house of accommodation for ye use and benefite of travellers.” A year later, Harrison completed the purchase of the Cranbury property from two local sachems or chiefs of the Unami Lenape named Hughon and Lumoseecon. Significantly, this May 8, 1699, deed recognized the Indians as “the true owners” of the land. It began:



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To All Christian People and Indians. . . . Know yee that Hughon & Lumoseecon Indian Sachimakers [Dutch for sachems] & true owners of all ye parcel of Land lying betwixt Cranberry brook & milston brook in East New Jersey . . . [hereby cede that land and its appurtenances to John Harrison and his heirs or assigns] in Consideration & for full satisfaction of twelve match koats [coats of coarse wool] ten gallons of Rum four white blankets four [thread?]-water Coats four Ketles four Gunns seven pound of money ten shirts Eight pair of stockings ten pound of powder ten barrs of lead [for musket balls] Eight [iron] Indian Hatchets Sixteen knives forty tobacco pipes ten pounds of tobacco & four botles by John Harrison.⁶

Thus did the local Unami Lenape sell the land around Cranbury for seven pounds money as well as an assortment of useful or pleasurable items worth several more English pounds. This was somewhat less than the twenty-five pounds sterling that Harrison had paid Pricket for the property, but it was more than the value of the beads and other trinkets that the Dutch had allegedly paid the Manahatta Lenape in 1626 for Manhattan Island. While John Harrison may have planned an inn, the first tavern-inn at Cranbury Brook was actually built by George Rescarrick. A Woodbridge resident, Rescarrick had been interested since 1686 in establishing a “house of entertainment for strangers and travelers” on the trail and then the road at Cranbury Brook.⁷ On December 17, 1700, Rescarrick made his move, buying property there from John Harrison for “Sixtie pounds Currant money of new york.”⁸ The same day, the proprietors granted his request to settle on “a small tract of land at Cranberry Brook on the great Post Road . . . and keep a good house of entertainment for strangers and travelers . . . ,” ordering the surveyor general to survey and lay out for Rescarrick 300 acres “to run halfway between Cranberry Brook and Millstone Brook.”⁹ Subsequently Rescarrick moved to Cranbury in 1701 and built and operated a tavern-inn at the junction on the north bank of Cranbury Brook of Lawrie’s Road from Perth Amboy and George’s Road from New Brunswick.¹⁰ Running the inn must have been profitable. George Rescarrick’s will of 1714, inventoried in 1720 after his death, made ample provision for his wife, Mary, and their two children, George Jr. and Anne, and stipulated legacies to several other people, including “Rev.

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ċĎČ. ·. An artist’s rendering of Rescarrick’s or Predmore’s Inn at Cranberry Brook

and a stage wagon, predecessor of the stagecoach, in the early 1700s. (Drawn for this book by Clara Amend)

Edward Vaughan or whoever preaches the funeral sermon.” Presumably the family continued to run Rescarrick’s Inn, at least until the death of George Rescarrick Jr. in 1729.¹¹ Because Cranbury was the midpoint on the postal route across the province, postriders carrying the mail on horseback would set out for it once a week from Perth Amboy and Burlington. Each would stop midway at Cranberry Tavern to exchange mailbags, then return to their starting point, bringing new letters back with them. The tavern served not only as an inn, but also as a post house supplying fresh horses for the riders as well as for stage wagons along both Lawrie’s and George’s roads. In the process, the innkeepers became quite prosperous. An advertisement in 1732 for the sale of the house and land by Cranbury Brook formerly belonging to the late George Rescarrick described the property: “The House has three Rooms on a Floor, also a Barn, Stable and other out Houses, a large Orchard, about 60 or 70 Acres of Land cleared and within Fence, and two or three Hundred Acres of Woodland.”



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ĞĔĚēČ ćĊēďĆĒĎē ċėĆēĐđĎē Ďē ĈėĆēćĚėĞ, ΅΋Ά· It was on a rainy October day in 1723 that a strapping, seventeen-yearold lad from New England, Benjamin (“Ben”) Franklin, arrived in Cranbury on his way to Philadelphia to make a name for himself and earn his fortune. The son of a Boston soap and candle maker and his second wife, a schoolteacher’s daughter, Franklin had been apprenticed at fourteen to his half-brother, James, a printer who edited and published the weekly New England Courant. Because his older brother would not let him write copy for the newspaper, Ben, quick-witted and irreverent, had begun surreptitiously writing a series of satirical and iconoclastic letters to the editor under the pseudonym “Mrs. Silence Dogood,” which his brother published. In the resulting furor when his identify was disclosed, the ambitious young Franklin fled Boston in an attempt to become a journeyman printer and newspaper editor in New York or Philadelphia. Finding no openings in Manhattan, Franklin set off for Philadelphia across East and West Jersey with, as he later remembered, “very little ċĎČ. Έ. Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Franklin had

little money, so he walked across New Jersey, through Cranbury, in 1723 on his way from Boston to Philadelphia. An artist depicted the young traveler for a 1911 schoolbook.

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Money in my Pocket.” After a long and storm-tossed voyage across New York Harbor and down the Kill von Kull channel, he arrived at Perth Amboy, drenched and feverish. Drinking large quantities of water and spending the night at an inn, he felt somewhat better the next day. On the morning of Thursday, October 3, 1723, Franklin took Redford’s Ferry across the wide mouth of the Raritan River to South Amboy and then began what would be a long, fifty-mile, three-day walk along Lawrie’s Road to Burlington, where he planned to take a ferry down the Delaware River to Philadelphia. His walk did not begin well. “It rain’d very hard all the Day,” he recalled in his autobiography, “I was thoroughly soak’d and by Noon a good deal tir’ed, so I stopt at a poor Inn, where I staid all night, beginning now to wish I had never left home.”¹² A leading authority on the Autobiography has concluded that Franklin probably had not gotten farther than Cranbury, about twenty miles from South Amboy — and perhaps he did not get even that far — when he stopped stomping along the muddy road that rainy day.¹³ If Franklin had reached Cranbury, he may have found the inn there in a deteriorating condition, as George Rescarrick had died three years earlier. Soaked and shaking, Franklin did not present an impressive appearance. Shoes and stockings splattered with mud, his hat and working-class clothing drenched, the tired and perhaps still feverish teenage boy may have appeared to be a fugitive apprentice fleeing from his indenture. Franklin later concluded as much. “I cut so miserable a Figure too,” he recalled, “that I found by the Questions ask’d me I was suspected to be some runaway Servant, and in danger of being taken up on that Suspicion.”¹⁴ Whether the “poor inn” in which he stayed the night of October 3 – 4, 1723, was Rescarrick’s or not, seventeen-year-old Ben Franklin had to have gone through Cranbury at some point in his walk, because the road from South Amboy to Burlington, Lawrie’s Road, ran right through the village. On the morning of Friday, October 4, with the weather cleared, he set out at a brisk stride and, nearly twenty miles beyond Cranbury, reached Bordentown on the Delaware, where he stayed the night at the inn of Dr. John Browne, later called “Washington House.” With his spirits revived, the bright and friendly youth spent an engaging evening discussing religion with the sixty-year-old physician. The next day, Franklin walked some fifteen miles south to Burlington, where that evening he caught a boat headed downriver. He arrived around nine o’clock Sunday



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morning at the main wharf at Philadelphia. Tired and dirty from his journey, hungry, but with only “a Dutch [silver] Dollar and about a Shilling in Copper,” he found a bakery and bought three large puffy rolls. With a “roll under each Arm, and eating the other,” he headed into the city looking for lodging. He walked past a building that would become his lodging, and in the doorway, the owner’s daughter, Deborah Read, who would later become his wife, saw the arrival in Philadelphia of the rather bedraggled young printer who, neither could have guessed, would become not only a leading citizen of the city but ultimately of a new nation.

ĊĘęĆćđĎĘčĎēČ Ć ěĎđđĆČĊ Less than a decade after Franklin’s journey through Cranbury, Rescarrick’s Inn was taken over by John Predmore (or Pridmore, the spelling varies), who improved it and ran it from the 1730s to the 1760s. Predmore eventually also co-owned a stage coach line along Lawrie’s Road. A 1753 advertisement in the New York Weekly Gazette alerted passengers and those shipping merchandise from New York City to Philadelphia that, after leaving Manhattan on Mondays or Thursdays on a “commodious Stage Boat,” they would proceed to “Perth-Amboy Ferry, where there is kept a good Stage-Waggon ready to receive them, who on Tuesday and Friday Mornings, set out and proceed with them to the House of John Predmore of Cranberry, where there is kept a fresh Set of Horses and Driver, who immediately proceeds with them the same Day, to the House of Jonathan Thomas in Burlington,” where the next day they would board another stage boat waiting to take them to Philadelphia.¹⁵ In many early colonial settlements, the establishment of an improved trail or roadway led to a tavern-inn, which was sometimes followed by a cluster of houses, workshops, and other structures, becoming a village. So it was in Cranbury. In Cranbury, other businesses also sprung up to serve increasing numbers of travelers and settlers. Thomas Grubbs built a gristmill on the south side of “Cranberry Brook” in 1737 to grind the grains of a growing number of farmers. Isaac Debow established a blacksmith’s shop for shoeing horses and making iron implements. Completing the institutions of the early town, residents constructed a Presbyterian church up the hill from the mill in 1740.

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ċĎČ. Ή. A benevolent summer sun softly illuminates this picturesque portrayal

of the Cranbury Presbyterian Church’s parsonage and farm in 1833. (Courtesy of Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library)

The Presbyterian Church is the oldest existing institution in Cranbury. By at least 1734, the first settlers in the village had joined with those in the surrounding area to build a house of worship in what later became known as Monroe. Although the Cranbury Presbyterian Church celebrates 1734 as the founding of the congregation, it was not until 1738 that the local Presbyterians had separated from Monroe and 1740 when they erected a church in Cranbury. King George II in 1750 had granted the Cranbury Presbyterian Church a Royal Charter, a photocopy of which is today on display in the narthex of the church. The congregation obtained the interim ministerial services of the Tennent brothers, Gilbert and William, who, with their father, William Tennent Sr., were considered among the best educated and most dynamic American ministers of their day. The first permanent minister of the Cranbury Presbyterian Church was an evangelical friend of the Tennents, a ScotsIrish clergyman named Charles McKnight. In addition to serving the congregations in Cranbury and Allentown from 1744 to 1756, the Reverend McKnight was an early trustee at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). McKnight and his family lived in a farmhouse



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on the east side of what is now called Old Trenton Road. In 1759, after McKnight had left, the congregation purchased 150 acres as a “parsonage plantation” for a house and farm in the village itself. In 1788, the Cranbury Presbyterians erected a new and larger church building farther up the hill; it was rebuilt in 1839 in Greek Revival style. With subsequent modifications, that structure remains in use today as the First Presbyterian Church at 22 South Main Street.¹⁶ By 1790, the thirty-year-old parsonage or “manse” was in such dilapidated condition that the Reverend Gilbert Tennent Snowden refused to reside there. Instead, he built his own house at the north end of the village. In 1798, the manse was rebuilt on Parsonage Lane, located now at 10 Symmes Court, and it continued to serve that function until 1914, when a new manse was built at 46 South Main Street, whereupon the old parsonage became a private dwelling. A second house of worship was built in Cranbury in 1745, five years after the erection of the Presbyterian Church, when local Baptists

ċĎČ. Ί. Looking south along Lawrie’s Road, now Main Street, this woodcut from

an 1847 history of New Jersey depicts the First Presbyterian Church, on the right, and its schoolhouse, the Academy. The church building remains today, but the Academy, later Cranbury’s South School, was razed sometime after 1896. (Courtesy of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

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established their own place of worship. John Hight (sometimes spelled Hite), founder of neighboring Hightstown, was one of the original seventeen members. The small Baptist congregation had a meetinghouse and burial ground, both located just south of what is today West Park Place. Forty years later, in 1788, the congregation sold the meetinghouse and moved to a new church in Hightstown. The Baptist Church retained ownership of the burial ground in Cranbury for many years, but no trace of it remains. Some of the best guides to the early settlement of Cranbury are found in the histories of the early Euro-Americans who put down roots here in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Half a dozen of those early families were Dutch Calvinists with surnames such as Covenhoven or Conover, Gulick, Longstreet, Schenck, Snedeker, and Wyckoff (the names were often variously Anglicized from Dutch surnames such as Kouwenhoven and Langstraat). They came not directly from Holland but from former New Netherland, especially the farms on Long Island. Peter Wyckoff arrived in Middlesex County from Long Island sometime after 1734. His sons Arthur and Cornelius Wyckoff became farmers in Cranbury in 1760. Garret Schenck arrived in 1698. Garret Snedeker purchased several hundred acres, became a prosperous landowner, an elder in the Cranbury Presbyterian Church, and became known as “Gentleman Garret.” Several of the town’s old families were descendants of French Huguenots, as reflected in their surnames: Bodine (originally Bodin), Dey or Dye, Mershon (originally Marchand), Perrine (Perrin), and the Rue (la Roue). They did not come directly from Europe but, like the Dutch, arrived from other parts of the colonies. The Perrines had owned land on Staten Island and Long Island before Matthew Perrine and his wife, Isabel, settled in Perth Amboy. Their son, John Perrine, came to Cranbury and married Eleanor Wyckoff in 1770. Dutch and French settlers reflected a different heritage from the English, the dominant ethnic group in New Jersey, but there appears to have been very little political conflict among the groups. In mixed settlements like those in and around Cranbury, the Dutch Calvinists and French Huguenots were assimilated, and many joined with English and Scottish settlers as members and even elders of the Presbyterian Church. Cranbury, like New Jersey, was already demonstrating the mingling of diverse cultures and faiths.



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Most of the first English settlers in Cranbury migrated south from New England or Long Island to settle the lands made available by the conquest of the Dutch colony. These early Yankee families included the Applegates (sometimes spelled Applegets), the Mounts, the Stites, and the Wetherills. In the late 1600s, Thomas Applegate had settled in Middletown under the Monmouth Patent. Later, several of his descendants purchased land in Cranbury, settled there, and subsequently married with the Perrines, the Deys, and other local families, and three centuries later, many of them still live in Cranbury. The ancestors of William Stites of Cranbury had been among the first Puritans to arrive in New England. William’s grandfather, John Stites, had been the surgeon to an infantry regiment in the English Civil War and was one of the physicians who certified the death of Charles I after the king was beheaded in 1649. Several years later, when Charles II prepared to resume the Stuart monarchy, Dr. John Stites fled with this family to Massachusetts and then Long Island. Two generations later, the doctor’s grandson, William, and William’s wife, Mary Hall, moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. Their son, John, and his wife, Abigail, had a child they named Hezekiah. Born around 1730, Hezekiah Stites later became a prominent physician and established a practice in Cranbury. The Wetherills were another prominent English family in the Cranbury area. Their first acquisition in Cranbury came in 1713 when Thomas Wetherill, a prominent Anglican and owner of a blacksmith business in Piscataway, purchased 500 acres on the north side of Cranbury Brook. Later, he gave some of this property to his oldest son, Thomas Wetherill Jr., who built a house there on what is today Maplewood Avenue, then part of Lawrie’s Road. The descendants of another son, George Wetherill, later settled near the village of Cranbury. Among the town’s most noted Scottish settlers were the Barclays, descendants of Colonel David Barclay, a member of the gentry in Scotland. Two of his sons, Sir Robert Barclay and John Barclay, were proprietors of East Jersey. The descendants of John Barclay of Perth Amboy became the Barclays of Cranbury. Affluent and influential landowners, elders in the Presbyterian Church, they would, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also play a prominent role in Cranbury’s business community. Other Scots who came to Cranbury in the eighteen century were the Campbells, Duncans, and the Muirheads. Because preserved records of individuals tend to reflect the affluent,

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the literate, those who registered deeds and wills, and those whose families erected large, costly grave markers that have withstood the ravages of weather and time, details about many Cranbury families in colonial times are unavailable. Also because, aside from censuses, records tend to concern more influential or politically active groups, there is more material from that period about the affluent than the poor and middle class, more about men than women, and more about whites than blacks. Contributing to this lack of information is the fact that particularly in the early eighteenth century, many land deeds and wills in New Jersey were never officially registered or even written down, usually to avoid land title disputes with the proprietors. In some cases, the best that can be done is to list the names of some of the early eighteenth-century Cranbury families whose earliest histories remain largely undocumented, including, but not limited to the Ashfields, Conovers, Combs, Covenhovens, Dyes or Deys, Jewells, Reids, Stults (from the German Stoltz), Van Kirks, and Voorhees. Even less is known about specific African American families of the early eighteenth century who lived and worked in Cranbury. A census of Middlesex County in 1737 – 1738 indicated that there were 503 black slaves and that they made up slightly more than 10 percent of the 4,764 persons in the county. A decade later, in 1745, some 900 black slaves represented a similar percentage of the county’s population, which had also almost doubled. Unlike the South, plantations with large numbers of slaves did not exist in New Jersey, but many farmers and townspeople owned one or two slaves who were house servants, field hands, or skilled artisans. The wills or probate records of many prosperous Cranbury families in the eighteenth century included references to such “slaves” or “servants” identified only by a first name, and usually the names of those who would inherit the slave. Early on, several black families who had earned or purchased their freedom in New Netherland or New York moved to New Jersey and obtained land to farm, bringing with them agricultural skills from Africa and other parts of America. The 1790 federal census showed South Brunswick Township, which included part of Cranbury, had 10 free blacks and 216 slaves. In Cranbury, there were black slaves, indentured servants, and also some free blacks, the latter gradually increasing in number over time. Some of the early family names of free blacks in Cranbury included the Greens, Jenkins, Ditmars, Thompsons, Free-



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mans, Littles, and Valentines. Information gleaned from the Book of Communicants of the First Presbyterian Church between 1791 and 1833 indicates forty-two baptisms of free and enslaved blacks there. (Lidia, an adult slave, was baptized on October 15, 1791, the first slave listed.)¹⁷ More recent investigation of the Records of the Trustees of the church indicate many more black free and slave marriages, baptisms, and members in the First Presbyterian Church in those years, although it is unlikely that blacks participated freely in most of the social activities of the congregation.

ęėĆēĘĕĔėęĆęĎĔē Ćēĉ ęčĊ ČėĔĜęč Ĕċ Ć ĈĔĒĒĚēĎę Ğ Although as a Euro-American settlement, Cranbury began as a merely a collection of independent farmsteads around the brook, a town with its own sense of identity gradually emerged in the early 1700s. Several developments encouraged that growth: the emergence of its tavern-inn as a major stopover on the way between the Raritan and Delaware Rivers; for area residents, the construction of a gristmill to grind the grains of local farmers; and the building of a church, which dignified Cranbury’s status and attracted congregants from miles around. Transportation has always been important to Cranbury. The town owed much of its early growth to its position on Lawrie’s Road, authorized in 1683, which went from Perth Amboy to Burlington. Much of the route of Lawrie’s Road from Perth Amboy to Cranbury was close to what is today South River – Cranbury Road, Middlesex County Route 535, coming into the village through what is now Maplewood Avenue. A second highway arriving in Cranbury on what is now North Main Street came from New Brunswick via Dayton (much of it today replaced by U.S. Route 130) and was known first as the Lower Road and then as George’s Road, possibly for George Rescarrick, whose inn was located by Cranbury Brook at the juncture of the two colonial roadways. After meeting on the northern edge of Cranbury Brook, Lawrie’s Road and George’s Road merged, crossed the stream, and then, as a single roadway, the Lower Road, followed the route of an old Indian trail south to the Delaware. Thus, Cranbury, in addition to being the midpoint, was also at the fork of that Y-shaped colonial highway system

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ċĎČ. ΋. Cranbury and its roads in 1789, a modification drawn by Virginia H.

Swanagan of Ruth Berg Walsh’s 1995 adaptation from Christopher Colles’s A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, a 1789 survey considered the first road map or guidebook of the United States.

across the waist of New Jersey. Some early accounts called the Lower Road the “best road to Burlington,” and in August 1751, the Pennsylvania Gazette included an advertisement to travelers from Philadelphia about a “stage-waggon [sic] with awning kept by Fretwell Wright at the Blue Anchor in Burlington and John Predmore at Cranbury and James Wilson at Amboy Ferry” across from New York City. Despite the hopes and strenuous promotional efforts of the proprietors and of entrepreneurs such as Rescarrick and Predmore, Lawrie’s



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Road would not remain the primary route across New Jersey. Travelers preferred a newer and more westerly route, the Upper Road, also based on an old Indian path, that ran from Elizabeth and New Brunswick through Princeton, eight miles west of Cranbury, to Trenton. Similar to today’s State Route 27 and not far from modern U.S. Route 1, the Upper Road had fewer wide rivers or bays to cross, had more towns, and reportedly offered better and more convenient accommodations. Yet Lawrie’s Road remained the official post road until the mid-eighteenth century, when Benjamin Franklin, then joint deputy postmaster general for British North America, designated the more heavily traveled Upper Road as the new Post Road. Although Lawrie’s Road continued to serve much traffic, and Cranbury remained a logical place for many travelers to stop over, the primacy of the Upper Road through Princeton meant that Cranbury was somewhat off the beaten track. No matter which route a traveler might take, travel by horse-drawn stage wagon across New Jersey was arduous for much of the eighteenth century. In 1759, a young Quaker girl named Hannah Calder wrote a diary account of a hasty and trying journey she took with her family from Philadelphia to New York, including the trip along Lawrie’s Road through Cranbury. The Calder family’s journey had begun with a ferry up the Delaware from Philadelphia to Burlington. The next morning, they had arisen at four o’clock to begin a long ride to Perth Amboy. At dawn, their stage, pulled by four horses, headed north on Lawrie’s Road. Hannah Calder’s diary continued: By seven o’clock we arrived at Crosswicks, where we breakfasted at Douglas’s. Passed through Allentown. Took another passenger in, Dr. Noel. Dined in Cranberry at Prigmore’s [Predmore’s Inn]. Here we fell in company with the other stages, those from Bordentown. Took the [stage] wagon that goes from here to Amboy Ferry. Diversity of objects and company filled our minds with abundance of ideas. Saw the wrecks of two stages [stage wagons] occasioned by [drunken] drivers and passengers. Crossed the head of the famous South River, whose navigation benefits New York with wood. We arrived at Amboy Ferry by six o’clock [in the evening], little fatigued considering the length of the journey — fifty miles. The house was full of people, being the place for both stages. Notwithstanding the drinking and roaring appeared strange to us, it did not keep us awake all night.¹⁸

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Like many other travelers, Hannah and her parents could complete their trip north by boarding a sailboat ferry in Perth Amboy and arriving in New York City several hours later. The Calder family had pressed on, making the trip across New Jersey in one very long day. More leisurely travelers spent the night at Cranbury or another stopover tavern-inn on the road. Beginning in 1766, travel time between New York and Philadelphia was reduced by the introduction of an improved new vehicle advertised as the “Flying Machine,” based on the latest British stage coach. Still, because of the long distances along narrow dirt roadways through woods and fields in sparsely settled territories that travelers had to cross, whether in speedy, new stagecoaches or slow, teamster-driven wagons, it is easy to understand the importance of colonial tavern-inns and how profitable they could be on a major route. Early inns, such as Rescarrick’s, were very simple and Spartan by present-day standards. Travelers had to be prepared to share rooms, even beds, with other guests, if necessary. A set of house rules from the Cranbury Inn from the eighteenth century warned “No more than 5 to a bed.”¹⁹ Over time, the inns at Cranbury evolved from Rescarrick’s original rustic tavern to fancier establishments under John Predmore in midcentury and Campbell’s Tavern in the 1760s, and by a long line of other successors in the town, up to today’s Cranbury Inn. Colonial taverns served an abundance of food and drink. Many of the beverages were locally produced hard ciders, apple whiskeys, and ales, but there was also often a varied collection of imported wines, rums, and brandies. A Thanksgiving Day menu for the late eighteenth century included cider and rum to accompany a meal offering calf ’s head soup, roast goose and ham, turkey with relish, duck, pheasant, venison (hot or cold), eggplant, turnip, potato, and hominy. For dessert, diners could choose from a pyramid of cheeses, a variety of puddings, including Moravian sugar loaf, spreads of jelly, nuts, raisins, and apples. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tavern-inns were far more than places simply to buy a drink or rent a bed for the night. They also had important social and political roles. Rescarrick’s, Predmore’s, and their successors were places for local residents to meet friends, exchange news and gossip, read posted public announcements, discuss policy and politics, and receive mail. It was the area’s only official post office. Some colonial taverns had a seamier reputation, invit-



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ċĎČ. Ό. Cranbury gristmill as it may have looked during the

colonial period. (Drawn for this book by Clara Amend)

ing drunkenness, gambling, and loose morals. The New Jersey Assembly tried repeatedly to control what one court denounced as those “seminaries of vice.” Nevertheless, taverns continued to flourish at Cranbury and throughout the colony. Almost as important to Cranbury as Lawrie’s Road was the town’s first gristmill. Thomas Grubbs had built it around 1736 or 1737 on four and a half acres on the south side of Cranbury Brook, on the site of what are now Memorial Park and the old firehouse. A narrow sluiceway increased the velocity of the mill’s part of the stream, pivoting a large wooden paddle wheel, which in turn rotated two large, circular millstones that ground the grain between them. Later, in the early 1800s, a dam was built, creating a roadway over the brook and forming a millpond, which subsequently became Brainerd Lake. Although the original mill building and several successors were replaced after fires or deterioration, a gristmill operated on that site for nearly two hundred years until the last one was shut down in 1917. By that time, the final mill was a large, three-story wooden building, and the structure was used for other purposes until it was finally demolished in 1939.

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Grinding flour and cornmeal into food for humans and feed for animals, a mill was essential for an agricultural community, and it soon became the nucleus of Cranbury’s earliest business district. Farmers bringing their grain to the mill were ready customers for other specialized services, and soon many tradespeople had set themselves up in nearby businesses. By the 1760s, Cranbury had a general store, and the following decade it also boasted a “convenient shop for a cooper, and a still and a malt house.” Later these were joined by blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and other artisans.

ĉĆěĎĉ ćėĆĎēĊėĉ Ćēĉ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ The most heralded episode in the early history of Cranbury is Rev. David Brainerd’s mission among the Native Americans in the middle of the eighteenth century. Images of the young missionary preaching to the local Indians are today part of the village’s welcoming signs as well as the logo of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and the official seal of the township. The elm under which he preached was reportedly located on the southwest corner of what is now North Main Street and Bunker Hill. Some reports indicate the original elm was felled in 1867, others that it lasted until the early twentieth century. Several prominent sites in the town are named for the young missionary: Brainerd Lake; Brainerd Cemetery; and, in the nineteenth century, the Brainerd Institute, a private academy. Inspired by the challenges of the Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals that swept through the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, the young evangelist from Connecticut had bridled as a seminarian at the rigid orthodoxy of Yale’s theological seminary. In 1744, as a twenty-five-year-old minister, he began his work among the Indians. Preaching among remnant bands of Unami Lenape, first in eastern Pennsylvania and then in central New Jersey, he sometimes achieved spectacular conversions, although many converts eventually returned to their old beliefs. Still, just as Brainerd’s message changed the Indians in numerous ways, so their response changed him. As a result of his experience with the Native Americans, this extraordinary and empathetic



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ċĎČ. ΍. Municipal Seal of Cranbury

Township, adopted in 1997, emphasizes “Historic Cranbury” and includes images of David Brainerd preaching to the Indians as well as farmland, the gristmill, and the Old School, now the Town Hall. (Reproduced here with special permission of the Cranbury Township Committee by Resolution adopted July 5, 2011)

young man was able to transcend to some extent his own society’s restrictive concepts of race and culture.²⁰ Brainerd arrived in Cranbury from New Brunswick on Tuesday, June 18, 1745, jotting in his journal: “In the afternoon, came to a place called Cranberry, and meeting with a serious minister, Mr. [Charles] McKnight, I lodged there with him. Had some enlargement and freedom in prayer with a number of people.”²¹ After spending the night at McKnight’s home, a farmhouse, elements of which are still extant, located on the east side of what is today Old Trenton Road between Farmstead Way and Jefferson Road, Brainerd then rode some fifteen miles south to Crossweeksung (present-day Crosswicks) to preach to a group of Indians still living there. In his ministry, Brainerd preached that the kingdom of God was open to the outcasts of society through a compassionate Jesus, a concept that resonated powerfully with the discouraged Native Americans who were becoming outcasts in their own land. The numbers of his followers increased dramatically, possibly because of his preaching and because he helped reunite a shattered Indian community. Consequently, he and his Lenape converts decided in March 1746 to relocate about fifteen miles north of Crosswicks to some land the Indians had previously settled a few miles northwest of Cranbury village. In his own vision, Brainerd sought to create a distinctive settlement that was spiritually uplifting but also one that taught practical skills to the approximately 130 Indians

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who accompanied him. He described his purpose in his journal entry for Monday, March 24, 1746: My people [are] going out this day upon the design of clearing some of their lands above 15 miles distant from this settlement [Crosswicks], in order to their settling there [in or near Cranbury] in a compact form, where they might be under advantages of attending the public worship of God, of having their children schooled, and at the same time have a conveniency for planting, etc., their land in the place of our present residence being of little or no value for that purpose, and the design of their settling thus in a body and cultivating their lands (which they have done very little at in their pagan state) being of such necessity and importance to their religious interest, as well as worldly comfort, I thought it proper to call them together, and show them the duty of laboring with faithfulness and industry.

After trekking through the village of Cranbury, where Brainerd may have preached to them, the group arrived in April 1746 at their new home, some eighty acres located north of Cranbury Book at what Brainerd later wrote was “at or near Cranberry.”²² Today, that site that includes land on both sides of Perrineville Road in Monroe Township, just northwest of Cranbury. More than two centuries later, a plaque commemorating the site of Brainerd’s Indian mission, which he called Bethel, or House of God, was dedicated in 1977 in Thompson Park. Brainerd purchased the former Indian lands from their then current owners. He encouraged construction of log-built huts, a school, and mission church. He also expedited the productive growing and harvesting of corn, grain, and fruit, seeking not only to bring Christianity to the Indians but also to bring the Indians into eighteenthcentury society. The Cranbury Presbyterian Church strongly supported Brainerd. The missionary frequently and favorably cited the Reverend McKnight, as well as the Tennents, in his writing, and they, in turn, helped him and praised his work. The reception by some of the local inhabitants in Cranbury, as in Crosswicks, and elsewhere was decidedly mixed. Many distrusted the Indians and believed they should be encouraged to move westward. Some local property owners, as well as influential members of the Board of Proprietors, harassed Brainerd and his Christianized Native Americans (“praying Indians” as such converts were called) because

ċĎČ. ΅΄. Bible in hand and eyes heavenward, the young missionary

David Brainerd leaves newly converted Native Americans in New Jersey or Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Unfortunately, the artist for this 1891 Presbyterian publication portrayed the dwellings as teepees, which were typical of nomadic Indians of the Western Plains rather than the wigwams of the more settled Indians of the Eastern Woodlands. (Courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.], Philadelphia)



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the missionary might encourage the Indians to claim land rights and enter the ongoing disputes over land titles in the province. In April 1746, the month in which Brainerd and his Unami congregation had arrived at Bethel, he was denounced at a meeting of the Governor’s Council. At a time of widespread violence by British and French forces and their Indian allies in North America during the height of King George’s War, Cranbury resident James Blain claimed that Brainerd was creating an imminent danger. As the minutes indicated: The Council received information that tho’ for Six years past, no Indian men had lived near Cranberry, but Andrew & Peter . . . there were come forty fighting men of Indians to Live there; that, about three weeks before that information, one Indian came there who had a blue Laced Coat on, which, it was Said, he had got, as a present from the [French] Governor of Canada, and he Lodged in the Informant’s house one Night; and Some of the other Indians told the Informant that he was a King of some Indians on Delaware, and that he was come to View that place, and was to come and Settle there with his Indians, and that they expected they would be about Three hundred Indians there, in all, that the Neighbours there about were extremely Alarmed, at this Number of Indians Coming to Settle there, where it is Decreed impossible for such a Number to Live, without Stealing or Killing their Neighbours Creatures. That the Cause pretended, for Such a Number of Indians coming to Live there, is, that they are to be taught the Christian Religion, by one Mr. Brainard [sic] and for that purpose they are to build a Town, a Church, and a School house.²³

Blain also linked “Andrew,” one of the Indians living near Cranbury Brook, with a September 1745 disturbance caused by “Rioters” over land titles, and Blain warned the council that the warriors among Brainerd’s large band of Indians would provide additional strength for future “Rioters” in disputes over land titles. Brainerd frequently complained about the use of this and other tactics by his enemies. Some involved fear and threats to the local community designed to stir up sentiment to drive him and his congregation away. Others encouraged dissension among his Indians by planting false rumors that Brainerd planned eventually to sell them into slavery in England. In his journal, Brainerd described the problems he faced at Bethel: “There being at this time a terrible clamour raised against the



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Indians in various places in the country, and insinuations as though I was training them up to cut people’s throats. Numbers wishing to have them banished out of these parts, and some giving out great swelling words, in order to fright and deter from settling upon the best and most convenient track of their own lands, threatening to molest and trouble them in the law, pretending a claim to these lands themselves, although never purchased of the Indians.”²⁴ By the winter of 1746 – 1747, Brainerd’s health had seriously deteriorated, probably the result of tuberculosis, then known as consumption. Sensing that he was dying, he left the mission village for the last time in March 1747. By then Bethel contained 160 Indian residents, 37 of whom had been baptized and took communion; 53 of whom were children in the school. Eighty acres had been planted with various crops, and the women were being trained to use spinning wheels. Brainerd’s younger brother, John, also a Yale graduate, succeeded him at Bethel. David Brainerd died in October 1747, at the age of twenty-nine, in the Massachusetts home of Rev. Jonathan Edwards. It would be Edwards, one of the most important theologians in American history and later the third president of what became Princeton University, who would publish Brainerd’s journal. Its publication, and Edwards’s own work that was inspired by it, would have major impact. They stimulated the furthering of the Great Awakening as well as the expansion of the American missionary movement at home and abroad. John Brainerd continued to head his brother’s village-mission. Although he had important support from some local residents, from the Presbyterian mission society, and from the British Lords of Trade, he also faced relentless antagonism from those seeking to invalidate the Indians’ land titles and evict the converts. No one was able finally to protect the Indian lands at Bethel from a court decision, probably based on a fraudulent will, which led to their eviction and the abandonment of Bethel in 1755. The hostility of the chief justice, the pressure of land claims and speculation, and the hysteria surrounding the French and Indian War combined to deprive these and other New Jersey Indians of their land and drive them westward.

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ĘĔĈĎĆđ đĎċĊ Ďē ĈĔđĔēĎĆđ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ Throughout most of the eighteenth century, Cranbury was a small, rural village focused on serving main transportation routes and the needs of a growing agricultural hinterland. By 1789, the village consisted of some twenty-five buildings, fifteen of them private homes, stretched out north and south of the brook on the main roads. By then there were two taverns, a mill, a general store, several small other businesses, plus the First Presbyterian Church and Baptist meetinghouse. It was a fair-sized village for its time and place. Princeton, eight miles away on a busier roadway and the site of the College of New Jersey, had about fifty buildings. Such small villages were typical of the predominantly agricultural society of the Mid-Atlantic and New England colonies of eighteenthcentury British North America. The rich soil of New Jersey’s inner coastal plain, where Cranbury was located, provided bountiful harvests. Early settlers endured difficult conditions, but they also found a land of surprising abundance. An English immigrant named James Johnstone, who settled in Spotswood in southern Middlesex County in 1685, provided an early and exuberant account of the area in a letter to his brother. “I have taken up a part of my land 9 miles from Amboy and 4 miles from Piscataway . . . where there are exceeding great plains without any timber, where there is excellent Gunning for deers and Turkies of which there is a great plenty and easily shot. . . . In the summer there is plenty of Fruits, Peaches, Walnuts, Chestnuts, Strawberries and another berry like Currents. . . . I and all who have come over have kept our health very well; our food hath for the most part been Venison we got from the Indians, which I like exceedingly well. The Indian Corn, Indian Beans, and Pease are pleasing grains. We have good fishing.” Gradually the early settlers augmented the game and Indian vegetables with European grains and domesticated animals: pigs, cows, goats, and sheep. From hogs came fresh pork as well as smoked bacon and ham for the winter; from cows, milk and other dairy products. Sheep provided wool for homespun cloth and mutton for meals. Wheat, corn, oats, and barley supplied families with bread, porridge, and home-brewed ale. From the orchards, apples, peaches, and pears provided fruits to eat and regular or hard cider or brandies. Indeed, because available water was often deemed unhealthy, milk and cider, beer and ale, were major beverages in the colonial era.



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Family farms were largely self-sufficient, producing most of the family’s foodstuffs, and the market was mainly local. Other needs and wants were obtained through trade with neighbors or purchase in the village. The majority of Cranbury’s residents were farm families who came to town only once or twice a week to attend church, make an occasional purchase, and catch up on local news. Such farmers grew a variety of crops for their own use, often brewed their own cider and ale, and stored large quantities of meat, game, and fish for themselves and their families. Although it was possible to sell surplus produce to the nearby markets in New York and Philadelphia, ground transportation was frustratingly slow and expensive, and farmers without direct access to cheaper water transportation were at a disadvantage. Rural family life revolved around the home, with families producing by themselves or with the help of neighbors almost everything they required. Many of the early homes were just cabins built with logs from local trees. Not until water-powered sawmills were established did frame and clapboard structures become readily available. Inside, the furnishings of most homes were sparse, simple, and usually homemade: wooden chairs, tables, and wood and rope beds. Until iron forges arrived in the region, tin was the most common metal for dishes, mugs, and utensils. Forks were rare among rural dwellers until the late eighteenth century. Most farm families ate with a knife and wooden spoon from a wooden serving platter called a trencher. Physically, average Americans were smaller in the eighteenth century than today, in large part because of their diet. They ate much less protein, much less meat. Although people were generally smaller, families were larger, and some had as many as ten or twelve children. But infants and children often died of disease, and many women perished in childbirth. It was a hard life, and death was ever present. Amid such a Spartan setting, people worked long and hard. Fields had to be cleared and plowed, crops planted, tended, and harvested. Men built and repaired houses, barns, stables, fences, and outhouses. Those with special skills, such as working with wood, iron, or leather, took on extra work, particularly in winter when farm work eased. Women and daughters sometimes aided with the planting and harvesting and usually had their own vegetable gardens and fed the chickens, but most of their work was done in the house. Inside, the daily routine focused on the preparation of meals and the care and upbringing

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of the children. Using the spinning wheel and other implements, the women produced homespun cloth from wool or flax; they also made most if not all of the family’s clothing. The women were responsible for the washing and mending. Most domestic life took place around the fireplace, where the meals were cooked and which was usually the only really warm room in winter. Large families were an asset, because they eased some of the labor of the husband and wife. Yet even with the entire family at work, some tasks required additional help. Friends and neighbors assisted with the building of a new house or barn and the taking in of the harvest, occasions that provided the opportunity for a celebratory social occasion. Most clothing for rural and village people was made at home. But in addition to the homespun and woven clothing, that is, clothing totally made and dyed at home, for Sunday use, a prosperous farmer or tradesman usually owned at least one imported suit, or a suit made from imported cloth. Such a suit came with breeches that ended just below the knees. A man’s calves were seen as attractive then. They were clad in form-fitting stockings that descended to the buckled shoes. Outdoors with such a suit, men wore three-cornered hats. They kept their hair long, usually tied in a bow in the back. The more fashionable men, particularly in the cities, powdered their hair white; the rich had wigs. Most women wore caps, but affluent women could also afford fancy hats. Women also had their Sunday dresses, copied from European models and often made with imported material. They usually owned a good pair of shoes, and other finery for special occasions. Upper-class women, especially in the cities, had elaborate dresses with low-cut bodices and side skirts and many ribbons, but in rural areas, women generally dressed comfortably in informal rather than fashionable clothing. Through countless hours at spinning wheel and loom, many Cranbury women and girls made all the wool and linen cloth needed by their families and traded surplus cloth to neighbors or local merchants. Such women’s work often led to communal spinning “bees” and quilting “bees,” where groups of women would work and talk together. Old newspapers provide some sense of life in Cranbury in the eighteenth century, but as today, much of the reporting focused on sensational events. The in September 1731 reported a near-fatal accident involving “Daniel Parine” (undoubtedly Perrine) of “Cranberry” while he was sharpening his knife on the flint



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of his flintlock firearm. The knife accidentally sparked the powder in his gun, firing the weapon and discharging “a Bullet and seven swan shot” into his wife, just above her hip. Fortunately, as the story explained: “The Force of the Shot was deadned by her Quilt Petticoat so that the Bullet and Wadd was taken out but an Inch in the Flesh near her Back. Her life was at first dispaired of she being with Child and near her Time; but it is now hoped that her inwards are not hurt, & that she may recover.” Another potentially disastrous event in Cranbury, a “melancholy accident” on a Sunday in February 1769, was reported in the New York Journal. The home of Joseph Rue and his family burned to the ground while he and his wife were out. Luckily a neighbor saw the smoke and rescued the Rue children, who had been left alone in the house. Newspapers in New York and Philadelphia frequently carried paid advertisements of rewards for runaway slaves and indentured servants in the region. A few were from Cranbury. In 1764, John Rees, David Williamson, and Patrick Hanlon all offered rewards for slaves who had escaped from local farms. One of the runaway slaves, a thirty-year-old woman named Lucy, reportedly spoke fluent Dutch; another fugitive slave was described as “a Spanish Negroe Man named John Jesk.” It is not clear whether a runaway named Philip had been a slave or an indentured servant.²⁵ In 1770, Robert M’Ghee of “Cranbury,” as the newspaper spelled it, reported the loss of two male servants, presumably indentured servants, named Harbackkuch Eastwood and John Nickles, and an African slave named Ham. Joseph Riggs of “Cranberry” offered three pounds in 1773 for the return of a twenty-year-old Irish indentured servant named John Letteridge, who had fled on July 26, “a few days after being bought from the Amboy gaol from a Philadelphian from whom he had [previously] run away.”

ĈĔđĔēĎĆđ ĉĎĘĕĚęĊĘ Ćēĉ ęčĊ ǴĈėĆēćĚėĞ ćėĆĜđǵ The Board of Proprietors’ periodic challenges to land titles and their attempts to collect quit rents contributed to a series of demonstrations and social protests in the 1740s and 1750s. These pitted small, landholding farmers and their political allies against the proprietors supported by many of the gentry and top government officials. Seeing such

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disturbances as threats to law and order, the royal governor and most of his council denounced such demonstrations as “riots.” However, the protesting “rioters” were also land-owning voters, and they often won support from their elected representatives in the colony’s assembly. Cranbury never had a “riot” — the closest in the county appears to have been in Perth Amboy — but it did experience an incident that grew out of the conflict. The so-called Cranbury Brawl, which took place at Predmore’s Tavern on August 4, 1751, was really more of an argument than a brawl, but its causes were more complex than they appeared. The incident began on a Sunday after church services, when John Hite, a Middlesex County constable, claimed he saw Lewis Morris Ashfield and his companions drinking at “John Pridmore’s [sic] at Cranbury” and heard them “Swearing in a most Profane manner.” Hite delivered a reprimand and ordered them to respect the “Lord’s day and the King’s Laws.” “God Damn you with your King’s Laws,” Ashfield allegedly responded and then, according to Hite, tried to assault the constable.²⁶ Wielding his whip, Ashfield, however, accidentally struck Hite’s wife. In reparation, Ashfield offered her thirty shillings, which she eventually accepted, but charges were still brought against him. There were many eyewitnesses but just as many disagreements, especially about what Ashfield had said. The intensity and duration of the controversy that resulted from the “Cranbury Brawl” can be best understood by examining the political background behind it. Lewis Morris Ashfield was a member of the provincial gentry whose family owned property in both Cranbury and Perth Amboy. One of the most prominent persons in the colony, he was also a member of the Board of Proprietors. Because of his political ambitions, Ashfield had run afoul of the royal governor, Jonathan Belcher, who accurately saw him as an emerging rival. A year before the episode in Cranbury, Ashfield had obtained a royal appointment to the Governor’s Council, despite Governor Belcher’s opposition. Apparently Belcher seized upon the brawl at Predmore’s to discredit Ashfield, having him indicted by the grand jury of Middlesex County and then, as a result, dismissing him from the council. But because Ashfield produced five sworn affidavits from eyewitnesses denying that he had ever said anything like “God Damn you with your King’s Laws,” the proprietor was not imprisoned. Hite could produce only his own associates as witnesses, and many suspected that the governor had put him up to the charge.



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Governor Belcher may have hoped to obtain a conviction by playing on the intensified anger against the proprietors in the wake of the latest land riots. But if so, he miscalculated. His superiors, the Lords of Trade in England, ruled against him on the case in 1753. Although they acknowledged that Ashfield’s behavior had been “indiscreet,” they declared that the Cranbury incident did not justify removing him from an office to which he had been appointed by the Crown. Rebuking Governor Belcher for acting “very irregularly,” London reinstated Lewis Morris Ashfield to the Governor’s Council.

ęčĊ ĆĒĊėĎĈĆē ėĊěĔđĚęĎĔē Ćēĉ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ New Jersey was only gradually drawn into the dispute with Great Britain that led to the War for Independence. Its politicians were best known for their refusal to levy taxes and for issuing paper money on credit, which had left New Jersey, on the eve of the American Revolution, the most heavily indebted of the English North American colonies. But in the final crisis over the power of Parliament and the rights of Americans, Middlesex County was one of the centers of patriot sentiment in the state, and some Cranburians were activists in the movement for independence. After the Boston “tea party” and the British imposition of the “Intolerable Acts” upon Massachusetts, New Jersey patriots in 1774 formed a Committee of Correspondence, as other states had, to foster coordinated action. Soon each county had a similar body. Cranburians were among the founders of the Middlesex County committee. Delegates from the committees met in New Brunswick and formed a New Jersey Provincial Congress, bypassing the established government in New Jersey, and sent delegates to the first Continental Congress in protest against British actions. In July 1774, the New Jersey Provincial Congress, including John Wetherill and Jonathan Combs, Cranburians in the Middlesex County delegation, denounced “all other modes of taxation [other than by their own representatives] in the Colonies, by a British Parliament, under whatever name or form . . . [as] arbitrary and oppressive.”²⁷ When the Second Provincial Congress met in New Brunswick in January 1775, four Cranburians were delegates: Charles Barclay, Stephen

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Pangburn, Lucas Schenck, and John Wetherill. Later, Wetherill was chosen to represent Middlesex County in the New Jersey Assembly. David Chambers, who owned a large farm and orchard in Cranbury, was made a colonel in the militia. All were members of the Cranbury Presbyterian Church. Indeed, so many Presbyterians, already a dissenting sect against the established Church of England, became activists against British rule that some other New Jerseyeans referred to the Revolution as “the Presbyterian rebellion.”²⁸ Former Cranbury minister Charles McKnight was one of those Presbyterians active in the Revolution. After marrying and starting a family in Cranbury and being elected a trustee of Princeton University, the Reverend McKnight and his wife and children had moved to Allentown in 1756 and a decade later to other pastorates in Monmouth County. During the Revolution, in addition to his pastorate at Middletown Point (today’s Matawan), he served as a chaplain in the Continental Army and was wounded by a British saber blow at the Battle of Princeton in January 1777. Inflamed by McKnight’s agitation and fiery sermons (he admonished his parishioners that God would take care of their liberty if they would take care of the Redcoats), the British burned down his church and took him and his youngest son prisoner. They confined them both in such wretched conditions in one of their filthy prison ships in New York Harbor that the son perished and McKnight became so debilitated that he died in 1778 shortly after the British released him. McKnight’s eldest son and namesake, Charles McKnight Jr., who had been born in Cranbury in 1750 and spent his first six years in the parsonage there, also took part in the war. He had graduated from Princeton, a classmate of James Madison, and then studied medicine in Philadelphia. In 1775, when the fighting broke out, the twenty-five-year-old surgeon enlisted in the Continental Army Medical Corps. His skills were quickly recognized, and within two years he was promoted to senior surgeon and wound up as the army’s chief hospital physician in the Middle Colonies. After the war, he became one of the most prominent physicians in New York City and a professor and trustee at Columbia College. Decisions about war and independence split Americans throughout the thirteen former colonies into patriots (sometimes called “Whigs”) and loyalists (called “Tories”), while many colonists remained undecided, neutral, or simply apathetic. Individuals made choices based on ideology, material interests, social or political rivalries, or religious or ethnic



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identification, not to mention individual expediency and opportunism. Among religious congregations, Presbyterians and Congregationalists were most often supporters of independence, whereas most Anglicans sided with the Crown. Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics tended to split on the issue, and the pacifist Quakers tried to remain neutral. Cranbury, predominantly Presbyterian, was overwhelmingly patriot, as were Middlesex and Essex Counties. During the winter of 1776 – 1777, British soldiers occupying New Brunswick seized grain and livestock from farms throughout Middlesex County. Several militiamen from the southern part of the county, whose surnames suggest that they were Cranburians or related to old Cranbury families, subsequently reported losses to foraging Redcoats while the militiamen were away on duty. Sergeant William Davison said the enemy had driven off with his wagon and two horses. Private Cornelius Dehart reported that British raiders had stolen “seed wheat and rye” from his barn and warmed themselves over a fire built from his “rail fence.” Captain James DeBow suffered the loss of cattle, hogs, clothing, and the partial destruction of his house. Cranburians Peter Stults, Isaac Snedeker, and John Wetherill also filed claims for substantial losses to foraging Redcoats. In response to such raids, Middlesex County formed a number of fifty-man cavalry companies, one of which was headed by militia captain Robert Nixon, a Cranbury resident who ran a tavern in Hightstown. Captain Nixon and a dozen troopers from his unit known as the “Cranbury troop of horse” were out on patrol on March 12, 1777, when they came upon a foraging party of British regulars from the New Brunswick garrison. With a burst of gunfire, the Cranbury troopers drove off the Redcoats and consequently retrieved seventeen head of cattle that the British had seized from local farmers. This was one military engagement, albeit a minor skirmish, that occurred in Cranbury during the American Revolution. Cranbury’s most important role in the Revolution came in the summer of 1778, when the Continental Army arrived in the village on its way to the Battle of Monmouth. In June of that year, after France had officially joined an alliance with the newly declared United States of America and declared war on Great Britain, some 10,000 British and Hessian soldiers under General Sir Henry Clinton left Philadelphia and began a long march across New Jersey for New York City. George

ċĎČ. ΅΅. The route of George Washington and his army through Cranbury, and the British Army’s route through Allentown on their way to what became known as the Battle of Monmouth, June 1778. (Original map by Virginia H. Swanagan)



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Washington and the Continental Army with 12,000 troops moved out in a parallel track hoping for a chance to strike a destructive blow on the enemy column.

ČĊĔėČĊ ĜĆĘčĎēČęĔē ĆėėĎěĊĘ Ďē ĈėĆēćĚėĞ While the British Army marched through Mount Holly and Allentown, New Jersey, and then headed northeast to Monmouth Court House (today Freehold) on its way to Sandy Hook, Washington and his main body of Continentals crossed the Delaware at Coryell’s Ferry (near Lambertville), and marched to Hopewell. There Washington dispatched an Advanced Corps of 1,500 light infantry under a young French nobleman, the Marquis de Lafayette, accompanied by one of Washington’s trusted aides, twenty-one-year-old Alexander Hamilton. Heading toward the British forces, Lafayette and his men arrived in Cranbury on June 25, 1778, the marquis writing to Washington that “the Detachment is in a wood covered by Cranberry Creek and I believe extremely safe.” Lafayette established his headquarters — as General Washington also would the next day — in the fine home of the prominent physician Hezekiah Stites and his wife, Mary, atop a hill at the south end of the village of Cranbury. (The original structure no longer exists; the present house at 53 South Main Street was built some seventy years later in the 1850s.) A native of Elizabeth, the fifty-two-year-old doctor had established his practice in Cranbury and built quite a reputation. Not just a country doctor, Stites had joined the Medical Society of New Jersey in 1767, a year after its founding, and was elected as its president in 1775. He also served in a legal function as one of Middlesex County’s three justices of the peace, local magistrates. Alexander Hamilton left Stites’s house before midnight on a scouting mission, but Lafayette spent the night, leaving the village with his light infantry very early the next morning, heading east toward the moving British column.²⁹ General George Washington and the main body of the Continental Army arrived in Cranbury from Kingston around nine o’clock on Friday morning, June 26, 1778. Down the wagon road between the village’s two dozen structures came the commander-in-chief riding a magnificent white stallion that he had just received as a gift from New Jersey

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governor William Livingston. Washington was surrounded by his life guards, a group of mounted dragoons, followed by his generals, and behind them a very long line of troops, artillery, and supply wagons. The weather was not auspicious for Cranbury’s historic moment. The army had been beset by a steady rain frequently accompanied by heavy thunder and sharp lightning. Because of the wet condition of his soldiers, the dampness, and an oppressive heat wave, with temperatures soaring into the high nineties, Washington decided, as he later reported to Congress, not to proceed farther that day but to encamp in Cranbury in order to provide the troops with rest and sustenance. Thus more than 8,000 Continental Army soldiers — infantry, cavalry, artillerymen, and their support units — encamped in Cranbury and the surrounding area on June 26. Like Lafayette, who had left Cranbury several hours earlier at dawn that day, Washington established his headquarters in the Stites house as a guest of the doctor and his wife. How did George Washington appear to the people of Cranbury in 1778? He was forty-six years old, tall (a little over six feet), stately, and reserved. He usually held his forceful temper in check, and, with an emphasis on dignity and leadership, he helped create an atmosphere of respect and even admiration.³⁰ While at Cranbury on June 26, 1778, Washington made some very important decisions and issued some highly significant directions for what would become, only two days later, the Battle of Monmouth. He sent out half a dozen directives that concentrated the various other units of the army and of the New Jersey militia, which had become widely scattered by the erratic route taken by the enemy column. Washington also increased the Advanced Corps to 5,000 troops and put it under the overall command of General Charles Lee. (No relation to the Lees of Virginia, Charles Lee was a retired British officer who settled in America before the Revolution and become the most senior of Washington’s generals.) According to the diary of James McHenry, a surgeon with the troops, the Continental Army left Cranbury and marched several miles east on the Englishtown Road on the morning of Saturday, June 27, 1778. Washington and his force headed to Penelopen (now Manalapan), where they encamped along Manalapan Brook in what is today Monroe Township. Three miles ahead at Englishtown, General Charles Lee, with two brigades, joined Lafayette and took command of the now



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ċĎČ. ΅Ά. Arriving at the head of his army, an angry George Washington confronts

subordinate General Charles Lee and his retreating soldiers in this 1858 engraving of the beginning of the Battle of Monmouth. With Washington in command, the Americans repulsed numerous British attacks and won the day. (Library of Congress)

enlarged Advanced Corps with orders from Washington to attack the rear of the British column the next day, June 28, 1778. The Battle of Monmouth, some fourteen miles east of Cranbury, proved to be one of Washington’s finest victories. Charles Lee’s initial attack upon the British rear guard as the enemy column had marched east from Monmouth Court House almost resulted in disaster for the Americans. Lee was unable to coordinate his disparate units, and the British launched a furious counterassault, driving back and then pursuing the outnumbered Americans. At that moment, Washington, riding ahead of his main body, arrived and, finding the Americans retreating, angrily demanded an explanation from General Lee. Then taking charge, Washington rallied the dispirited troops, deployed the main body of his army on the high ground, and personally directed the American forces for the rest of the day. On the British side, General Henry Clinton, angrily seeking a victory against the “rebels,” personally supervised ferocious frontal assaults and also ordered stealthy attempts to outflank the Americans. But time and time again the American soldiers — whites, blacks, and a few Native Americans — held their ground against the finest regulars of the British

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Army. A two-hour artillery duel in mid-afternoon in which Mary Hays, later celebrated as “Molly Pitcher,” took part was a last desperate attempt by General Henry Clinton to defeat Washington and the Continental Army. The British cannon fire failed to dislodge the Americans from their positions, and a simultaneous flanking maneuver by the Redcoats was repulsed by the blue-coated Continentals. The entire British counterattack failed to achieve what Clinton wanted — a devastating blow against the Americans. The British Army began to withdraw, and the day ended with bloody fighting between Continentals and crack British units: the Grenadiers, the Royal Highlanders, and the Coldstream Guards. The battle ended at dusk with the Americans in control of the field, and the British falling back and establishing camp for the evening. Washington intended to renew the assault at dawn, but the British set false campfires and moved out silently near midnight heading for the seacoast, where the Royal Navy would ferry them to New York City. The Americans had suffered as many as 500 or 600 killed or wounded; the British, doing most of the attacking, suffered perhaps 1,000 casualties. The Battle of Monmouth demonstrated that the Continental Army, newly trained by a former German soldier, a self-proclaimed baron and aristocrat, Friedrich “von” Steuben, had stood up well against the best of the British Army, and the Americans had remained in control of the field at the end of the day. The battle enhanced Washington’s stature and bolstered the morale of the Continental Army, the Congress, and patriots throughout the land. Monmouth was the last major battle of the war in the North. For the next three years, the British maintained their control of New York City, and Washington and his army kept watch on them. The British and their loyalist allies sent out raiders, and skirmishes took place, especially in northern New Jersey and upstate New York, but no major battles there. Instead, London turned to a southern strategy, seeking to win over at least the South. But even that would eventually fail. In 1781, three years after the Franco-American Alliance, Count de Rochambeau, and 4,000 French regulars, together with Washington and 3,000 Continentals, staged a quick march south to trap a major British Army contingent under General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. Marching through New Jersey for the first time, the French troops marveled at its bounty and beauty. They spent the night of August 31, 1781, camped around Princeton, eight miles from Cranbury village. The



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Abbé Robin, a chaplain, waxed eloquent at what he described as the “vast and beautiful plains, which the hand of the geometrician seems to have smoothed to a level. These plains are adorned with large and handsome edifices; the country abounds with orchards, fields of wheat, rye, barley, Indian corn, and flourishing woods.”³¹ Feeding Rochambeau’s army of 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 horses required enormous quantities of bread, corn, fruit, and fresh meat for the soldiers, as well as oats, hay, and straw for the animals. The French Army paid in silver coins, unlike the Continentals with their devalued paper currency, or the British Army with their promissory notes or foraging raiders. Local farmers and merchants rushed to supply the Frenchmen’s needs and receive the much prized silver livre coins in return. “Provisions are brought into our camp from all quarters,” Abbé Robin wrote while at Princeton. Surely some of those bounteous provisions came from the farms and orchards of nearby Cranbury. Within three months, the 8,000-man British Army force under Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, London’s will to continue the war collapsed, and serious peace negotiations began. Less than two years later, Britain recognized American independence in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Cranbury had played its part in the American Revolution. The town had been a major contributor to patriot sentiment and leadership in Middlesex County. It had sent delegates to the new provisional and state governments. Local men and women supported the cause with both goods and services. The town contributed men to the Middlesex County militia, the local defense force, and to the New Jersey regiments in the regular Continental Army. The remains of eighty veterans or other patriots of the American Revolution are buried in Brainerd Cemetery of the First Presbyterian Church at 22 South Main Street in Cranbury. Like other townspeople and farmers in New Jersey, the people of Cranbury suffered the costs of war when armies battled across the state, enemy soldiers participated in looting and pillaging, and loyalist bands engaged in acts of terrorism and revenge. There were times early in the war when the chances of success seemed dim. But during the darkest days of the Revolution, which were in Tom Paine’s words “the times that try men’s souls,” the spirit of independence had remained alive in the town of Cranbury. Beyond those dark days lay Washington’s victories at Monmouth and at Yorktown, and British recognition in the peace treaty of 1783 of the independence of the new United States of America.

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Two centuries later, in 2006, the U.S. Congress officially designated large parts of New Jersey, including Cranbury, as “The Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area,” acknowledging the key role that the state played in the American Revolution. More recently, in 2009, the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route of 1781 from Rhode Island to Virginia, via New Jersey, was designated a National Historic Trail, yet another testament to the contribution of New Jersey to the nation and to the value of preserving historic sites related to American history. Though the American Revolution was the end of an era, it did not mean an immediate dawning of a new age. Americans now remember the rebellion with great pride and commemorate it as the birth of a nation; few recall the suffering and devastation it caused. New Jersey, in particular, was exhausted. Recovery took time; the next revolution would not be political, but social and economic. The young republic was on the verge of major transformations, fueled by economic and industrial innovations in a new century.

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Today, the village and farmsteads of Cranbury still reflect much of the architecture and character of nineteenth-century America. At the beginning of that century, however, Cranbury was still a small, unincorporated rural community and not yet an official township, although it was unofficially recognized as a village with its adjoining farmsteads. Consequently, it lacked its own local government, tax collection, and polling place. The villagers and most of the farmers lived in what was officially South Brunswick Township, while some farmers in eastern Cranbury resided in South Amboy Township and, after 1838, in the newly created Monroe Township. Eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century farm families considered themselves residents of the place if they recorded their marriages and baptisms at its church or ground their flour at its mill. Although few if any farmers had homes in the village, they therefore still thought of themselves as Cranburians. In 1789, Cranbury village itself had only twenty-five structures, most of them related to businesses. The first federal census of 1790 listed 1,817 persons as residing in South Brunswick Township. Separate census categories noted 439 free white males ages sixteen or over, 361 free white boys under sixteen, 178 free white females, 10 free blacks, and 218 slaves.¹ An unknown portion of the population, possibly a quarter



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and composed mostly of farming families, would have lived within the boundaries of what is now Cranbury. Beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, Cranbury entered a period of rapid growth as the new nation, particularly the North, was transformed by a transportation revolution involving roads, canals, and railroads, a subsequently expanding market, and the beginning of an industrial revolution. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, the sleepy rural village of Cranbury grew from a handful of dwellings around a gristmill and a church into a proper modern town, with enough economic and population growth to have its own schools, newspaper, bank, and business district. It was a community that still served local farmers and travelers, but increasingly also participated in a dramatically enlarged marketplace. Some sense of the magnitude of change between 1789, when the village had only two dozen structures, and the town that had emerged by the 1830s was apparent in A Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey, which in 1834 listed Cranbury as containing “a Presbyterian church with cupola and bell, an academy, a grist mill, 2 tanneries, 3 taverns, 2 stores, and from 60 to 80 dwellings.”² A decade later in 1845, chroniclers of the state provided details indicating even greater growth: “The village is principally built on a single street and contains 2 Presbyterian churches, 2 academies, 73 dwellings and about 620 inhabitants [about 450 residing within South Brunswick Township and 170 in the eastern section in Monroe Township].”³ Such a transformation, more than a tripling of the number of buildings in the town between 1789 and 1834, was typical of the new nation that in the early nineteenth century experienced extraordinary technological innovation, rapid growth, and a veritable market revolution. Because of the steamboat, the turnpike, the canal, and the railway, productive farmers could ship their produce to previously distant markets. ċĎČ. ΅·. Opposite: As this section of an 1850 published map of Middlesex County

shows, cartographers were still using the spelling “Cranberry” in the midnineteenth century. For this rural area, the surveyors identified by name homes and other buildings in the village as well as farmsteads in the surrounding countryside. The forked pattern of the two main highways remained the same as in 1789, but in 1850 the Camden & Amboy Railroad cut across the southeastern area through Cranberry Station Depot. (From the Collection of the New Jersey State Library)



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Increasingly, the self-sufficient farm of the eighteenth century gave way to a family enterprise attuned to the pulse of a larger marketplace and the expanded opportunities for profit. Added cash in farmers’ hands fueled the impressive growth of small rural towns like Cranbury, as local businesspeople rushed to tap the expanded purchasing power of the farmers. Society was changing, and as Cranbury grew in size, it changed as well. In the eighteenth century, rural New Jersey towns had typically been made up of some tavern keepers, specialized artisans and tradespeople, a doctor, a minister, and some small farmers. There might also be some of the gentry, gentlemen farmers, and some slaves and servants. In the nineteenth century, however, new social groups came to the fore, especially new businesspeople, entrepreneurs responding to opportunities created by expanding transportation networks and markets. They included merchants and shopkeepers and, in the second half of the century, more prominently, bankers and manufacturers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the family farmer and town artisan, though still important, would be overshadowed by those who prospered in a dynamic new market economy driven by commercial agriculture, industry, and finance.

Ć ėĊěĔđĚęĎĔē Ďē ęėĆēĘĕĔėęĆęĎĔē The eighteenth century’s self-sufficient farms were soon eclipsed as enterprising farmers gained access to faraway markets through a transportation revolution. Although New Jerseyans sometimes grumbled about living in a state whose “two greatest cities” lay just outside its boundaries — even in colonial times, New Jersey had been called a “barrel tapped at both ends” — there were many advantages to the situation. The transportation revolution enabled many of New Jersey’s farms and businesses to grow prosperous while selling to New York and Philadelphia and beyond. With the new federal government encouraging a national marketplace and inventors developing improved means of transportation, the nation, it seemed, was on the move. The turnpike, the freight wagon, stage coach, and the steamboat all joined forces in a transportation network of speed and comfort that would have amazed an eighteenth-century colonist,



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whose roads were little more than cleared paths through the countryside and whose streams and rivers had to be crossed by ferry, forded, or gone around. While in the eighteenth century, the journey from Philadelphia to New York had taken three to four days, in the early nineteenth century, it would take only a single day, thanks in large part to turnpikes, toll roads run for profit by stockholder-owned corporations under stategranted charters. In place of the dirt trail or roadway, the central section of such turnpikes consisted of a rock roadbed over gravel, topped, using the macadam method, with a hardened surface. In the great boom in turnpike construction between 1804 and 1820, which linked the major cities in a network of surfaced roads, about two dozen turnpikes were built in New Jersey. One of the earliest was built by the Trenton and New Brunswick Straight Turnpike Company. Quickly supplanting the old meandering Upper Road to the west, the turnpike provided a nearly straight, direct, surfaced road, with drainage ditches and wooden bridges, over the twenty-five miles between those

ċĎČ. ΅Έ. Stagecoaches had

come a long way since the “stage wagons” of the early eighteenth century. They roared along the macadam turnpike that went through Cranbury in the early nineteenth century. With the advent of the railroads, stagecoaches and stage wagons were confined to other roles such as shuttling people between the village and the railroad depot for 15 cents, as indicated in this advertisement in the Cranbury Press of January 7, 1887. (Courtesy of the Cranbury Press/ Packet Publications)

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two towns. Following a route similar to modern-day U.S. Route 1, this new turnpike brought the main line of highway traffic across the waist of New Jersey a bit closer to Cranbury than the old Upper Road. A decade later, Cranbury benefited directly when in 1816, the Bordentown and South Amboy Turnpike Company created a rival route between Philadelphia and New York by paving a new, straight turnpike close to the old route of Lawrie’s Road. From Bordentown on the Delaware to Cranbury, the turnpike followed a route somewhat similar to today’s U.S. Route 130. From Cranbury north to South Amboy, its route was close to modern Middlesex County Route 535, including parts of Main Street and Maplewood Avenue in the village. While improved passenger stagecoaches roared along the new paved turnpike, many teamsters driving freight wagons preferred the old Lawrie’s Road, in part to avoid the tolls, speeding coaches, and heavier traffic of the turnpike. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, rival stagecoach companies, the Union Line and the Resides Line, their coaches fitted with new independent suspension systems, competed for business along the new Bordentown to South Amboy Turnpike. Years later, Cranbury resident David Chambers Lewis recalled that in the early 1800s “fourhorse stages ran through Cranbury, carrying the passengers between New York and Philadelphia. .  .  . The competition [between the stagecoach lines] made exciting times with us boys.”⁴ By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the turnpikes had gone bankrupt. They and other roads, whose maintenance had been relegated to local communities, had deteriorated so badly that they were relegated primarily for local use, while longer-distance traffic turned to new forms of transportation: canals and railroads. The Delaware and Raritan (D&R) Canal, completed in 1834, passed some eight miles west of Cranbury village on its route from Trenton to New Brunswick. Canals’ slow-moving barges pulled by mules on a towpath offered the cheapest fare for heavy, bulk commodities such as anthracite from the Pennsylvania coalfields or flour, grain, cornmeal, and feed, some of it produced in Cranbury. If the first third of the nineteenth century was the era of turnpikes and canals, the rest of the century belonged to railroads, which were faster and more convenient. Once again New Jersey led the way, and Cranbury was directly affected by this innovation in transportation. The Camden and Amboy (C&A) Railroad, chartered by the state in 1830,



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became one of the first railways in the nation. Its tracks ran through the eastern sector of Cranbury, and a mile east of the village itself, a depot was created called Cranbury Station, which still exists today. The C&A railroad was the brainchild of John Stevens, an engineer from Hoboken, who initially surveyed the route in 1812 and was the first to see its possibilities. Two of his sons were on the founding board of directors, and one of them, Robert L. Stevens, was chief of engineering and first president of the C&A. Robert Stevens was one of the great innovators of railroad development. He introduced prototypes of modern spikes, rail connectors, and ties. The use of wooden ties, one of his most important innovations in railroad design, occurred almost serendipitously. Stevens had planned to secure the parallel iron rails with spaced stone blocks on each side. When delivery of the blocks from New York’s Sing Sing prison dribbled in too slowly, he decided to substitute rectangular wooden pieces that would extend from rail to rail and prevent them from shifting by filling in the spaces between the lighter weight wooden ties with crushed stone, a method used, thereafter, for more than a century and a half. Stevens is also credited with inventing the modern T-shaped iron rail, which quickly became standard. A small section of the track, including some of the stone blocks from Sing Sing prison that anchored the first rails of the Camden & Amboy, is on display at the Cranbury Museum. The new railway company linked South Amboy with Bordentown in 1832 and with Camden two years later. Workers laid its tracks through the farmlands of eastern Cranbury. The railroad used horses to pull the wheeled cars for the first year until September 1833, when a British-built, wood-burning steam locomotive called the John Bull arrived and made its first trial run. Its only mishap that time was the decapitation of a hog that had strayed onto the tracks. Later a “cow-catcher” was attached to the front of the engine to shove aside such straying animals. A much more serious accident occurred two months later in Cranbury on November 8, 1833, when a rear passenger car on a train speeding south from Amboy at between twenty and thirty-five miles an hour suddenly plunged off the tracks and overturned. It was later determined that an overheated axle had broken. Two or three of the two dozen passengers in the wooden open-sided car were killed or mortally injured, and all the other the passengers in the car suffered injuries. It was a horrible scene on the farmland of eastern Cranbury, as the dead and injured

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from the open-sided car were scattered about. A physician aboard and passengers from other cars gave aid as best they could. Leaving the empty, derailed car, the train chugged on four miles to Hightstown Station, where the dead and seriously injured were removed. A number of prominent individuals had been aboard the train. Shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt had been in the derailed car and suffered a broken leg. U.S. congressman and former president John Quincy Adams, a passenger in another car, escaped injury, but was horrified by the disaster. In his diary, Adams wrote an account of the episode that is believed to have been the earliest recorded train accident in which passengers were killed. “Blessed! Ever Blessed by the name of God!” the New Englander wrote that night, “That I am alive, and have escaped unhurt from the most dreadful catastrophe that ever my eyes beheld.”⁵ Although Hightstown was the station closest to Cranbury on the C&A line at the time of the accident in 1833, Cranbury Station was opened by the railroad a few years later. The new railway stop was connected by dirt road to Cranbury village one mile to the west, and a stage wagon or coach shuttle was soon carrying passengers between the station and the village center. Heavier wagons carried farm produce to the depot at Cranbury Station. Despite several accidents, the C&A railway was a financial success from the start. Most of its profits came from passengers eager to take advantage of the speedy new means of conveyance. The trip between Amboy and Camden was cut from one day to seven hours. The John Bull continued to run between Camden and Amboy, including stops at Cranbury Station, until it was retired from service in 1866, augmented and then replaced by more modern locomotives.

ēĊĜ ĒĆėĐĊęĘ ċĔė ĆČėĎĈĚđęĚėĊ Ćēĉ ćĚĘĎēĊĘĘ Under the impact of the transportation revolutions, farmers were gradually changing from self-sufficient family farms to a larger proportion of cash crops for market and, in many cases, from mixed crops to specialized production. Early farms had produced a variety of grains, vegetables, fruits, meats, and dairy products to feed their households and perhaps trade or sell some surplus locally. With the coming of the railroad and larger markets, some had specialized in grains like wheat. But



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ċĎČ. ΅Ή. Made in England, the original John Bull locomotive pulled trains across

New Jersey and through Cranbury Station on New Jersey’s first railroad, the Camden & Amboy, beginning in 1833. This photograph shows it with a cab and a cowcatcher, which were later additions. The John Bull locomotive is now in the Smithsonian Institution. (Library of Congress)

specializing was risky because in such a broad market, prices could fluctuate widely from year to year. To reduce risk, many farmers continued or resumed mixed farming. Many New Jersey farmers then turned almost entirely to truck farming, producing fruit and vegetables for regional commercial sale, and meat, butter, eggs, and other perishables locally. By the 1860s, for example, a number of local orchards shipped carloads of baskets of peaches and apples by rail from Cranbury Station to the wholesalers in Jersey City and then on by ferry to retailers in New York. As farmers became more affluent and as they devoted more of their produce to market, they bought increasing amounts of supplies from rural towns. The changes in agriculture as well as transportation contributed to the economic growth and prosperity of Cranbury. Main Street, the commercial district of Cranbury village, lined with both residences and businesses, developed rapidly in the nineteenth century. Beginning as a small nucleus of workshops and stores near the gristmill in the midto late eighteenth century, this district took on a new life and importance by the middle of the nineteenth century.

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ċĎČ. ΅Ί. This charming scene of men and women picking peaches in “Cranberry”

was part of larger drawing accompanying a full-page story entitled“The Supply of Peaches from New Jersey for the New York Market” that appeared in the September 9, 1865, issue in the widely read, national periodical Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

In the early 1800s, at the onset of Cranbury’s period of economic expansion, Main Street was still dominated, as it had been the previous century, by the shops of independent artisans and craftspeople. Jacob Hagerman and Matthew A. Rue were wheelwrights; William Newton had a blacksmith’s shop; James Clarke and Aaron Lane owned tanneries located on Cranbury Brook near the mill. By 1840, Cranbury also had a hatter, Isaac Van Arsdale; a cabinetmaker, Jefferson Halsted; a tailor named Page; and three shoemakers or “crispins,” Isaac Brokaw, Jacob Snedeker, and Harmon Conover. Theirs were small establishments with a master craftsperson and one or two apprentices. The village also had three general stores in 1840 owned by merchants Benjamin M. Clarke, Garret G. Voorhees, and John Dey. The village in these years also had at least three hotels and as well as several taverns, all catering especially to travelers along the roads and turnpikes. Dating back to the eighteenth century, many of these taverns



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not only served food and drink but also had some accommodations for travelers with rooms for themselves and stables for their horses. The most historic, and the only one still functioning today, is the Cranbury Inn at its original location, 21 South Main Street. In the late seventeenth century, two post houses there were owned by Richard Handley, who was also a militia cavalry officer. In 1800, newly wedded Peter Perrine and Hannah Disbrow Dey built their home across the front of the two post houses. Eight years later, Captain Timothy Horner, who had owned a tavern on North Main Street, bought the property and renamed it the United States Hotel. Abraham Voorhees, who at that time ran a stage line to Cranbury Station, succeeded Horner as its owner in 1833.

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ: Ć ēĎēĊęĊĊēęč-ĈĊēęĚėĞ ĆėĈčĎęĊĈęĚėĆđ ęėĊĆĘĚėĊ For modern-day Cranbury, architecture is one of the most tangible legacies from the past. The town looks as if it might have been lifted clapboard and curbstone out of New England, right down to the white columned church and its lofty steeple. The view is a Currier & Ives original. The homes and the small stores and shops are only two stories high. The white frame homes that line Main Street provide graceful, ever-present reminders of the history of the town, indeed of the state and the nation. Adding to the town’s lingering ambience of a nineteenth-century village, many of the structures have been researched, restored, and registered as historic dwellings, with accompanying outdoor plaques providing the year of construction and often the name of the original owner or local builder. The various architectural styles, the majority of the historic buildings being from the 1830s to the 1880s, provide insight into the values, ideals, and life of people in the past, and are recognized as such in the Historic District that comprises most of the original village. Only parts of a barn and a few other structures in Cranbury date back to the colonial period. There are, however, a handful of structures, elements of the Cranbury Inn, and some houses and farmsteads that still exist from the late 1700s. Rural homes were generally simple and unpretentious in those days and emphasized form over design. Almost all of these, however, were extensively remodeled in the nineteenth century. The plain, functional style began to change dramatically after the

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American Revolution, first in the cities and eventually also in country towns like Cranbury. Cranbury’s Historic District is dominated by two particular classical styles popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America: Federal style, popular in the 1780s through the 1840s, and Greek Revival, in vogue from around the 1820s through the 1860s. Both shared certain classical features. These were not rigid types because, particularly in rural towns like Cranbury, where styles arrived later than in the cities, local carpenter builders often mingled elements from different styles.

ŽŽ¡Š—ဖ¤®—Žœ¦£Ž£ှŒနၹၿႀၸ£¤œၹႀၼၸ£ဿ Several Cranbury houses were built during the federal period and reflect the formal, classical elements of that style, which typically included windows and doors in symmetrical rows, an elliptical or semicircular fanlight over the front door, corner boards, a frieze, and a dentil trim, a molding of small projecting rectangular blocks beneath a cornice or the roof line. A number of original Federal-style houses have been modified over time with various additions such as porches, side rooms, and additional trim, and they are best described as vernacular Federal, with later alterations. The Walking Tour guide published by the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society indicates that noteworthy examples include Rev. Gilbert Tennent Snowden House at 107 North Main Street, dating from 1794; the House of Doctors at 6 North Main Street from about 1800; and the part of the Cranbury Inn at 21 South Main Street that was built in Federal style in 1800.⁶ Affluent, educated, and well connected, the Reverend Snowden was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church from 1790 to 1797. Refusing to live in the old and then deteriorated parsonage near the church, Snowden around 1794 built a comfortable, new house at the other end of town. (The official parsonage remaining at the southern part of town near the church was ultimately remodeled sometime after Snowden’s death.) Mixing Colonial and Federal styles, Snowden’s house was part of his farm, first 150 and then 200 acres, stretching west from Main Street between what are today Plainsboro and Dey Roads. Inheriting the estate when Snowden died of yellow fever in 1797, his son, Isaac Snowden, dwarfed the original house by building a very large addition on the



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ċĎČ. ΅΋. The Snowden House: Federal-style home with Victorian porch. The

original part of this North Main Street dwelling, the smaller section on the right, was built in 1794 by Rev. Gilbert Tennent Snowden in the then new Federal style. His son, Isaac, built the large addition, which was augmented by Commodore Thomas Truxtun. (Photographed for this book by John W. Chambers; courtesy of Laura Bowering Mullen)

southern side in 1805, creating an impressive, Federal-style mansion. Later in the nineteenth century, when Victorian styles predominated, the Federal-style appearance of the front of Isaac Snowden’s addition was largely overshadowed by a sweeping curved porch roof with fancy wrought-iron work.⁷ Another prominent example of a Federal-style residence in Cranbury is the two-story, whitewashed brick house at 6 North Main Street, sometimes referred to as “The House of Doctors.” Built around 1800, it has served sequentially as the home and office of half a dozen physicians: Doctors Clow, Hunt, Sanbury, Lott, and Voorhees in the nineteenth century, and Dr. H.  C. Symmes in the early twentieth century. The door on the right was the entrance to the office. The portion of the house facing Main Street dates back to the early 1800s, although the rest of the building has been altered, most recently in 2011.

••••••••••••••••••••••••• • • ĆĆėĔē ćĚėė ċđĊĊĘ ęčėĔĚČč • ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ĆċęĊė ĐĎđđĎēČ • ĆđĊĝĆēĉĊė čĆĒĎđęĔē • • Legend has it that the Snowden house was the refuge of Vice • • President Aaron Burr when he ƪed from Manhattan in July • 1804, following his indictment for fatally wounding Alex• ander Hamilton in a duel. According to the long-standing • folklore, Burr stayed overnight in the 107 North Main Street • home of his friend, retired commodore Thomas Truxtun • (often erroneously misspelled Truxton), a naval hero from • the Revolution and celebrated commander of the frigate • USS Constellation during the undeclared war with France in • 1798–1799.* • The legend, however, is erroneous. Burr did spend the • night of Sunday, July 21, 1804, in Truxtun’s home, but that • home was in Perth Amboy, not Cranbury. From 1795 to 1807, • the commodore resided there in a Ƥne High Street mansion, • • “Pleasant View,” which looked over Raritan Bay. Still, Burr, then the vice president of the United States, did • • ƪee through Cranbury after being indicted for the fatal duel • with Hamilton. On Monday morning, July 22, 1804, Burr, and • his black servant, Peter Yates, hastily left Perth Amboy with • Truxtun in his Truxtun’s carriage and were driven twenty • miles south to Cranbury. There, at one of the inns or livery • stables, Burr bid farewell to Truxtun, hired a wagon, and was • driven on to Burlington, where he and Yates caught a ferry • to Bristol, Pennsylvania. He arrived in Philadelphia on July • 24 on a long journey to South Carolina, where Hamilton was • unpopular, dueling was not illegal, and Burr could feel se• cure at the estate of his daughter and her husband. • Four years later, Truxtun purchased the former Snowden • • mansion at 107 North Main Street and moved to Cranbury. • The erroneous legend seems to have emerged from confu• sion over the facts that Truxtun did harbor the fugitive Burr • ••••••••••••••••••••••••• †

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••••••••••••••••••••••••• • • overnight and that Burr ƪed through Cranbury, but it over• looked the fact that Truxtun had not moved to 107 North • Main Street in Cranbury until 1808, when he purchased the • house and 87 acres for $6,000. Indeed, although the com• modore enhanced and enjoyed what he called his “Cran• • berry Place,” enlarging it to more than 200 acres with Ƥelds • of corn, wheat, rye, ƪax, vegetables, and an orchard of some • 500 apple trees, his wife, Mary, did not. The Truxtuns, used • to long absences while the husband was at sea, both found • it diƥcult to adjust to his retirement. Mary was accustomed • to managing the home and the commodore was used to in• stant obedience by those under his command. Their feuding • reached a peak when he refused to pay for a pair of shoes she • purchased from a Cranbury cobbler and posted a notice in • the Trenton newspaper that he would not be responsible for • his wife’s debts. In 1812, at Mary’s insistence, in part perhaps • to move their numerous marriageable daughters closer to • urban society, he sold the Cranbury house and moved the • • family Ƥrst to a mineral spring and popular spa near Moores• town and later to Philadelphia. Although the Cranbury house apparently had no direct • relationship to Aaron Burr’s ƪight, the dwelling at 107 North • • Main has always been recognized as one of unusual architec• tural and historical signiƤcance, if not because of the ƪeeing • vice president then because of the prominent pastor, Gilbert • Tennent Snowden. It stands today on a long, tree-shaded lot, • a Ƥne, if modiƤed, example of the Federal style of architec• ture in Cranbury. • • * For examples of the legend printed as fact, see “A Blight Left by Aaron • Burr: Ill Luck after His Stay in Old New Jersey House,” New York Sun, Apr. 6, • 1902; Eleanor N. Shuman, “Ill-Fated Cranbury House Sheltered Burr,” TrentoJune 18, 1962. • nian,Eugene S. Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation (Baltimore: Johns Hop• kins University Press, 1956), 236; Aaron Burr, Aaron Burr: Political Correspon• dence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr, ed. Mary-Jo Kline, 2 vols. (Princeton, • N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:886–890. • •••••••••••••••••••••••••

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¡ŽŽ–Ž¨“¨Š—¤®—ŽှŒနၹႀၺၸ£¤œၹႀၾၸ£ဿ In 1840, a water-powered sawmill was erected next to the grain gristmill on Cranbury Brook, and this made it easier for residents of the expanding town to obtain lumber to build new houses and add to existing residences. As classical Greek Revival architecture was the dominant new style in America at the time the town was rapidly developing in the antebellum period, it, or adaptations of it, became the predominant architectural form in historic Cranbury. The typical Greek Revival house in the village is a two-story, wood structure with the peak of the roof running parallel to the street. The front doorway is usually framed in a columned portico with rectangular sidelights and transom. Indeed, sometimes the Greek Revival entranceway was added onto older structures. Other features include pilasters, a simple paneled frieze, cornice, and corner boards, and, as with some older styles, symmetrical rows of double-hung, six-by-six pane windows. Some noted examples of the Greek Revival style include the Cranbury Museum at 4 Park Place East, which was built around 1834 as the home of Dr. Garret P. Voorhees, and the First Presbyterian Church at 22 South Main Street, which was built in 1839. As with other styles and houses, some of the originally Greek Revival dwellings in Cranbury were later modified by subsequent alterations and restorations in accordance with later styles and trends, but the classic appearance still dominates. Cranbury builders continued to erect Greek Revival homes long after Gothic Revival and other styles became predominant elsewhere. Perhaps this reflected architectural conservatism, or a desire to build houses that fit into the existing streetscape, or simply the time lag before new styles reached small towns.

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ ĈčĚėĈčĊĘ As previously noted, the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church, founded in 1734, created its own building in Cranbury in 1740. The church flourished, but became increasingly crowded as worshipers came from throughout the area, as far as Manalapan, Dayton, and Dutch Neck. In 1838, twenty-nine members, including three elders, left after trying for several years to persuade the trustees to enlarge the building.



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The group founded the Second Presbyterian Church of Cranbury on the opposite end of the village on Westminster Place between North Main Street and Maplewood Avenue.⁸ There was initially some acrimony between the two Presbyterian congregations, particularly when the trustees of the new Second Presbyterian Church asked for their share of the funds and real estate of the First Presbyterian Church. When this request was twice rejected, they appealed to the state legislature without success.⁹ Despite this disputatious beginning, the congregants of the two Presbyterian churches did develop a harmonious relationship. The second church opened its doors temporarily to fellow worshipers from up on the hill when the first church decided to erect a new, Greek Revival – style building in 1839 and enlarge the structure twenty years later, and the first church reciprocated when the second church was later enlarged. Membership lists suggest that subsequently most new members joined whichever Presbyterian Church was nearest to them. The longest-serving minister of the Second Presbyterian Church was the Reverend Joseph S. Van Dyke, who was its pastor for nearly thirty years, from 1869 to 1897. The Second Presbyterian Church building no longer exists, but when it was completed in 1838 it was a large Greek Revival structure with a steeple. A chapel was built nearby in the following year on the corner of Westminster and North Main Street. A sexton’s house was erected in the 1840s between the chapel and the church. Westminster Cemetery was created along Westminster Place to Maplewood Avenue. In 1869, the original chapel was sold to John Petty, who moved it diagonally across the street to 85 North Main Street to form the front part of his smaller, existing house. On the site of the old chapel, the Second Presbyterian Church then erected a new, larger building, Wesminster House, that housed both a Sunday School and a chapel. It had its own short, squat steeple. The manse for the Second Presbyterian Church was a large white clapboard house located on what is now Park Place West behind the current post office. At the time, a row of stately elm trees lined the path to the parsonage, which undoubtedly had its own farmland. More than seventy years later, in late 1916, when a large modern house, then only seven years old, became available at what is today 10 Bunker Hill, the trustees purchased it as the new manse from John J. Bradley, an executive at the American Spice Mill downtown. The house at 10 Bunker Hill remained the manse of the Second Presbyterian Church until 1935.

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ċĎČ. ΅Ό. The Second Presbyterian Church, left rear, and its Sunday School and

Chapel building, right, no longer exist. This postcard photograph showing them from the side was taken around 1907 from across North Main Street at the corner of Bunker Hill (then Elm Street). The white cross at the southwest corner of the intersection marks the spot where, according to local legend, David Brainerd preached to Native Americans under a large elm tree. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

Methodism also has a long history in Cranbury. Its roots go back to the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Methodist itinerant preachers occasionally rode through the area. The first ordained Methodist bishop in America, Francis Asbury, the organizer of American Methodism, visited Cranbury several times between 1772 and 1790. A century later, in 1897, Mrs. Mary Cox, Methodist daughter of James Perrine, a Baptist, and his wife, a Methodist, remembered her father talk about hearing Bishop Asbury preach while staying at the house of Perrine’s parents on George’s Road just outside the village.¹⁰ Not until the Second Great Awakening in the antebellum period, however, did Methodists establish their own church in town. Drawing on a Hightstown pastor, Cranbury’s Methodists began by meeting in the home of local members in 1845. Increasing numbers of worshipers led to the purchase of a site at 21 North Main Street, where construction of a church building commenced in 1848. Services began there when the lower level meeting room was completed the following year. A parsonage for the Methodist minister was obtained a few blocks away at



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6 Westminster Place at the corner of newly named Wesley Place. It remained the Methodist parsonage until 1919. Later, between 1866 and 1868, the upstairs sanctuary and a steeple were completed for what is today the United Methodist Church of Cranbury. In the early twentieth century, the original cone-shaped steeple was blown over in a storm and was replaced by the current, shorter and more substantial steeple and bell tower. After World War II, a Sunday School was added at the rear of the building. In 1959, that structure was enlarged to include a second-story Fellowship Hall.

ĜĔĒĊē Ćēĉ ėĊċĔėĒ In the early 1800s, the dynamic economic growth in America, the expansion of the middle class, and a religious revival, the Second Great Awakening, was accompanied by reform movements that sought to improve society by aiding the poor and oppressed. Although the reform groups included members of both sexes, their efforts often brought women out of the home and into public life. In New Jersey as elsewhere in the North, women reformers often came from Protestant denominations with evangelical traditions. With the aim of helping the urban poor by providing food, clothing, training, and education, Presbyterian women in Newark in 1803 founded the first women’s benevolent society in New Jersey, only the third in the nation. A decade later in August 1813, a group of Presbyterian women in Cranbury created the Female Charitable Society of Cranbury. “The objects of this Society,” the Cranbury women declared in the organization’s constitution, “shall be to aid the funds of the Western Missionary Society of New Jersey — to purchase Tracts for gratuitous distribution — to aid the Theological Seminary at Princeton — and in general, to relieve the indigent and distressed, at the discretion of the Managers.”¹¹

ĊĉĚĈĆęĎĔē In the new republic and even more in the urbanizing democracy of the early nineteenth century, public education came to be seen as imperative if the country was to have a responsible citizenry and an enlightened

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electorate. Although by the 1840s most northern states had public school systems, New Jersey was slow in developing a statewide system of public schools. Instead, it largely continued the practice of leaving education to the hazards of local initiatives and private and parochial schools. For its part, the First Presbyterian Church had built an academy, a two-story structure, capped by a bell tower, near where 40 South Main Street is located today. Another parochial school was created at Westminster Place and North Main Street by the Second Presbyterian Church after it split from the first church in 1838. The Second Presbyterian Church’s school was first located in the Session House and after 1869 in its larger replacement, Westminster House, which included both the school and a large chapel.¹² Although a new state constitution in 1844 authorized distribution of state income for public education and the creation of a State Superintendent of Public Schools, change came slowly. By 1855, only twentynine townships had tuition-free common schools. Cranbury, as part of South Brunswick School District, was one of them. Not until reforms between 1871 and 1876, however, did a free public elementary school system prevail throughout New Jersey. Cranbury was part of these state trends, although often a bit ahead of them. Back in the early 1800s, its educational situation, like that of other towns, had consisted primarily of privately funded schools with male tutors or schoolmasters. “The early schools of Cranbury were supported by the payment of a stated tuition per scholar, and kept in small schoolhouses built by subscription, or by the combined efforts of the heads of families who clubbed together and erected them,” recalled a long-time resident, M. O. Rolfe, in 1882. “The early teachers boarded around, staying with each family a week, more or less, or as long as he was welcome and liked the fare. The earliest remembered teacher at Cranbury was John Campbell, who was teaching in 1805, but doubtless there were schools there much earlier.”¹³ Such a system had serious disadvantages. Many children, whose parents did not have enough money or who needed their labor on the farm, never or seldom attended. Teachers suffered from inadequate compensation and relatively low status. Often largely itinerant tutors, few of them stayed in a particular town for more than a few years while instructing youngsters how to read and write and providing a smattering of education in a few other subjects.



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Under the 1844 state constitution, Cranbury, as part of the South Brunswick School District, had been one of the New Jersey municipalities to create public schools. In 1850 – 1851, the school district built a substantial, two-room wooden schoolhouse on a small lot located off North Main Street, halfway up what was then called Elm Street. The lot was donated by a married daughter of the Bunker family, whose farm included most of the land on the hill, which reached the highest elevation in Cranbury. Officially it was known as the North School (the former academy of the First Presbyterian Church became the South School), but unofficially it was known as the Bunker Hill School. It was built in a carpenter Gothic style. Older children were taught on the first floor, younger ones on the second. During the school year, teachers boarded at various homes, each for a week or two. In 1945, Elm Street was renamed Bunker Hill. The schoolhouse building at 6 Bunker Hill still exists today although it is now a private residence, having been sold when the central schoolhouse was built at 23 North Main Street in 1896.

ĘđĆěĊėĞ, ĆēęĎĘđĆěĊėĞ, Ćēĉ ĕĔđĎęĎĈĘ What became the most powerful issues of mid-nineteenth-century America — slavery, abolition, and secession — also affected Cranbury and the entire state of New Jersey. Unlike abolitionist New Englanders, the majority of New Jerseyeans, especially before the outbreak of the Civil War, maintained that their state stood on the middle ground, “geographically and politically between all extremes,” as a New Jersey Republican congressman put it in 1860. Many residents thought the state should help preserve the Union against the impeding schism fostered by what some saw as fanatical defenders of slavery and states’ rights in the South and immediate abolitionists of the North. In ideology and politics, New Jersey, as a whole, moved along cautiously with the tides of change. Middlesex County had a conservative majority in the early years of the Republic, and South Brunswick Township, including Cranbury, delivered large majorities for the Federalists long after the party had lost nationally. This staunch conservatism dominant in Middlesex County may have derived from the fact that it was one of the state’s richest counties,

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it had an able business leadership, and its ethnic Dutch and some of the Scottish and English voters were hostile to the pro-Napoleon foreign policies of the Jeffersonians.¹⁴ When the Federalists were succeeded by the Whig Party in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats, most of Middlesex County’s rural areas, including Cranbury, voted for the Whigs against the Democratic urban strongholds, such as New Brunswick, and frequently carried the county for the Whigs.¹⁵ In the 1850s, however, when slavery issue began to fracture the two national parties, first the Whigs and then the Democrats, dissatisfied voters in Middlesex County supported emerging new parties and coalitions. A new majority in Middlesex County emerged through an opposition coalition of Republicans (successors to the Whigs), as well as some ex-Democrats and some nativists of the American Party, all of them hostile to the Southern slaveowners and their attempts to control the federal government and to extend slavery. New Jersey had lagged behind other northern states in abolishing slavery. Partly this was due to the comparatively large number of slaves in north Jersey, especially in Bergen County. There were 12,400 slaves in the state in 1800. A state law four years later called for the gradual abolition of slavery, freeing slaves only after they had served nearly two decades as “bound apprentices” for their masters. The formation of the state’s Anti-Slavery Society, the growth of the radical abolitionist movement, and the efforts of New Jersey’s free blacks and Quakers to end slavery in the state led to a new law in 1846. A compromise, it eliminated enforced “apprenticeships” for all black children born after its passage. It formally outlawed slavery but designated all existing slaves as “indentured servants.” Although they could not be sold without their consent, such “servants” were not truly free. Due to these reforms, the number of slaves in New Jersey decreased dramatically on paper from almost 11,000 in 1810, to around 8,000 in 1820, down to 2,000 in 1830, and 674 in 1840 (in contrast, the 1840 federal census recorded only 64 slaves in Pennsylvania and 4 in New York). Middlesex County had only 28 slaves in 1840 among its 1,500 free blacks and 20,000 whites. Cranbury was then still split between South Brunswick and Monroe Townships, and the 1840 census showed 7 slaves (5 of them owned by James Combs; 2 by John C. Lears) and 414 free blacks in a total population of 5,250. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, there were technically only 18 slaves left in New Jersey (only 1 in Middlesex



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County), a state in which the free blacks numbered 25,000, or about 4 percent of the state’s population.¹⁶ Slavery continued on a limited basis in Cranbury, as in the rest of the state, into the 1830s and 1840s. Baptism and marriage records in the First Presbyterian Church refer to black servants “living with” or “belonging to” their owners, in contrast to free blacks. Most of the slaves, one or two in each instance, were owned by farmers who mainly used them in place of hired field hands. However, some of the most prominent villagers — businesspeople, doctors, or some ministers — had slaves, primarily as household servants. Dr. John Lott, a Cranbury physician from around 1814 to 1840, owned several slaves. Surprisingly, at a time when many northern clergymen opposed slavery, Rev. Symmes Cleves Henry, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church from 1820 until his death in 1857, owned a number of slaves. His son-in-law, Rev. Joseph G. Symmes, a dedicated abolitionist, who succeeded the Reverend Henry as minister of the First Presbyterian Church in 1857, immediately became the first Cranbury clergyman known to have taken a public stand against slavery.¹⁷ Abolitionist preacher Rev. Joseph Gaston Symmes was only thirtyone years old when he was called to the pulpit of Cranbury’s First Presbyterian Church four years before the outbreak of the Civil War. Descended from New England Pilgrims, Symmes had been born in 1826 on a farm on the Ohio frontier. His father died when the child was four years old. Instilled with a love of learning and a keen sense of justice by his mother, Joseph graduated from a liberal college in Cincinnati and then from Princeton Theological Seminary. While a student at Princeton, he learned of Rev. Symmes C. Henry in Cranbury. Struck by the similarity of their names (as a surname, Symmes came from “Simeon’s son”), he rode over to meet the Cranbury minister. Joseph Symmes’s visits became increasingly frequent, and after his graduation from the seminary in 1854, he married Symmes Henry’s daughter, Mary. The young couple had been at Joseph Symmes’s first pastorate in Madison, Indiana, for only three years when Mary’s father, Symmes Henry, died suddenly in 1857, and the Cranbury congregation summoned Joseph as their new pastor to succeed his father-in-law. It was an auspicious calling. The First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, which had 392 members and had led to the creation of eight other churches in the area, was then the largest church in the Presbytery of Monmouth. In

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addition to having the parsonage near the church as a residence and the use of the large parsonage farm behind it, Symmes received an annual salary of $500, all of which provided a quite comfortable life (at a time when full-time laborers could earn $300 a year without accommodations or other benefits). During the inflation that accompanied the Civil War, the trustees raised Symmes’s salary to $975 in 1864 and eventually to $1,200 a year before his death in 1894. From his early youth, Joseph Symmes and his two brothers had been passionate abolitionists. Inspired by their mother and her sister’s husband, who kept a station on the Underground Railroad in Ohio, the Symmes boys denounced black slavery in word and deed. As a youth in school, Joseph began one entry in his journal with the words “American slavery is an outrage on the negro.” As an adult, he labored for the abolitionist cause and became an ardent and lifelong Republican. During the Civil War, he was steadfast for preserving the Union and ending slavery, championing the cause from the pulpit and in the recruiting campaigns for the Union Army. He gathered supplies to be sent to the soldiers, and at the end of the war in 1865 he actively chaired a committee that raised $2,000 for a monument for the local men who had died in the war. Cranbury’s original Civil War monument was dedicated in Brainerd Cemetery by the governor in August 1866. Free blacks outnumbered black slaves and indentured servants in Cranbury as in the rest of New Jersey in the years before the Civil War. The majority of the town’s free African Americans worked in or around the village or on farms as laborers, teamsters, domestics, skilled artisans, or in other trades. Many had vegetable patches and some had their own small farms. Despite a number of white abolitionists, such as the Reverend Symmes, the core of abolitionist sentiment in Cranbury was undoubtedly in the black community. At the heart of the African American community was the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. From its founding in the early 1800s in Philadelphia, the A.M.E. had spread throughout the North and become the largest independent black church in the United States. By 1860, there were thirty-two A.M.E. churches in New Jersey. They served not only a spiritual function but, like the free black communities themselves, helped with education, assisted runaway slaves, sought to end slavery, and worked to achieve equal legal and voting rights for African Americans. An A.M.E. congregation had been established in



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Cranbury in the antebellum period, first meeting in members’ houses. In 1851, Rev. John B. Hill published the sermon that he had preached at the A.M.E. Church in Cranbury that year.¹⁸ The first formal building for the Cranbury’s A.M.E. Church was established a few years later, in 1855, with support from the larger community. Among its trustees were Elias Voorhees, George Montin, and Lewis F. Ditmus. The church was constructed on land purchased from Samuel Nixon and was located on Old Cranbury Road, an area south of the village, where, as an elderly white resident recalled in 1882, several free black families lived “in a portion of Cranbury village locally known as ‘Africa’ and ‘the colored neighborhood.’ ” Cranbury’s A.M.E. church building continued to be a house of worship until the 1880s when the congregation moved to the larger A.M.E. church in Hightstown. The abandoned church was subsequently converted into a dwelling. Although there is little detailed information on the Cranbury A.M.E.’s activities, the church certainly provided black residents with much more than a house of worship. Its members kept in touch with one another, circulated black newspapers from the cities, engaged in education and self-help activities, and worked on issues facing the local black community and activities in support of the Underground Railroad to smuggle Southern slaves to freedom and the abolitionist campaign to abolish human bondage as a blot on American democracy. Because of its location between two main abolitionist centers, New York and Philadelphia, New Jersey played an important part in the Underground Railroad. Courageous New Jerseyans, both blacks and whites, hid runaway slaves from Southern slave-catchers as the fugitives “followed the North Star” to freedom. Native New Jerseyan William Still, an African American abolitionist, was the most important contact in Philadelphia, and the legendary Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman from Maryland had worked in Cape May and undoubtedly crossed New Jersey with many of the more than three hundred fugitive slaves she shepherded to safety. No other state had so many all-black communities as Underground Railroad “stops,” most of them in rural southwestern New Jersey. Cranbury was a stop on the Underground Railroad, too. It was located on the branch that ran north via Bordentown, with its A.M.E. church, then to Crosswicks and the summer estate of Enoch Middleton, a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker merchant and ardent abolitionist.

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From Crosswicks, the route went on to Cranbury and beyond. At night, Middleton or one of his sons would take the fugitives, usually in groups of three to five, from Crosswicks to Allentown and then on to Cranbury, South Brunswick, or even all the way to New Brunswick. There has been some speculation that the Cranbury Inn may have been a station on the Underground Railroad. But the senior specialist at the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office, although “convinced that the underground railroad operated through Cranbury,” believed it “highly unlikely that the tavern was involved,” given that taverns were too public for such secret, illegal activities as smuggling escaped slaves away from the slave catchers. Properties documented with this underground network, he reported, were invariably private homes. It has been suspected that Cranbury’s Underground Railroad station was a large farmhouse located at 269 Prospect Plains Road, about a mile east of the village and the main road. In 2011, the structure was scheduled for destruction because of the widening of the New Jersey Turnpike.¹⁹

ęčĊ ĈĎěĎđ ĜĆė In the 1860 election that led to Southern secession and the Civil War, New Jersey split its seven electoral votes. Republican Abraham Lincoln won four; the Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, running in the state on a fusion ticket with the two other anti-Lincoln candidates, received three. Lincoln swept most of South Jersey and a few other counties, but the Democratic fusion ticket carried the rest of the state for Douglas. The Democratic fusionists had been extremely active in central Jersey. Indeed, on Friday evening, November 2, four days before the election, they held a “grand union rally” in Cranbury for those they called “friends of the union electoral ticket . . . and all others opposed to the election of Lincoln and Hamlin, the Republican-abolition candidates, and to preserve our Union from the dangers with which it is threatened by the ascendance of that party.”²⁰ The flier for the mass meeting announced that it would be held at Vanderveer’s Hotel in Cranbury village. It would be preceded by a torchlight parade, with political and patriotic clubs, some of them in uniform, from New Brunswick, Hightstown, Spotswood, and Princeton, and it would culminate in speeches by New Jersey and national dignitaries.



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On Election Day, November 6, 1860, Middlesex County went strongly and surprisingly for the Democrat fusionists. The former Whig and Republican county’s defection was shocking and disappointing to the state’s Republicans. Republican newspapers blamed the Camden & Amboy Railroad, which, seeking to prevent the building of a rival line in Middlesex and Somerset Counties, it was alleged, had spread money lavishly there, buying votes at the polls at unprecedented prices.²¹ Unlike Middlesex County’s urban areas, which went strongly for the anti-Lincoln fusionists, rural areas such as South Brunswick Township, including Cranbury, cast the majority of their votes for Lincoln and the Republicans.²² When the states of the lower South seceded from the Union and the war began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, New Jerseyans vigorously endorsed active suppression of the rebellion, although subsequent casualties and many of the Lincoln administration’s domestic policies contributed to Democratic electoral victories in New Jersey and a number of other Northern states. Nevertheless, nearly one tenth of the state’s population served in the Union Army and Navy between 1861 and 1865. The Union Army was composed primarily of state units of the U.S. Volunteers. Friends and neighbors joined together, often electing their sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. The Fourteenth New Jersey Infantry Regiment, raised in response to Lincoln’s call in 1862 for 300,000 three-year volunteers from throughout the North, like other infantry regiments, initially numbered about one thousand men. Four of its ten companies came from the urban areas of Trenton and Elizabeth. Six companies came from the rural communities in Monmouth, Ocean, and Middlesex counties. Company H of New Jersey’s Fourteenth Volunteer Infantry Regiment was the unit in which the largest number of Cranburians served. Other white Cranburians enlisted in different units of the racially segregated Union Army, a number in Company B of the 28th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the second largest contingent from the town. Some black Cranburians served in the U.S. Colored Troops. Among the 114 volunteers in Company H were many with familiar Cranbury family names such as Applegate, Bradley, Dey, Griggs, Kenze, Mount, Perrine, Rue, Silvers, Stults, and Snedeker. In command were Captain Symmes Henry Stults and his cousin, First Lieutenant Marcus Aurelius Stults.²³ Many of Cranbury’s Civil War soldiers practiced

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at the Drill Room, a building that had been recently constructed at 27 Maplewood Avenue. Mustered into service in August 1862, the Fourteenth New Jersey did most of its training at Camp Vredenburgh located on the Monmouth battlefield of the Revolutionary War. Its soldiers spent 1863 largely doing guard duty at strategic points in Maryland and Virginia. Back home, local churches and community organizations, such as the women of Cranbury’s chapter of the Soldiers Aid Society, raised donations and supplies to be sent to the soldiers in the field and provided assistance to their families. In 1864 and 1865, the regiment fought valiantly through some of the bloodiest engagements of the war, including the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Virginia. Marcus Stults and Symmes Stults were cousins from neighboring farms on South River Road and Prospect Plains Road in eastern Cranbury. They were both twenty-one years old when the Civil War began. Marcus was shy and more reflective and lived on the farm with his parents, Thomas and Mary Stults, and his sister, Mary Ann. In contrast, Symmes, orphaned and raised by a grandmother and an aunt, was bolder and more impetuous; he had left the farm and become a carpenter. When Lincoln called for an initial 75,000 three-month volunteer militiamen in April 1861, the more impetuous Symmes persuaded Marcus to enlist for duty and glory. Perhaps they were also inspired by the fact that one of their ancestors, Henry Stults, had fought in the American Revolution in the Cranbury militia. After three months, the cousins returned home to raise and train a new militia unit. In August 1862, after Lincoln called for three-year volunteers, their Cranbury militia unit formed the core of Company H of the Fourteenth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and both served as officers. Despite Marcus’s early enthusiasm and his continuing belief in the righteousness of the Union’s cause, he had seen enough death and destruction by early 1864 to become fatalistic. On a brief furlough that winter, he had told Pastor Joseph G. Symmes that he feared he would not return. Back with the Army of the Potomac, he wrote glumly to his mother in April about General Ulysses S. Grant’s planned offensive against Lee that would begin the following month. In the letter, he concluded: “There is no doubt but what Old Grant has extensive preparations made for a successful movement, but we fear he will not be as successful as he formerly has been.”²⁴



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ċĎČ. ΅΍. These two cousins and Civil War officers from Cranbury were later killed

in action in 1864. Lieutenant Marcus A. Stults, left, in a photograph from the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society. Captain Symmes H. Stults, right, in a photograph from John W. Kuhl Collection.

Grant’s offensive began on May 4, 1864, with the Wilderness Campaign in Virginia, and resulted in severe casualties. A month later, on the first day of the Battle of Cold Harbor, First Lieutenant Marcus Stults was severely wounded while leading a charge against a rebel redoubt. His men carried him back when the assault failed. But when counterattacking Confederates then overran the Union lines, the wounded officer became a prisoner. His family hoped that he had survived the June 1, 1864, engagement, but he was not among the Union prisoners freed at the end of the war. His body was never found, and it was presumed that he had died on the battlefield and was buried by the Confederates in one of the mass graves for Union soldiers.²⁵ After the battle, his cousin Symmes had Marcus’s field trunk sent back to his parents’ farm in Cranbury. It contained a toothbrush, a pipe box, family photographs, and letters. It also held an unaddressed penciled note containing a single sentence: “I feel I am going to die in battle.”²⁶ Even more Cranburians died a month later at the Battle of the Monocacy (MO-knock-ah-see) River Valley in Maryland. It was there that

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the regiment earned lasting fame for playing a crucial role in defending the nation’s capital from a Confederate attack. Robert E. Lee had sent General Jubal Early in a flanking movement up the Shenandoah Valley to assault Washington, D.C., from the northwest. To slow or stop the rebels while the capital was reinforced, Grant dispatched General James R. Rickett’s Third Division, which included the Fourteenth New Jersey Regiment, from the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, where the two main armies were engaged in a massive siege. When the 5,000 Union soldiers arrived at the Monocacy River just east of Frederick, Maryland, on July 9, 1864, they discovered that they were facing 30,000 Confederate troops. Outnumbered six to one, the Union troops fought stubbornly and bravely throughout the day trying to hold the eastern side of the river against Confederate infantry, cavalry, and artillery. But the enemy’s numbers proved too great and the ranks of blue too thin. The gray-clad Southerners battled their way across the bridges and by the end of the day, the Union force was forced to retreat. However, by inflicting heavy casualties and holding the Confederates back for more than eight hours, the Fourteenth New Jersey and the other Union troops had provided time for General Grant to send a large force north, which from behind the fortifications of Washington, D.C., successfully defended the nation’s capital. Monocacy was a costly battle. Almost one-third of Rickett’s Third Division were killed or wounded. The Fourteenth New Jersey had been located near the left end of the Union line, a particularly vulnerable position as the Confederates sought continually to outflank it. The regiment suffered 255 casualties that day, 73 percent of its already reduced force of 350 men were killed or wounded, including all of its officers. Among the fallen were many of the men in Middlesex’s Company H, including four of its color bearers and its commander, Captain Symmes Henry Stults, who was killed as he led his men in a charge. He and his cousin had been born a month apart in 1840; they died a month apart in 1864. In recognition of the Fourteenth New Jersey’s heroic role, it became known as the Monocacy Regiment, and a monument to it was erected on that battlefield in 1907.²⁷ With subsequent replacements, the regiment fought in several engagements in Virginia, culminating in the Union forces’ pursuit of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his army from Petersburg to his



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surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. Out of a total of 1,312 men who served in the Fourteenth New Jersey regiment during the war, 357 were killed or died of disease, a mortality rate of 27 percent. Of the regiment’s ten companies, Company H from Middlesex County suffered the highest death rate, 29 percent, with 33 of its 114 soldiers dying in the war, 25 of them killed in action. As a result of fund-raising led by the Reverend Symmes, a monument to the fallen was erected in 1866 in Brainerd Cemetery. The names of both Stults cousins are among those memorialized on it. The actions, bravery, and casualties of the Fourteenth New Jersey led to its inclusion within the list of the 300 regiments that had the highest casualties in the two-million-man Union Army. The regiment celebrated the fact that it was composed entirely of volunteers. There were no draftees or substitutes in its ranks. In four years of war, 6,300 New Jerseyans serving in the Union Army and Union Navy perished, about 500 of them African Americans. The names of 70 men from Cranbury and adjoining communities who died fighting in the Civil War were listed on the memorial erected in Brainerd Cemetery in 1866, and the commemoration of their sacrifice was continued on the new Civil War Monument dedicated in Memorial Park in June 2011. Among those memorialized, including Applegate, Conover, Davison, Dey, LaBaw, Perrine, Rue, Silvers, Snedeker, Stults, and Voorhees, were young men from some of the oldest families in Cranbury and its surrounding farmlands, men who died helping to preserve the Union and to ensure a new birth of freedom.

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Like New Jersey, Cranbury shared the rapid, if cyclical, economic growth of the North in the decades after the Civil War. These were years in which the developments in transportation, communication, and manufacturing expanded the marketplace for goods and the arena for ideas and social and political organizations. Business, industry, and agriculture grew dramatically and so did many municipalities. As a result of such growth in and around the village, Cranburians petitioned the state for township status, and on March 7, 1872, the legislature officially created the new and independent Township of Cranbury. The new municipality united the previously unincorporated village and most of its farmland that had been in South Brunswick Township with some of Cranbury’s eastern farmland that had been in Monroe Township. As an incorporated township, Cranbury now had the right to elect its own local government and to assess and collect taxes for its own support. It was a familiar pattern: just as the people of Monroe had broken away from South Brunswick and South Amboy in 1838, so now in 1872, the residents of Cranbury achieved their own independence. The new Township of Cranbury was larger geographically than it is today, because in 1872 it extended on the west all the way to the town line of Princeton in Mercer County. At that time, the large and newly independent Cranbury Township had a population of around 3,000.¹ The far western area remained part of Cranbury until it obtained its own

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independent status as the Township of Plainsboro in 1919, completing the present configuration of neighboring townships in southern Middlesex County. Before Cranbury was recognized as an independent township, however, a number of its residents apparently believed that they needed to establish, once and for all, the spelling of its unusual name, the origin of which is still unconfirmed. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the village was referred to as “Cranberry” or “Cranberry Town” (although occasionally the spelling “Cranbury” was used as well). Eighteenth-century Americans were not known as sticklers about spelling, but their nineteenth-century counterparts, perhaps because they were responsible for the free public school system, may have believed they had more of a reputation at stake. Normative grammar and spelling became the rule, presided over by stern schoolmasters and righteous parsons. In 1867, Rev. Joseph G. Symmes of the First Presbyterian Church offered his own historical analysis of the name, Cranberry, and recommended that its spelling be changed. Symmes asserted, without any evidence to support it, that the town’s name had been derived from berries allegedly found there. He then declared that while the spelling of Cranberry was appropriate for the fruit, it was incorrect for a town. “The old English custom . . . ,” Symmes wrote, “was to call a district or town a borough, which was contracted into burg or bury, according to whichever they thought sounded best.” Williamsburg and Canterbury were such examples. “Let us have the correct, respectable, historical spelling for our pleasant little village,” Symmes proclaimed, and he urged that the spelling be changed to “Cranbury.”² The Reverend Symmes’s explanation of the origin of the town’s name, based on his unconfirmed conjecture, has been repeatedly cited since then. Although modern linguists and others might disagree with his analysis, his interpretation of the correct spelling provided learned justification at the time for a spelling that local people wanted anyway. The Hightstown Gazette had reported in January 1870 that “Cranbury citizens have petitioned the P.M. [Post Master] General to spell the name of their Post Office with a bury instead of a berry . . . but to our knowledge a great part of the well-informed citizens of that town, including the worthy P.M., have for a long time been using the correct orthography.”³ New Jersey’s legislature recognized “Cranbury” as the proper spelling of the town’s name when it authorized the creation of the new township

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in March 1872. A month later, on April 9, 1872, the township held its first official meeting at the inn of William Stults at 10 North Main Street. The gathering was presided over by David Chambers Lewis, Matthew A. Rue, and Ezekiel Silvers. They also supervised the first township election. Ezekiel Silvers and Matthew Rue were elected as the two “chosen freeholders” (equivalent then to today’s governing Township Committee, which began thus with two members, soon went to three members, and a century later, around 1990, was expanded to five members). Edward A. Brown was the first town clerk; Abijah Applegate the first assessor; David P. Messeroll, tax collector; and Henry H. Stults, James H. Conover, and William R. Johnson the first commissioners of appeal. In 1875, William H. Bergen became the township’s first justice of the peace. The township itself provided few services and had a minimal staff during the nineteenth century and, indeed, during much of the twentieth. The few public officials, the town clerk, the tax assessor, the justice of the peace, were part-time officeholders, each with a regular full-time position in the private sector. The Township Committee originally met in a tavern and later in other public places, including the firehouse for most of the twentieth century. Until 1990, a part-time town clerk kept minutes of their meetings, record of ordinances, issued permits, and was responsible for overseeing elections and recording their results. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cranbury remained largely a Republican town, generally under the leadership of members of prominent old families as well as some skilled and energetic newcomers. Politically, Cranbury had been predominantly Republican since the 1850s. A majority of voters in the newly independent township continued to support what called itself the “Grand Old Party” (GOP). The two major parties, the Republican and Democratic parties, were relatively evenly divided in New Jersey, but Cranbury was Republican by a margin of more than two to one. Still, in the late nineteenth century, the town had a diversity of political opinion that included conservative and liberal Republicans as well as some Democrats and a few who supported third protest-issue parties.⁴ Within the newly independent township, clear signs were evident of a growing civic consciousness. Because of the increased value of the imposing new businesses and homes, a number of leading business people formed the Cranbury Mutual Fire Insurance Company in 1879 to help protect against loss. Ezekiel Silvers was president; Richard C. Dey, vice



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ċĎČ. Ά΄. When the newly formed Cranbury Volunteer Fire Company obtained its first horse-drawn ladder wagon at the turn of the century, they showed it off by giving free rides while other firefighters demonstrated the fire hoses. The makers of this postcard photograph decided to label it “Cranbury Firemen in Action.” (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

president; David Chambers Lewis, treasurer; and John G. Groves, secretary. In 1882, R. M. Stults founded the town’s first weekly newspaper, the Cranbury News. Three years later, it was succeeded by the Cranbury Press, established by George C. Burroughs. The Cranbury Press shifted offices several times in its first half dozen years, but in 1892 it moved to a permanent location at 13 North Main Street, the Cranbury Press Building, where it remained for nearly a century. The two-story Greek vernacular style structure had been built around 1810 by Samuel Disbrow Jr. as his home, and it had subsequently housed blacksmith’s and tinsmith’s shops, a tavern, a library, and the office of a Cranbury savings and loan association. After 1892, it housed the editorial and business offices and the typesetting and pressrooms of the weekly newspaper. More than a century later, Virginia (“Ginny”) Swanagan, who with her husband, Don Jo, had bought a house across the street in 1959, recalled that when the newspaper’s presses began to run on Thursday evenings they drained so much electricity that houselights

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dimmed throughout the neighborhood.⁵ The locally owned and edited newspaper was sold in 1979 to the Princeton Packet Company, which moved it out of town but which continues to publish the Cranbury Press as one of its weekly newspapers to the present day. Cranbury’s volunteer fire company, which had its origins with a bucket brigade in the early 1800s, obtained its first hand-operated pumps in 1885. Hose reels replaced the hand pumps in 1900. Not long afterward, the volunteer firemen acquired their first horse-drawn ladder wagon, plus a hand-pulled cart to haul extinguishers. The town’s fire bell was originally a metal ring, the rim of a locomotive wheel, which reverberated loudly when struck by a hammer. That ring remains as a monument today next to the new firehouse, which relies on a siren instead. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fire equipment was stored in a small, shedlike structure between 8 and 10 Maplewood Avenue, today marked by a plaque, as Cranbury’s first firehouse built in 1898 by W. P. Perrine. In 1907, the Cranbury Water Company began to provide public water service to the village, a service that included fire hydrants in the downtown area. The volunteer firemen officially incorporated as the Cranbury Fire Company in 1913 and built a firehouse near 2 South Main Street in 1921.

ėĆĎđėĔĆĉĘ, ĒĆėĐĊęĘ, Ćēĉ ĈčĆēČĎēČ ĆČėĎĈĚđęĚėĊ Transportation continued to play an important role in Cranbury. The Camden & Amboy Railroad’s eastern line, which had been put through Cranbury in the 1830s, had been profitable for the railway and the town and its farmers. In 1840, the railroad opened a western line through Trenton to New Brunswick and on to Jersey City. The western route later became the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) when the “Pennsy” took over the C&A in 1871, and it continues to be the main line of Amtrak, the earlier railroads’ successor, to the present day. However, the eastern line of the C&A and its successors, running through Hightstown and Cranbury Station, continued to channel goods and travelers across the state, make profits, and help develop its service area for more than a century. It continued to increase markets for local products,



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ċĎČ. Ά΅. The Pennsylvania Railroad took over the Camden & Amboy in midcentury and brought in a line of modern locomotives, ultimately such as this one photographed at Cranbury Station around 1905. Waiting to take passengers one mile to Cranbury Village is Harvey Dey’s horse-drawn shuttle wagon. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

spurring population growth and connecting cities and the countryside, including rural towns like Cranbury. Begun in the 1830s as a little depot, Cranbury Station, one mile east of the village’s Main Street, had grown into a little hamlet by the 1880s, including, in addition to the depot, a general store and post office run by families like the Applegates and Voorheeses. Subsequently several people built homes there, and the number of businesses grew to include a blacksmith shop, a hay-pressing facility owned by William Perrine, and a hotel run first by the Applegates and then by the Pettys. In the late nineteenth century, a local stagecoach service shuttled people between the village and the depot to meet scheduled passenger trains at a price of 15 cents each way. Later, at the turn of the century, Harvey Dey took over the service, first with a house-drawn wagon and subsequently with used automobiles that ran between Cranbury Station and Dey’s home on South Main Street. With access to an important new

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network of roads, highways, turnpikes, canals, and railroads, Cranbury grew and prospered. By the late nineteenth century, business and agriculture were changing dramatically, as was the relationship between the farmland and the village. Although the farmers produced foodstuffs, they, like almost everyone by the end of the century, purchased much of the food consumed by their families. In Cranbury, this meant going to the grocery stores on Main Street, spending cash, and contributing to the economic growth of the community. Still experimenting with cash crops under changing conditions, farmers in New Jersey turned from large-scale wheat production to potatoes and corn as the extensive production of wheat shifted to western states while the railroads expanded the national market after the Civil War. Potatoes had long been an important crop in New Jersey, and in the last third of the nineteenth century, they gradually became more lucrative. Although agricultural changes were gradual, several new trends began to appear in the 1860s and 1870s. Farmers were helped by the establishment of a state College of Agriculture, founded after Rutgers had been designated a land-grant college. The faculty encouraged “scientific farming” based on recent research. Stimulated by that advice and by local groups such as the Hightstown Agricultural Association, some farmers began to experiment with new fertilizers and crop rotation. Although booming potato prices in the 1870s encouraged growth of the white potato in Monmouth and Middlesex Counties, sharp price declines in the 1880s curtailed the initial enthusiasm of some farmers about the profitability of the starchy tuber. Growing urban markets with their demands for fruits and vegetables all year led entrepreneurs in the food-processing industry such as Joseph Campbell of Camden in 1869 to create a high-production vegetable and fruit preserve and canning industry. Campbell, of course, specialized most famously in tomatoes. Such a mass market lured some farmers to begin producing larger quantities of tomatoes, peaches, and other crops to be canned and sold year round. Mixed farming, nevertheless, remained the most common practice among New Jersey farmers. Most producers relied for their major cash crops on potatoes, corn, wheat, and other grains, while selling perishable meat, dairy products, and fresh produce locally for extra income. Even the railroads did not change this, largely because food preservation was too difficult and marketing firms



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were still small and locally based. Such a system had many benefits for a small rural town like Cranbury, which became the center of a vigorous local trade in agricultural products and services. The town had a creamery, gristmill, icehouse, livery stable, slaughterhouse and tannery among its other businesses. In the late nineteenth century, travel between local villages was still by horse and wagon, which made it difficult for people to shop outside of their local areas. The village and local farmers remained interdependent.

Ć ćĔĔĒĎēČ ĒĆĎē ĘęėĊĊę In the second half of the nineteenth century, Cranbury continued to be an important stop on the transportation routes, the key roadways and railroads that crossed New Jersey. Its hotels and taverns still hosted travelers and other visitors and played important local roles. Some of these taverns were converted into inns and hotels. The structure, then at 10 North Main Street, may have been known as the National Hotel when it was initially run by John Laning, but by the 1870s, at least, it was known as William Stults Inn, with a tavern on the ground floor and accommodations, including the innkeeper’s own rooms, on the second floor. Taverns remained social gathering places, particularly for men, and often served as sites for political discussions and meetings. Indeed, when the state legislature approved the creation of the Township of Cranbury in March 1872, it mandated that the Township Committees of Cranbury, South Brunswick, and Monroe “should meet at 10 a.m. on the second Tuesday of April 1872, at Stults Inn in Cranbury village and . . . arrange an equitable division of the assets and liabilities of the three townships.” That they did. Stults Inn no longer exists. It burned down in 1880. The current, three-story Victorian house on the site at 10 North Main Street was built the following year as the residence of the family of John Embly, a prosperous Philadelphia banker who soon became one of the early directors of the First National Bank of Cranbury. Corson’s Tavern at 14 North Main Street had been built by William M. Corson in 1854. It was rebuilt in 1869 as a white-columned, Greek Revival – style hostelry, renamed the American Hotel, and operated first by Henry Wagoner and later Maria Bowne. Its long, shaded front porch became a favorite spot for people to watch horse races

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down Main Street in summer and sleigh races in winter. The hotel lost its liquor license in 1904, due largely to protests from the minister and congregation of the Methodist church diagonally across the street. Renamed Colonial House, it was, thereafter, known locally as the “Temperance Inn.” In 1910, a new owner of the property wanted to build his house on the site. He arranged to have the hotel moved in its entirety to its present location, a block east to 1 – 5 Scott Avenue, where it became, and still is, an apartment house. Cranbury’s expansion in the final third of the nineteenth century after the town’s incorporation was evident in the growth of the village’s commercial district, primarily along Main Street. A Bradstreet inventory of businesses in Cranbury in 1889 listed six “hotels” (an exaggeration as there were actually only two hotels, the American Hotel and the United States Hotel, which was the name at that time of the present Cranbury Inn; the rest were “guest houses,” or what would be called “bed and breakfasts” today). The report also listed three general stores, three merchant establishments, three milliners, three harness makers, three distillers, two millers (for the gristmill and the sawmill), two wheelwrights, two shops selling leather goods, one dry goods store, one tailor, one tinsmith, one lumber business, one store specializing in stoves and other appliances, plus one druggist, restaurant, tobacconist, wine and liquor store, painter, a variety store, and one furniture store. The old gristmill, then known as “Wycoffs Mill,” ground out flour and cornmeal at the dam on Brainerd Lake in the center of the village. It continued to be the largest of the three gristmills spread across what was then the extensive Cranbury Township. The oldest Cranbury firm still in operation today is A. S. Cole & Son, Co., a funeral home at 22 North Main Street. It began in 1858, like many early undertaking establishments, as a furniture store. Two years later, the energetic young cabinetmaker there, Alexander S. Cole, bought out the original owner, Ezekiel Silvers. Often skilled carpenters, early undertakers could also make coffins when needed and also provide a carriage or hearse. A major part of the business was in making, selling, and repairing furniture, which involved not only woodworking but dealing with upholstery, fabrics, and mattresses. Funerals were usually conducted in the home or in a church. The lamp in front of Cole’s establishment today is a reconstruction of one of the gas lamps that lined Main Street for a good part of the nineteenth century (its crossbar is said to



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ċĎČ. ΆΆ. Undertakers were often also furniture makers, as this

1886 advertisement for A. S. Cole & Son in Cranbury made clear. (Courtesy of William H. Schanck)

have been used by the lamp lighter to rest his ladder). Not until the twentieth century did funeral homes, like Cole’s, then run by the descendants of Cole’s son-in-law, Isaac Hoffman, establish chapels for conducting services on the premises. Until 1938, its funeral home services were held at Hoffman’s house across the street. Old traditions changed slowly — Isaac’s son, William Cole Hoffman, recalled that “my uncle, who had said that he would never allow anything but horses at a service, gradually had to relinquish this idea, and motor equipment began to be purchased around the turn of the century.”⁶ What became one of the largest and best-known businesses in Cranbury in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began in October 1865 as the American Steam Coffee and Spice Mills. Local merchant John S. Davison started the mill at that time when he sold his general

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store to his brother and opened a wholesale trade in pure spices and flavoring extracts. The railroad brought in barrels of spices from the Far East, teas from China and India, and coffee from around the world, all of which were processed at the new plant in Cranbury and sold throughout the region. Davison called the new business the American Spice Mills. Within a year, he realized that while he could supervise the manufacturing process, he needed an energetic, younger partner to run the business and expand the marketing. Davison chose twenty-four-year-old John S. Silvers, eldest son of Ezekiel and Lydia Silvers. On April 10, 1866, the partnership of Davison & Silvers was formed.⁷ Expanding beyond spices and flavor extracts, the partners soon added freshly ground and roasted coffee, produced by steam-powered machines, packaged and sold with the rest of its products to grocery stores and restaurants. After Davison died in 1890, John Silvers added his brother, William, as a partner. The firm thus became J. S. Silvers & Bro., although the name American Mills was included on some products and remained on the sign at the plant in Cranbury. The business had started in a small frame building on Main Street, but the structure burned down in a fire, triggered by the coffee-roasting machine. Subsequently, the Spice Mill moved to a new brick building, located just west of Main Street and south of present-day Park Place West. Business grew so rapidly that the company added a two-story, wood-frame addition, doubling its warehousing space. The Cranbury-based firm enjoyed a widespread reputation for the purity and quality of its spices and coffee, and it soon added teas, a line of sundries, and its own brands from mayonnaise to cough syrup, which it marketed by horse-drawn wagons to grocery stores throughout central New Jersey. Highly successful and respected manufacturers and merchants, Davison and Silvers had soon become involved in other profitable operations in Cranbury in the late nineteenth century. In addition to the spice mill, John S. Davison had become one of the largest stockholders and ultimately president of the Cranbury Manufacturing Company, a shirtmaking operation. While running the mill, John S. Silvers also invested in and became president of the Cranbury Mutual Fire Insurance Company and, when the First National Bank of Cranbury was founded in 1884, he became its president and remained so until his death in 1915. Such interlocking directorates were typical in the nineteenth century when larger manufacturers began to play a dynamic role in the town and



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ċĎČ. Ά·. Workers pose for a photograph at John S. Silvers’s American Mills

Tea, Coffee, and Spices warehouse behind North Main Street near present-day Park Place West. Teamster James Phares prepares to leave with a wagonload of goods. (Ralph and Gertude Danser Collection, courtesy of Sara H. Danser and Susan A. Danser)

in its expanding relationship to the larger world around it. The American Spice Mill had been a partnership, but the Cranbury Manufacturing Company, established in 1879 by Matthew A. Rue, was more typical of a new corporate enterprise. From the beginning it was a modern industrial concern with a board of directors, stockholders, a large workforce, and a factory. In its plant, which occupied two large buildings in town, workers, primarily women, sewed shirts together from pieces that had been cut in New York City and then shipped by train to Cranbury for assembly. Typical of the time and garment industry, the workers were paid on a piecework basis, that is, for each shirt that they assembled. Naturally, the piece rate for the rural seamstresses in Cranbury was lower than that of the city workers in New York. The completed shirts were shipped back to the city for marketing. Using local labor and the regional transportation network, this new Cranbury enterprise was thus integrated into the large and thriving, ready-to-wear garment industry that had developed in Manhattan since the Civil War. Two years after Matthew Rue had started the company, the shirt-making operation was

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leased in 1881 to E. T. Daneer [sic], who moved it into a newer and larger two-story building, eighty feet long and twenty feet wide. By then, the company had sixty sewing machines and employed as many local women as needed to operate them. Its prospects seemed so profitable that many of Cranbury’s most prominent business people invested in it. Traditional artisans sometimes could transform their workshops into larger enterprises. Based on his previous success as an independent tradesman, P. R. Bergen began a major wheelwright operation in 1861 on the corner of what is now Maplewood and Scott Avenues (then known as Monroe and Dey Streets). By utilizing some of the new manufacturing equipment and managerial and marketing techniques, Bergen expanded production far beyond the limits of a traditional wheelwright’s workshop. In 1882, he was employing six to nine men, depending on the season, manufacturing a complete line of light wagons and carriages. Although a few firms were growing in scale and serving markets far beyond Cranbury, there were still many small retail businesses in town. Farmers and village residents did their personal shopping in town, patronizing retailers. Goodwin’s, Chamberlin Brothers,’ Grover’s, and Duncan’s were the four general stores in 1882. James H. Goodwin was one of the most energetic and popular persons in Cranbury. A native Philadelphian, he had arrived in Cranbury at age thirty-nine in 1872, after the death of his first wife, and purchased the general store of Bergen and Van Horn on North Main Street. Four years later, he married a prominent local widow, Ann Amanda Stults Gulick. As his advertisements indicated, J. H. Goodwin sold dry goods, notions, groceries, hardware, paints and oils, even hats and caps. Residents not only shopped there but also gathered to exchange news and discuss local issues. His store, believed to have been located at 43 North Main Street, became one of the most popular places in town. Besides being a successful merchant, James Goodwin was also a popular politician and bandleader. An active civic leader, Goodwin was one of the first to advocate streetlights for Main Street. In 1875, he was elected to a two-year term as township clerk, and he later served as assessor and as judge of elections. From 1879 to 1881, this staunch Republican was a member of the Middlesex County Board of Freeholders, concluding his term as its director. Afterward, he served a term in the New Jersey Assembly. Besides owning a prosperous store that employed several clerks, Goodwin invested in both the Cranbury Manufacturing Company and



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ċĎČ. ΆΈ. Acclaimed across central New Jersey, Goodwin’s Band from Cranbury

thrilled audiences for decades. Main Street merchant James Goodwin, fourth from the left with the bass horn, founded the band in 1877. In this c. 1910 photograph in front of the Old Tennent Church in Manalapan Township, the musicians, standing, left to right, were Lemuel Stults, William Bergen, Daniel Appleget, James H. Goodwin, Harry Moore, William Owens, Isaac Hoffman, Clarence Perrine, William Dey, an unidentified man, Albert Stults, James H. Conover, and an unidentified man; kneeling, Raymond Wicoff, left, and an unidentified man. (Gift of Mahlon M. Thompson to the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

the First National Bank and held positions on their boards. He was also an elder at the Second Presbyterian Church. It was, however, his role as organizer and conductor of the Goodwin Band that brought him the widest and most lasting fame. From 1877 to his death in 1914 at age seventy-seven, the bewhiskered shopkeeper enthusiastically led, and played the bass horn in the band at towns and cities in Middlesex, Mercer, Monmouth, and Somerset Counties, and helped to make the name of Cranbury known throughout the region. Heralded by the Cranbury Press as “an honor to the town and a source of much pleasure to the residents,” the ensemble of some two dozen amateur musicians, including two of Goodwin’s sons, had a wide repertory.

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“Uncle Jim” and the band could render classical pieces; but audiences cheered the most when the band pumped out such favorites as “Swanee River,” “America,” and the marches of John Philip Sousa.⁸ The other general store owners in Cranbury were also economically successful if less prominent than Goodwin. The Chamberlin Brothers had a store on the first floor of 5 North Main Street with large shop windows made in a new plate-glass process. Upstairs was a large open room, Chamberlin Hall, where townspeople held meetings to discuss local affairs. After being owned by a series of shopkeepers in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the building at 5 North Main Street underwent a major change in 1932. The new owners, the Windsor family from Princeton, converted the first floor into a restaurant, The Lakeview, and the second floor into three rental apartments. Later, when the restaurant closed, the entire building was made an apartment house, the Lakeview Apartments, which it still is today. In the 1880s, John Grover ran a general store on North Main Street that also sold dry goods, boots and shoes, some groceries, especially canned goods, as well as hay and seed as a sideline. A general store on South Main Street, across from Cranbury Station Road, had been started by David Clarke, who in the 1840s sold it to John Dey. It was passed down in the Dey family until it was bought in the early 1870s by John Duncan, who ran it for years as a typical general store with groceries, dry goods, pots and pans, and other items. Specialty shops on Main Street in the 1880s provided a variety of goods. A bakery, specializing in cakes, pastries, candies, as well as other baked goods, was established by Christopher Buhler at 33 North Main Street around this time. Under a series of owners, Appleget, Dey, and Schnell, the bakeshop continued on the site until well into the twentieth century. After World War II it became Cranbury Paint and Hardware for several decades and, most recently, a successful specialty store, Charmed by Claire. At another location in the 1880s, A. T. Skillman sold stoves, ranges, heaters, metal grates, sheet iron, slate, and tin roofing. A trained mechanic, Skillman also installed and repaired plumbing, drilled wells, and serviced his line of stoves and ranges, and he soon established a fine reputation in Cranbury and the surrounding area. That same decade, Peter Rathgeber had a barbershop (haircuts cost 15 cents, a shave was 10 cents) at 29 North Main Street, a building which later became the Maplewood Garage and most recently a branch of the American



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Repertory Ballet, Princeton Ballet Studio. Jacob Prince ran a tailor shop at his home at 31 North Main Street, which under a subsequent owner became a watch repair shop and a small post office with mailboxes in the window. With horses still the main means of local transportation, the harness trade was at its height in Cranbury in the 1880s, and the town had two harness shops in those days. Charles Ehrlich arrived in New Jersey from Germany right after the Civil War. Fifteen years later, in 1881, he moved to Cranbury and established a harness-making business. Besides making horse collars and harnesses, Ehrlich also sold a full line of equestrian goods, including currycombs, brushes, bridles, and bits. Nelson Petty, born in Dayton, was later apprenticed to a harness maker in Freehold who made and sold cavalry equipment for the army. In 1877 at the age of twenty-one, Petty set up his own harness shop in Cranbury with the majority of his trade subsequently coming from Trenton. The family business later moved to 66 North Main Street, and it operated there until 1944, making Petty’s harness shop one of the longest-operating businesses in the history of Cranbury. Women ran several shops listed in the 1882 inventories of Main Street businesses. Following the custom of the time, they were, if married, identified by their husband’s name. Mrs. L. Wakeley was the proprietor of a confectionary, toy, and notion store, Mrs. Wakeley’s Candy Shop, a favorite stopping-off place for children on their way home from school (a relative, Mrs. W. A. Wakeley, served as postmistress). Three women, identified in the 1882 listing only as Mrs. R. M. Vanderveer, Mrs. Emily Mouret, and Miss J. Fleming, were milliners doing a profitable business making and selling women’s hats. Sometime thereafter, other records indicate that one of the millinery shops on North Main Street, which carried a very popular line of ladies’ hats as well as novelties in feathers, flowers, ribbon, fancy collars, aprons, and handkerchiefs, was run by the milliner Emma Everingham Harder. Born in Cranbury in 1875, a descendant of John Marlin Stults, a local veteran of the Revolutionary War, Emma Perrine Everingham had already started a successful millinery business when she married Frank Harder, a partner in a local hardware store. Tragically, in 1903 while Emma was pregnant with their daughter, Gertrude, both her husband and their young son died of tuberculosis, then known as consumption. At twenty-eight, she found herself a young widow with a newborn

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ċĎČ. ΆΉ. Cranbury milliner Emma Harder is pictured here around 1898, when she was twenty-three, wearing one of the hats she designed. Although she lost her husband and son to tuberculosis in 1903, she raised her infant daughter and continued a successful millinery business at various locations in town. (Photograph from the William Gerald Danser Collection, courtesy of Sarah H. Danser and Susan A. Danser)

infant. Emma Harder never remarried, but with diligent effort and with some support from her parents until their deaths in 1923, this strong and entrepreneurial woman raised her daughter while making hats and earning income from a series of different millinery stores in Cranbury. Her shops, labeled “Mrs. F. Harder, Millener,” included one on Maplewood Avenue and later a small store on a lot just north of the chapel of the Second Presbyterian Church on North Main Street. Subsequently, she ran a shop out of her home at 31 North Main Street. Her daughter, Gertrude, married Ralph Danser, and they lived with her in her home. Emma Harder died in 1965 at the age of ninety.⁹



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Of course, women who did not run their own business or, for other reasons, did not have enough income for servants — in other words, the majority of women in Cranbury and the country — also had plenty of work to do. They managed their own households, and in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century that meant getting the groceries and other supplies, preparing the meals and washing dishes, doing the laundry and cleaning the house, as well as taking care of the children. Since Cranbury was still primarily a farming community, a number of businesses in and around the town catered directly to the agricultural needs of local growers. Ultimately, the most prominent was a company founded by Albert Chamberlin and his son-in-law, Ezekiel S. Barclay. In 1904, they established Chamberlin & Barclay, which, as will be described shortly, ultimately became the largest independent agricultural supply house of its kind in the state. Several small, farm-oriented businesses were scattered in or around the town in the 1880s. One of them was operated at the Cranbury

ċĎČ. ΆΊ. Housekeeping was physically hard work in the 1890s, and there are few photographs of women doing such household chores, which makes this amateur photo such a rarity. While Anna Groves, right, churned butter, her daughters, Marie, left, and Rose Ella, center, washed and scrubbed the laundry by hand in a tub on the back porch of their home at 82 North Main Street. (Collection of Lillian S. Conley)

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ċĎČ. Ά΋. In a white satin bridal gown, trimmed with pearls,

Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Chamberlin, daughter of Albert Chamberlin, married Ezekiel S. Barclay on June 4, 1896, uniting two of the most affluent and entrepreneurial families in town. Eight years later, her father joined with her husband to establish the agricultural firm of Chamberlin & Barclay. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

Station railroad depot by William D. Perrine, who had a hay-press and dealt in hay, grain, and straw. Most of the agricultural-oriented businesses at that time were concentrated around Cranbury Station or Hightstown to be closer to the railroad. Local business received a momentous boost in 1884 with the founding of the First National Bank of Cranbury. Established by a group of Main Street businesspeople during a cyclical national economic depression in



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1883 – 1885, the local bank was intended to encourage stronger ties between Cranbury merchants and farmers and to enhance the area’s economic growth. Merchants and farmers in the area were equally represented among the board of directors, but two merchants were elected officers, John S. Silvers of American Spice Mills as the first president and James H. Goodwin, general store owner and band leader, as secretary. Charles Applegate was the first cashier. The bank employed a number of tellers and bookkeepers at what were at the time standard salaries that ranged from $4 a week for inexperienced help to $7 a week for the head clerk, George B. Mershon. The bank itself was first located in two rented rooms on the first floor of the brick building owned by the Chamberlin Brothers at 11 North Main Street. The annual rent was $85 and the first order of business was to purchase a safe for $1,474. When the bank opened on Monday, June 2, 1884, with assets of $41,000, one of the first customers was Dr. John C. Holmes, a physician, who arrived with several hundred dollars in gold coins that he had kept under a trapdoor in the floor of his office. Within three years, the bank’s deposits had grown to $100,000, earnings had doubled, and the directors began to plan a modern building. A decade later, in 1898, after acquiring part of the DeWitt blacksmith shop property, the First National Bank of Cranbury moved into a substantial new bank building at 32 North Main Street. By the end of the nineteenth century, the First National Bank had become the primary depository for savings and checking accounts and a major source of credit, holding notes and mortgages on many of the area’s businesses, farms, and residences.¹⁰

ēĊĜ ĆėĈčĎęĊĈęĚėĆđ Ęę ĞđĊĘ In the Victorian era, classicism and formality gave way to romanticism, and in architecture this movement often veered toward the picturesque, with complex structures featuring broken silhouettes and irregular floor plans. As a source of inspiration, the Greek temple was replaced by Gothic cathedrals, medieval castles, and Italian Renaissance palazzos and villas. Many of the most representative Victorian houses were mansions whose sheer size reflected the new wealth of their middle- and upper-class owners.

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œ¤’“ŒŽ¨“¨Š—Šš“Œ¤œ¡“ŠšŽ¡›ŠŒ¦—Š¡¤®—Ž£ ှŒနၹႀၼၸ£¤œၹႀႀၸ£ဿ Beginning in the 1840s, many Americans had begun to turn away from the classical Greek Revival toward a new architectural style, called Gothic Revival. Instead of the simple, formal, classical details and balanced proportions, architects and later carpenter-builders moved toward a more casual, cozy, picturesque impression of “cottage residences.” Characteristically, a peaked gable at the end of a steeply pitched roof faced the street. Pointed arch windows provided a decorative effect. The invention of the scroll saw facilitated extensive, wooden ornamentation, called “gingerbread,” along the eaves and around windows and decorative porches. Improvements in glass-making allowed two-by-two-pane double-hung windows. A modified form of the Gothic Revival with many of its characteristics — angled, high-pitched, cross-gabled roofs and two-by-two paned windows — but without the extensive “gingerbread” ornamentation — succeeded Gothic Revival and was called Carpenter Gothic or Victorian Vernacular. Elements of the Gothic Revival or Carpenter Gothic style can still be found at 6 Bunker Hill in the old schoolhouse built in 1850 – 1851 and currently a private residence as well as at 6 Cranbury Station Road and 5 Prospect Street. The latter also indicates how changes in style sometimes resulted in the transformation of existing houses. The original structure at 5 Prospect Street, an old farmhouse built around 1854, was constructed on east-west axis with its main entry and porch facing south away from the street. After 1864, a subsequent owner built a large new addition facing the street and forming a “T” with the old farmhouse. The addition included ornate trim with fancy corbels supporting

ċĎČ. ΆΌ. Opposite: Keeping up with changing styles is well demonstrated in the

transformation of this house on Prospect Street. As the top photograph indicates, Victorian Gothic Revival style features, including a peaked gable and curved top window, were added in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the front of the house sometime after it was purchased in 1875 by shopkeeper – band leader James Goodwin. The bottom picture shows how earlier, in the 1860s or later, an entirely new front section with elements of various styles had been constructed perpendicular to the original farmhouse, the smaller structure to the rear, which had been built around 1854. (Courtesy of William L. Bunting Jr.)



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heavy eaves and a transom and sidelights around the main door in the middle of a broad front porch now facing the street. Sometime after 1875, the front of the addition was remodeled into the Gothic Revival style by adding a peaked gable with a curved top window and other Gothic trim. The old six-by-six front windows were replaced by twoby-twos. The house at 5 Prospect Street became the home of merchantbandleader James H. Goodwin and his family from 1875 until the early twentieth century.

“Œ¤œ¡“Šš ¤Š—“ŠšŠ¤Ž¤®—ŽှŒနၹႀၼၸ£¤œၹႀႀၸ£ဿ Among the many Victorian styles, Italianate was popular in Cranbury, perhaps because it broke less dramatically with established building conventions. The typical Italianate house usually had a flat or low-pitched roof with large, wide, overhanging eaves and cornices supported by prominent and elaborate brackets. The style emphasized strong vertical lines, particularly between the stories of the house, an effect heightened by contrast with the long, often ornamented porch embracing the entire front of the first floor, sometimes with a cupola at the end. Cranbury examples of the Italianate style include 9 Park Place East, 1 Prospect Street, 95 North Main Street, and 39 South Main Street. Sometimes builders modified the Italianate, or other pure styles, into what has been called “folk Victorian.” A Cranbury example of such vernacular Victorian architecture within a predominant Italianate style is the house at 10 North Main Street. The tall, imposing, three-story house features high vertical windows, sculpted brackets, and a symmetrical façade that originally contrasted with a horizontal front porch until the latter was removed by an owner in the 1950s.¹¹ Some of Cranbury’s public buildings also show the influence of the Italianate style, for example, on North Main Street, the old Brainerd Institute’s Italianate bell tower (removed when the building was converted to an apartment house) and many elements in the façade of the Methodist Church.

¦ŽŽšššŽ¤®—ŽှŒနၹႀႀၸ£¤œၹႁၹၸ£ဿ Only a few examples exist in Cranbury of the intricate, exuberant Queen Anne style of the late Victorian era. These are irregularly shaped houses with a variety of steep roofs, various exterior textures of clapboard and



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patterned shingles, decorative millwork, and ornamented windows of different contours and sizes. Most spectacularly, a round turret or a rectangular or octagonal tower often juts out as a striking component from one corner of the building. Undoubtedly, the most elaborate Queen Anne style mansion in Cranbury is the house built at 1 North Main Street in 1886 for John S. Silvers, owner of American Coffee and Spice Mills. Its soaring three stories are drawn skyward by two high-pitched front-gabled roofs, several tall brick chimneys, and many extremely tall and narrow windows. A rectangular, second-floor overhang protrudes from the left front, its Tudorlike qualities emphasized by leaded glass in the bay window beneath. Fancy millwork on the façade and on the front porch on the right adds to the house’s elaborate image. Equally dominating, however, is the grand, point-topped porte cochère over the carriageway leading to the main entrance on the south side of the building. Silvers’s estate was also noted for its sunken gardens extending south to Cranbury Brook and for its enormous, three-story carriage house to the rear.

ċĎČ. Ά΍. With its soaring gables and chimneys and its massive porte cochère over

the driveway, the Queen Anne style 1886 mansion of John S. Silvers, owner of the coffee, tea, and spice mill, was, as shown in this c. 1905 postcard, and still is one of the most striking homes on Main Street. (Lawrence Fish Collection; courtesy of Jan Lewis)

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Subsequently, in the late twentieth century, the house at 1 North Main Street became the home of Edward J. Katzenbach Jr., a member of a prominent Democratic family, whose father was attorney general of New Jersey in the 1920s and whose mother, Marie Louise Hilson Katzenbach, was the first woman president of the State Board of Education and for whom the Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf is named. Edward J. Kazenbach Jr., whose brother, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, was attorney general under President John F. Kennedy, bought the house at 1 North Main Street in 1972, a decade after serving as Kennedy’s deputy assistant secretary of defense.¹²

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ ĒĊĆēĉĊėĎēČ ĕĔĘę ĔċċĎĈĊ Cranbury has had a post office since 1806, but until the twentieth century it wandered nomadically from place to place among many different buildings for its first one hundred years. As in other rural towns, the Cranbury post office in the nineteenth century was merely part of a store where the postmaster had his or her main business. Although the names of the Cranbury postmasters are recorded, the sites of the post offices are not known until 1861, when one was located in John S. Davison’s store on Main Street. Thereafter, the office moved again as different merchants were named postmaster. In 1897, Harry Moore was appointed to the position, and the post office was operated out of 31 North Main Street, his watch and jewelry repair shop, which also served as his home. Moore put incoming mail in open pigeonhole boxes in the front bay window on the first floor. People could see from the street whether there was mail waiting for them. In 1902, rural mail delivery by horse and wagon began despite the opposition of many village merchants who believed it would diminish farmers’ trips to Main Street and, therefore, hurt local business. Around 1910, the post office moved across the street to the first floor of the Odd Fellows Hall at 30 North Main Street, where it remained for sixty years until 1971, when the government built the town’s first freestanding post office. The current, one-story brick, Colonial-style building erected at 65 North Main Street replaced an elm-shaded walkway to the large white house behind Main Street that served as the manse



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ċĎČ. ·΄. All dressed up and ready to go out on the winter day in 1902 when rural mail delivery was initiated in Cranbury, these postal carriers with their horsedrawn wagons posed in front of Postmaster Harry Moore’s watch repair shop at 31 North Main Street, the building flying the American flag, which also served as the post office. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

for the Second Presbyterian Church from 1835 to 1916. By 1971, the new post office already had a full-time staff, including postmaster, clerks, and letter carriers, and Wayne Stahl, fulltime postmaster from 1950 to 1974, had implemented the system of separate numbering sequences for buildings on North and South Main Street. When Stahl retired in 1974, he was succeeded by Mary Liedtke, the second woman postmaster in Cranbury’s history. The first, Samata Wakeley, had succeeded her husband as postmaster when he died in 1870.

ĊĉĚĈĆęĎēČ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ ĈčĎđĉėĊē Several affluent Cranbury residents joined in 1865 to create a private academy, called Brainerd Institute, as a preparatory school for their children, young men and women, who would be going on to college. The first board of trustees, all members of old Cranbury families, included Elias Dey, president; William Snediker, treasurer; and Ezekiel Silvers, secretary. Many of the principals were local ministers, including Rev.

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Joseph S. Van Dyke of the Second Presbyterian Church nearby. The large, three-story school building, constructed on an ample lot of grass and trees on the southeast corner of North Main Street and Plainsboro Road (the latter then known as the Princeton Turnpike), remains there today, although, as will be detailed later, the building, minus the Italianate bell tower that topped it, has been used for a number of different purposes since its use as a preparatory school ended at the turn of the century. No matter how good the Brainerd Institute was, it only solved the problem of education for those who were able to afford the price of the private school. Under statewide educational reforms adopted in the 1870s, Cranbury Township, which became independent from South Brunswick in 1872, established five geographical public school districts, each with its own small schoolhouse. Two were already in the village, the South School (the former Presbyterian Academy) at the south end and the Bunker Hill School at the north end. At these two public schools, four teachers tried to keep order and educate fifty to sixty pupils of various ages in a variety of subjects. Three small, one-room schoolhouses, none of which remains, were in outlying rural areas. In 1880, of the 453 school-age children in Cranbury Township, 342 were enrolled in the public school system; 24 attended private schools; and 87 did not go to any school. Almost all the funding for Cranbury public schools at that time came from the state, with the town’s 1880 school budget based on $1,774 from the state, as contrasted to only $185 derived from local taxes. For much of the nineteenth century, most of the state’s revenue came from taxing the Camden & Amboy Railroad. Since the railroad charged interstate passengers and shippers higher rates than local people and businesses, the main cost of New Jersey state government, including funding for the public schools, was shifted to out-of-state individuals and companies. Women played important roles in the public school systems created in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, generally replacing men as teachers, particularly in the lower grades, but not as principals or superintendents. The Cranbury History Center has a handwritten diary of one unidentified young woman teacher, who began her career in 1885, that provides some insights into a teacher’s life in those days. It reveals much of the tedium as her daily entries begin simply “school” or “school again” and deals mainly with her social life in the late afternoons, evenings,



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and weekends. But the diary also supplies occasional indications of her instructional duties, such as the entry for Thursday, October 29, 1885, “School — little rain — spelling drill after school — lot of big boys. Rec’d book I ordered Tues. — Degraff ’s School-room Guide. p.m.: Sophie & Anna McC in.”¹³

ĘĔĈĎĆđ Ćēĉ ćĊēĊěĔđĊēę ĔėČĆēĎğĆęĎĔēĘ The nineteenth century saw the formation of numerous social fraternal service and benevolent organizations for men and similar single-sex organizations for women. Indeed, the period 1860 to 1910 has been called the “Golden Age of Fraternalism” in the United States. Many of these were designed to provide a social gathering for compatible people, to provide aid and assistance to members and their families, and to perform charitable work for the community. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), brought to America from Britain in 1819, and one of the largest of such organizations, had members throughout the country. In 1849, Cranburians who were members of the Odd Fellows established a separate Cranbury chapter of Middlesex Lodge No. 90. Forty years later, in 1889, the Cranbury chapter erected the handsome, twostory meeting hall at 30 North Main Street. The Odd Fellows Hall was a place to hold meetings and social events as well as to plan charitable work. It also provided a hall for the community in which plays, dances, educational talks, and even political debates were held. In 1931, a number of Cranbury women created an IOOF auxiliary organization, Lady May Rebekah Lodge No. 94. Cranbury members of an even older and larger fraternal organization, the Free and Accepted Order of Masons, formed their Apollo Lodge No. 156 in the town in 1885. Its female counterpart, Brainerd Chapter No. 132 of the Order of the Eastern Star, was organized by several Cranbury women in 1920. The Masonic and the Eastern Star organizations held their meetings in the Odd Fellows Hall until they merged with their Hightstown counterparts at the end of the 1970s. Among the most important social, cultural, and philanthropic organizations for women were the women’s clubs, formed mainly among middle-class wives and business and professional women, beginning

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after the Civil War and expanding in the late nineteenth century. By 1913, New Jersey had 132 women’s clubs with a total of 13,000 female members. In addition to their other activities, these women’s clubs worked for better parks and playgrounds and improvements in day nurseries and housing, plus the creation of a public college for women in New Jersey (that goal was achieved in 1918 with the establishment of New Jersey College for Women, later Douglass College, Rutgers University, in New Brunswick). The Woman’s Club of Cranbury dates back to a November day in 1898, when a dozen women met at the parsonage of the Second Presbyterian Church and formed a cultural group which they called the “Reading Circle.” They thought it would be not only intellectually stimulating but also a good way to bring the women of the town’s three churches together. The object, they said, was “to fill our minds with those things that shall inspire us to higher attainments.” Their motto: “True to the best within us and Loyal to each other.” Over time, the “Reading Circle” increased in size and added civic and welfare programs. In 1919, the group changed its name to the Woman’s Club of Cranbury, and three years later, it affiliated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Increasingly committed to community service, the Woman’s Club of Cranbury in the 1920s began awarding college scholarships, later loans and scholarships, to several Cranbury students each year. The club’s civic service continues to the present day. It makes contributions to various local volunteer organizations and holds forums to hear candidates for township office. The discreet welcoming signs to the town erected in recent years were the result of an initiative by the Woman’s Club. The women also help to beautify Main Street with barrels of flowers in the spring and summer and evergreen boughs and red ribbons in the winter. Since the 1920s, the Woman’s Club has, on the first Friday of December, welcomed the holiday season with caroling at the community evergreen tree, which its members decorate, in Memorial Park.

ĜĔĒĊē ėĊċĔėĒĊėĘ The end of slavery and the national debate during Reconstruction of the South in the late 1860s over giving the vote to black men had led to an important discussion about extending the franchise to women.



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The movement for women’s rights had begun in New York at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, but the movement was further invigorated by the debates over the extension of voting rights during Reconstruction. In 1866 the American Equal Rights Association, advocating voting rights for adult women as well as black men, was founded, and chapters established in half a dozen states, including New Jersey. Women also petitioned for equal rights, and in New Jersey, married women in 1871 achieved equal right to custody of their children in a divorce and, in 1874, the right to their personal property and inheritances. By the 1890s, women in New Jersey could make contracts and sue in court and could have separate control over their own earnings. In regard to local education, New Jersey women also obtained the right in villages and towns like Cranbury (although not in cities), to serve on school boards and to vote on issues of local school appropriations. Fifty women in the state served on such local school boards between 1873 and 1895. While men continued to run the government, women entered the public sphere by addressing social and cultural issues affecting society, as well as seeking equal rights as citizens. An almost spontaneous movement against the “liquor traffic” and alcoholism arose across America in 1873 – 1874, when thousands of women, including many in New Jersey, staged a “Woman’s Crusade,” issuing public protests, praying, petitioning, and parading for this cause. They decried the threats posed to women and families from increasing rates of drunkenness among male workers, who spent their pay in taverns or saloons and physically abused their wives and children. In 1874, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded, and in 1879, Frances Willard, a former dean of Northwestern University, became its president, serving until her death in 1898. Frances Willard expanded the organization’s program to include women’s suffrage and social reforms in addition to its original goals of obtaining pledges of abstinence to alcohol and of ending the liquor trade. In part because it fit within the dominant gendered ideology of women’s responsibility for the spiritual and physical maintenance of the home and family, many middle- and upper-class women eagerly joined the movement, and by 1892, the WCTU, with 150,000 dues-paying members, had become the largest women’s organization in the country. In New Jersey alone, its membership soared from 517 women in 26 chapters in 1881 to 8,000 women in 208 chapters by 1890. It was only

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following Willard’s death, after nearly twenty years at the helm, that her successors in the first decades of the twentieth century contracted her broad reform goals down to a primary focus simply on the prohibition of alcohol.¹⁴ Cranbury women played a leadership role in the Middlesex County WCTU. In May 1890, four years after the county organization was founded, nearly a dozen Cranbury women met at the Methodist Church and listened to Sarah Jane Corson Downs, president of the New Jersey WCTU, and Hannah S. C. Garrison, wife of the local Methodist minister, advocate the establishment of a chapter in Cranbury. Enthusiastically, the women organized the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Cranbury and joined the national organization. Soon there were thirty-three members, including, as “honorary members,” men who took the WCTU’s pledge of abstaining from alcohol and paid the 50-cent annual dues. According to the chapter’s history, these three dozen members included “six colored women,” indicating that Cranbury had a racially integrated rather than segregated chapter, unlike many others. The local membership increased over the years until it reached a peak of 100 members. Among them were many longtime Cranbury families such as the Bergens, Campbells, Chamberlins, Coles, Davisons, Deys, Groves, Gulicks, Perrines, Pettys, Rues, Scudders, Snedakers, Stults, Symmeses, van Dykes, Voorheeses, Wakelys, and Whitakers.¹⁵ A Methodist minister’s daughter born in Philadelphia in 1844, Hannah S. Cline had graduated from the state college at Trenton and been a teacher before her 1870 marriage to Rev. Charles Ford Garrison, a newly ordained Methodist minister from Millville, New Jersey. In 1888, when Charles Garrison had become pastor of the Cranbury Methodist Church, they and their two children, Phillip and Frances Elizabeth (“Beth”), had moved into the Methodist parsonage at 6 Westminster Place in Cranbury. In addition to being a pastor’s wife and raising their two children, Hannah Cline Garrison pursued an active organizational life. The Cranbury Press later described her as “a bright, pleasant woman . . . especially gifted in prayer . . . a prominent woman of our town, always anxious to do good.” Besides playing a leading role in founding the local WCTU, she formed an organization of Methodist ministers’ wives, called the “Itinerant Sisterhood,” and also became active in the newly formed New Jersey Conference Women’s Home Missionary Society, serving first as secretary and later as state president. In Cranbury,



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she and her daughter also participated in a Reading Circle among local women, a group organized in 1898 that eventually evolved into the Cranbury Woman’s Club. Five years after she had organized the local WCTU, Hannah Garrison was elected president of the Middlesex County WCTU, a position she held for the next eight years. An able speaker and a successful administrator, she oversaw the expansion of the organization and its activities, increasing its membership and adding new chapters. She enhanced the WCTU’s work of education and reform with young people and different ethnic and racial groups through her efforts in schools, churches, and prisons, and through active lobbying of state and local governments.¹⁶ During the couple’s stay in Cranbury for nearly twenty years, Hannah S. C. Garrison’s work was actively encouraged and assisted by her husband, Rev. Charles F. Garrison, a dedicated and quiet man and pastor of the town’s Methodist Church for part of that time. She also received support from her son and daughter, the pastors of the two Presbyterian churches, and numerous other men and women in the town.¹⁷ As an indication of countywide support and success, Hannah Cline Garrison reported in 1902 that the Middlesex WCTU had become fourth in the state financially. When in 1903 after eight years as head of the country organization, Garrison resigned because of serious illness, her daughter, Beth, was elected president. The organization voted in 1904 to make Hannah Garrison an honorary life member, and in the spring of 1905, the Middlesex County WCTU held a spring institute in Cranbury in Garrison’s honor. She died that fall of breast cancer at the age of sixty-one.¹⁸ As committed temperance advocates, the Garrison family had worked from their arrival in town in conjunction with the Cranbury Township Temperance Alliance, which had been established in 1882 by the local ministers and several other leading men and women in the town.¹⁹ Earlier, Rev. Dr. Joseph G. Symmes of the First Presbyterian Church, one of the leaders of the local Temperance Alliance, had led delegations to the Middlesex County Courthouse in 1872 and 1874, protesting against any liquor business in the town. Although he was not entirely successful, only one liquor license was granted in Cranbury, to a hotel, in 1874. The other hotels, without liquor licenses, came to be known as “temperance hotels.” Temperance people advocated water instead of alcohol. Symbolically in 1907, the Cranbury WCTU, with funds bequeathed by local merchant

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John Mount, who had become a temperance advocate, built a substantial drinking fountain on Main Street by Brainerd Lake. Made of rounded stones from streambeds, the fountain had separate water basins on opposite sides. One was for horses on the street, the other for humans on the sidewalk. Rebuilt in 1979, the WCTU fountain remains there to the present day. WCTU social reformers in New Jersey in the nineteenth century failed to achieve their goal of having the legislature enact a total statewide ban on liquor sales. They did, however, obtain legislation requiring “scientific temperance instruction” in the schools. They also supported the movements for women’s rights and suffrage as additional ways to protect the family, and, in the twentieth century, they worked for and applauded the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment (“Prohibition”) to the U.S. Constitution in 1919 and opposed its repeal in 1933.

ėĊě. ĈčĆėđĊĘ ċ. ČĆėėĎĘĔē, ęčĊ ĒĊęčĔĉĎĘę ĈčĚėĈč, Ćēĉ ćėĆĎēĊėĉ ĎēĘęĎęĚęĊ Hannah Garrison’s husband, Rev. Charles F. Garrison, had an impact on the temperance movement, the Methodist Church, the new central public school building, and the private Brainerd Institute during his nearly two decades in Cranbury at the turn of the century. The son of a prominent South Jersey family from Millville, Charles Garrison had studied at the Pennington School and Drew University and was ordained in 1870. Having ministered to several congregations, he arrived in Cranbury in 1888 with his wife and children and served as Methodist pastor there for the next five years. He was an honorary member of the WCTU, and, along with his wife, was a strong and steady foe of alcoholic beverages and the liquor trade. An advocate of expanded public education, he was elected to the Cranbury School Board, where he played an important role in the decision and design for a new central school building, erected in 1896 – 1897.²⁰ Although he was an empathetic person and a dedicated reformer, Charles Garrison was not a commanding preacher. His ministry was “not spectacular,” explained the writer of his obituary in a Methodist journal. “He did not greatly attract the curious crowd.” But, the writer



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added, his “method was ever quiet and successful.” With his abiding confidence in humanity, Charles Garrison worked in his own subdued manner both as a pastor and as a life-long advocate and supporter of the temperance movement and of efforts to provide adequate education and care for the mentally challenged and developmentally disabled. With his brother, Rev. S. Olin Garrison, he had played an important role in the creation in 1888 of the Vineland Training School for the developmentally disabled, one of the first half dozen such facilities of its kind in the United States. After leaving his pastorate at the Cranbury Methodist Church in 1893, Garrison took charge of the facilities of the former preparatory school at Brainerd Institute and turned it into a home for the developmentally disabled, similar to the one he and his brother had established in Vineland. For nearly a decade, he served as the superintendent and chief fund-raiser of the reorganized Brainerd Institute. He and his

ċĎČ. ·΅. As this “bird’s-eye” view from the new water tower around 1906 shows,

Cranbury was still a nineteenth-century village bordered by vast farmlands. The original steeple of the Methodist Church was later blown over by a storm. The new Central School, capped by a clock tower, stood alone with its outhouse behind North Main Street. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

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family lived at the Brainerd facility until 1902, when he left Cranbury for ministries at Methodist churches in other communities.²¹ The Reverend Garrison died at Eatontown in 1914, his last recorded words being, “I am ready to go home. There is nothing to be afraid of.”²²

Ć ćĎėĉDZĘ-ĊĞĊ ěĎĊĜ Ĕċ ęĚėē-Ĕċ-ęčĊ-ĈĊēęĚėĞ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Cranbury was already a quaint and charming rural town. Its surrounding farmland spread as far as the eye could see, and at the center was the bustling village. One of the state’s main highways, still a two-lane dirt road for horse-drawn traffic, ran through the middle of town. A series of images produced by an itinerant photographer, John W. Frazier, from atop the new water tower behind the bank at 32 North Main Street around 1905, revealed a town in transition. Along with the seemingly ageless farms, water-pumping windmills, and even some outhouses in town, the grainy sepia prints revealed new buildings among the old structures, including the resplendent Silvers mansion, the result of successful entrepreneurial spirit, and the new, three-story, brick schoolhouse, epitomizing as it did the hope for the future as Cranbury and its people set forth on a new century.

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A town is more than a collection of houses, farms, and businesses, but because architecture and public records are so much more accessible, we generally know more about what people’s houses looked like and when people were born and died than we know about their daily life in the past. But knowledge of the attitudes and experiences of regular people has increased since the 1960s, with a new emphasis on social history and one of its main methodologies, oral history. The Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society has recorded and transcribed interviews with a number of longtime Cranbury residents about past life in the village and on its farms. Most of the oral histories so far have focused on Cranbury from the 1890s through the 1930s when Cranbury was still a self-sufficient, if not insular, small rural town. They provide insight into Cranbury in the early twentieth century.¹ With considerable humor, William Cole Hoffman, grandson of the founder of A. S. Cole & Son, remembered the town long before it began a gradual process of gentrification in the late twentieth century. As he and several other longtime residents remember it, they did not consider Cranbury as “charming” or “pretty” in the years around 1900. It did not



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ċĎČ. ·Ά. The old mill on South Main Street stands near Brainerd Lake, and the

road across the dam has a wooden railing in this photograph taken around 1895. (Courtesy of William H. Schanck)

have any sidewalks or paved roads at the time, and a good downpour could turn Main Street into a muddy quagmire. The wooden railings along Brainerd Lake, which was then a long “pond,” were unsightly, rickety, and frequently the propping-up place for what Hoffman recalled in 1974 as an “inebriate . . . whom we used to see fairly often, now, not at all.” In the summer, a scale for weighing hay and other animal fodder stood at the corner of Main Street and Park Place in the center of village, an indication of the importance of horses and agriculture to the town. Important changes were already under way, however. At the turn of the century, workers put in telephone poles and lines and electric streetlights, but initially only businesses and more affluent residents had telephones or electricity. In 1905, immigrant work crews dug trenches by hand and put in water mains with fire hydrants. (Despite the water mains, a sewer system, replacing individual septic systems, was not installed in the village until the late 1970s.) Still a dirt road, Main Street at



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the turn of the century was gouged by ruts three to eight inches deep as a result of winter rains and mud and became quite dusty in the dry days of summer. Taking care of the dirt roads was the job of Harry Scott, who owned a livery stable and a construction business at the corner of Maplewood and what is now Scott Avenue. He had half a dozen strong horses, dump wagons, and a large horse-drawn roller. His teamster was Charles Moody, a member of an African American family, longtime residents in Cranbury. Under contract with the township, the two men would level the town’s streets and keep the dirt roads repaired. They also ran a sprinkling wagon, which would water down the dusty streets in the summer. Stella LaBaw remembered that the children ran behind what she called the “sprinkler wagon” on hot summer days. If the town around 1900 lacked some of its later amenities, it was nevertheless a busier marketplace than it is today and also more often the scene of collective entertainments. Before movies, automobiles, radio, television, or electronic devices, residents knew how to fashion their

ċĎČ. ··. A postcard view from around 1905 down South Main Street, a dirt and macadam road lined with hitching posts, leading to the columned First Presbyterian Church in the distance. I. C. Hoffman’s general store on the near right would, ten years later, be used briefly as a theater for silent films. The site, now a vacant lot between 12 and 14 South Main Street, is identified today by a historic marker. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

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own diversions during the increased leisure time as the work week was generally reduced to an average of eight hours a day for five or five and one-half days a week. Cranbury was noted for James Goodwin’s brass band, in which William Hoffman remembered playing the trombone. The band marched in parades and played concerts alongside the lake and throughout the region. Like many other small towns, Cranbury had its own amateur baseball team, whose games with neighboring towns were well attended and hotly contested. For years, a baseball field with bleachers stood behind 55 North Main Street (near where a Babe Ruth League – style baseball field was built in 2010). Schoolchildren, adults, and amateur leagues played on the old baseball diamond. When the school took down the baseball field in the 1950s, the amateur leagues had already faded into the past, but youngsters still wanted to play, and a generous resident built another diamond for them on the north side of Old Trenton Road just west of South Main Street. Roi Taylor, a lifelong resident and currently director of the Cranbury History Center, remembers that in the 1950s and 1960s that diamond was called “Delany Field” in the donor’s honor. Almost every oral history of the early 1900s also mentions the horse races held on Main Street in summer and the sleigh races in the winter. These races were important and enjoyable events for which even busy merchants often closed their stores, at least temporarily, to take part in the festivities. During much of the first half of the twentieth century, one of the main gathering places for the Cranbury men was the barbershop run by George Puerschner at 11 North Main Street, a red-brick building that dated back to around 1810. Puerschner and his wife lived in the northern part of the building; in the southern part, they had the barbershop and a small newsstand and tobacco shop, as well as several pool tables (Mrs. Puerschner cut women’s and girls’ hair in the kitchen). Each morning around five o’clock, Harvey Dey would go to the train depot at Cranbury Station and bring big-city newspapers back for sale at Puerschner’s. For years, a wooden statue of an Indian clutching a fistful of cigars stood out in front of the tobacco shop. Over time, the price of cigars went up, as did the price of haircuts, which increased from 15 to 25 cents. A shave cost a dime. Both white men and black men would shoot pool at the pool tables on the first and second floors. Some black residents would come in and play dominoes and a card game called euchre. James F.



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Eiker remembered that Puerschner’s “was a place between 1910 and 1940 that you got all the news.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Brainerd Lake froze over, which it frequently did in winter, townspeople would gather for ice skating during the afternoon, or especially at night under the glow of lanterns or artificial lights (replaced in the twentieth century by the headlights of automobiles and later by electric floodlights). Before electric refrigerators arrived in the 1920s, ice from the lake was used for preserving foods. James Conover, a farmer who also owned the icehouse on the south bank, stored blocks of ice cut from the lake in winter and delivered them to customers for the family ice-cooled refrigerator, or “icebox.” From their reminiscences, it is clear that Cranbury’s oldest residents had poignant reflections on the changes in the way of life when they were interviewed for their oral histories in the final third of the twentieth century. They were wistful for what they recalled as having been a slower, friendlier, more relaxed time and place before there were automobiles, networks of paved roads, shopping malls, radio, and television. The turn-of-the-century town they recalled had been less connected to the outside world, and people, they believed, had relied more on their own talents and resources. Carefree days of sailing on Brainerd Lake dotted with the blossoms of giant lotuses in rented open or canopied boats for ten to twenty-five cents an hour in the early 1900s were billed as what a guidebook called “one of the county’s most beautiful spectacles.”² Such idyllic sojourns in the picturesque rural town brought out not only people from nearby farms and villages by horse and buggies but also urban visitors arriving by excursion trains via Cranbury Station from regional cities like Trenton and New Brunswick. Days and nights of music and dancing to the sounds of Goodwin’s Band (or boating as there was a band pavilion propped up over the lake at the dam), sleigh rides and horse races down Main Street, wellattended baseball games against neighboring towns — all of these are vivid reminders of how much has changed, and how much, in a sense, has been lost in the trends that have dominated the past fifty years. By the last third of the twentieth century, Cranbury’s story became largely one of integration into the regional and national economy and of avenues and opportunities that pulled people away from the village, yet at the same time, of the town’s efforts to preserve some of its legacies from the past.

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ċĎČ. ·Έ. Boats on Brainerd Lake available for summer-day rentals for tourists and residents. The Conover Farm icehouse is the tall building on the right. Postcard, c. 1905. (Courtesy of William H. Schanck)

ęčĊ ĕėĔČėĊĘĘĎěĊ ėĊċĔėĒ ĊėĆ Ćēĉ ĜĔėđĉ ĜĆė Ď Cranburians had, of course, been aware of the large political and international issues of their day, which we now know would have so much impact in the twentieth century. The pivotal presidential election of 1896 ushered in a Republican majority in the American electorate that lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Cranbury continued overwhelmingly to support the Republican ticket. In 1896, 346 men in Cranbury cast their ballots. The result was 4 – 1 for Republican William McKinley against the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Cranbury’s Republican majority far exceeded the 3 – 2 ratio in Middlesex County and New Jersey as a whole.³ In the Progressive reform era a decade later, Cranbury again retained its Republican majority, although the crucial election of 1912 revealed considerable reform sentiment there. That election pitted a conservative Republican incumbent, President William Howard Taft, against two



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reformers, former president Theodore Roosevelt who bolted the G.O.P. to run on the Progressive ticket, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The election split the Republican vote. Taft received 24 percent of the popular vote nationally, Roosevelt scored higher with 28 percent nationally. But because the G.O.P. split, the Democrat, Wilson, former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, was elected with 42 percent of the popular vote, but a landslide in the Electoral College.⁴ Republican voters in Cranbury also split, but unlike the national rankings, in Cranbury, Taft came in first with 36 percent, Democrat Wilson came in second with 34 percent, and Progressive Republican Roosevelt took third place with 29 percent. With the Democrats limited to about one-third of the voters, Cranbury remained a G.O.P town, even as its Republican voters split between the conservative and progressive wings of the party.⁵

ĜĔėđĉ ĜĆė Ď President Woodrow Wilson’s domestic policies in his first administration were overshadowed in his second term by U.S. participation in the First World War. Fighting the Germans in France in 1918, New Jersey volunteers and draftees, like other “doughboys,” suffered high casualties, up to nearly 30 percent, in the bloody trench warfare of the Western Front. Thirty-four Cranburians served in the armed forces, many of them with names familiar from previous wars but some who were more recent residents. One of the newer residents, Lieutenant William S. Bull, a young Cranbury physician serving as a surgeon with the American Expeditionary Force in France, was killed in action in October 1918, just a few weeks before the Armistice that ended the war. Cranbury’s initial World War I memorial was a wooden plaque erected in 1920 on the front of the Odd Fellows Hall, then still serving also as the post office. Later, the names of the Cranburians who served in World War I, including Dr. Bull, were inscribed alongside those of Cranbury residents who served in World War II, when a permanent, granite War Memorial was dedicated in Memorial Park in 1949. At home, New Jersey became a major producer of military equipment and foodstuffs as the United States helped to supply its allies as well as its own forces. “I can remember when the peace [the Armistice] was

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signed on November 11, 1918, my birthday,” recalled James F. Eiker. “They rang the big round iron ring by the fire department. The school whistles blew and the churches rang their bells. I was nine years old, and people passed the word that peace was being signed.”

ēĊĜ čĔĚĘĎēČ Ęę ĞđĊĘ Ďē ęčĊ ēĊĜ ĈĊēęĚėĞ Confronted with the unsettling impact of rapid change in the early twentieth century, many Americans turned to housing styles reflecting comforting, idealized, nostalgic images of the past: Colonial Revival, Tudor, American Prairie or Four-Square, and Craftsman’s styles were particularly popular.

œ—œš“Š—Ž¨“¨Š—Šš¦œ¡¤®—Ž£ Colonial Revival, predominant from the 1880s through the 1950s, came in a number of variations. The most popular had a simple rectangular shape roof with the gables facing the sides, and restrained ornamentation using colonial-style materials and design elements. But instead of the original eighteenth-century appearance, in the twentieth century Colonial Revival houses had doors with sidelights and large doublehung sash windows, often a covered entrance and sometimes a substantial porch or enclosed side rooms. Cranbury’s favorite example of the Colonial Revival is undoubtedly “the house on the lake,” a picturesque, three-storied, white-clapboard, gabled, and dormered house perched on a promontory on the south side of Brainerd Lake. It was built in 1929 just off South Main Street for C. Raymond Wicoff on the site of the old icehouse operated by farmer James Conover. Dutch Colonial Revival, another favorite architectural style in the first half of the twentieth century, presented a simple, but broad, oneand-one-half story house with a gambrel roof (two slopes on both the front and back and with the gables facing the sides). Unlike its actual colonial ancestors, the twentieth-century version generally had a high rather than low gambrel roof, and a low dormer often ran across the façade. Examples of Dutch Colonial Revival houses exist at 50 South Main Street, 135 North Main Street, and 62 Maplewood Avenue.



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ċĎČ. ·Ή. Known in Cranbury as “the house on the lake,” this Colonial Revival – style residence was built overlooking Brainerd Lake in 1929 by Raymond C. Wicoff on the site of the Conover Farm icehouse. (Courtesy of Mahbubeh Stave and the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

Although not as popular as Dutch or other Colonial Revival styles, Tudor Revival, with its stone or timber-patterned stucco walls, seemed to offer reassurance and prestige by harking back to a nostalgic image of either charming medieval cottages or stately great houses in old, picturesque “Merrie England.” There is an example of such a Tudor Revival cottage, much enlarged, at 13 Bunker Hill, and a great-house style Tudor Revival is located at 7 Symmes Court.

¡Š“¡“Ž¤®—Žœ¡˜Ž¡“ŒŠš œ¦¡Ÿ¦Š¡ŽှŒနၹႀႁၸ£¤œၹႁၺၸ£ဿ Inspired in part by the Prairie School of Frank Lloyd Wright, the American Four Square house, comfortable and space-efficient, was built in large numbers across the country during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Prairie Box or American Four-Square home provided a solid, substantial house for the growing middle class. Essentially a square box, two stories high, plus an attic and full basement, the

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American Four-Square’s interior consisted of four rooms on each floor, one in each corner. The exterior, providing a variation on the linear style pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright, had a one-story porch across the front, and sometimes around the side. The hipped roof, where all sides sloped down toward the walls, had massive, prominent eaves and a squat chimney in the center. Sometimes a single broad dormer faced the street, although there were endless varieties. In Cranbury, with crisp white clapboard siding and dark shutters, many of the American Four-Square houses took on the look of Colonial Revival. Numerous examples and variations of the style exist in Cranbury, among them the houses as 8 Symmes Court and at 4, 52, and 54 South Main Street (the last in Mediterranean Style), 9 Prospect Street, and 10 Bunker Hill. The Colonial Revival – style, American Four-Square house at 10 Bunker Hill at the northeast corner of Prospect Street was built in 1909 by John J. Bradley, a top salesperson and subsequently president of J.  S. Silvers coffee and spice company. From 1917 to 1935, the house served as the parsonage for the Second Presbyterian Church until the merger of the two Presbyterian churches in 1935, after which it became a private residence.⁶

¦š‘Š—œªှŒနၹႁၹၸ£¤œၹႁၼၸ£ဿ A more modest style, the “bungalow” was one or one-and-one-half stories, usually with a low-pitch gabled front, although rustic, Craftsman’s style variations could be taller. In both cases, there were usually wide, overhanging eaves and a gable over a broad porch with prominent, often tapered, porch roof supports that often reached to the ground. Frequently, the entrance was off-center, the windows grouped, and the house narrower in front than it was deep. Examples of bungalow-style houses in Cranbury are located at 6 Symmes Court, 86 and 88 North Main Street, and 40 Maplewood Avenue. Bungalows were popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by the early dwellings along the Massachusetts coast, the Cape Cod cottage was a small, one-and-one-half story house with a side gable roof, with or without dormers. It usually had a centrally placed doorway flanked symmetrically by six-by-six-pane windows. Constructed from the 1920s through the early 1950s, these little houses were



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highly popular throughout the country, exuding the charm of a colonial cottage at an affordable price. An example of an attractive Cape Cod is located at 128 North Main Street.

ęčĊ ΅΍Ά΄Ę: ĆĚęĔĒĔćĎđĊĘ, ĒĔěĎĊĘ, Ćēĉ ĒĔĉĊėē ęĎĒĊĘ The Jazz Age is the term novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald applied to the 1920s, a time after the war when the search for personal gratification seemed to replace the Progressive Era’s concerns with reforms and the public welfare, a hedonistic trend encouraged by the automobile and the movies. The rush to be “modern” was in vogue, particularly in more cosmopolitan areas, but rapid changes upset many people, and confrontations between modernists and traditionalists occurred in the halls of government, in courtrooms, in the press, and sometimes on the streets. The U.S. Census of 1920 showed that for the first time fewer people lived in rural areas (49 percent) than in urban areas (51 percent), the latter then defined as areas with populations over 2,500 persons, and thus including anything from villages to metropolises. Middlesex County entered the 1920s with a population that had grown by nearly one-third to 162,000 over the previous decade, and nearly half the county’s population lived in the main cities of New Brunswick and Perth Amboy. Much of the rest of Middlesex County was still rural countryside dotted with small towns and isolated farmsteads. Cranbury’s population had been reduced by nearly one-third, from 1,424 in 1910 to 1,083 in 1920, because its disgruntled western section had separated and been officially recognized in 1919 as the independent Township of Plainsboro.⁷ Increasingly, the engine of economic growth in the United States had shifted from industrial equipment to consumer goods, and the trend had become obviously dominant. Automobiles, now widely owned, emerged as a symbol of the 1920s. Although the motorcar or “horseless carriage” was limited to the affluent when it first appeared around the turn of the century, even as early as 1908 the Cranbury Press had emphasized complaints about the clouds of dust being created by cars roaring down Main Street, mainly a dirt roadway although it was still a major travel route. By 1914, nearly seventy families in Cranbury owned motorcars.

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ċĎČ. ·Ί. A horseless carriage crosses the stone bridge at Brainerd Lake dam in

this enchanting picture from downstream on Cranbury Brook. Postcard, c. 1905. (Courtesy of William H. Schanck)

Rural areas like Cranbury had no full-time, professional police protection until the formation of the New Jersey State Police in 1921 in part to provide law enforcement for rural areas. Cranbury relied largely upon the nearest State Police Barracks then located in Hightstown. Consequently, individuals formed organizations to help with the problem of stolen motorcars, or horses and carriages for that matter. Modeled after similar groups in the tristate region, the Cranbury Vigilant Society, founded by leading citizens in 1901, was a combination citizens’ posse and theft-insurance organization. Each member paid $10 annually per motorcar or $5 per horse or mule. If such property were stolen, members were to notify immediately the “Chief Pursuer,” Harvey S. Dey, who, with his assistants, was to pursue the “thief or thieves, with all possible speed and dispatch to a distance not exceeding fifty miles, and two hundred miles for automobiles.” The society would pay rewards if the culprits and the stolen items were captured; if they were not, the fund would reimburse the owner up to $175 per horse and $300 per automobile. The society maintained its insurance fund until 1947.⁸



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In the early years of the century, Cranbury’s Main Street was part of State Highway 25, a major artery across the state. The dirt road had been partially paved before the 1920s, but by then, vehicular traffic had reached alarming proportions. On some weekends, Main Street was clogged with automobiles. “Wake up Citizens!” the Cranbury Press warned in 1925. “We need protection. 700 motor cars per hour pass through town on Sundays.” Yet, for decades, the town resisted having any traffic lights in the village itself. The first signal on Main Street was not installed until after the Second World War. A few old-timers recall a blinking warning light at South Main Street and Cranbury Neck Road to caution motorists about tractors and potato trucks coming through that intersection on their way to the railroad depot at Cranbury Station. Then finally, in the 1990s, full traffic signals with red, yellow, and green lights were put into place at village intersections at South Main Street and Old Trenton Road as well as at North Main Street at Plainsboro Road, the latter after a fatal accident there.⁹ The town had initially responded to the increased flow of automobiles on Main Street in the 1920s by hiring a part-time policeman rather than installing traffic signals. Harry L. Schanck, who had driven a school transportation vehicle, was appointed a constable and also served as chief of police of the town’s part-time, one-man police force beginning around 1928. His main job was to direct traffic on weekdays when school began and ended and on summer weekends. This he did until his death at age sixty-four in 1947. Extensive use of automobiles as well as trucks magnified the need for improved highways. The modern public road movement had begun in 1891, when, at the urging of farm-to-market groups, New Jersey became the first state to provide regular funding for road construction. The federal government began highway financing in 1916. The number of allweather roads, hard surfaced with macadam, doubled in the state during the next decade. To improve the flow of traffic by reducing intersections and stops on major highways, New Jersey’s highway engineers created traffic circles, and to reduce accidents, they erected concrete, center dividers, which other states called “Jersey barriers.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Cranbury’s Main Street and some other primary roads were finally hard surfaced with liquid asphalt to reduce wear and road dust, but many of the local country roads remained unpaved even after the Second World War.

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ċĎČ. ·΋. When this bucolic picture of Cranbury Neck Road looking east toward the intersection with South Main Street was taken for a postcard around 1907, it was still a narrow dirt road lined by farms and farmhouses all the way into town. (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

Automobiles brought other changes to the town. In the 1920s, an automobile garage was built in Cranbury by Sam Aler just outside the village on George’s Road. Frederick (“Fritz”) Liedtke and Ralph Danser converted the old Civil War drill hall on Maplewood Avenue into an automobile repair shop. The Silvers and Danser families opened the Central Garage at 29 North Main Street and also sold Overland and Willys-Knight automobiles there. Several years later, Liedtke and Danser moved their garage to the Central Garage on Main Street, but continued to call it the Maplewood Garage. They sold Plymouth and Dodge vehicles and repaired all makes and models. Most recently, the garage with its large showroom was transformed into a dance studio of the American Repertory Ballet’s Princeton Ballet School. Several full-service gas stations sprung up around town. An AMOCO (American Oil Company) station was located at the north end of town at Dey Road. Cranbury ESSO (Eastern Seaboard Standard Oil; now Exxon), run by a descendant of the Farr farming family, pumped gas across the highway at South River Road. At the south side of town,



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Hagerty’s Sinclair Oil station, together with a grocery store, was located at the corner of South Main Street and Old Trenton Road, later the site of Hagerty’s florist business. In the village itself, there were gasoline pumps on the sidewalk in front of Danser’s Central Garage, 29 North Main Street; Lasche Brothers’ General Store, 60 – 62 North Main; and O’Neil’s Grocery Store, 79 North Main Street. Some of those curbside gasoline pumps and their underground tanks were not removed until the 1980s. Movies came to Cranbury in 1911, when short reels of flicking, blackand-white images were projected onto a sheet hung on the wall in the Odd Fellows Hall. They proved so popular that in 1915 an early movie theater was created in a building between 12 and 14 South Main Street, which was a general store for much of the period from the 1880s to 1940s. Like the early urban “nickelodeons,” which charged five cents per show, the store was converted into a theater simply by installing a handcranked film projector, a white sheet or screen, rows of chairs, and perhaps a piano for musical accompaniment to the silent films. Movies were shown on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Cranbury nickelodeon did not last long. In 1922, when a theater in Hightstown was remodeled with a newer and larger screen, better projector, and permanent seating, Cranburians abandoned their makeshift nickelodeon to drive there or to even larger and more modern movie theaters in Trenton or New Brunswick. Electric lights and telephones proliferated in Cranbury village in the 1920s, although many farmers continued to rely mainly on kerosene lamps until the rural electrification projects in the 1930s. The town’s first telephone office, the Farmers and Traders Phone Exchange, staffed by women operators, was housed on the second floor of 39 North Main Street. Few people could afford private phones; most had “party” lines with four or five residences on the same line. The bell would ring a different number of times for each house on the line, but anyone in the several residences would hear the ring and listen to the conversation. Consequently, as one longtime resident recalled, “everyone knew everyone else’s business.” Frances Bradley L’Hommedieu said the woman operator on duty knew even more. “We’d call somebody or ask her to ring somebody, and she’d say, “Oh, there’s no use ringing them, they’ve gone to New York today.” Automobiles and improved highways revived many local inns, including the oldest in Cranbury. In 1920, the old United States Hotel at

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21 South Main Street was renamed the Cranbury Inn by its new owners, Joseph Thomas Wincklhofer and his wife, Mary. The Wincklhofers opened a 6,000-square-foot dance pavilion on the north side of the inn, and the Perrine Band, successor to Goodwin’s, played there on Wednesday and Saturday nights. As the local justice of the peace, “Judge Wink” oversaw municipal court proceedings at the inn on Tuesday evenings. The Cranbury Inn was taken over in 1932 by Adrian Van Ravesteyn, a member of a Dutch hotelier family, and his wife, Marjorie. With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, they created a new Tap Room in one of the original post houses, and using funds from a New Deal project for artists, had historic murals painted on the walls. The Ravesteyns built a new dining room in the side yard where the dance hall had been. From 1956 to 1972, new owners, Maurice J. (“Doc”) D’Agostino, a Princeton graduate, and his wife, Elizabeth (“Betty”), operated the inn as a restaurant and hotel. The last resident to live in the inn was Dorothy Mack, a colorful, elderly spinster who rented the upstairs front bedroom from 1940 until her death in 1972, when she was found dead of pneumonia in her bed one chilly morning. “Miss Mack” as she was known, is also the source of one of the many “ghost stories” that are part of the folklore linked to half a dozen old houses in the town. Since 1992, the Cranbury Inn has been owned by Thomas and Gloria (“Tom” and “Gay”) Ingegneri, who in 2005 expanded it to include a large, timber-frame Dutch barn. Although the Cranbury Inn stopped taking overnight guests in 1974, it still serves food and drink and hosts many functions. It is the only eighteenth-century inn and tavern still operating in the town and is surely one of the village’s most widely known businesses. The Cranbury Inn is one of the relatively few eighteenthcentury tavern-inns in the country that still exist and continue to serve the public.¹⁰

ĜĔĒĊē Ćēĉ ėĊċĔėĒ As a result of the U.S. entry into World War I, the domestic political situation had changed enough that two long-advocated reforms — prohibition of alcohol and women’s suffrage — were adopted nationwide. The temperance movement achieved its goal of banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors when Congress passed the



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Eighteenth Amendment in 1917 and the states ratified it in 1919. Prohibition lasted until it was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933. With most women supporting mobilization during the war and with the beer and liquor interests and other opponents on the defensive, suffragists gained increased support, including finally that of President Woodrow Wilson. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment providing for women’s suffrage in 1919, and the states ratified it in time for the election of 1920. Although the women’s movement lost much of its force after the achievement of suffrage, female organizations continued to work for better conditions for women and the family. Opportunities for women to achieve political office increased quickly as New Jersey took the lead in altering its laws in order to allow female citizens to serve on juries and political committees and to hold political office. Women began to campaign for office and to win. By 1930, New Jersey women comprised a little more than 10 percent of the sixtymember State Assembly; four were on boards of county freeholders; more than a dozen were on election boards. One, Mary T. Norton, was the state’s first U.S. congresswoman. Norton was from Jersey City. Rural areas lagged far behind the cities in nominating women for state or national office. While Essex and Hudson Counties nominated 181 women between 1920 and 1946, Middlesex County did not put forward a female candidate for the legislature until 1945, and none was elected until 1986.¹¹ Cranbury elected its first woman to the Township Committee in 1974, when two women vied for a vacant seat. By their usual 2 – 1 Republican majority, Cranbury voters elected Patricia (“Pat”) Scott over Democrat Wendy Katzenbach. Scott was sworn in as a member of the Township Committee on New Year’s Day 1975 and served for the next twelve years, including three terms as mayor of Cranbury.

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The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that lasted through the 1930s curtailed the rampant financial speculation and many of the heated cultural issues of the previous decade. In the initial sharp downtown, thousands of banks failed, major employers such as the copper refineries in Middlesex County first reduced wages and then laid off workers. Municipalities cut their payrolls. Average income in New Jersey plunged 50 percent. By 1933, more than one-quarter of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. Prices, including those for agricultural commodities, also plummeted, which hit small family farms particularly hard, although at least farm families, unlike many city dwellers, usually had enough food to eat. The country did not fully recover economically until World War II. Cranbury was not immune to the Depression. Following the market crash of 1929, as the economy spiraled downward until the spring of 1933, the $2 million resources of First National Bank of Cranbury plunged by nearly half. Its conservative management, and its capital, surplus, and undivided profits, which totaled $180,000, enabled the bank to survive. Many people, however, lost their jobs, their homes, their farms, or their businesses. “It was rough,” recalled Agnes Hall Wilson, who had married Joseph Wilson and joined Cranbury’s black community on Maplewood Avenue in 1937. “Bread was a nickel a loaf, five cents for a quart of milk, fifty cents for a pound of butter, and fifty cents an hour for housework.

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The pay wasn’t much, but then the price of food was low, so your dollar went further.”¹ John W. Ervin, whose father worked at A. S. Cole’s funeral home and whose mother raised five children on a working man’s pay, had a job as a teenager in a butcher shop during the Great Depression to help to supplement his father’s income. It was “a rough life” during the Depression, he recalled, but because Cranbury was an agricultural community, “we all had enough to eat. We didn’t have much money, but we all had enough to eat and we did get along.” With a population of less than fourteen hundred, fewer than a thousand in the village itself, Cranbury, he said, was a small town. “Everybody knew everybody else and it was a friendly town.” Cliques and prejudices existed, Ervin remembered: Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. But during the Depression if people were down-and-out, Ervin said, “the community got together and took care of them . . . ; even with all the prejudices that existed at the time, people came together to help people out when it was really necessary. That seems like a dichotomy, but that’s the way it was.”² As an additional source of government revenues as well perhaps as a lift for some people’s spirits, Prohibition was repealed. Cranbury received two liquor licenses: one for the Cranbury Inn on South Main Street, the other for William (“Bill”) Hagerty’s road house on Old Cranbury Road. The latter had a jukebox and dance floor. Later, after Hagerty’s road house closed, the liquor license was transferred to what one Cranbury resident recalled as “a gin mill” near the Route 130 Circle. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and the Democratic Congress used unprecedented peacetime federal intervention in the economy to ease the impact of the Depression and the resulting widespread discontent. In conjunction with federal programs, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), New Jersey built 6,000 miles of streets and highways and 326 new bridges. Among these was the construction of a new highway through Cranbury Township, which would eventually be designated U.S. Route 130. It was not an easy project. When the Middlesex County Board of Freeholders received federal WPA funds in 1933, they proposed improving the old north-south highway, then labeled State Route 25, that went right down Cranbury’s Main Street. This was still one of the few towns in the county whose highway was not yet fully paved from curb to curb. The paved center

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was bordered by dirt and grass. Villagers were divided over the proposed highway project. The newly formed Lions Club, established in 1932, and many residents objected to the idea of increasing the already heavy traffic on Main Street and supported a bypass around the village. Main Street merchants, however, feared the loss of business if the new highway bypassed their stores. Some residents agreed with them, fearing that the value of their homes would depreciate even more if the center of town life shifted elsewhere. Several years of debate and the consideration of a variety of locations finally resulted in an acceptable compromise by 1936, a nearly threemile-long bypass that would skirt the business center of Cranbury. The bypass would be built slightly to the east of the village. Completed in 1938 and still labeled part of State Route 25 until designated U.S. Route 130 in 1952, the bypass diverted an increasingly heavy flow of cars and trucks away from Main Street. In the long run, that divergence helped preserve both Main Street and the historic village. So did the fact that it was the modernized U.S. Route 1, about half a dozen miles west of the village, rather than State Route 25, later U.S. Route 130, that served as the main highway between New York and Philadelphia until the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike after World War II. The Great Depression “was awful tight,” recalled James Eiker, the son of a local farmer. “It was tough for people to pay their bills. I remember people who worked on the roads would get paid by the county in ‘script money.’ .  .  . It wasn’t real money but redeemable.” A lot of merchants would discount it, counting $10 as $8, for example, because they had to wait a long time to get repaid by the county or state. Eiker had bought a truck in 1934, and for the next thirty years he delivered produce and fertilizer around the state. He remembered how some of the people were hard hit by the Depression, but “they made out somehow with the help of neighbors and friends.” Farmers had food, but if they could not meet their obligations because of bad weather or falling prices, they had to turn to the banks or to the local commodity dealers — Chamberlin & Barclay at Cranbury Station, Bennett and Clayton on Prospect Plains Road, or Bennett and Mount in Hightstown — for loans to tide them over. “If things didn’t turn around in three years or so, they would lose everything.” With prospects so poor, America’s birth rate sank and population growth stagnated like the economy. Cranbury, which had grown by



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200 new residents (16 percent) in the booming 1920s, increased by only 64 persons (5 percent) in the 1930s. The town had 1,342 inhabitants in 1940.³ Because of the adoption of women’s suffrage in 1920, however, the electorate doubled. Although not all eligible women voted at first, the number of Cranburians casting ballots increased, from 380 in 1912 to 580 in 1920. The town remained overwhelmingly Republican even during the Great Depression. The national popularity of President Roosevelt, a Democrat, nonetheless, reduced the town’s normal Republican dominance of 4 – 1 over Democratic voters down to merely a 2 – 1 Republican majority.⁴

Ć ĈčĆēČĎēČ ĊĈĔēĔĒĞ As in the majority of American towns, most businesses in Cranbury prospered in the first decades of the twentieth century but were hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although some adjusted and were transformed, others did not survive. The two largest business enterprises in Cranbury followed very different paths with opposite results. Chamberlin & Barclay, Inc., had, since its founding in 1904, quickly gone beyond its original business of buying hay and straw from farmers and selling these to livery stables in the towns and cities. By 1915, as horses began to be replaced by motorized vehicles, the company entered the fertilizer business, selling bags of a manure-based product labeled “Old Reliable.” With the spread of automobile suburbs in the 1920s, it also began marketing its fertilizer for lawns, which ultimately made up nearly half the sales. As Cranbury became the center of the potato-growing region of the state, Chamberlin & Barclay emerged as a major supplier and marketer for the crop, selling seed potatoes and fertilizer to the farmers in the region and shipping the harvested potatoes in small bags to grocers and other retailers and in bulk to food processors. By the 1930s, the company had become an intermediary between farmers and the increasingly large food-processing companies that purchased most of the potatoes. With considerable resources through its profits and interlocking directorates with the local bank, insurance company, and other firms, Chamberlin & Barclay was able to adapt to both the changing structure of its industry and fluctuating business and agricultural cycles even during the Depression. Keeping abreast of new

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business opportunities, it expanded into selling tractors and other specialized farm machinery as federal subsidies in the 1930s helped mechanize larger farms. From its nearly one dozen buildings at Cranbury Station, the company shipped truck and freight carloads of potatoes and fertilizer throughout the eastern half of the country. Chamberlin & Barclay, a family-run operation, weathered the Great Depression because it had resources far beyond those of smaller firms and because its management adjusted to organizational and technological changes in the emerging field of agribusiness. In contrast, J.  S. Silvers & Bro., with its American Mills producing and wholesaling a line of specialty coffee, tea, spices, and sundries, was less able to deal with changes in its field. Since its founding in the mid1860s, the Silvers’ company had by 1900 a good and long-standing reputation for its products, which were sold to grocery stores and restaurants in Middlesex, Monmouth, and Mercer Counties, as well as to resort hotels along the shore. It had adjusted to the automotive age in the 1920s by replacing the horse-drawn wagons and salesperson’s carts with trucks and automobiles. Reba Thomas joined the company in 1906 as a twentyfive-year-old secretary working at the mill at the north end of the village. She was one of up to a hundred workers, men and women, who kept the plant operating weekdays from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Increasingly profitable, J. S. Silvers & Bro. Company celebrated its fiftieth year in business in 1916. Following the deaths of the Silvers brothers, in 1908 and 1915, William’s only son, William Russell Silvers, a recent Princeton University graduate, took charge of the firm. But the young executive died prematurely in October 1918, a victim of the influenza pandemic, and John J. (“Jack”) Bradley, one of the company’s top salesmen, succeeded him as president. When fire destroyed the plant in December 1927, Bradley erected a new building in Hightstown, closer to the railroad depot. The majority of employees, however, continued to be from Cranbury and commuted to Hightstown. Some may have commuted in the old cars of the local transportation service, which shuttled among Cranbury, Hightstown, and Cranbury Station. Unlike Chamberlin & Barclay, the Silvers’ company did not survive the Great Depression. It lacked the financial resources to compete in a more aggressive market with much larger enterprises that survived on slimmer profit margins by negotiating lower rates for supplies and



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selling over a wider area. Nor was American Mills able to adapt to dramatic changes in the structure of the wholesale and retail food industry. The A&P Company, which opened its first economy grocery store in 1912, owned 14,000 discount grocery stories by 1925. Particularly during the Depression, tight family budgets and undercutting by chains like the A&P resulted in the demise of many of the small, independent grocery stores that had been customers of the Silvers’ company. American Mills was unable to develop new markets to replace them. “There didn’t seem to be much future for the wholesale grocery business,” recalled Rebecca Thomas Davis, who by then had married and been promoted to head bookkeeper. “This, with the withdrawing of some capital, caused hardships for the company, and they closed their doors during the year 1935.”⁵

ĈđĔĘĎēČ Ĕċ ęčĊ ĘĊĈĔēĉ ĕėĊĘćĞęĊėĎĆē ĈčĚėĈč During the Great Depression, attendance and revenue at the two Presbyterian churches declined precipitously. Despite continued discussions of a merger, it was not until March 1935 that the reunification of the two churches was accomplished. That was nearly a hundred years after the initial schism. The merger occurred after Rev. Dr. Joseph Ellsworth Curry, who had been pastor of the First Presbyterian Church since 1894, was accidentally struck by a speeding car, hurled seventy feet, and killed as he walked across the Hightstown-Cranbury Road.⁶ With one of the pulpits suddenly and unexpectedly open, the trustees of the two churches concluded an agreement. The pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, Rev. Frank B. Everitt, led his flock to the First Presbyterian Church on the hill. The Second Presbyterian Church building was razed, its former site indicated today simply by a small marble monument. The sexton’s house, built in 1840 at 3 Westminster Place, became a private home, subsequently enlarged. The former Sunday School and chapel building on the corner of North Main Street and Westminster Place was turned over to the township and, as Westminster Hall, served as a place for community events, social gatherings, and subsequently as a youth center until the 1950s. Eventually abandoned, the structure gradually deteriorated until it was finally demolished.

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ċėĔĒ ĒĎĝĊĉ ċĆėĒĎēČ ęĔ ǴĕĔęĆęĔ ĈĆĕĎęĆđǵ Ĕċ ēĊĜ ďĊėĘĊĞ Agriculture underwent important changes in the first half of the twentieth century. Most farms in Cranbury and the rest of Middlesex County had traditionally engaged in mixed farming. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the farmers had grown a wide variety of vegetable and grain crops and kept livestock and poultry, producing dairy and poultry products. The self-sufficient family farm, with some extra produce sold for income, had been the aim and the norm. But as wheat and other grain production shifted to the western states, local farmers turned increasingly to producing garden vegetables and fruits: beans, peas, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, lettuce, beets, as well as fruits such as apples and peaches. In the 1920s, motor vehicles and improved roads had expanded the ability of local farms to truck their fresh, perishable fruits and vegetables to urban markets. Cranbury farmers proved successful in this transition, and they also took on important roles in agricultural organizations at the local, county, and state levels. Franklin Dye served as secretary to the New Jersey State Board of Agriculture for twenty years before his death in 1920. James C. Ewart served on the State Board of Agriculture as a member in the late 1930s and as president from 1940 to 1941. J. Edward Chamberlin was also elected to the State Board from 1949 to 1953. Local farmers were also well represented on the Middlesex County Farm Bureau, where they provided advice on agricultural policy and often won recognition for their own achievements. Williams M. Cox, owner of a farm and orchard at the north end of town, was allegedly the first farmer east of the Mississippi to grow Red Delicious Apples. For many years, he was also the lone Democrat on the Cranbury Township Committee, and he also served as a Middlesex County freeholder. His daughter, Jennie, and her husband, R. Stanley Griggs, acquired the thirty-acre Eastview Orchards, by North Main Street and Plainsboro Road, where they grew apples, asparagus, and red raspberries. Some of the fruits were sold retail at the farmstand, but the bulk was transported to wholesale commission merchants in Newark and New York City. In the fall, apples were also taken to the Freehold Cider Mill for processing and bottling as cider. It was, however, the white potato that became the main cash crop of central New Jersey, beginning in the 1920s. In Middlesex, Mercer, and



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Monmouth Counties, the light sassafras loam soil and the flat or gently sloping farmlands proved particularly conducive to growing the humble if profitable tuber. By 1940 the “Three M” counties produced threequarters of New Jersey’s potatoes, and spuds amounted to 71 percent of the foodstuffs grown in the state. As the growing and shipping center for potatoes, Cranbury became known as the Potato Capital of the state.⁷ Yet with higher profits came higher risks. Specialized potato farms spent far more than mixed ones on labor, fertilizers, machinery, and selected seed types. Because of increased costs, they were more likely to be in debt to the bank and to carry mortgages on their farmlands and buildings. Potato farms were generally larger than vegetable farms, and they depended on the highly volatile potato market, notorious for sharp variations in price. To alleviate a crisis caused by overproduction, disease, and inferior seed types in older growing regions, the New Jersey Department of Agriculture in 1922 began introducing new, select varieties of white potatoes and providing useful grading, marketing, and price information. This occurred just as the Cranbury boom was beginning. None of these advantages could protect farmers from the price fluctuations and generally declining market during the Great Depression. Partial help came from new state and federal loan and service programs and by marketing and financing innovations of firms like Chamberlin & Barclay, Inc., which began offering extended credit to farmers in bad crop years. Amid the general decline, high potato prices in 1929, 1933, and 1936 allowed farmers to pay down their debts and live well in those years. With New Deal payments and eased credit policies, many farmers began reducing their costs by purchasing tractors, mechanical planters, and potato digging machines. Reminiscing about growing up on his father’s farm on Cranbury Neck Road during that era, Stanley C. Stults recalled that the situation of the potato farmers varied over time: “When you had a good year, the farmer bought a new car. I remember we had a 1930 Buick, a 1936 Buick, and a 1939 Buick. . . . About every third year was a good year. Dad always did pretty well; we never wanted for anything.” The Perrines, an old Cranbury farming family, had also switched mainly to potatoes. Arthur E. Perrine, who lived on South Main Street and had a 135-acre potato farm on what later became the Rossmoor retirement community development in Monroe Township, won best exhibit at the annual crop show at Rutgers College of Agriculture two years in row in the 1920s and a Chamberlin & Barclay award in 1930 for

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the twenty-five largest potatoes. He also raised chickens, especially New Jersey Black Giants, which were all the rage at the time and which won prizes at poultry shows throughout the tristate region. Among the several potato dealers in the Cranbury area, Chamberlin & Barclay was the largest. After moving to Cranbury and marrying Clifford Stults, Alma Flock Stults went to work as an assistant bookkeeper for the company in 1924. She worked in the plant near Cranbury Station for thirty-eight years. “I had to make sure the potatoes were weighed properly and billed out to the Chicago [commodity exchange] prices,” she recalled. Many of the farmers were still hauling in their potatoes and other crops in the 1920s with horses and wagons, but these were soon replaced by trucks. Chamberlin & Barclay sold the farmers manurebased fertilizer, which was mixed in the fertilizer building. It sold them seed potatoes brought in by rail from Maine, and it carried some farmers on the books over poor crop years. Ezekiel S. Barclay came up with what Alma Stults remembered as “a very original idea” of packaging small bags of potatoes to be sold by grocery stores under the brand names of Bakers and Snowflakes. “The package was labeled in script lettering in red, ‘Old Reliable,’” she said, adding that Chamberlin & Barclay used the same red “Old Reliable” label on the 100-pound bags of potatoes they shipped to wholesale houses as well as on the bags of fertilizer they sold to farmers and gardeners.⁸ Despite the technological innovations in the 1920s and the increased acquisition of tractor-hauled plows and mechanical diggers in the 1930s, farmers’ production of potatoes was not fully mechanized until the development of effective harvesting machines in the 1950s and 1960s. In the meantime, potato production was labor intensive. It began with splitting the seeds by hand in cold, unheated buildings in raw days of early spring, then planting the seeds, fertilizing and watering the plants, and spraying or dusting them with lime biweekly to control harmful insects and disease. Then in the summer, the main harvest time, growers temporarily needed many workers to complete the harvesting. Although a tractor-drawn, mechanical potato digger lifted each furrow, shook off the dirt, and deposited the potatoes in a row on the ground behind it, the potatoes still had to be gathered by hand. “It was pretty heavy work,” Stanley Stults remembered, “getting down on your hands and knees and filling two field bags [at a time] that weighed 75 pounds and then loading them onto trucks.” Carted to the barn, the potatoes were subsequently



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separated according to size by hand or by an electric grading machine before being stuffed into smaller bags and taken away for marketing. When the main crop was harvested in the summer, the trucks loaded with potatoes would rip through Cranbury on their way to the wholesalers on the east side of town. “We kids always collected potatoes that fell off the trucks,” Roi Taylor remembered, “built a small fire at the curbside at Station Road and South Main, then cooked ourselves potatoes to eat.”⁹

ĒĎČėĆēę ĕĔęĆęĔ ĜĔėĐĊėĘ ċėĔĒ ęčĊ ĘĔĚęč The increasing size and yield of potato farms and the contracting economy during the Great Depression also led to changes in the workforce in the potato belt. On small farms, owners and their sons continued to do work, but larger farms required more workers. Traditionally, local farmhands, white or black, had performed the job, but by the 1ate 1930s, the larger growers began to rely increasingly on migrant workers, particularly during the ten-week growing and harvesting period in the peak of summer. This migrant labor came up from the Deep South and was composed primarily of poor, rural black men, sometimes accompanied by their wives and children. Working mainly for black labor contractors they called “crew chiefs,” the migrants and their families were trucked north from Florida and Georgia, picking crops in each state at harvest time. In central New Jersey at the height of the potato-harvesting season in August, migrant pickers outnumbered local farmhands by more than three to one. A state report indicated that in 1939, the 325 largest potato farms in the “Three M” Counties, with a combined total of 25,000 acres in potatoes, employed most of the nearly 4,000 black migrant workers who labored in the state that year. Wages were low in the Deep South, so New Jersey farmers could pay far less to these Southern black migrants than they could for local workers, black or white.¹⁰ During their several weeks in the potato belt, the migrants found temporary housing in old barns, abandoned shacks, or former chicken coops, lit by kerosene lamps, usually on the farms where they worked. Harvesting potatoes in the hot and dusty fields, they earned 3 cents for each field bag weighing 75 to 100 pounds, bringing in only $2.00 to $3.00 a day.

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With unemployment high in New Jersey, there was considerable resentment about outsiders undercutting local workers. Hostility grew higher when nearly one in five migrants failed to leave the state at the end of the season and went to cities like Trenton, seeking low-paying industrial jobs or being added to the welfare rolls and increasing the tax burden.¹¹ In and around Cranbury, then a township of less than fourteen hundred people including approximately two hundred, long-established African American families, hundreds of seasonal black migrants from the South arrived annually for the potato harvest. On weekends, after receiving their meager wages, the men, sometimes accompanied by their wives and children, would be driven by the black contractors into Cranbury or Hightstown to get food and other supplies. The migrants often put on a happy face and appeared “carefree” to many people, but some residents were concerned about drinking and fighting among them.¹² With the speech, mannerisms, and attire of the poor, rural, black South and with their transient residence on the farms outside the village, the migrants remained outsiders to the majority of residents of Cranbury and other towns in central New Jersey. Some Cranburians, whites as well as blacks, offered help for the transitory, impoverished workers, trying to get them better housing, food, and clothing, and also education for their children. Rev. David J. Spratt, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, obtained funds from his congregation as well as from the Presbyterian National Missions Board to enlist and support Rev. Mark M. Gibson, a black clergyman, and his wife. Beginning in the summer of 1938, the Gibsons ministered to the spiritual and practical needs of migrants in the Cranbury area. The Presbyterian Council of Women for Home Missions provided a recreational worker; and the local A.M.E. Church in Hightstown offered clothing and hymnals. Much of the community simply ignored the migrant workers, but some people resented their presence. On Monday, August 7, 1939, fifty residents attended a Township Committee meeting, and, according to the Cranbury Press, “some of the group said that numbers of these colored people were congregating in front of their homes with loud talking and drinking. Others of the group said that drunken Negroes would crowd them off of the streets, and they felt it was up to the Township to give them added police protection.” The Township Committee did appoint a special police officer to work on weekend evenings.¹³



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ēĎČčę ėĆĎĉĊėĘ A few days later, the hooliganism of a group of nearly a dozen white youths put a tragic blot on the history of race relations in New Jersey’s potato belt in general and Cranbury in particular. On the night of Friday, August 11, 1939, four carloads of white youths drove to the far end of the Cranbury potato farm of Raymond Dey off Old Trenton Road. With handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and with flashlights, a rifle, and a shotgun, they roused the sleeping occupants of an isolated shack. Five single men and a newly married couple from Georgia were forced to strip naked, their wrists bound with tape, and then marched into the dark potato field. The five single men escaped into the woods, a fusillade of shots fired over their heads, but the married couple was driven to another potato field. There, the masked raiders poured white enamel paint over them. Before leaving, one of the raiders told them: “Go on back down South where you belong!”¹⁴ Cranbury as a whole was outraged by the attack. The next day, indignant farmers joined with the state police and the town’s part-time police in searching for the assailants. The Cranbury Lions Club, headed by County Welfare Director C. Raymond Wicoff, adopted a resolution, printed in the Cranbury Press, declaring that it “condemns this lawless action and it is unalterably opposed to such vicious and un-American conduct.”¹⁵ An editorial in the New Brunswick Home News applauded the Lions Club’s condemnation of the assault, stating that it represented the attitude of Cranbury as a whole and that the attack was “incongruous with its type of residents and the community’s character.”¹⁶ Interviews by an investigator sent by Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), confirmed the widespread feeling of outrage in Cranbury.¹⁷ Governor A. Harry Moore, a conservative Democrat from Jersey City, was concerned about both the violence and the widespread criticism that migrant workers were undercutting local laborers, and he asked for a program to limit and regulate the flow of the seasonal workers into New Jersey from the South.¹⁸ Applauding Moore’s request, the Trenton Times emphasized that in New Jersey as in California, migrant workers in the Depression found themselves exploited and not generally wanted, and those who remained in the state aggravated social and economic discontent.¹⁹

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In Cranbury, Hampton Davis, a black resident of Maplewood Avenue, had called upon the NAACP to investigate the brutality against the migrant workers, which it did. There was some dispute, however, between the NAACP and the Workers Defense League (WDL), a civil liberties and worker welfare organization affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), as to who would represent the victims. The black migrants ultimately chose the Workers Defense League.²⁰ Within two weeks, the state police had arrested ten teenage boys and young men, tracing some of them through the purchase of the binding tape and the fingerprints on the paint cans left behind in the field.²¹ Nine of the accused white assailants were between seventeen and twentythree years of age; the tenth was fifteen years old. The accused were from Cranbury and Hightstown; five were farmhands, three of them unemployed; four others held blue-collar jobs in agriculture or transportation. Charges against the fifteen-year-old were dropped. The other nine were arraigned on charges of assault and battery and released on bail. A week later, the nine defendants entered pleas of non vult. Without expressly admitting guilt, they declined to contest the charges and agreed to be treated as though they had been found guilty.²² The judge upbraided them for “a vicious malicious assault on innocent people committed without any legal, moral, or social justification” and for introducing “a mob psychology which has caused a disgrace to our county.” He sentenced them to two to three years in prison but suspended the sentences and released them on probation. “You are all apparently respectable boys,” the judge said to the youths, six of whom were teenagers, “although I do not know what you think of yourselves since you committed this act.”²³ Although the racial violence was never repeated, neither the black nor white residents of Cranbury at the time ever forgot the occurrence. Fifty years later, Wayne Stahl, a white Cranburian born there in 1908 and postmaster for three decades, still felt indignant about the youths’ abuse of the migrant workers. “It wasn’t right,” he said. “It was terrible what they did [and] .  .  . they were never punished, as I recall.”²⁴ The brutal episode was remembered even more strongly by the black community in Cranbury and the surrounding area.²⁵ This was the only incident of its kind in Cranbury, and there were reports that the Cranbury and Hightstown youths may have been incited by a white Floridian



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described as having “typical Southern and K.K.K. prejudices” who was a visitor in Cranbury in that summer of 1939.²⁶

ĎĒĕėĔěĊĒĊēęĘ ċĔė ĒĎČėĆēę ĜĔėĐĊėĘ Ćēĉ ęčĊĎė ĈčĎđĉėĊē Cranbury took the tragic episode of August 11, 1939, to heart and sought to improve conditions for the annual influx of impoverished black migrants. In 1954, noted English journalist and travel writer James Morris wrote a book about the United States. Gathering material, he and his family lived in Cranbury for a few months that winter while he traveled around the country, and he described the situation in the farm village to his British readers: Each year bands of migrant workers, mostly Negroes, arrive in the district to help with the potato harvest. They are very poor, and often ruthlessly bullied by the Negro contractors, who have engaged them and brought them from the South in lorries. They live in shacks and huts provided by the farmers, communing only with themselves, strangers to the country, like Israelites in Egypt. Every year the good people of Cranbury, through their various societies, take care of these unfortunates, arranging for the schooling of their children, providing meals and occasional outings.²⁷

The First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury had begun a summerschool program for children of the black migrants. When Hamilton Stillwell, who had become principal of Cranbury School in 1939, returned from the army after World War II, he organized summer classes at the schoolhouse and summer camp activities for the migrant children. By the postwar period, the Cranbury area was also the site of a staterun migrant labor camp providing living and eating facilities as well as a health care clinic. In a Thanksgiving Day broadcast in 1960, Edward R. Murrow’s prizewinning CBS Reports television documentary, Harvest of Shame, exposed the plight of migrant agricultural workers on the East and West Coasts. But Morrow singled out Cranbury for praise. With footage shot in the Old School Building, Murrow noted that New Jersey was one of

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only six states that provided summer school for migrants’ children. In Cranbury School, a CBS reporter interviewed eight-year-old migrant children from Florida and their Cranbury teacher, Christine Shack, a northern black woman, about their enthusiasm for learning how to read, write, and do arithmetic at Cranbury summer school.²⁸ Beverly Gilbert, who taught at Cranbury School from 1963 to 1983, recalled teaching a preschool program for four-year-olds that included children of the migrants. The other children helped them, she said, but the migrants had to leave at the end of the harvesting. “I hated to see them go back because they probably got more out of our schools than the schools where they came from.”²⁹ The number of migrant workers dwindled in the 1960s and 1970s, but their children continued to attend the summer school and sometimes the regular school in Cranbury through early October after the last of the potatoes and cabbage had been picked. Appalled at the impoverished condition of many of the poor black migrant families from rural Florida, a group of Cranbury women under the direction of Sally Edwards, Kate Shankweiler, and Mahbubeh Stave started a thrift store in the lower level of the Old School Building in 1968. For nearly a decade, every Thursday night during the harvesting season, the “Cranbury Bargain Basement” offered clean secondhand clothes, shoes, bedding, linens, kitchen items, toys, books, and other needed items to the migrants and their children.³⁰ The end of the use of black migrant labor for potato harvesting in the 1980s, a result of increased mechanization but also declining potato production in the area, eliminated that issue in Cranbury.

ĜĔėđĉ ĜĆė ĎĎ Ćēĉ ęčĊ ĕĔĘęĜĆė ĊėĆ The Second World War not only decisively defeated the Axis Powers — Germany, Italy, Japan — but also pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression. The booming wartime economy provided jobs for nearly one million workers in the state and opened up new opportunities for women and minorities. “People were friendly and cooperating” during the war, recalled Eugenie (“Gene”) McEdward Bunting, who raised her three children and ran a small family farm in Cranbury, while her husband, Colonel William Lyman Bunting Sr., served abroad. “The women made bandages for Fort

ċĎČ. ·Ό. While Sally Edwards shows children’s books to one young customer at Cranbury’s thrift store for migrant workers and their families, another youngster tried out some toys in this illustration accompanying a New York Times story in July 1975 on how Cranbury volunteers were helping Southern migrants who arrived each summer to work the potato harvest on area farms. (Courtesy of freelance photographer Larry Kasperek)



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Dix. People were afraid that the Germans would invade us. We were told to black out our houses at night. There was a fear that even one plane could fly over. And of course, we had rationing: we couldn’t buy [much] butter, sugar, gas or tires.”³¹ Air raid wardens ensured that there were no lights showing during test “blackouts.” The Lions Club collected aluminum and tin from housewives as part of nationwide drives to gather such scarce materials. A “Victory Garden” committee provided information that helped Cranbury have a higher percentage of such home vegetable gardens than many other communities. The federal government instituted rationing as well as wage and price controls to limit wartime inflation, and provide a more equitable distribution of scarce commodities. The local War Price and Rationing Board No. 6 was located on the second floor of the Cranbury Press Building, 13 North Main Street. Labor shortages led to the use of prisoners of war for agricultural and other work. In Cranbury, between one and two dozen German soldiers who had been captured in North Africa in 1942 and 1943 arrived five days a week by truck from the POW stockade at Fort Dix. They worked at Mike Pack’s chicken processing plant at the corner of Old Trenton and Old Hightstown Roads. William L. Bunting Jr., a youth at the time, remembered them lounging outside smoking while on break, guarded by military policemen but not handcuffed. “They seemed happy to be out of the war,” Bunting said.³² With the government encouraging the highest possible production of foodstuffs to feed Americans and the Allies, farm income soared during the war. Cranbury’s prospering farmers and villagers bought more than their quotas of war bonds in the six major “War Loan” drives to help finance the war. Similarly, Cranburians oversubscribed to the blood drives, sponsored by the Cranbury Red Cross chapter and the Lions Club. One of the last, a blood drive held at the First Presbyterian Church in September 1944, resulted in the donation of 187 pints of blood, 5 percent over the town’s quota. “Most of all the young men from Cranbury went to war,” one resident remembered, “except for some of the farmer’s sons who were exempted because of the need for farm produce to feed the nation and the Allies. .  .  . There were high-paying jobs in the defense industries and other factories and many people left the town and the farms to work in the factories.”³³



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More than 10 percent of Cranbury’s nearly fourteen hundred residents, whites and blacks, served in the armed forces during the war, 150 men and 6 women. Once again familiar Cranbury names as well as more recent residents were among those who volunteered or were drafted. Years later, participating in a session at Cranbury School honoring World War II veterans, Christian Christiansen recalled how he had served as a gunner’s mate on a destroyer in the Pacific, at one point going through sixteen months and innumerable battles at sea before returning to the naval base. “I went in to do a good job and I did. To come back home and know that they’re free [the folks at home], that’s payment enough.” When one student asked if the fighting had been as bad as the students had been taught, James R. Perrine, an Army Air Corps veteran whose Cranbury School chum Lieutenant Carl J. Snyder had received two medals for bravery but was killed at Okinawa, grabbed the microphone and declared firmly: “It was worse. Much worse.”³⁴ Six Cranburians, five young men and one woman, died in the war. In addition to Carl Snyder, the war dead were Franklin D. Ely, Charles A. Downs, William F. Hoffman, John S. Snow, and Jean D. Vogt. Many others had been wounded. The names of those who served and those who died are etched into the Cranbury War Memorial, an eight-foothigh monument of Vermont granite erected at the new Memorial Park on South Main Street next to the firehouse on May 30, 1949. With increased demand and government support, potato production had reached such levels during the war that, according to grower Stanley Stults, the Chamberlin & Barclay Company at Cranbury Station was shipping 100 railroad carloads a day at harvest time. Alma Stults recalled that on the larger farmsteads the farmers’ sons often received draft deferments because the Local Draft Board deemed them essential to production. But, she added, “The draft boards did not favor the smaller farms and felt that the father could manage the smaller acreage without his son.”

ĕĔĘęĜĆė ĈčĆēČĊĘ: ĉĊĈđĎēĎēČ ĕĔęĆęĔĊĘ Ćēĉ ČėĔĜĎēČ ĘĚćĚėćĘ Removal of government support and price controls after the war and the resumption of competition from abroad soon led to a return of the

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fluctuating prices of a normal market. To deal with the risks, Cranbury growers produced a variety of crops, not just potatoes, including corn, apples, and tomatoes. Potatoes continued to dominate the Cranbury economy, but increasingly, the farmers sold their spuds to large agribusinesses, especially Wise Potato Chips and Frito-Lay. Subcontracting through brokers like Chamberlin & Barclay, Wise alone bought about 40 percent of Cranbury’s potatoes. In the 1950s and 1960s, the more successful local growers increased their yields with new fertilizers and reduced their labor costs through the use of mechanical potato harvesters. In the summer of 1960, Chamberlin & Barclay shipped 5,000 sacks of potatoes a day for Wise Potato Chips. But by then the Cranbury firm, run by the sons of founder Ezekiel Barclay, earned most of its revenue through other services. It sold 25,000 tons of fertilizer a year not just to farmers but increasingly to suburban homeowners for their lawns and gardens. Although it was not recognized at the time, 1949 marked the end of the unprecedented growth in potato yield and profits for farmers in Cranbury and the New Jersey potato belt.³⁵ After that, the state’s potato crop fell into decline. Small-scale New Jersey potato growers found

ċĎČ. ·΍. A bountiful tomato harvest from the Cranbury farm of Leroy Scott, standing on the right, filled nearly two hundred baskets. The truck, owned by William G. Van Treuren, standing left, is bound for the Campbell Company’s Camden processing plant, where the fresh tomatoes will be turned into Campbell’s tomato soup. Photograph, c. 1950. (Courtesy of William H. Schanck)



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ċĎČ. Έ΄. Potato farming was still a major enterprise in Cranbury when this photograph was taken in the summer of 1955. Local resident Washington R. Johnson drove a tractor pulling a mechanical potato harvester on the Gordon Dey Farm on Dey Road while migrant workers bagged the potatoes. The bulk of Cranbury’s potatoes were then sold to make potato chips. (Courtesy of the Rohm and Haas Company, Philadelphia, and Elias J. Oliveira, Dey Farm, Cranbury, N.J.)

themselves undercut by lower-cost agribusiness in the West, which flooded the market and drove down potato prices. Local farmers were hit by higher costs for laborers in the East and for increasing amounts of insecticides to combat the invasive Colorado potato beetle.³⁶ In 1990, Stanley C. Stults Jr., on Cranbury Neck Road, abandoned the potato business and auctioned off all the related machinery. Stults was the last of the Cranbury potato farmers. The others had already shifted from potatoes to corn, wheat, and soybeans. Although planting some of those crops, Stults turned primarily to a “Pick Your Own” farm for fruits and vegetables.³⁷ During and after World War II, the First National Bank of Cranbury boomed along with the economy, and in 1953, the old two-story building from 1898 on north Main Street was remodeled, a one-story brick

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addition provided, and a new overall façade created in a Colonial Revival style. A further addition, including a drive-up window, was made in 1977. Later, a wave of mergers toward the end of the twentieth century resulted in the First National Bank of Cranbury being taken over by Midlantic in the 1970s and PNC Bank in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the renamed bank continued to serve the community from its original location, until 2009, when PNC abandoned the site and established its new Cranbury branch on Route 130. For the nation’s Bicentennial Celebration in 1976, the township had placed a time capsule in the bank building. When the bank was closed in 2009, the time capsule was removed and stored, at least temporarily, in the Town Hall. One of the most dynamically growing sectors of the economy in the post – World War II period was suburban housing for new families, the veterans and others who were producing the postwar “baby boom.” Throughout the tristate region, developers, led by the Levitt brothers, rapidly turned old farmland into new tracts of houses. Economic growth and suburbanization were facilitated by expanded transportation. The postwar years saw major bridge and highway building, including construction of the 148-mile-long New Jersey Turnpike, which was accomplished in only twenty-three months in 1951 – 1952, creating what is today one of the most traveled highways in America. When the turnpike opened in 1952, it slashed through farmlands in the far eastern part of the township, just over a mile from the historic village. For more than a decade, the nearest access was Exit 8 in Hightstown. But in the 1960s, following the development of retirement communities like Rossmoor in Monroe Township, the Turnpike Authority opened Exit 8A, the “Jamesburg-Cranbury Exit” just north of the Cranbury Township line. In the 1950s and 1960s, while much of Middlesex County was transformed by extensive residential and commercial development and a frenzied quest for tax-producing “ratables,” Cranbury hardly grew at all. In 1950, it had a population of 1,797, an increase of some 400 persons since before the war. A decade later in 1960, the number of Cranburians had grown by 204, or 11 percent, to 2,001. Ten years later, it was up another 13 percent, with 252 new arrivals bringing the population to 2,253 in 1970.³⁸ Viewing such slow growth as trivial, John T. Cunningham, a popular historian of New Jersey’s past, declared that Cranbury had virtually stood still. The town remained, in his words, “a shining symbol of



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old-fashioned non-growth charm. Bypassed by the Camden and Amboy Railroad in 1833 and by Route 1 about a century later, Cranbury is a place where it is said people enjoy ‘seeing nothing happen.’”³⁹

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ Ďē ęčĊ ΅΍Ή΄Ę ęčėĔĚČč Ć ćėĎęĎĘč ěĎĘĎęĔėDZĘ ĊĞĊĘ A reader of the 1956 travel memoir As I Saw the U.S.A., by British journalist James Morris, might also believe that the quaint little village of Cranbury had remained largely untouched by the cataclysmic events of the mid-twentieth century. To Morris, who sublet a house at 25 South Main Street for his family from January to April 1954, neither the Great Depression nor World War II seemed to have left a mark on the town.⁴⁰ “An anachronistic village,” he called it, within easy commuting distance of Manhattan yet “off the beaten track,” remarkable chiefly because it seemed to defy the course of history. “Nobody goes there very much, but it is notable all the same,” Morris explained to his British readers, “because it has openly and successfully defied all those powerful influences of modern Americanism that are always pulsing and pushing just over the hill.”⁴¹ Morris should not be taken literally, but there was some truth to his vision of Cranbury as part of a vanishing world, half a real, half a Hollywood small-town fantasy as in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Long after Cranbury ceased to be a self-contained rural village, its architecture and farms, and remnants of a Victorian era community, still lent their spirit to the place. The town, in Morris’s view, was at its best on a frosty, moonlit winter night, when people gathered for skating on Brainerd Lake. Although the music came from loudspeakers at the firehouse, and the light from floodlamps on telephone poles, the village’s gliding skaters conjured up what to Morris was an “old-fashioned scene — a compound of Grandma Moses and the elder Brueghel.”⁴² The only sign of change Morris observed was that some homeowners had begun to dismantle porches and other recent additions as they sought to accentuate the original eighteenth- or nineteenth-century appearance of their houses. To the British journalist, this demonstrated a growing awareness of the need to preserve the town’s historic character. Aside from that, Morris viewed Cranbury as almost immune to change.

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ċĎČ. Έ΅. Ice skating in the twilight on Brainerd Lake on a winter day in 1962,

with the water tower in the distance. (Photograph by LeRoy Taylor. Courtesy of Roi Taylor)

He saw life in the village’s social life centered on the firehouse and the churches, a phenomenon that symbolized for him the town’s defiance of cosmopolitan Princeton, Manhattan, and the modern world beyond. If the firehouse provided a form of fraternal organization fostering civic pride and manly duty, the churches, particularly the Presbyterian Church, influenced the entire family. “The predominant influence in Cranbury is not Princeton or the industrial regions around the corner,” Morris wrote, but the Presbyterian Church whose white steeple rises gracefully above the housetops. Religion in such a place as this is at once devotional, philanthropic and social. On Sunday mornings Main Street is crowded with the cars of the churchgoers, and the sidewalks (lined with trees) are full of people dressed very decidedly in their Sunday best. The children, in particular, shine with an unearthly hygiene, their hair slicked or curled, their faces pink with cold and soap, their hands considerably gloved. The boys wear bow ties and coats with fur collars, the girls, frilly party dresses.

Morris found what he called “the American do-gooder” prevalent in small towns like Cranbury, and it was, he believed, church activities that



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encouraged such people. Whether it was what Morris called the Stitchand-Chatter group, the Helping Hand Club, or a church bazaar, even the most casual resident, he wrote, could “hardly escape the advances of a lively American church of this kind.” Their charitable interests, Morris wrote in the mid-1950s, ranged from “a dam in Pakistan or a school in Iraq” to helping the families of the local needy or the poor black migrant workers who continued to arrive each summer for the potato harvest. Just the previous year, Eugenie Bunting, head of the Cranbury Woman’s Club’s committee on “Friendly Town,” had told a meeting of the club members about the New York Herald Tribune’s new Fresh Air Fund, which aimed at sending children from the city’s slums on a two-week vacation in the countryside. “It is your opportunity to engage personally in a mission of rescue,” Mrs. Bunting said, and she urged members of the Cranbury Woman’s Club to open their homes to these underprivileged youngsters (several women reportedly volunteered immediately), and to ask friends to do likewise to help others and to ensure Cranbury’s reputation as a “Friendly Town.” The Cranbury Press enthusiastically endorsed her recommendation as “another opportunity for Community Betterment.”⁴³ Beyond the volunteer organizations — the Woman’s Club, Lions Club, Odd Fellows, Masons, Golden Age Neighbors, Rocky Brook Garden Club, and others — as well as the churches and the firehouse, much of life in Cranbury in the early 1950s centered on the material comforts of a “fairly well-heeled village” and, especially, on its children. Morris believed Americans generally spoiled their children and unduly sheltered them from the realities of the world, but he observed that “the Cranbury children are but little corrupted by these philosophies, and are both friendly and well-mannered.” He found them to be industrious and hard working, particularly when there was “a dollar in prospect” and fully attuned to national values of the era that stressed the importance of a career and material success.⁴⁴ In fact, Morris found in Cranbury something that he, at least, believed to be quintessentially American: In the eighteenth century Crevecoeur posed the celebrated question: ‘What is he, the American, this new man?’ His shade might well go to Cranbury for an answer, on a moonlit skating evening, and choose for itself a characteristic citizen. The elderly man leaning against the wall of

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the fire station, for example, chewing a harsh cigar and exchanging a few cryptic words with the fireman in the upstairs window. Such a man knows little of Europe and its values, but is quite willing to learn; dislikes and distrusts authority, but is ready to co-operate if nicely asked; can be a fearful bore, but tries to reach his conclusions fairly; enjoys watching the skating, but will be up early next morning; cares not two hoots for smart Princeton or dazzling New York; owns a fine car and a sound bank balance, but still approaches life with some humility.⁴⁵

No doubt that the twenty-seven-year-old Morris, coming from the deprivations of postwar Europe and the fears of the early Cold War, offered a flattering and rather romanticized portrait of Cranbury in the mid-1950s. Only casually did he mention that “the nearest thing to a slum is a little group of plain houses with cracked windows, where [some of ] the Negro community lives.”⁴⁶ More than a decade later, during the American civil rights movement, black residents would complain that they were excluded from many community institutions: the Fire Company, the Lions Club, the Woman’s Club, the local bank, and all of the school and township governing boards.⁴⁷ Race has been an issue throughout most of American history, and Cranbury was little different in that regard from most other New Jersey towns. Similarly, like all municipalities, Cranbury had its social problems, its prejudices, and its disagreements over politics and policy. Yet it is likely that in the early 1950s there was a period of relative tranquility, as Morris observed. The economic hardships of the 1930s were distant memories, and the town was not yet caught up in later controversies surrounding equal opportunity, housing development, zoning, affordable housing, and historic preservation. Although Cranbury already appeared “anachronistic” to an outside observer like Morris, most of the people of the town could still comfortably take life for granted in their little, rustic village.

ęčĊ ĐĔėĊĆē ĜĆė Cranbury’s peaceful world in the 1950s was interrupted by the tensions of the Cold War and especially by the Korean War. In that war, 33,000 Americans were killed and more than 100,000 were wounded fighting between 1950 and 1953 against invading Communist forces from North



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Korea and the People’s Republic of China. Twenty-five young Cranburians who volunteered or were drafted served in the U.S. military during the Korean War. Although some were wounded, none was killed. Drafted into the army in September 1951 while a student at Cornell University, Private First Class Kenneth E. (“Ken”) Eiker served in the Second Infantry Division. He received a Combat Infantry Badge and remembered many battles against enemy forces for “Old Baldy,” a bitterly contested ridge in west-central Korea, while the armistice talks dragged on at Panmunjon. The Korean War Armistice was signed in July 1953, but it was still unclear whether hostilities would resume when Lieutenant William L. (“Bill”) Bunting Jr. of the U.S. Army arrived in South Korea five months later, at one of the largest American air bases, Osan-Ni Air Force Base, forty miles south of Seoul. Bunting worked with a special military engineering and construction unit that had completed the 9,000-foot long, 24-inch thick concrete runway earlier that year for F-86 Sabrejet fighterbombers and heavy air force transport planes. There was still much construction and maintenance work to be done, and he remembered his engineering unit “working seven days a week, around the clock, in all kinds of weather.” Bunting did, however, have an opportunity to visit in Seoul with Robert Harris, a former classmate at Cranbury School and Hightstown High School. A graduate of the University of Illinois before going to Korea, Bill Bunting subsequently earned a law degree from the University of Virginia after leaving the service. He then returned to Cranbury and, having also worked in the military justice system in the army, was appointed judge in the municipal court, where he served the township for a dozen years. In the meantime, he established a legal practice in Princeton. With growing concern, Bunting watched ongoing developments that would threaten the historic integrity of the village.⁴⁸

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Ć ćĔĔĒĎēČ ĈĔėėĎĉĔė Ďē ĈĊēęėĆđ ēĊĜ ďĊėĘĊĞ With business optimism stimulated by Republican control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in more than two decades, a group of real estate investors in 1953, looking for opportunities for large-scale housing and commercial development, hired Walter Isard of Harvard, a leading economist, to identify the most profitable future growth areas of the East Coast. In his study for the group, Isard recommended investment along the corridor between Trenton and New Brunswick, because that area offered the greatest advantages. He cited transportation routes, the opening of the New Jersey Turnpike the previous year, labor sources, and access to supplies and markets. In addition, land values were comparatively inexpensive there because the acreage was primarily in farmland. Isard proved correct. Cranbury and Princeton were at the center of his predicted growth corridor. Although later questions were raised about the impact of the subsequent transformation on the once peaceful area of farms and vil-

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lages by rampant development of offices, malls, and the proliferation of housing developments, at the time Isard’s 1953 report was hailed by many in the area, including the Cranbury Press, as a sign of better times to come.¹ Cranbury certainly benefited from the arrival of branch offices of large, national corporations in nearby townships over the next few years. As the region’s agricultural sector declined, electronics, research and development, and the service sector offered new sources of jobs and municipal revenue. By the mid-1960s, among the largest employers in the area, although located just outside the township’s boundaries, included the RCA Space Center, the Forrestal Research Center, the David Sarnoff Research Center, the Western Electric Research Center, and other similar research divisions of major corporations. Along with accompanying housing, this construction began to fill the former farmlands of East Windsor, West Windsor, and Plainsboro. However, because of cutbacks in government spending or other reasons, several of the plants in the area, including Carter-Wallace on Half-Acre Road in Cranbury, would close before the end of the twentieth century. During the boom period, as these companies and their new facilities grew, they provided jobs for residents, younger people in particular, and they also brought in managers, engineers, and technicians who relocated to the area with their families. This triggered a noticeable escalation in real estate prices and a boom in the construction of high-cost suburban housing. These development pressures began to transform much of the farmland in neighboring communities into extensive apartment complexes or crowded subdivisions of single-family homes. These developments also led to attempts to control such transformation through restrictive zoning or by dissuading farmers and absentee landowners from selling their land to developers. Ultimately, the pressures in Cranbury also led to tensions between the advocates of historic preservation and supporters of development, between townspeople and farmers, and to attempts to arrive at a solution that could accommodate both preservation and economic growth. In Cranbury, these long-term pressures also changed predominant attitudes in the town. From welcoming new jobs and other economic opportunities, the prevailing attitude changed to one where pressures for massive residential development were seen as a potent threat to the character of the historic community and the quality of life there.

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ĈėĆēćĚėĞ Ćę ęčĊ ćĊČĎēēĎēČ Ĕċ ęčĊ ΅΍Ί΄Ę When Cranbury entered the 1960s, little had changed in a town that the urban newspapers in New Brunswick and Trenton often described as quaint, sleepy, and peaceful. Its eighty working farms, many of them in their families for generations, produced bumper crops of grains, vegetables, and potatoes. Its rich soil also supported two wholesale florist complexes, Wright’s Roses, with its five large greenhouses off Bunker Hill, and Hagerty the Florist whose greenhouses were situated at the south end of the village. Main Street was lined with old houses and shops in varying condition. The picturesque community was slowly beginning to grow as more people discovered its convenient location, its fine school, and its bucolic charm. Some new houses had been built along the streets leading into the village, and plans were being made for two small subdivisions on the old orchard and farmland of the Evans and Griggs properties in the southern and northern parts of the village. Cranbury’s citizens and township officials sought orderly and manageable growth and modernization that would preserve the historic village while also providing for the increasing needs of the population without creating excessive debt or taxation. It did mean some changes. The continually increasing traffic finally led the township to replace its one-man, part-time police force (Peter Nagurny, who was also editor and publisher of the weekly Cranbury Press). In his place in 1961, the township hired its first full-time police officer, Kenneth Logan, a thirtyone-year-old air force veteran originally from the Midwest. When Logan began his service as chief of police and as the sole full-time policeman, Cranbury was still a rather sleepy little town of some two thousand residents. Chief Logan was always on call, doing everything from crossingguard duty at the school to solving murder cases. (The only two homicides in Cranbury in Logan’s thirty years as chief resulted from Friday night fights between Southern migrant farm workers in the early 1960s.) From his hiring in 1961 to his retirement in 1991, Logan had overseen the development of the modern Cranbury Police Department, which had grown from one to eleven full-time officers, while the size of the town had increased 50 percent from 2,000 to 3,000 residents. When the new Cranbury Police Station opened on Station Road in 2005, its address, One Logan Drive, was named in his memory.²



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At the beginning of the 1960s, there was no publicly owned land in town other than the school property and a small war memorial area next to the firehouse. The only public access to Brainerd Lake for fishing, boating, or ice skating in winter was from the railing at the sidewalk on the combination dam and bridge on Main Street. In 1964, when the Evans Tract was being developed along the south side of the lake, the township purchased thirteen acres on the lake’s north shore to prevent the lake from being completely surrounded by private housing in the future. Subsequently, the township converted the property into Village Park, and later a gazebo was erected to continue the tradition of having a bandstand on the lake, a tradition that began in the early twentieth century. Before converting the newly acquired property into a park, however, the township used the site as a tree nursery to replace many of the town’s shade trees, which had deteriorated or been lost to Dutch elm disease. Two thousand seedlings — red oak, pin oak, scarlet oak, sweet gum, and sugar maple — were planted there in 1966. They soon were large enough to fill the gaps among the shade trees, and extras were sold to neighboring communities. The remainder of the trees became too large to transplant and now provide, along with some evergreens, shade for a picnic area at the southeast corner of Village Park. Although the main entrance to the park is at the intersection with Westminster Place, a public pathway was later installed between 10 and 14 Maplewood Avenue. The footpath goes directly through what is, at more than thirty-one feet in height, New Jersey’s largest pawpaw tree, a tree whose fruit was relished by Native Americans, and as a chilled dessert, by George Washington. A Board of Recreation Commissioners was established in 1961 to supervise recreational activities in the town, and a Park Planning Committee was created four years later. Working with the Department of Public Works, the two groups acquired and maintain playground equipment, tennis courts, a basketball court, and two baseball fields and a cookout pavilion at Village Park. In subsequent decades, different facilities were created at the other parks in the town, including the soccer and baseball fields at Millstone Park and the children’s recreational equipment at passively oriented Heritage Park. The Recreation Commission, headed since the early 1990s by Lisbeth (“Beth”) Veghte, also supervises adult and youth recreational programs in the spring and summer and has in recent years held a concert series at Village Park, canoe races on Brainerd

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Lake, and an annual family campout at that park on the Cranbury Day weekend.³ In the late 1960s, the dredging of Brainerd Lake, which had become clogged by weeds and silt, resulted in a fifty-foot mound at the eastern end of Village Park used by youngsters for dirt-bike riding in the summer and sledding in the winter. It was known by many local youngsters as “Dirt Mountain.” Looking back at the township in the 1960s from the vantage point of the town’s tercentennial in 1997, former mayor Richard (“Dick”) West, a professor of forestry at Rutgers University, reflected that “the acquisition of the Village Park land on the lake was the most significant accomplishment [of the township] of the Sixties.” There were, of course, many other accomplishments in Cranbury in the 1960s, as will be discussed — the town’s first Master Plan was adopted, the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society was established, the historic Old School Building was saved by the predecessor of Cranbury Landmarks Inc., and, at the end of the decade, the first black Cranburian was elected to the school board. Thirty years later, reflecting on the decade, West concluded, “In retrospect, I believe the Sixties were a landmark decade for Cranbury, providing the framework for continuing responsive local government and active citizen involvement.”⁴

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ ĆċėĎĈĆē ĆĒĊėĎĈĆē ėĊĘĎĉĊēęĘ One important part of the active citizen involvement in the 1960s was by Cranbury’s black community, which, although longtime residents, sometimes going back generations, had not been part of the governing structure of the township or of its most influential organizations. This was despite the fact that as late as 1970, the long-established black community traditionally represented nearly 14 percent of the residents. In that year, 309 of the town’s 2,253 residents were African Americans. Until the 1970s, no black Cranburian had run for public office in the town, and few blacks even belonged to the leading organizations. Hampering the task of reconstructing the history of the African American community in Cranbury is the fact that written records about the black community before the 1930s are relatively sparse. However, this gap in the historical



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record has begun to be filled by oral history interviews with longtime black residents. There were two distinct communities of African Americans in Cranbury. One was composed of the stable, long-established, black workingclass and middle-class families who owned their own homes on or around Maplewood Avenue behind North Main Street or on a few other streets. The other was made up of a largely transient group of Southern blacks, who, from the 1920s through the 1960s, came north for the annual harvest and most of whom returned south after it was over. While in Cranbury they lived in barns or shacks on the farms, those who stayed clustered in rented deteriorated houses on or around Old Trenton Road on the outskirts of the south end of town. Interaction between the two groups of African Americans was apparently minimal for most of that period. Although she was born in Trenton in 1921, Marina Agnes Hall married Joseph Wilson, an African American native of Cranbury who was born in 1914 in his grandmother’s house at what is now 46 Maplewood Avenue. Agnes Wilson lived with her husband at 18 Maplewood Avenue from 1937 until 1995, several years after his death. A hard-working and strong-minded woman, she worked in a number of capacities, including as a cafeteria manager at Cranbury School, and in 1970 she became the first black person elected to the Cranbury School Board. Reelected several times, she served on the board for nine years. Interviewed in 1996 by family members, Agnes Wilson remembered much about the established black community in Cranbury between the 1930s and the 1990s. Many of her memories were corroborated by other lifelong black Cranburians, including Myrna Wilson Doggett and Fred and Viola Phares Nixon.⁵ In the first half of the twentieth century, several African American families owned their houses on Maplewood Avenue, among them the Doggetts, Nixons, Phareses, Thorntons, Watkinses, and Wilsons. Both whites and blacks lived on Maplewood Avenue and some other streets. Some members of the black community owned and operated small businesses in town. In the 1930s and 1940s, Mamie and Clarence Thornton ran a restaurant called Mamie’s, next to the white-owned Cranbury General Store at 60 – 62 North Main Street, then run by Irme Lindenfeld and before him by the Lasche brothers. The Thorntons also rented

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out boats on Brainerd Lake. Later, in the 1950s, they sold their restaurant to Shadrach and Sadie Douglas, who ran it for more than a decade, while the Thorntons relocated Mamie’s to Route 130 near Bennett Place (where C&H Garage is now located). Lou Ida Jones, reportedly the town’s first black beautician, operated a beauty parlor next to Sadie Douglas’s restaurant in the 1950s and 1960s. Viola Nixon owned a farm before retiring to Maplewood Avenue. Blacks from Maplewood Avenue held jobs in area hospitals, post offices, and businesses as well as on local farms. A number of other African American families lived in a building at the corner of Old Trenton Road and Old Cranbury – Hightstown Road on the Updike property. Many of them worked for Mike Pack’s chicken-processing plant on that corner. The plant closed in the 1950s, although its old, whitewashed concrete and cinderblock buildings were still standing on the site in 2011. Nearby on Old Trenton Road, black Cranburian Dora Weeks had a house, and next to her, Clarence Reeves owned a house and small farm behind which was an old African American cemetery with crumbling headstones. Reeves’s house and the headstones vanished long ago. In addition to the African American farmers and entrepreneurs, black Cranburians worked in several different establishments. Several African American residents of Maplewood Avenue worked at Wright’s Roses, among them John Owens, Joseph Wilson, and Clarence Thornton. The latter also played drums and helped his wife, Mamie, at her restaurant. The family of Shadrack Douglas lived at 2 Maplewood Avenue for many decades after World War II. Douglas had been born in Virginia in 1899. He married there, arrived in Cranbury in 1931 and worked on the farms of Frank Hand and Hand’s son-in-law, Frank Danser, on Old Trenton Road. In addition to his regular occupation, Douglas ran a taxi business for a decade and was also co-owner, with his second wife, Sadie, of the Dinner Belle, a restaurant on North Main Street. Fred Nixon was born in Cranbury in 1929, the son of a Cranburian who worked at Chamberlain & Barclay. Young Nixon was employed at Wright’s Roses before getting jobs at rug and upholstery companies in Hightstown. Viola Phares Nixon, Fred Nixon’s grandmother, lived her entire life in Cranbury, from her birth in 1874 to her death at nearly 100 years old in 1974. She remembered attending the small schoolhouse on Bunker Hill and later helping her husband in the fields. The most exciting invention that she saw in the nineteenth century, she recalled in 1973,



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was the indoor toilet, which she first saw when one was installed in John S. Silvers’s Victorian mansion at 1 North Main Street around the turn of the century.⁶ As churchgoers, some African Americans from Cranbury attended the predominantly white Presbyterian and Methodist churches. The Phares and Ditmus families had been members of the First Presbyterian Church for nearly 150 years. But many attended black churches. In the 1930s, some members of the black community worshipped in what was called the Upper Room in the old gristmill before the building was demolished in 1939. In the 1950s, a black Baptist minister, Rev. Arnold Thompson, started a church that met upstairs in the Odd Fellows Hall for almost a decade and subsequently in the chapel building of the former Second Presbyterian Church. When the Reverend Thompson left, some members went to Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Hightstown. Some of the black families on Maplewood Avenue attended the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Monroe Township. Myrna Wilson of Maplewood Avenue was born in 1940 and was baptized and attended Sunday School and services in the Methodist Church. When she married Ernest L. (“Pete”) Doggett Sr., the Reverend Thompson performed the ceremony in the Baptist worship room in the Odd Fellows Hall. Like many of the African American women on Maplewood Avenue, Myrna Wilson Doggett worked as a caregiver. Her job was at a nursing home on the corner of Maplewood Avenue and Plainsboro Road. Later, after retirement, she was an active member of the Cranbury First Aid Squad and of the Board of Cranbury Housing Associates, which helped obtain affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families. To hundreds of schoolchildren, Myrna Wilson Doggett was best known in the last years of her life as the friendly crossing guard in front of the old Cranbury Firehouse on South Main Street. “I cannot think of a more beloved person in town than Myrna,” said former mayor Rebecca (“Becky”) Beauregard when Myrna Doggett died suddenly at age sixty-two in February 2002.⁷ When Township Historian Betty Wagner, a white woman and former business librarian, interviewed Myrna Wilson Doggett in October 2000, she concluded by asking, “Is there anything you would like to put on this tape about the community? What was your general impression of life in Cranbury as a little girl? Did you feel as though you were discriminated against?”

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Myrna Wilson Daggett replied: My grandmother, Lizzie Wilson, was a very strong Baptist individual. She always taught us to love our neighbors and that is the way I was raised. As a little girl, I always went to the Methodist Church and they always treated me very warm. I remember playing with children of all colors. The only problem I ever had was being poor, certain children would laugh at us and certain children would call us names, but we ignored that. That’s how I raised my children. We were raised to love one another; it makes no difference what color we are and what we have in life. There were times when my own race would have altercations because I played with white children. Kids can be cruel and can always find something to pick on.⁸

“All of my family are gone,” Myrna Wilson Daggett continued. I remember my grandmother also saying that when she first moved here to Cranbury [around the turn of the previous century] she had some problems. But, she was a very firm woman and she stood up for her rights, and I believe people got to respect her, understand her, and love her and years went on. She was a very hard working person and she worked for a lot of families here in Cranbury. I remember her working for the chronically ill in North Brunswick. She raised her children to have a good vocational background. They were either painters, carpenters, nurses, musicians, or ministers.

Asked during the October 2000 interview if she had faced racial discrimination herself, Myrna Doggett responded, “I didn’t see it in the way that I can see it now. When I got married in 1955, on my honeymoon, I went down to my husband’s home town in Cape Charles, Virginia, and while visiting there, he took me to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I went to the bathroom and saw the sign for the ‘colored’ and ‘whites.’ That’s when I first became aware of discrimination. Up until that time, I was always treated fairly.” Today, there is one black-owned business on Main Street. The “Cranbury Cobbler,” a small shoe-repair shop, at 63 North Main Street, next to the post office, was established in 1989 by Pierre Dujue, who grew up in Monroe and had been an apprentice to a shoemaker in Freehold before coming to Cranbury. He was later joined by his brother, Monte.



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“This town has been really friendly,” Pierre Dujue told a reporter in 1991. He has remained in business in Cranbury two decades later.⁹

ĈčĆđđĊēČĊĘ Ĕċ ęčĊ ΅΍Ί΄Ę The 1960s was a time of challenge to many long-standing institutions in America, and it was a time of testing in Cranbury as well, particularly in regard to race relations. The Vietnam War was a trial for the nation. Forty-two young Cranburians, whites and blacks, served there as draftees or volunteers. Magnus W. (“Bill”) Ostergaard was eighteen and just out of high school when he found himself in the army and then in Song Bay, South Vietnam, firing artillery shells at a disappearing enemy. After a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam, veterans were flown back to the United States and discharged as individuals rather than in units. Ostergaard recalled in 1986 that when he returned to the United States in the late 1960s, “there was no recognition, no adjustment period. I went right from the jungle, back to the street. . . . Two days after I was in Vietnam, I was standing on that corner over there,” pointing to North Main Street at Park Place West. Paul J. Christiansen, son of the head of Cranbury’s Public Works Department, served from 1968 to 1969 as an army helicopter pilot, ferrying troops and supplies between their bases and the fields and jungles in South Vietnam. When his parents had taken him to Philadelphia Airport in October 1968 to see him off, his father later remembered that “we went up to the observation deck and watched his plane take off. You didn’t know, you just didn’t know, it might be the last time you saw him — alive.” Paul Christiansen did return alive. Bill Ostergaard did too, although two decades later, painful memories from combat in Vietnam were still waking him up in the middle of the night. Only one Cranburian failed to return. Private First Class James P. (“Jimmy”) Robinson, nineteen, a member of Maplewood Avenue’s black community, was killed when he stepped on a land mine on a combat mission on January 6, 1968. Six months later his posthumous Bronze Star medal was presented to his young widow, Juanita Robinson, holding their baby daughter, in a ceremony at Fort Monmouth. On Memorial Day in 1986, Cranbury added the names of local veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars to the town’s granite war memorial.

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The civil rights movement began the direct-action movements for change in the 1960s. It successfully challenged racial segregation laws and voting restriction methods against blacks in the South and then turned to assault de facto discrimination where it existed in the rest of the country. Race riots broke out in the ghettoes of most of the large cities in the nation, including Newark in 1967, and Trenton and other cities in 1968.

ėĆĈĎĆđ ęĊēĘĎĔēĘ Ćę ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ĘĈčĔĔđ, ΅΍Ί΍ – ΅΍΋΄ In the winter of 1969 – 1970, in the wake of the civil rights movement, black discontent and a 1969 decision by the Nixon administration to delay federal desegregation efforts, the issue of racial discrimination and black anger also emerged in Cranbury. It took the form of a dispute over the question of racial discrimination in Cranbury School and in the town itself, and it became a matter of heated debate. At the time, Cranbury residents, black and white, realized that they were addressing the kinds of issues that were of major concern in the nation as a whole as well as in Cranbury and its neighboring communities: issues of changing racial attitudes, institutions, and customs in America. Cranbury’s triggering incident came in September 1969. It began with a scuffle in a school bus between two male youths, one black and one white. The fight itself had little importance. The real dispute focused on how school authorities handled the incident. The white student received no punishment, but the eleven-year-old black student was suspended from school. He was accused of allegedly making disrespectful remarks to the white youth’s mother, who was a special education teacher at the school. Outraged at the disparity in treatment, Cranbury’s longtime black community mobilized and demanded an investigation. To ensure that their concerns would be heard, they formed an organization, the Cranbury Community Action Group. Most of the group’s twenty-four original members were residents of Maplewood Avenue; Clinton Douglas was its president. “We felt that with the growing unrest in Jamesburg and Hightstown and elsewhere,” Douglas explained to the Cranbury Press, “that we ought to do something here. We see things happening — racial discrimination against black kids at school, unfair



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treatment — and we decided to do something about it and to help our kids if we can. That’s our primary objective.”¹⁰ Douglass contended that there was “deep-rooted racism” in the Cranbury school system, brought on primarily by what he claimed were “a couple of teachers who are totally racist.” “We are not a militant, loud group,” he explained, “but we are determined.” The group made a number of suggestions: that a black teacher be hired, black students be given a chance to air their grievances, and a black history course be offered to all students. Douglas also said that in the township, exclusionary attitudes kept blacks out of many of Cranbury’s leading voluntary organizations as well as from appointments to the planning and zoning boards. At a stormy meeting of the school board on November 12, 1969, described by the Cranbury Press as a “two-hour shouting match,” representatives of the black community repeated their accusations that the incident revealed racist sentiments at the school. They demanded the dismissal of the principal, the special education teacher, and the school bus driver, an African American who had denied that he had seen the original scuffle. The following week, they filed a formal petition with the board.¹¹ That winter, the Cranbury Press was filled with letters to the editor from blacks and whites over whether and the extent to which racism existed in the school and the town.¹² The Board of Education’s formal response did little to reassure Cranbury blacks that their criticisms had been heard. In January 1970, it dismissed the petition against the principal and other school employees on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Nevertheless, the campaign had an impact: it raised the issue of racism in the school and the town, and the school agreed to make some changes. At the beginning of December 1969, a month before dismissing the petition, the Board of Education, the school administration, and the school faculty issued a joint statement outlining curriculum changes designed “to provide the best possible education for all Cranbury children.” The changes included establishing a human relations workshop, assembly programs to provide children with a better understanding of America’s many cultures, and the recruitment of a black teacher. The changes also included incorporating into the curriculum the contribution of minorities to American society, establishing a day commemorating the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and creating student-faculty committees to allow students to air their grievances and to help resolve discipline problems.¹³

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The town voters also responded to the black community’s accusations of racism. The February 1970 election for three seats on the Board of Education brought out 39 percent of the registered voters, an unusually high percentage for a school board election. The result was the election of the first black person to the Board of Education (indeed the first black person to any board in the township). She was forty-nine-year-old Agnes Wilson of Maplewood Avenue. Within a week of the February 1970 election, the embattled school principal, who had been in his position for only three years, announced his resignation.¹⁴ Agnes Wilson served on the Cranbury School Board from 1970 to 1979, and as she recalled in 1996, one of her concerns was that so few of the black children in Cranbury School had gone on to high school. The majority of black students in Cranbury, she said, simply quit after the eighth grade, although some, like her husband, Joseph Wilson, and his siblings, as well as the Moody children, had attended Bordentown Trade School for black youths before that statewide boarding school for African Americans was closed in 1955. Some black residents such as Ulysses Douglas, who graduated as president of the Cranbury School Class of 1949, had attended Hightstown High School with white Cranburians.¹⁵ Some other black Cranburians had gone to a vocational trade school in New Brunswick. In the 1970s, Agnes Wilson, a graduate of a vocational technical school herself, and Charles Argento, the new principal of Cranbury School, campaigned successfully for transportation and access to trade schools for black and white Cranbury youths who were not interested in or able to go to college. Subsequently, Cranbury arranged for such students to attend vocational technical schools in East Brunswick and New Brunswick. Argento, Wilson, and the other members of the newly elected Board of Education also encouraged more black students at Cranbury School to go on to high school and to college.

ĉĊěĊđĔĕĒĊēę: ĕđĆēēĎēČ Ćēĉ čĎĘęĔėĎĈ ĕėĊĘĊėěĆęĎĔē Since the 1960s, and particularly in the closing decades of the twentieth century, town planning, development, and preservation — relatively new issues in the history of Cranbury — have represented among the



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most important concerns in township politics. Much has changed in Cranbury, as in America, since the days in which growth and progress were viewed as synonymous. Suburbanization, with its housing developments, malls, and offices, accelerated dramatically across the nation since the 1950s, facilitated by government highway programs and tax policies and comparative prosperity. Accompanying such development, of course, was the rapid disappearance of open land. By the end of the twentieth century, more than one-third of the land in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in America, had been developed. The flight to the suburbs in search of the American Dream had come at a price. Major unanticipated costs included traffic congestion, pollution, financial difficulties, and the destruction of natural resources and historic legacies from the past. Beginning in the 1960s, as people reacted to the wholesale demolition of historic neighborhoods and other areas by interstate highways, urban renewal, and suburban sprawl, the rationale for historic preservation changed. It moved from national patriotism, which had resulted in the saving of Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the Gettysburg Battlefield, and Colonial Williamsburg, to the preservation of vernacular architecture and everyday sites, important local or regional aspects of history that contained special meaning for specific groups or communities. Encouraged by numerous groups and stimulated by a national report entitled With Heritage So Rich, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, recognizing the need to maintain important and symbolic places of the past to give people an appreciation of their history and a sense of orientation in time and place.¹⁶ The legislation helped to launch the modern preservation movement to rehabilitate and maintain historically significant aspects of the natural and the constructed environments, including urban neighborhoods as well as small villages and the rural landscapes that surrounded them. Congress expanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Register of Historic Places, created an Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, provided grants-in-aid, and encouraged the states to follow suit.¹⁷ In New Jersey, the movement for historic preservation had already been encouraged as the state prepared for its celebration in 1964 of the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Jersey. A Cranbury committee had been appointed to carry out activities in the town for state’s

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tercentenary. In 1970, the legislature established the New Jersey Register of Historic Places, declaring historic preservation to be the official policy of state, county, and local governments in New Jersey. It was in the 1960s, with the rising consciousness nationally and locally about the costs of unrestricted construction and suburban sprawl and with the celebration of the state’s tercentenary in 1964 and the nation’s forthcoming bicentennial in 1976, that Cranbury, recognizing and valuing its uniqueness, joined the emerging movement in support of historic preservation. Although today in the twenty-first century, historic preservation is taken as a conscious goal, this was not always the case. Until the last third of the twentieth century, Cranbury, later aptly described as Middlesex County’s “best-preserved nineteenth-century village, remarkable for its intact and cohesive domestic and commercial architecture,”¹⁸ was preserved more by chance than conscious decision. Of course, one cannot discount the unstated and casual preference for maintaining “things as they are” over the years, as well as some conscious decisions about housing by people in the town and its environs. Preservation had certainly been aided by prosperity among the farmers, whose lands created a natural buffer around the village. One of the reasons that the farmland was not sold off and developed as quickly as in neighboring areas may have been that many of the farmers in Cranbury in the 1950s and 1960s had children whom they wanted to continue to farm and who were willing to be farmers like their parents. The fact that Cranbury was a centered community with a village and a long-established town probably also contributed. As long as Cranbury remained relatively rural and self-contained, there was little threat from change. There were indications in the 1950s that a more self-conscious “historic” attitude was emerging among some residents. As indicated earlier, James Morris had commented in the mid-1950s that some townspeople had removed their front porches in an attempt to restore the eighteenthor nineteenth-century façades of their homes. But the emphasis in the fifties was more on style than historic detail, often resulting in a kind of pseudohistoric reconstruction condemned today by most preservationists, who urge faithful adherence to a building’s original style and detail. The 1953 renovation of the First National Bank of Cranbury, for instance, was an attempt to make a late nineteenth-century building resemble a colonial one.



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The origins of the awareness of the need for preservation in order to protect Cranbury’s unique historic village came about in the 1950s, when a number of old buildings were torn down in the name of progress. One of the oldest farmhouses in the area, the Oscar Danser farmhouse on South Main Street (in what is now Heritage Park), had been abandoned and allowed to deteriorate until the demolition of the farmhouse and its old barn and other outbuildings awakened a number of people to the danger that many such historic buildings in and around the town might soon be lost forever. The destruction of two fine old houses in center of the village, the Rue and Barclay homes on North Main Street, to provide room for an addition, a drive-up window, and a larger parking area for the bank, was seen by some budding preservationists as evidence of a growing threat to the town’s historic streetscape. “Some fifty years ago [in the 1950s],” Barbara (“Babs”) Thomsen, a longtime Cranburian and an active preservationist, recalled in 2002 (with a minor lapse in chronology), “I stood in front of the hardware store, across the street from Aunt Clara Rue’s colonial home, where she ran a kindergarten school, and watched as a truck with a cable attached to the corner of her home pulled it flat to the ground.” Previously the “the magnificent Victorian home of the bank’s founder next door [was] destroyed. I felt an uneasy sense of loss. A parking lot and new bank [addition] fill the space today.” Later, an old house and store owned by Martha Stahl at the corner of North Main Street and Westminster Place was razed to build a savings and loan office, despite community pleas to adapt the old building for the new usage. “The biggest shock,” Thomsen said, “came with the school board’s decision [in 1964] to demolish the old school building.”¹⁹

ęčĊ Ĕđĉ ĘĈčĔĔđ ćĚĎđĉĎēČ ĈĔēęėĔěĊėĘĞ Ćēĉ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ đĆēĉĒĆėĐĘ, ĎēĈ. In the center of the village stands Cranbury’s classic nineteenth-century, two-story, red-brick schoolhouse, capped by a white clock tower and a weather vane. Completed at the end of 1896, it replaced five smaller schoolhouses that had been scattered around the village and the surrounding area. For seventy years after it opened in January 1897, the Old

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School was the place where most of the youngsters from the village and its farms received their basic education. In the first year, 159 students filled its old-fashioned seats and desks. Each of the four rooms contained a different department: primary, grammar, intermediate, and high school. As the town’s population grew, a south wing was added in 1906 and a north wing in 1922. In a series of subsequent additions culminating in 1957, the school board augmented the Old School Building with one-story brick additions to the south and west for classrooms for a kindergarten and middleschool students and later for a primary school wing and a gymnasium. Beginning in 1913, eleventh and twelfth graders attended Hightstown High School, ninth and tenth graders joining them beginning in 1919. Thereafter, Hightstown was the public high school for Cranbury students until 1977, when the Board of Education contracted for students to attend Lawrence Township High School. Since 1988, a subsequent arrangement provided for Cranbury public school students to attend Princeton High School.²⁰ In 1964, faced with increasing enrollments coming from new residential developments, the school board, contending that the existing facility was outdated and not worthy of renovation, proposed a new, modern, one-story school just west of the Old School building.²¹ Although there was some opposition to the cost of the new school, the board’s proposal generated an enormous outcry against demolishing the beloved Old School building. Outraged local citizens formed an ad hoc group, the “Save the Old School Committee,” and urged that the old building be renovated and used for other purposes. But the school board, which owned the structure, argued that the cost of renovating the nearly seventy-year-old building was prohibitive, and the board insisted that it be destroyed. Demolition was endorsed by a Fact-Finding Committee, appointed by the board as well as by the Cranbury Press, but voters sided with the preservationists and turned down a proposal for a bond issue to demolish the Old School and build a new one, rebuking the board on both economic and sentimental grounds. A heated debate lasted throughout 1965, with the voters once again rejecting a bond issue that would have financed the Board of Education’s plan.²² Raising funds from local residents, the Save the Old School Committee took the board to court and obtained an order enjoining the board from tearing down the old schoolhouse. The controversy divided



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the town and even some families. One of the members of the Save the Old School Committee, which filed a lawsuit against the Board of Education to preserve the old building, was Kathryn (“Kate”) Shankweiler, wife of the then president of the school board, Raymond (“Ray”) Shankweiler. The suit claimed that the board was acting against the wishes of the public and that with its stately brick façade, ornate cornices, and slate roof topped by the elegant, white clock tower, the Old School building was a prime, historic example of American schoolhouse architecture of the late nineteenth century. In a December 1966 referendum on a new proposal from the board, voters accepted a plan to build a new school but without demolition of the Old School building. A modern, one-story, brick building costing nearly $1 million was constructed between 1967 and 1969. The old building was vacant in 1968. Having saved the Old School, supporters now sought to preserve and convert it to some public purpose. But the school board, still the legal owner, disavowed any interest, and the building’s future hung in the balance for several years. The battle for the preservation of the Old School went through a number of phases. From 1964 to 1966, the preservationists’ goal had simply been to save the building from demolition. In this initial phase, W. Earl Applegate, a farmer and commercial trucker and former township committee member, took a leading role in galvanizing the diverse group, which included people opposed to increased taxes for the new construction, alumni with sentimental attachments to the Old School, and residents who simply wished to preserve the historic building. The second phase, after the demolition had been prevented, involved the problem of renovation and the future use of the old building. The school board and the Township Committee rejected proposals to convert the old structure into a Town Hall that would centralize the scattered municipal offices. Still, the principle of preservation had triumphed through the courts and then through the ballot, first in regard to the referendums and second for elective office. In 1970, in a close election centered on preservation of the Old School, Donald Armstrong, a preservationist, was elected to the Township Committee, taking his seat in January 1971. He was the second Democrat elected to that governing board in one hundred years. The Save the Old School Committee, together with the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, began the process of applying for state and federal recognition of the Old

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School building as a Historic Landmark. The Committee on the Preservation of Historic Sites in Cranbury, headed by Norman Wright, owner of Wright’s Roses, endorsed the application. For its historic significance and architectural merit, the Old Cranbury School building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 21, 1971.²³ Despite the building’s official designation as a state and national historic landmark, there was still no money for renovation and thus no guarantee that the Old School would, in fact, survive. Residents grappled with these problems for several years. The solution, under which saving the Old School entered its third phase, entailed the creation of a new, not-for-profit organization, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., in September 1973, by members of the former Save the Old School Committee. Staffed entirely by volunteers, Cranbury Landmarks’ longterm goal was to organize all Cranbury citizens interested in preserving “the rich historical, architectural, and cultural heritage of Cranbury Township.” In practical terms, its first task was to preserve, restore, and manage the Old School building. The structure’s use as a school had ended in June 1968, and when Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., took over responsibility for it in 1973, the building, although of sound construction, was by then in a state of considerable disrepair. Under an arrangement worked out with School Board, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., became responsible for restoration and for finding suitable tenants for the building. Among the more than a dozen members of Cranbury Landmarks’ initial board of trustees were Clara E. Amend, president; Kathryn Shankweiler, treasurer; Barbara F. (“Babs”) Thomsen, secretary; Donald N. Armstrong, general contractor; William L. (“Bill”) Bunting Jr. and Allen E. Burns, legal advisers; with Francesco Drago and Mahbubeh Stave, among others, helping to find tenants.²⁴ Over the years, other contributing members included, among others, Helen de Forest Lee, Anna Drago, James Golubieski, Allan Kehrt, Andrew Massie, Richard Spencer, Emma Stults, and Norma Swale.²⁵ Local architect John M. Dickey planned the overall restoration of the building. Much of the actual work was carried out by volunteers, including the board and other members of Cranbury Landmarks, Inc. The organization raised money for the major work of exterior restoration through grants from the New Jersey Historic Sites Commission and other state and federal entities as well as from private foundations and local contributions.



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In 1975, even while renovation of the building continued, the Princeton Ballet School became the first tenant in what was called the Old School Education and Community Center. Others included Flatroc, a nonprofit educational organization offering a year-round program of community arts; the New Jersey Poets and Writers Association; and Rutgers University Extension Division’s program, which offered courses. During the summer, between 1968 and the early 1980s, a bargain store for migrant farm workers and their children was staffed by volunteers in one of the lower-level rooms. The Old School Center was also used for meetings of the boy scouts and senior citizens’ organizations as well as for workshops, art exhibitions, lectures, and discussion groups. By 1980, the building was fully rented, completely renovated, and all debts paid. Starting shortly thereafter, several rooms were rented to the township for some of the municipal offices. Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., continued to maintain and manage the building until 1990, when the school board abruptly decided to resume the management of the structure. That year, the Board of Education itself once again began meeting in the building that an earlier school board had tried unsuccessfully to destroy.²⁶ Gradually in the 1980s and 1990s, the township increased the number of offices it had in the Old School building, until most of the municipal offices were there. This centralization was a new development. For most of the township’s history since its incorporation in 1872, most offices had been decentralized. Key members of the municipal staff, all part-time, including the clerk and the tax collector, maintained their offices and their records in their own homes. Art Romweber, part-time township clerk from 1954 to 1990, who owned and ran a meat market and general store on Prospect Plains Road, had kept his office and the township records in his home at 46 North Main Street. To pay their property taxes, residents went to the home of Gertrude Danser, for years the part-time tax collector, at 31 North Main Street. For about a decade from the mid1960s to the early 1970s, the township had rented a room on the first floor of a then private residence at 54 North Main Street (now the Cranbury Bookworm) to serve as the township permit office where building permits, dog licenses, and other such authorizations were obtained. The nineteenth-century house at 54 North Main Street that now houses the Cranbury Bookworm has an interesting history illustrating the multiple uses of some North Main Street houses in the twentieth century. Owned in the 1920s by Lemuel Stults, it was called the “pink

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house,” because, as Wayne Stahl remembered, it was the first house in Cranbury village that was painted a color other than white.²⁷ It was subsequently painted white. It remained a private residence in the years after World War II, but it also included a small pet shop in the enclosed porch on the north side and, briefly, in the early 1960s, a tiny luncheonette in the southwest corner. When the luncheonette left, it was replaced by the township permit office for nearly a decade. That ended in the early 1970s. In 1973, the new owner of the building, an avid book collector, converted the structure into a secondhand bookstore. With an inventory of more than 100,000 used hardcover and paperback books, the Cranbury Bookworm continues to attract readers and collectors to the present day. One at a time during the 1970s and 1980s, most of the scattered township offices were brought together in the Old School building that

ċĎČ. ΈΆ. A historic landmark, the renovated Old Cranbury School

built in 1896 became the Cranbury Town Hall in 2001. (Photographed for this book by Audrey Smith)



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had been restored by Cranbury Landmarks, Inc. In 1990, the township decided to hire its first, full-time professional staff member, Christine (“Chris”) Smeltzer as township administrator. When Smeltzer retired in 2010, the Township Committee’s resolution declared that “Cranbury Township’s reputation as a friendly and expertly-managed town has greatly benefited from the high esteem in which Chris is held by all . . . for her hard work, dedication, fairness, integrity and poise.”²⁸ In 1999, the township took over legal ownership of the Old School building from the Board of Education, made more improvements to conform to its use as a municipal building, and in October 2001, the Old School building was officially dedicated as the Cranbury Town Hall. In keeping with its community role established by Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., the Town Hall still included meeting rooms for organizations such as the boy scouts, the Golden Age Neighbors Club, and a senior citizens’ center on the lower level, plus, on the first floor, a public room, the Gourgaud Gallery, for exhibiting the work of local artists and for other community functions. Thanks to Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., the beautiful, old historic building was put to new uses, thus still continuing to serve the community as it had for more than a hundred years.

ęčĊ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ čĎĘęĔėĎĈĆđ Ćēĉ ĕėĊĘĊėěĆęĎĔē ĘĔĈĎĊę Ğ The Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society (CHPS, or the Historical Society) is the largest organization in the town devoted to furthering interest and knowledge about Cranbury’s history and to preserving the historic character of the village and its farmland. A not-for-profit voluntary organization founded in 1967 (and incorporated in 1970), the Historical Society traces its origins to plans begun in 1963 for local participation in the celebration of New Jersey Tercentenary in 1964. In August 1963, under the guidance of Frances Osgood, president of the Cranbury Woman’s Club, the club’s Historical Committee, chaired by Ellen Hoke and Mary Morgan, launched plans to exhibit historic artifacts in the school and arrange a tour of several old houses in town in October 1964 as part of the state’s anniversary celebration. The house tour proved extraordinarily successful and began a tradition in Cranbury of a biennial House and Garden Tour. It not only introduced people to the

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charm of the town and gave them a sense of the value of its history, but also generated funds that, along with the individual donations and other resources, helped to establish and sustain the Historical Society and the Cranbury Museum.²⁹ The mid-1960s was a formative period in the growing awareness in Cranbury and the nation of the problems posed by rapid development and the need for appreciation of local history and historic preservation. As indicated earlier, Congress had adopted the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, and New Jersey responded by creating the New Jersey Historic Trust in 1967. Three years later, the legislature established the New Jersey Register of Historic Places and also made historic preservation the official policy for New Jersey governments at all levels: state, county, and municipal. In line with these new developments, a group of women and men representing both old Cranbury families and newer residents, most of them professionals, organized the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society in 1967. That June, Ellen Hoke, a relative newcomer from Williamsburg, Virginia, who had co-chaired the Historical Committee of the Woman’s Club, was made chair of the organizing committee, which enlisted 175 families as charter members. In addition to dues, the initial funds for the Historical Society came from the proceeds of the 1964 house tour, which the Woman’s Club, now headed by Gladys Frisch, had been saving for this purpose. When elections for the new Historical Society were held in September, Richard (“Dick”) Torbert, a lawyer and newcomer whose eighteenth-century house on Symmes Court had once been the Presbyterian parsonage, was elected president. Amy Evans, a resident for more than thirty years, was elected vice president; Anne Taylor, whose ancestors on her mother’s side — Wikoffs, Formans, Conovers, and Longstreets — dated back to colonial times, was secretary; Susan Hagerty, a lawyer from a longtime Cranbury family, was assistant secretary; Walter Johnson, a financier and newcomer, was treasurer; Richard Zeigler, whose family had been residents for years, was assistant treasurer; and William L. Bunting Jr., who had been raised in Cranbury, was counsel. In addition to the officers, the first board of trustees of the Historical Society included comparative newcomers such as Jacqueline (“Jackie” Sullivan Bencze, originally from New Brunswick, who lived in the old Snowden house; Ann Hogarty, who came from Plainsboro; and Ellen



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Hoke, as well as members of the old-line Cranbury families such as Emma Mershon Burroughs and Sara Perrine Hoffman.³⁰ The purpose of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, as explained in its 1967 statement for incorporation, was “to promote, support and encourage the beautification of the land and the buildings located in the Township of Cranbury and restoration and preservation of its old and historic buildings and sites and to acquire, preserve and exhibit relics, and to acquire and maintain housing and sites for preservation and exhibition by purchase, lease, or otherwise.”³¹ Membership of the Historical Society continued to grow, and it became one of the most influential organizations in town. The Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society played a significant role in the town’s participation in the nation’s bicentennial celebration of 1976. It also did a great deal of research on the history of the town, its buildings, farms, and families. A key member, Ruth Berg Walsh, compiled and published in 1975 a historical collection of documents and articles, entitled Cranbury: Past and Present. A descendant of Mayflower pilgrims, Walsh was state registrar for the New Jersey Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and state chairwoman of the DAR’s Bicentennial Committee. She was also historian for the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and later the first Cranbury Township Historian. In many ways, her book embodied the society’s research and discoveries that preceded the national bicentennial celebration in 1976.³²

ĘęĆęĊ Ćēĉ ċĊĉĊėĆđ ėĊĈĔČēĎęĎĔē Ĕċ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ čĎĘęĔėĎĈ ĉĎĘęėĎĈę, ΅΍΋΍ – ΅΍Ό΄ One of the most far-reaching accomplishments of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society was obtaining official designation of part of the town as a nationally recognized Historic District. To that end, members spent endless hours themselves and with preservation experts throughout the 1970s to document the history of the town and the more than two hundred buildings that dated back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. They researched early maps, deeds, wills, inventories, even Revolutionary War service records at the State Archives and other

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locations; deeds, mortgages, and court records at the Middlesex County courthouse; as well as local church records and family documents donated to the Cranbury Museum. Census reports were combed and notes taken from tombstones in local cemeteries. Files from the Cranbury Press, back to its founding in 1885, were explored, and oral history interviews of longtime residents were conducted.³³ By 1975, when Walsh’s Cranbury: Past and Present was published, the Historical Society had most of the documentation to support a multipage nomination for official recognition as a Historic District. Not all residents agreed with the idea, and the process hit a number of snags, including concerns by the Township Planning Board, which did not endorse the proposal until October 1976. Finally, in 1977, the application was submitted to Trenton, and two years later, on August 9, 1979, the state accepted the nomination and officially recognized the Cranbury Historic District and added it to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places.³⁴ It declared that “Cranbury is the best preserved 19th century village in Middlesex County. . . . While there are many small mill towns in New Jersey, few are in such an undisturbed environment as that of Cranbury.”³⁵ With the state’s endorsement, the federal government also accepted the town’s nomination, recognizing the Cranbury Historic District and adding it to the National Register of Historic Places on September 18, 1980.³⁶ “It could be it means potentially federal funds might be available for restoration work,” declared Mayor Thomas Weidner, a Princeton attorney, in response to the federal designation, “but I think what’s more important, it has added to the basic feeling of pride in our New England type village. Cranbury is a very nice rustic type place and it’s good to have somebody give it recognition for what it is.”³⁷ Many people were responsible for the creation of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and for its roles in establishing the Historic District and the Cranbury Museum, but Sara Perrine Hoffman, a sturdy, white-haired woman with snapping blue eyes, was known as one of the most enthusiastic, energetic, and indomitable: “the Society’s continuing fount of inspiration,” as the organization’s newsletter described her in August 1968. In the spring of 1967, Sara Hoffman, Amy Evans, and more than a dozen other people from the Historical Society had visited members of old Cranbury families asking them to donate items from the time of their parents or grandparents or earlier.



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They obtained artifacts that included the bell that Mary Christopher had used when she sold ice cream from her wagon up and down Main Street in the nineteenth century, the tools and writing desk of William Walker that he used while supervising the building of Cranbury School in 1896, a collection of Indian arrowheads found in Cranbury, and many additional items from the town’s history. The burgeoning collection was first exhibited in a small barn behind 15 South Main Street obtained in 1970, but it proved too small, and in 1972, an 1834 house at 4 Park Place East was purchased to serve as a permanent museum. In May 1970, after Richard Torbert announced his departure from Cranbury, Sara Hoffman declined a nomination to succeed him as president (instead, his office was filled by Hoffman’s sister-in-law, Harriet Perrine, who was followed in turn by Amy Evans). Rather than the presidency, Sara Perrine Hoffman had accepted a position as the first director of the museum, a title later changed to curator. She supervised in the collection and exhibition of artifacts for the next fifteen years.³⁸ A life-long Cranburian, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Symmes H. Perrine, Sara Isabel Perrine was born in 1896, attended Cranbury School, spent a year at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, then attended and graduated from Trenton State Normal School, today the College of New Jersey. For two years, she taught English and history at Cranbury School, and then, in 1917, married William Cole Hoffman, a friend since childhood and a member of the family that had run A. S. Cole and Son since the mid-nineteenth century. They raised three children: William, Joseph, and Margaret. Their oldest son, William, died when his B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber was shot down over Germany in February 1945. Sara Perrine Hoffman had determination, a strong faith, and seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm. In the postwar years, she served as president of the United Presbyterian Women and president of the Cranbury Woman’s Club. She was the first woman on the board of elders of the First Presbyterian Church and was the first woman elected to the Cranbury Board of Education. In addition to being the curator of the Cranbury Museum, she operated a local gift shop with her sister-inlaw. When the Cranbury Lions Club created its Citizenship Award in 1977, it made her the first recipient. In 1985, at age eighty-nine, she gave up being curator of the museum, “reluctantly,” she said, because “it’s been the joy of my old age.” She died ten years later, one year short of 100.

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ċĎČ. Έ·. Sara Perrine Hoffman, one of the original trustees of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and the first curator of the Cranbury Museum, enjoys the 1977 Memorial Day parade. (Photograph by Edgar Lawson. Courtesy of Edgar H. Lawson and Margaret H. Dubell)

A portrait of her hangs in the museum, and a plaque in the herb garden just outside commemorates “Sara’s Garden.” Creating the Cranbury Museum was a tremendous task. The 140year-old house at 4 Park Place East was badly deteriorated when the Historical Society bought it in 1972 with its own money and a generous matching grant from Frances Bradley L’Hommedieu, a leading preservationist and the daughter of the former president of American Spice Mills. More than seventy volunteers contributed their labor to the restoration that summer, scrapping off many coats of paint, repairing and painting walls, refinishing furniture, and filling the place with antiques and other artifacts. It was a wondrous transformation. Tragically, Amy Evans died suddenly on a visit to Florida that winter and did not see the final results. With its elegant Victorian parlor, its rustic, colonial kitchen-dining room (or “keeping room”) and other period rooms, the museum handsomely depicts Cranbury and the life of its residents in earlier times. Periodic themed exhibits of historical interest are held in a new wing added in 1975, through a donation by Mary Perrine in memory of her parents, Arthur and Elizabeth Perrine. The museum itself is furnished with antiques and memorabilia donated by descendants of some of the town’s earliest European settlers and also includes some Lenape Indian artifacts from the collection of local resident Robert Flammer. Recently



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more artifacts have been acquired: quilts, children’s toys, and old farm implements reminiscent of the town’s rural origins. In addition to the museum, the Historical Society acquired a library of books, pictures, and papers documenting the origins and development of the town. Creating that library was the first of many contributions to the Historical Society and to the town of Cranbury by Elizabeth (“Betty”) Wagner since she moved to Cranbury in 1971. A dozen years later, she was correctly characterized as “a great motivator” by the Middlesex County Freeholders when they honored her in 1983 as a “service-oriented, outstanding community leader, who continues to leave her mark on her community.” “Motivator,” “sparkplug,” “dynamo,” the self-effacing yet indefatigably persuasive Betty Wagner served the town’s best interests as president of the Historical Society for ten years and as Township Historian for a quarter of a century.³⁹ Born one of nine children in East Brunswick, Elizabeth (“Betty”) Smith (later Wagner) attended parochial schools in New Brunswick and was valedictorian at Saint Peter’s High School. A brilliant young woman, she graduated magna cum laude with majors in philosophy and English literature from Duke University, then earned a master’s degree in library science at the University of Michigan. After she “built a public library from scratch” at Fremont, Michigan, she held several other positions before capping her career as library director at one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Young and Rubicam in New York City. In 1971, she and her husband, William (“Bill”) Wagner, vice president and circulation manager of the New Brunswick Home News, retired and moved into a 119-year-old farmhouse on North Main Street in Cranbury. Retirement allowed her to pour her inexhaustible energy into civic affairs: organizing four biennual house tours of Historic Cranbury, instigating construction of a gazebo bandstand in Village Park, contributing to the creation of the Cranbury Bicentennial Quilt, and chairing the Historical Society’s committee that helped secure state and national recognition of the Historic District. As Township Historian and a member of the Planning Board, she worked to protect the town’s historic character. As head of the township’s Tercentennial Committee, she prompted three dozen Cranbury community organizations to participate in celebrating the 300th anniversaries of Middlesex County in 1983 and Cranbury in 1997. A champion of voluntarism, Betty Wagner emphasized

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that “involvement is vital to the life of any community and is certainly responsible for the evolution of Cranbury as we all know it and love it.”⁴⁰ The library that Betty Wagner had created in the museum was moved in 1993 to the new Cranbury History Center, which had been created by the Historical Society when it restored the old Gristmiller’s House at 6 South Main Street. The gristmill, long inactive, had been demolished in 1939, but the miller’s two-story, clapboard house, built around 1860, had remained, serving as a private dwelling until 1968. In that year, the township purchased it and used it as Cranbury’s police station until 1985. After the police left, the deteriorating structure was slated for demolition, but in the late 1980s, with help from Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and local businesses and residents, as well as a matching grant from the New Jersey Historic Trust, the Historical Society restored the building. Later an authentic nineteenth-century outhouse from behind one of the Main Street homes was added to the site as an exhibit. The renovated Gristmiller’s House opened in 1993, and in addition to the History Center, it also included a rental apartment for a resident tenant, part of the town’s affordable housing program managed by Cranbury Housing Associates. The History Center section contains the Historical Society’s library and collection of written, oral, and visual records of Cranbury’s past, which are available to the public for viewing and research. In planning for Cranbury’s own 300th anniversary in 1997, the township had created a Tercentennial Committee, chaired by Betty Wagner and composed of a steering committee and representatives from each of Cranbury’s organizations. The committee arranged an entire year of celebratory activities including lectures, concerts, socials, festivals, dedications, and displays. One of those exhibits featured the Tercentennial Quilt, composed of local historical images on which nearly a dozen women quilters worked for two years. It remains on exhibit at the Cranbury Museum. As a result of the work of Lee Nissen and a host of volunteers, the Cranbury Tercentennial Committee published a valuable, 150-page commemorative volume, entitled Cranbury, 1697 – 1997, which summarized each of the town’s organizations and institutions and included several oral histories and short memoirs.⁴¹ The Historical Society also made many contributions to the celebration. As a result of the town’s tercentennial, Cranbury Township adopted as its official seal an emblem, designed by resident Robert Haverkamp, incorporating drawings of its farmland, gristmill, and Old School as well as missionary



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David Brainerd, images encircled by the words “Historic Cranbury, New Jersey, 1697.” As a symbol of the key role that agriculture played in Cranbury’s history and to demonstrate the long and continuing connection the village has had with its adjacent farmlands, the historic Barn Park was created in 2010. The site, located on Cranbury Neck Road just west of South Main Street, is the former barnyard of and adjacent to the nineteenthcentury farmhouse on what was once the farm of H. William Updike and his son, Alvin. A red-painted Dutch-style wagon house, c. 1795 – 1805, and a double corncrib, c. 1890 – 1900, still remain where they were built. The centerpiece, however, is a restored English-style barn from 1741, one of a few such barns remaining in New Jersey. Once part of the Parsonage Plantation of Cranbury’s First Presbyterian Church, it had stood behind the manse behind Symmes Court for more than two centuries. Long unused, it had by the 1990s fallen into disrepair. At the initiative of historically minded townspeople and with funding provided by the Historical Society, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and Cranbury Township, the original timbers of the historic barn were dismantled in 2005 and the process was begun to repair and relocate the restored structure at the Barn Park across the road. In November 2010, the restored Parsonage Barn with its original framework of hand-hewn white oak timber, now covered by a replication of the original cedar shake roof and pine siding painted with a traditional red stain, was reassembled at the Barn Park. One possible use may be as a small agricultural museum complete with farm implements and other artifacts that, along with the adjacent old wagon house and corncrib, would help to demonstrate the connection of the village of Cranbury to the farms that the town served for several centuries.⁴²

ęčĊ ěĔđĚēęĊĊė ċĎėĊ ĈĔĒĕĆēĞ Ćēĉ ċĎėĊčĔĚĘĊĘ Ĕđĉ Ćēĉ ēĊĜ Historic preservation certainly did not always come easily. In 1978, the year before Cranbury received official certification from the state as a Historic District, a debate had begun over the Volunteer Fire Company’s desire for a new firehouse to replace the old one at 2 South Main Street. The controversy was less important in its own right than for some of the

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implications it revealed about the status Cranbury achieved the next year as an official Historic District. Unlike the Old School, the fifty-six-yearold firehouse was not then a historic building in the normal sense of the term. The 1922 structure was located by the old mill site, the historic core of the old village. Yet even this was not the real issue in the debate that began in 1978. The main question was whether the streetscape as a whole, in addition to particular buildings, should be preserved. Thus, the old firehouse was important for the way its demolition or renovation would affect the neighboring buildings and general appearance of Main Street in the predominantly nineteenth-century village. The Cranbury Volunteer Fire Company had long been one of the mainstays of the town. Its volunteer firefighters had put out many fires since its official creation in 1898. Two firemen had died as a result of firefighting activities. Chief Charles S. Harder succumbed to pleurisy from a chill caught fighting a nighttime barn fire in October 1899, and firefighter Joseph Clayton Wicoff was killed when a chimney collapsed on him while he was fighting a house fire in July 1924. The firefighters had tried to keep their equipment and facilities up to date, but beginning in 1978, they asserted that they urgently needed a new, modern firehouse. The next year, the fire company was surprised to discover that its plans were now of interest to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which had oversight concerning historical preservation. There was some confusion and irritation in town as residents discovered the full implications of Cranbury’s designation as a Historic District.⁴³ Though some may have thought that organized local interests and state and federal authorities had banded together to block all new construction and development, most people took comfort in the national and state recognition of the historic importance of their village. Additionally, the preservationist cause won support from the state’s historic preservation office, when one of its specialists declared that “Historic Cranbury Village has one of the finest streetscapes in New Jersey.”⁴⁴ Yet the old firehouse, even with additions made in 1950 and 1976, was by 1979 deemed severely inadequate. Discussions with all local, relevant organizations about the precise location as well as appearance of the new firehouse lasted for more than a decade. An acceptable plan was finally achieved in 1993, one that provided for preservation of the original firehouse as a museum and the construction of a new, larger, working



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firehouse behind it. The new building would be located off the street, set back considerably toward the woods and placed at an angle. Built in accord with historic Main Street architecture, the new firehouse, like the old one, was only two stories high and was capped by a dormered, greengabled roof. It was large enough, however, to have six deep bays for the vehicles, plus a modern radio room. Completed with an 85-foot radio tower to reach a wider region, the new $950,000 firehouse was put into service in October 1995. The official dedication ceremony was held off until September 1998, the one hundredth anniversary of the Cranbury Fire Company. Stripped of its later additions, the old firehouse was restored to its original 1922 appearance and converted into the Cranbury Fire Company Museum. Among its prize artifacts were an old horse-drawn Hand Pumper from 1886, a bright red Dodge fire engine from 1934, and a Cadillac ambulance from 1957.⁴⁵ (The ambulance belonged to the Cranbury First Aid Squad, which was established in 1957, with a bequest from longtime local resident Ella Groves Frazier. In 1908, she had married the itinerant photographer, John Frazier, who lodged at the Groveses’ house at 82 North Main Street and who had taken so many noted pictures of Cranbury that her brother, Charles Groves, sold as postcards as a sideline to his insurance business. The men and women of the Cranbury First Aid Squad had operated out of the old firehouse until the dedication of their modern, new headquarters at the north end of Maplewood Avenue in 1974.) The old firehouse, with its quaint façade of stucco and wood, the white bay doors, overhanging row of white globe lights, and green gabled roof, continues to preserve the ambiance of the fine old streetscape of Cranbury village. The concept of the uniqueness of that streetscape was important to the historic appearance of the town. However, it became significant in other ways as well because of an emerging controversy in New Jersey between attempts to preserve the traditional nature of rural and suburban communities and efforts to provide increased housing due to the state’s growing population.

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The decades from the 1960s to the 1990s proved crucial for the future of Cranbury and its ability to retain its historic character as an authentic nineteenth-century village with adjoining farmsteads. It proved to be a momentous, multifaceted challenge. Similar if not always identical problems were faced by other rural and suburban communities in New Jersey and across the nation. Long before the historic preservation movement, Cranbury, like many other municipalities, had sought to control unregulated growth through zoning ordinances. Local governments used such ordinances to separate what was seen as incompatible land use from desirable development. After World War II, New Jersey had become a leader nationally in using zoning to shape suburbanization. The state’s courts had upheld municipal requirements for large lot size or square footage for houses and restrictions on multiple family units, trailer parks, and many commercial uses. In 1976, the legislature had adopted a Municipal Land Use Law, which codified and confirmed the authority of the state’s 566 municipalities to establish master plans and ordinances governing zoning, subdivision development and historic preservation. The law also confirmed the power of municipalities to set up planning, zoning, and other boards to oversee these land-use policies.

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Just before World War II, Cranbury had adopted its first zoning ordinance in 1939. It was the town’s response to a sudden influx of new residents in relatively inexpensive houses built on small lots as well as to complaints about nauseating sights and smells from a newly built chicken-processing plant at the south end of the village. Like most of Cranbury’s subsequent zoning ordinances, it was designed to preserve the traditional nature of the community while allowing proper and gradual development, particularly in the residential areas. It divided the township into residential, mercantile, and commercial zones. A second ordinance, twelve years later in 1951, had a similar intent, and limited the development of many small houses by requiring that any residence on a public street had to be on a lot with at least 75 frontage feet and a depth of at least 150 feet.¹ This zoning ordinance of 1951 resulted from a plan by John and Amy Evans to build houses on the Evans Tract, the former Clifford Conover farm and apple orchard that they owned and extending from the south side of Brainerd Lake south to 15 Station Road and east to what is now U.S. Route 130. John W. (“Jack”) Evans was a civil engineer and a division head in the State Department of Highways, who helped develop Route 130, including Cranbury Circle. He and his wife, Amy Evans, had purchased the Conover farm and lived in the original farmhouse at 1 South Main Street. When they moved in, the land was still being farmed in wheat, clover, and bluegrass. In 1949, the Evanses decided to subdivide the farmland into lots, each measuring 100 by 150 feet, and sell them individually. The lakefront lots initially sold for $1,000. The Evanses interviewed each prospective buyer, required a minimum value per house, and discouraged radical designs in favor of traditional colonial styles. The houses went up beginning in 1949, and by 1960, there were fifty homes on Evans and Brainerd Drives. The Evans Tract was the first residential development of such size in Cranbury.² Requiring a minimum lot size, the 1951 zoning ordinance was designed to prevent additional subdivisions with even smaller lots in the village itself. The township also created a Planning Board, which produced Cranbury’s first extensive plan for regulated growth and development of the village. The board’s plan, completed in 1953 and adopted by the Township Committee two years later, established four zones: village, residential, rural (in the farmland west of the village), plus a new light

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industry zone (mainly east of U.S. Route 130). During the 1970s, Firestone Tire Company, Carter-Wallace (a pharmaceutical company), and General Foods erected plants in the light industry zone. While the Evans Tract houses had been built by individuals, the first planned development of an entire subdivision in Cranbury, in which one company bought the land, built all the houses, and then sold them to individuals, occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s and involved the former Griggs apple orchards at the northern end of the village just off Plainsboro Road. Within half a dozen years, there were some fifty homes on new streets named O’Brien, Ryan, and Griggs Roads in the development, which was called Cranbury Estates. Another builder purchased part of the Alvin Updike Farm at the south end of the village and in the 1960s constructed Wynnewood Estates, twenty-seven homes on Wynnewood and Woodview Drives off Cranbury Neck Road. Architectural styles had changed after World War II, and the new suburban houses included mainly split-level or ranch-style houses, although there were some Colonial Revivals and a few Cape Cods as well. The new housing developments in the village beginning in the 1950s generated the first major signs of tensions over land use, which would wax and wane in the town for the rest of the twentieth century. The disputes, which began in earnest in the 1960s, initially involved primarily farmers who owned open land and wanted to sell it to developers, and townspeople, including some longtime village residents as well as some new arrivals, who wished to preserve the nature of the historic village and its surroundings. Many residents were also concerned about higher taxes resulting from development and increased demands upon the schools and other local services. Cranbury was not alone. The same pressures for a shift in the balance between agriculture and residential and commercial development were happening in New Jersey as a whole, especially along the New York – to – Philadelphia corridor. Although farmers still found a ready market for their crops, their profits declined, and so did the amount of cultivated acreage. Less than one-third of the land in the state was in agricultural acreage by then, and a New Jersey Bureau of Farm Placement report in 1963 warned that farmland was rapidly decreasing. “Increased operating costs coupled with unfavorable market prices have caused a number of growers to accept the attractive prices offered for their land



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by residential and industrial developers . . . ,” the report explained, and it concluded glumly, “This reduction in the number of farms and farm acreage will continue.”³

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ ĎēĎęĎĆđ ĆęęĊĒĕę ęĔ ĉĊĆđ ĜĎęč ĉĊěĊđĔĕĒĊēę Ďē ęčĊ ΅΍Ί΄Ę It was in the sixties that Cranbury began to face the development issue already spreading into central New Jersey. During that decade, the agrarian landscape of the neighboring part of Monroe Township was transformed by a “Leisure World” enterprise into two thousand homes of an age-restricted community called Rossmoor. Half a dozen similar retirement communities proliferated there in subsequent decades. In 1969, an enormous, multi-unit, planned community, the Twin Rivers garden apartment complex for seven thousand residents, was begun in the former farmland of neighboring East Windsor. Rossmoor’s influence had resulted in 1966 in the opening of Exit 8A on the New Jersey Turnpike, which provided increased access not only to Monroe but also to neighboring communities such as South Brunswick and Cranbury. Fearing large-scale development that might burden and transform their historic community, members of Cranbury’s Township Committee in 1960 increased the minimum residential lot size to nearly an acre (200 feet of frontage by 200 feet of depth). Heated debates over the 1960 zoning ordinance revealed a community with sharp and bitter divisions over the issues of restricting or encouraging development. Although diverse individual opinions make it difficult to generalize, many came to see these divisions as a schism primarily between village residents and outlying farmers. The driving force behind the increased zoning restrictions were activists among the socalled in-town people, old-time families and newly arrived professionals, who lived in the village itself. Initially, many residents were not well informed, but activists made sure that they became aware of uncontrolled development as a threat and ways to combat it. Many of the in-town people actively endorsed increased zoning restrictions to prevent transformation of the historic town as well as to limit higher property taxes to pay for increased services.

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Most farmers and their families lived outside the village, and while many of them also opposed extensive housing development as an additional tax burden, many farmers, as well as absentee landowners, challenged any restriction on their ability to sell their land, which had skyrocketed in value, for the highest possible price. A great deal of money was involved, and some pro-development farmers vociferously denounced the in-town people and the Township Committee as obstructionists. A number of these farmers argued that the townspeople were “robbing” them of their retirement funds by limiting the price they could get for their land. Old farming families who wanted to sell at least part of their land to developers resented the interference of relatively new residents, suburban professionals without deep roots in the town who commuted to work in Princeton, New Brunswick, Trenton, or New York. Neither side in the debate was united, and many other farm owners, some of whom wished to continue to work the family farm, opposed unrestricted housing development as imposing higher tax burdens on farmers they said were already beleaguered.⁴ The ways in which Cranbury dealt with the divisions in the town over the impending possibility of extensive housing construction and the desire of many farmers and absentee landowners to profit by it prove illuminating, especially in contrast to other communities, some of which were entirely transformed by rapid, massive residential and commercial development. Cranbury activists and township officials decided on the need for harmony and the value of obtaining expert advice about the larger issues and trends in order to achieve an informed electorate, an enlightened, long-term goal for the town, and an acceptable, effective plan for achieving that vision. To begin with, township officials agreed informally that membership on the appointed Planning Board should henceforth include representatives of the farmers as well as the townspeople. During the controversy over the zoning ordinance, a group of residents had also urged the need for expert advice on long-range planning, given the increasing pressures for land use. Consequently, after the new, more restrictive zoning ordinance of 1960 was adopted, the town created the Citizens Committee on Planning, with representatives from the various contending interests. During the following year, the Citizens Committee, in conjunction with the Planning Board, held a series of public meetings in which residents and outside experts discussed current trends in land use, farming, suburban



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development, and planning as well as the long-term future of Cranbury. “The problem,” said Robert Kugler, an irrigation engineer, sales representative with Chamberlin & Barclay, and member of the Citizens Committee, “is not whether the farmer will survive, but whether we can preserve a green belt around us that is not chopped up by housing developments and industry.”⁵ Development pressures on open land in the area continued to mount. During the first half of 1961, an undisclosed syndicate expressed interest in building an entire planned community of houses, apartments, schools, churches, and retail businesses on two-thirds of the 3,000 farmland acres in western Cranbury then zoned “rural.” In a separate development just beyond the eastern boundary of the town, construction began on a new 1,000-acre Forsgate Industrial Park in adjacent Monroe and South Brunswick.⁶ Cranbury’s effort to plan its future and to achieve a consensus behind an acceptable plan by bringing in experts and by conducting a series of New England – style town meetings attracted widespread public attention. It appeared to be a fruitful approach to community planning. To the Citizens Committee’s knowledge, no other New Jersey community had previously sought to assess and educate public opinion about planning on such a scale as Cranbury did in 1960 – 1961. After all the town meetings, expert testimony, and extensive debate, the committee concluded that public opinion in Cranbury had crystallized on several broad issues. The town’s remaining open space, which gave it the enviable position of being one of the last rural communities in a direct line between New York and Philadelphia, had to be preserved. The town had to encourage desirable industrial growth to sustain its economy and to maintain an equitable tax rate for householders and landowners alike, but industrial development had to be planned, controlled, and attractive. The 1961 report cited the mounting pressure for housing in the area and acknowledged that “Cranbury cannot build a wall around itself.” Instead, in order to preserve the town’s character, the report said that Cranbury “must make provision for a balanced community in the future, giving room to the small householder as well as the large, the farmer as well as the suburbanite.” These goals, the Citizens Committee declared, would require continued, long-range planning as well as increased public services, including water supply, sewage disposal, police and fire protection. At the public’s request, the committee also urged

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the township to provide park and recreational facilities for an improved quality of life.⁷ For ongoing professional advice, Cranbury, at the recommendation of the Citizens Committee, retained its first planner. It contracted Charles K. Agle, a prize-winning Princeton architect and author of several works on urban planning, housing, and community appearance. Agle set to work immediately, helping to obtain planning grants, involving Rutgers University, and, most importantly, helping the township develop its first official Master Plan, encompassing all aspects of future development. That Master Plan was predicated on the assumption that the greatest pressure for residential development would come when the post – World War II “baby boomers” reached their thirties and would be looking for family housing. That phenomenon would peak in the late 1970s, and, as a result, the planners predicted, the area between U.S. Route 1 and the turnpike in this region would be flooded with residential development for the “boomers.”⁸ Completed and approved in December 1967, Cranbury’s Master Plan declared its object to be “to preserve the Township’s present rural character and thereby preserve its chief asset: Its reputation as a highly desirable place in which to live.” It also sought “to avoid a sudden influx of development of small houses and apartments which would upset the community both financially and socially.” The 1967 Master Plan’s recommendation was for continued strict zoning while anticipating increasing and carefully planned development over the next thirty years.⁹ By adhering to the one-acre minimum lot requirement established in 1960, Cranbury in the following decade escaped the extensive housing and apartment development that occurred in the surrounding communities of Monroe, Plainsboro, South Brunswick, East Windsor, and West Windsor. With its limited development and its several thousand acres of open farmland, Cranbury looked, when viewed from the sky, like “a hole in the donut.” The township did come under pressure in the 1960s to reduce the minimum lot size and allow extensive development of houses and apartment complexes. But public response led the proposed developer of a 2,000-acre planned community in western Cranbury to abandon his plan. Public protest also helped block another developer from obtaining a zoning variance to build 156 garden apartment units at the south end of Main Street. Acknowledging the pressures for development, Mayor Richard West and Planning Board Chair Stephen



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Bencze said they accepted the need for smaller lots, at least on a limited basis, to provide housing for young families confronted with the comparatively high price of homes in Cranbury. But West warned in 1967 that one nearby community that had drastically reduced zoning restrictions was “snowed by small developers, sewerage problems, and one headache after another.” “We have to be careful every step of the way with this zoning change,” West declared. “We could very easily destroy the very things we like about Cranbury if we’re not.”¹⁰

ĕĊėĒĆēĊēęđĞ ĕėĊĘĊėěĎēČ ċĆėĒđĆēĉ Concerned citizens, and preservation organizations such as Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and the Historical Society had successfully preserved historic sites and placed Cranbury village on the state and national historic registers. Subsequently, they sought to preserve most of the farmland in a western rural zone then amounting to almost 4,000 acres, and to channel opportunities for growth and development mostly into the area east of the village. Beginning in 1978, a citizens committee for a new Master Plan led an educational and evaluation effort using techniques similar to those of the previous ad hoc group that had created the 1967 Master Plan. The new committee, working in conjunction with the Planning Board, held public hearings, brought in new technical advisers, circulated opinion surveys, and gauged evolving public sentiment on land use, housing, affordable housing, recreation, and conservation. It sought to guard against scattered-site zoning and promote residential development contiguous to the village area, where water and sewer lines and business services were available. It also sought to limit scattered development in the farmland. In the end, it produced a new Master Plan, adopted in 1982. When it began its deliberations, the Citizens Committee for the Master Plan, headed by Andrew H. Massie Jr., and the Planning Board, advised by a new township planner, Thomas Marsh, concluded that the primary aim was to protect the historic and highly rated farmland in the western part of the township. While the 1982 Master Plan was being developed, the Township Committee in April 1981, after nearly two years of meetings and discussions about Cranbury’s future, introduced an ordinance requiring a

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minimum of six acres (up from one acre) for housing lots in the rural zone to protect the farmland west of Route 130 and to restrict scattersite housing development there. “That requirement stirred up a hornet’s nest,” recalled farmer Arthur V. “(Bub”) Danser. “Many farmers complained that the Township was taking away their retirement money.”¹¹ As the Cranbury Press reported in its year-end review of 1981, “the ordinance nearly blew up in their [the Township Committee’s] faces,” but, on the other hand, “other township residents praised the committee for their efforts at preservation.”¹² A battle between the contending interests started to erupt, but to maintain harmony, the Township Committee postponed a vote on the ordinance, and the opposing groups agreed to examine the entire issue in a more deliberate fashion. Two skilled planners were hired to determine a method of preservation that would achieve results from which the entire township would benefit. The aim of the six-acre minimum residential lot size ordinance had been to preserve the village’s historic farmland. Thomas Weidner, mayor in 1981 and 1982, later recalled that the three-member Township Committee, composed of himself, an attorney and Democrat, and two Republicans, Alan Danser, a farmer, and Patricia Scott, a longtime resident and former mayor, together with Township Attorney J. Schuyler (“Jack”) Huff, had made a lengthy study of such zoning ordinances in towns across the country. The decision to introduce the six-acre measure in 1981, Weidner remembered, was based most immediately on a report that the developer building the large Shadow Oaks development south of the village was planning to apply to build a second major housing development to the west. According to Weidner’s recollection, the Township Committee was advised that although it would be difficult to defend the six-acre ordinance in court without the comprehensive new Master Plan already completed and approved, taking the step earlier might head off massive development. “We had a better chance if the ordinance was introduced before the application [for development] was filed as we could, if necessary, hurry up and supply the comprehensive Master Plan while the litigation proceeded,” Weidner said.¹³ As it turned out, Garden State Land Company did not file an application for an extensive new development west of the village. The six-acre ordinance proposal did cause a firestorm. During the debate over the six-acre zoning and other attempts to pre-



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serve the western farmland in a rural zone in 1981, the Historical Society, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and Township Historian Ruth Walsh had all supported preservation of the historic farmlands bordering the village. At a heated meeting of the Township Committee in June of that year, Betty Wagner, then president of the Historical Society, declared: It seems to us that Cranbury is at the crossroads — it must decide where it is going. Will it be the rural community it has been for over 200 years, or will it allow this rich heritage to be swept away and buried under acres of concrete? Shall we preserve our land so that we shall continue to be an agricultural community, or shall we move into the world of the city, which demands more roads, more police protection, more sewers, more water facilities, more of everything, and which jeopardizes the quality of life we presently enjoy?”¹⁴

The Historical Society, Wagner declared, stood squarely behind the Township in its current efforts to establish a viable long-term plan for preserving our community’s farmlands, to reduce sprawl, and to direct growth to areas more suitable for residential development. Each and every community has an obligation to organize and manage its development. . . . [O]nce our farmlands are ravaged by trucks and bulldozers, and the concrete begins to flow, an irreversible tidal wave will take hold and our chance to preserve our agricultural heritage will be lost forever. The time has come to act.

Cranbury did act. After a series of public hearings, the Planning Board adopted a new Master Plan in September 1982, which established a 4,000-acre Agricultural Preservation Zone, with a six-acre minimum residential lot size, in the western area. The 1982 Master Plan also sought to ameliorate the concerns of farmers and other landowners there by adopting a system of transfer development credits (TDC). In the planned system, owners who guaranteed that their property would remain open land would receive from the township development credits, which they could sell to developers. These developers could then build increased density and more profitable units in eastern and southern areas of the township. The idea was to allow farmers in the Agricultural Preservation Zone to obtain a profit from the high value of their land

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but to preserve that western farmland because of its historic agricultural relationship to the village. The Township Committee adopted the plan for transfer development credits in mid-1983, but it was never implemented because the courts invalidated a similar plan, and the legislature declined to give such authority to municipalities. Irate farmers were left with the six-acre minimum and the feeling that they had been manipulated out of the full market value of their property. Meanwhile, proponents of the farmland preservation policy emphasized that by retaining the six-acre minimum in the agricultural zone and concentrating new development close to the village or in the east, they hoped to maintain at least the western farmland and its connection to the town center that continued to distinguish Cranbury from other municipalities in the area. In the midst of this controversy over farmland in the early 1980s, the New Jersey Supreme Court instituted a program for affordable housing in New Jersey, a ruling that added a major new dimension to residential development in rural and suburban communities across the state. The Cranbury Master Plan of 1982 was not only intended to preserve the farmland and the village’s historic relationship to farming, but also to permit a greater variety of housing in the town. Whether the town would be able to determine its own housing needs now remained to be seen.

ĉĊěĊđĔĕĒĊēę Ćēĉ ęčĊ ĆċċĔėĉĆćđĊ čĔĚĘĎēČ ĎĘĘĚĊ As the state’s population had grown in the second half of the twentieth century, many local communities, Cranbury among them, had sought to limit development in their town by restricting lot size, and sometimes by expressly prohibiting apartment houses and other multi-family units (in Cranbury’s case, the fact that it had no sewer system, only septic tanks, until 1979 also limited apartment complexes). In 1971, in the wake of the civil rights movement, a number of organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League, supported lawsuits against what they called exclusionary zoning that limited opportunity for economic diversity because of consequent high cost of housing. The New Jersey Supreme Court agreed with them in two major decisions, known as Mount Laurel I in 1975



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and Mount Laurel II in 1983.¹⁵ The latter reaffirmed the need for adequate affordable housing in “developing communities,” but going beyond the 1975 ruling, the justices in 1983 established a court-mandated system to establish quotas of low- and moderate-income housing required for such towns and then oversee the towns’ actions to ensure that the courtimposed quotas were met. Most contentious was the court’s attempt to use developers’ selfinterest to finance the affordable housing that the court had mandated. Under the so-called builder’s remedy mechanism, a developer who successfully sued a municipality for “exclusionary” zoning could then receive court authorization to build four profitable market-priced units for every one unprofitable or barely profitable affordable housing unit the developer erected there. In spite of the court’s assurance that Mount Laurel II was not designed to make New Jersey’s “open spaces and natural resources . . . a prey to speculators,” the “builder’s remedy” was obviously a potent tool for commercial interests. The Mount Laurel II decision and its implementation raised important issues, both of a general character and with regard to Cranbury in particular. The court’s goal was to distribute low- and moderate-income housing throughout the state, and this, according to the justices, required a reevaluation of all local zoning ordinances. The court based its solution to the problem on a regional and macroeconomic vision of the state’s housing needs, taking little account of individual townships. Town governments, in fact, were implicitly judged to be a part of the problem, centers of resistance to the statewide planning and implementation envisioned by the court. Developers had joined the original NAACP and Urban League plaintiffs and between 1983 and 1984 had filed more than 135 lawsuits claiming exclusionary zoning practices against numerous New Jersey municipalities, including several against Cranbury. Also by the summer of 1984, communities throughout the state began to learn of their courtdetermined affordable housing quotas. Many Cranburians had seen the concept of “exclusionary zoning” as difficult to apply to a rural village with a total inventory of only about 750 residential units, almost all of them single-family houses. But, in fact, few areas were to be more dramatically threatened by the court’s ruling than Cranbury, which lay near the center of an unprecedented construction boom developing along the New York – Philadelphia corridor in the middle of the state.

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At the end of July 1984, Judge Eugene D. Serpentelli of Toms River, Ocean County, who oversaw the Mount Laurel II implementation in central New Jersey, ordered Cranbury to change its zoning laws to accommodate 816 low- and moderate- income units. This was shocking to Cranbury, because it would double the town’s housing and population. But the impact threatened to be much greater because, based on the “builder’s remedy” four-to-one ratio, developers who built the 816 affordable units mandated for Cranbury would be entitled, regardless of local zoning regulations, to erect 3,272 profitable units in the township. That would mean a total of 4,080 new homes and apartments in a town that currently had fewer than 800 homes and 2,000 residents. Furthermore, the courts could order it accomplished within six years. The court gave Cranbury ninety days to rezone to begin to meet the new requirements.¹⁶ Such an enormous building project would have quickly and irreparably destroyed the nature of the historic village and its surroundings, and local citizens and organizations rapidly mobilized to prevent it. Cranbury and its citizens’ organizations introduced experts and information about historic preservation as a legitimate planning technique and factor to be considered in regard to affordable housing. Local citizens groups and township officials sought to preserve historic Cranbury while negotiating for reasonable affordable housing obligations. The township appealed the court’s decision and the Historical Society and Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., quickly sent a protest petition to the legislature signed by 80 percent of the town’s registered voters. Faced with protests from towns across the state against the justices’ massive intervention in local home rule, the legislature began public hearings. At one of them, Thomas Weidner, still a Township Committee member, declared that “[f ]ailure to limit Mt. Laurel litigation will place municipalities at the mercy of land speculators who can make millions of dollars at the expense of other sound planning goals such as farmland and historical preservation.”¹⁷ The Trenton Times agreed, stating that “Cranbury residents were not asking for immunity.” “What they want is growth consistent with the values their community considers important.”¹⁸ Historical Society president Betty Wagner spread the alarm in a letter to more than three hundred local historical societies in the state, declaring that the Mount Laurel II decision was “a real and serious



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threat to our mutually shared goal: historic preservation.” She explained that Cranbury is a rare community in this metropolitan region — a piece of Americana where folks still meet at the local eatery and where such events as a Methodist camp revival can evoke community participation. It has not commercialized its historic significance with gift shops and tourist attractions, and remains a typical American rural village — an oasis in the midst of developments, concrete, and highways. The effect of this Mount Laurel II decision is that growth becomes uncontrollable, local governments and municipal services are overwhelmed, and zoning for historic or environmental preservation becomes meaningless.

In Cranbury, public meetings were held and various courses of action discussed. Betty Wagner of the Historical Society, Bill Bunting of Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and Mark Berkowsky, chair of the History Society’s Historic Preservation Committee and a member of Cranbury Housing Associates, among others, played leading roles. Bunting led a delegation to Washington helping to obtain a $10,000 Crisis Grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation after similar funds were raised by Cranburians. These helped provide the resources to assemble a panel of land-use, planning, and preservation experts to “make New Jersey courts aware of the importance of preserving historic resources.”¹⁹ Together, the Cranbury Historical Society and Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., submitted historic preservation material and expert testimony to the court demonstrating how rapid overdevelopment would do irreparable harm to the Historic District and its surrounding farmland. A key expert obtained by the Cranbury organizations was Samuel N. Stokes, formerly a regional director with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Mellon Fellow at Yale, and a leading consultant on land conservation and historic preservation. It was Stokes who, after visiting Cranbury in 1984, submitted a report to the Historical Society that had a major impact on the thinking among preservationists in the town. Previously the emphasis had been on saving historic buildings in the village. Stokes emphasized the village’s organic connection with its farmland. “The significance of Cranbury’s National Register historic district is inextricably tied to its agricultural setting,” Stokes declared. “The town was built to serve the surrounding farm community and its

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ċĎČ. ΈΈ. William L. (“Bill”) Bunting Jr., left, president of Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and Elizabeth M. (“Betty”) Wagner, right, former president of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and former Township Historian, examine books on local and regional history at the Cranbury History Center in 2011. (Photographed for this book by Audrey Smith)

significance is directly related to that farmland.”²⁰ Stokes also provided statements from the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, expressing its concern that the cumulative effect of four thousand housing units would be “the effective destruction of the village’s setting, character and significance.” The court accepted the introduction of historic preservation criteria into the case, and it also reduced the original quota by about one-third (to 2,720 new units). But since this would still triple the town’s housing and sextuple its population within six years, the township, under pressure from the citizenry, declined to settle, and the lawsuit between the builders and the township continued. Nevertheless, an important step



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had been taken. “For the [first] time in the history of Mount Laurel litigation,” one consultant wrote, “historic preservation has become a major factor in the location of new development in a municipality.”²¹

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ Ćēĉ ęčĊ ēĊĜ ďĊėĘĊĞ ċĆĎė čĔĚĘĎēČ ĆĈę Ĕċ ΅΍ΌΉ Because many towns feared the costs of trying to defend their ordinances through lengthy and potentially unsuccessful lawsuits, some municipalities settled out of court. But due to its concerned and mobilized citizenry and its commitment to historic preservation, Cranbury did not. The Cranbury suit was never settled. Rather, the legislature and the governor sought to transfer the issue of affordable housing from the courts to the elected branches of the government. This was done under the New Jersey Fair Housing Act of 1985, in which Cranbury played a significant role. The town was frequently cited as a specific example of a community where an unbridled application of the Mount Laurel doctrine could undermine established and valued goals of historic and farmland preservation. New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean, a moderate Republican who was up for reelection in 1985, was a harsh critic of the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel decision. In March 1985, the Democraticcontrolled legislature, led by urban liberals, passed a bill that would create a state Council on Affordable Housing and which stipulated criteria and means for towns to meet their “fair share” of affordable housing needs. While the governor was considering the measure, Cranbury mayor Alan Danser, a Republican, and township committeeman Tom Weidner, a Democrat, wrote to his office stating that the vast majority of Cranburians of both parties hoped that the final bill would mandate recognition of historic and bona fide farmland preservation to “prevent the radical transformation of small municipalities.” Weidner also spoke with and wrote to the governor’s deputy chief counsel Amy R. Piro.²² In recommending adjustments to the legislature’s bill, chief counsel W. Carey Edwards and Piro advised the governor that “we believe a significant expansion of the current language [permitting consideration of environmental or historic preservation factors] is required, in particular we want to ensure that situations like that occurring in Cranbury are

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prevented. The character of the traditionally rural community should not be radically altered.” Consequently, they recommended an amendment mandating that “adjustments shall be made” when preservation of historic sites or their environs may be jeopardized, or established patterns of development in the community would be drastically altered, or adequate land for recreational, conservation, or farmland preservation or adequate open space would not be provided.²³ In a conditional veto message, Governor Kean spelled out the amendments he would require in order to sign the measure. Among them was the one making mandatory consideration of historic preservation and farmland preservation in determining a municipality’s fair share quota of affordable housing.²⁴ The legislature accepted the amendments in what became the New Jersey Fair Housing Act of July 2, 1985, which also established the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) to oversee implementation.²⁵ Cranbury had played a crucial role in promoting the provisions mandating consideration of preservation of historically significant buildings and farmland in determining the impact of housing quotas upon local communities.

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ĉĊĈĎĉĊĘ ęĔ ĕėĔěĎĉĊ ĎęĘ ĔĜē ĆċċĔėĉĆćđĊ čĔĚĘĎēČ The newly created Council on Affordable Housing lowered Cranbury’s quota of affordable housing in May 1986 from 816 to 187 units under Round I of implementation. The private developer with options on property east of Route 130 offered to construct all 187 low- and moderateincome units if the company could build 700 market-priced homes in Cranbury. The Township Planning Board and the Township Committee initially accepted the builder’s proposal. But the Cranbury Historical Society and Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., contending that such a rapid doubling of the town’s total housing would irreparably endanger the historic village and its environs, mobilized intensive citizen opposition. While the Council on Affordable Housing began an attempt to resolve the issue through mediation, the Historical Society and Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., proposed that Cranbury be allowed to develop the affordable housing itself and thus avoid the massive construction of marketpriced homes under the “builder’s remedy.” Their proposal — ultimately



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adopted — was agreed to by the Township Committee after a public forum and a strong letter-writing campaign in favor of it. COAH accepted the citizens’ innovative plan for the town to develop and pay for its affordable housing quota itself rather than rely on the “builder’s remedy,” and, after losing the mediation, the private developer abandoned his efforts to build nearly 900 new units in Cranbury. Subsequently, COAH reduced Cranbury’s affordable housing quota to 153 units. One of the town’s volunteer, not-for-profit organizations, Cranbury Housing Associates, accepted the challenge to develop the town’s affordable housing, and the township agreed to guarantee funding.

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ čĔĚĘĎēČ ĆĘĘĔĈĎĆęĊĘ Ćēĉ đĔĜ-ĎēĈĔĒĊ ĈėĆēćĚėĎĆēĘ As a volunteer group of local residents, Cranbury Housing Associates (CHA) had an admirable history. Since 1963, when a group of two dozen residents, whites and blacks, had joined voluntarily to help several black migrant worker families who were left homeless in a local fire, it had been acting on a small scale, helping to provide low-income housing, largely through “sweat equity” and minimal financing. CHA had quickly become a permanent organization dedicated to the housing needs of the low-income, disadvantaged, permanent residents of the area, primarily members of the black community and the elderly. Its first purchase and rehabilitation had been the two-acre Pin Oak property on Old Hightstown – Old Cranbury Road at the south end of the village, where it had renovated a building there into six units for former migrant workers. A newspaper story about how volunteers of the Cranbury Housing Associates were helping needy black families brought national attention and inquiries and offers of support from throughout the Northeast.²⁶ Early on, CHA had become critical of Cranbury’s zoning policies and advocated changes that would allow the construction of some high-density housing units for low income groups.²⁷ As a result of Cranbury’s ultimate decision to provide its own affordable housing, and because the Council on Affordable Housing recognized that CHA had accumulated considerable experience and credibility in providing such housing, COAH approved the Cranbury plan in 1989. Through CHA, Cranbury became one of the first municipalities in

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New Jersey to develop its own, nonprofit affordable housing mechanism, a volunteer organization independent of township officials.²⁸ In his 1989 book, Saving America’s Countryside: A Guide to Rural Conservation, Samuel Stokes cited the experience of Cranbury and the Cranbury Housing Authority as a case study of how a proactive local community could obtain outside funding and utilize state or federal regulations to protect historic areas and conserve farmland from overdevelopment. He attributed much of CHA’s success to the skills of its various members in architecture, administration, construction, law, and social work. Frank A. Wright, one of the early board members, noted that “when you work with the housing of the disadvantaged, you become involved in their personal lives. CHA often found itself providing medical services, teaching English, chasing down birth certificates in the South, and being a personal advocate.”²⁹ As will be described shortly, CHA began building the COAH-mandated affordable housing units in Cranbury in the 1990s and continues to do so to the present day.

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ĕėĊĘĊėěĆęĎĔē ĆĉěĎĘĔėĞ ĈĔĒĒĎęęĊĊ To protect, enhance, and perpetuate the town’s irreplaceable historical resources, the Township Committee in 1988 established the Historical Preservation Advisory Committee (HPAC). Two decades later, in 2006, as a result of changes in New Jersey’s planning statutes, HPAC was renamed the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC). The fivemember board continued responsibility for identifying and designating historic landmarks and districts and advising municipal officials, but its authority was increased in evaluating proposals for construction, renovation, and even minor external repair of structures within the Historic District.

ĒĆĘęĊė ĕđĆē Ĕċ ΅΍΍· After six years of work and numerous public hearings, Cranbury in 1993 adopted a new Master Plan, which had been created under the leadership particularly of Thomas B. Harvey, chair of the Planning Board, and



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planning consultant Harvey S. Moskowitz. It would serve the township well for many years to come. The main priorities were maintaining the town’s historic district, its rural character, and its western farmland. The 1993 Master Plan reinforced the designation of most of the western half of the township, approximately 3,500 acres, as an Agricultural Preservation Zone with an even more strictly defined six-acre minimum lot requirement. The most important new methodological decision made in 1993, however, was to encourage the industrial and office development of the eastern sector of the town to fund preservation in the west. The east-west division had been envisioned before, but the 1993 Master Plan formalized the concept and conceived of a way to help pay for preserving the farmland west of Route 130 by encouraging office and light industrial development in the area east of that highway. The township was able to raise revenue by actively encouraging suitable warehouse and other light industrial and office development in the east and to use resulting resources and funds from the New Jersey Farmland Preservation Act of 1983 to purchase development rights from farmers in the western zone. This revenue would give Cranbury leverage when seeking preservation assistance, because the township would arrive with funds to help foundations or the county and state governments achieve their own goals of preserving open space. The township also encouraged developers in specified areas to cluster their housing, using less open space, by allowing up to 25 percent greater density and thus increased profits, if the developer would keep as much as 75 percent of its land dedicated to open space.

ĘĚćĚėćĆēĎğĆęĎĔē Ďē ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ĘĎēĈĊ ęčĊ ΅΍Ό΄Ę The move to a six-acre minimum lot size in the western agricultural zone in 1981, reinforced in 1993, had been the result of the failure of the 1960 one-acre minimum lot size to limit suburbanization in the town’s farmlands. That failure was evident in the early 1980s, when the Garden State Land Company began building 173 upscale homes on one-acre lots on the old Frank Danser farm on both sides of Old Trenton Road, one to two miles southwest of the village. The building of the largest

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subdivision in Cranbury until that time, Shadow Oaks, led the township, as already noted, to boost the minimum residential lot size in the agricultural zone to six acres. The township also required Garden State Land Company to deed part of the site to the township, which later converted it into Millstone Park, and to deed forty-six acres on the edge of the site as a natural, wooded preserve along the Millstone River.³⁰ Subsequent residential developments built in the late 1980s included Parkview, twenty-four houses on Parkview Drive near Shadow Oaks; and Country Crossing, two dozen homes on Stockton Drive off Main Street at the south end of the village. In the late 1990s, the second-largest development in the town’s history, Cranbury Greene, was built in a cluster of housing at the southern end of the village on the former Oscar Danser farm. As completed, it reflected Cranbury’s desire to maintain the look of its historic streetscape in an age of modern development. Cranbury Greene, consisting of 115 houses on half-acre lots, was built between South Main Street and Route 130 on both the north and south side of the extension of Old Trenton Road to Route 130. For concessions by the developer, the township had abandoned the original three-acre zoning in the Village Planning Area, which would have accommodated only about forty houses, and agreed to a much higher density if the houses were built in a cluster rather than a sprawl. As part of the approval for the clustered construction, the town obtained ownership of sixteen acres of the site, which it used to create Heritage Park, a passive recreational area on a rolling meadow, and to enable Cranbury Housing Associates to build two dozen affordable housing units in the development. Persuaded by the Planning Board, the developer of Cranbury Greene also agreed to design the houses that would front Main Street, or could be seen from the historic district, to reflect features of the town’s colonial or early nineteenth-century style. They were built with wooden front porches, divided windows, gabled instead of hip roofs, and with garages set back from the street.³¹ Some of the new housing built in the township in the 1990s was increasingly large, upscale, and expensive. At the north end of the village, twenty-eight houses in Cranbury Walk were built on Silvers Lane. In the town’s rural northwest section of the township, along Petty Road,



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Lenape Court, and Nicola Court, a small number of large, mansionlike homes were erected. Later, at the southern end of the village, adjacent to Cranbury Greene, the Enclave, consisting of sixteen houses around Danser Drive and including affordable housing, was constructed. In another part of the southern end of the village, Four Seasons at Historic Cranbury, a retirement community of 136 one-story houses, was built on fifty acres on LaBaw and other streets off Old Trenton Road beginning in 2002. Under a settlement with the previous owner of the land, three acres on the site went to Cranbury Housing Associates, which erected twenty units of affordable units in townhouses there. Another twenty-two acres, also along the Old Cranbury – Hightstown Road, went to the township, which kept them as a nature preserve at that southern entrance to the town.³² Several more housing developments in the early twenty-first century employed the 1993 Master Plan’s clustered housing – open land formula that allowed 25 percent more units if a developer built in specified areas, clustered the units on smaller lots, and left up to 75 percent of the property as open land. In 2005, at the south end of the village on part of the old Updike farm just west of Main Street, the Sharbell Company, in a controversial move opposed by a number of residents who had urged the township to save that farmland, built sixteen large homes along a new street, Liedtke Drive. As a result of a cluster arrangement, the developer deeded thirty-three acres to the west of the homes as preserved open space. Similarly between 2001 and 2003, amid the mostly preserved farmland in the west, developers erected small clusters of sizable homes while deeding more open space. These included half a dozen homes on Cubberly Court, a smaller number on Applegate Court, and nearly three dozen large homes on Shady Brook Lane off George Davison Road. Looking back in 2010 on Cranbury at the closing decades of the twentieth century, planning consultant Harvey S. Moskowitz concluded that the town had been extraordinarily effective in preserving its historic village and farmland while achieving valuable but controlled economic growth. For this, he credited the foresight of the citizens, the importance of enlightened leadership, and the absence of political partisanship. As one example of the town’s innovative and proactive approach, Moskowitz pointed to the way members of the Planning Board, particularly the Development Review Committee, had made suggestions to applicant

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developers about how their project could better fit within or even enhance the attractive historic character of the town. Moskowitz remembered Thomas Harvey asking some developers in essence: What was in it for the town? “He made them think about making improvements there [on the site],” Moskowitz said, “sidewalks, parks, and the like so the town would benefit too. This wasn’t something that they had necessarily thought about when they came up with their proposal, but the committee helped them see the value of it.”³³

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ DZĘ ĆċċĔėĉĆćđĊ čĔĚĘĎēČ ĕėĔČėĆĒ With approval of the Council on Affordable Housing, Cranbury had begun in 1989 to meet its initial quota of 153 low- and moderate-income housing units by having Cranbury Housing Associates build and manage half of those units in Cranbury and by financing rehabilitation of the other half of the affordable units in Perth Amboy and Carteret, two needy urban communities in the area undergoing renewal and revitalization. Locally, Cranbury Housing Associates, supported by the Township Committee, found locations in or within walking distance of the village itself. It then obtained public and private funding, designed the Cranbury projects in a style appropriate to the neighborhood, built the new affordable housing, and managed the sale or rental of the units. CHA’s first new project was a twenty-unit garden apartment complex, called Village Senior Housing, which CHA designed and built in the center of the village on Park Place West, a block away from North Main Street. Funded by a state grant and a federal low-interest mortgage, the senior citizens’ housing complex was widely acclaimed when it opened in April 1991, particularly because the two-story, colonial, clapboard design was compatible with the Historic District in which it was located. In other projects, CHA rehabilitated nine affordable units on Old Cranbury Road. As indicated earlier, on parts of sites deeded by developers, CHA erected forty affordable units, mostly one- and twobedroom apartments but also some three-bedroom duplexes, dispersed at the south end of the village on Bergen Drive, Danser Drive, and South Main Street. By 1996, Cranbury had met its affordable housing requirements for Round 1 of the state’s fair-housing program.³⁴



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Cranbury’s proactive approach continued in the next rounds of implementing affordable housing. It built Parkside, sixteen two-story rental units on Bennett Place, on land purchased by the township next to Village Park. In addition, by 2008, CHA completed twenty units of twostory dwellings on Old Cranbury-Hightstown Road. Most recently, the township purchased four acres on the west side of Route 130 just north of Ryan Drive at the northern end of the village, where CHA proposed building up to three dozen low- and middle-income housing units. During its first twenty years as the official affordable housing agent for the town, Cranbury Housing Associates had built ninety-six affordable units in the town, and that did not include the thirty-two units that in 2011 were being planned for Route 130, nor the apartment existing at the History Center at 6 South Main Street, nor the residences that CHA had rehabilitated, nor the 110 units that the township had funded in the cities of Perth Amboy and Carteret. By June 2008, Cranbury, a town with only about 950 houses and 200 townhouse and apartment units, had provided a total 232 affordable housing units, exceeding its quota by 9 units. Two-thirds of the 96 units built in Cranbury itself were rentals, and all of the units, rented or sold, were deliberately scattered around the village rather than being concentrated in one sector of the town.³⁵ Cranbury proved that affordable housing could be developed while protecting and maintaining the town’s historic character. The guiding principles of CHA, its president, Mark A. Berkowsky, an architect, said in 2010, had remained the same: “Integrate affordable housing throughout the community. Design and construct quality buildings to be compatible with their neighbors. Provide a high level of maintenance to maintain the quality of the developments.”³⁶ In mid-2011, the future of the state’s affordable housing policy was uncertain. Courts had invalidated COAH’s most recent quotas and challenged its rules. Given the widespread criticism of the new affordable housing mandates throughout the state, Governor Chris Christie, a Republican elected in 2009, had urged the Democratic legislature to eliminate COAH, repeal the Fair Housing Act, and return decisions about low- and moderate-income housing to municipalities. The lawmakers finally passed new affordable housing legislation in January 2011, but the governor conditionally vetoed it. In June 2011, Christie said he would abolish the Council on Affordable Housing. It remained an open

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question in July 2011 whether New Jersey would reverse the way it had handled affordable housing for the previous quarter-century. It was also unclear whether such a plan would be held constitutional by the state Supreme Court.³⁷

ċĆėĒđĆēĉ ĕėĊĘĊėěĆęĎĔē ĘĎēĈĊ ęčĊ ΅΍Ό΄Ę The struggle between development and preservation of Cranbury’s historic qualities also involved farmland preservation. It had become clear that most residents considered the surrounding farmland as much a defining element of Cranbury as the village’s historic streetscape. The State of New Jersey also recognized the problem of disappearing open land, including farmland, in the Garden State, and it created programs — especially the Green Acres and Farmland Preservation Programs — to help preserve those natural resources. From the beginning, Cranbury was in the forefront of both programs. Two Green Acres projects in the town preserve some acreage along Cranbury Brook and also a unique forested wetland along Plainsboro Road. Cranbury is recognized as having some of the most attractive and productive farmland in New Jersey. With borrowed funds, revenue from new ratables, most recently warehouses in the eastern light-industry zone, and grants from the State Farmland Preservation Program as well as conservation and other nonprofit organizations, Cranbury, since the 1980s, has purchased the development rights from landowners that have ensured that nearly 3,000 acres in the western agricultural zone will remain as farmsteads or other open land in perpetuity.³⁸ Before the town started purchasing farmers’ development rights on such a scale, however, it had to confront a plan by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (DOT) to build a superhighway that would have slashed through the heart of Cranbury’s agricultural zone. The main proposal for what was tentatively labeled State Route 92 would have linked State Route 33 with U.S. Route 1 and State Route 206. A broad, elevated, divided highway with concrete sound baffles, the superhighway would go through East Windsor, slice through southern Cranbury across Cranbury Neck Road through Stults Farm, and continue on through Plainsboro and across Route 1. It would have fractured the



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ċĎČ. ΈΉ. Strawberries and peas are ready and other fruits and vegetable are grow-

ing at the “Pick-Your-Own” Stults Farm on Cranbury Neck Road in this June 2011 picture. (Photographed for this book by David Nissen)

landscape and destroyed the center of the farming area. Consequently, Cranburians took the lead in mobilizing against it, especially in the late 1980s. Massive opposition from Cranbury, Plainsboro, Princeton, and other communities caused DOT eventually in the 1990s to shelve its plans.³⁹ Route 92 was never built. Instead, DOT in 1999 constructed only a four-mile section of superhighway, designated State Route 133 and popularly known as the Hightstown Bypass, solely within East Windsor. While Cranbury was still fighting to prevent the proposed Route 92 from cutting through its farmland, Stults Farm on Cranbury Neck Road became, in 1990, the first farmstead in Middlesex County to be preserved through the state’s Farmland Preservation Program. It had been in the Stults family for three generations, since 1915. When Stanley C. (“Kip”) Stults Jr. and his wife, Jill, took over the farm in 1984, they added “Pick Your Own” strawberries and peas to the 140 acres they had planted in potatoes. In 1990, they abandoned the potato business, concentrating instead on growing “Pick Your Own” fruits and vegetables, while including some wheat and soybeans as rotation crops. Five years later, in 1995, they purchased another 100 acres of preserved farmland,

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helping to make the 200-acre Stults Farm, which is popular with people throughout the area, one of the most prominent “Pick Your Own” farms in central New Jersey.⁴⁰ With increased tempo in the 1990s, Cranbury Township and the Middlesex County Agricultural Board put together funding packages and convinced many landowners, including previously reluctant farmers, to sell the development rights and commit their land to farmland preservation.⁴¹ By 1999, Cranbury had committed $800,000 to leverage $8 million in grants and loans in order to preserve 1,300 acres of open farmland extending almost two miles west of the historic village. Seven years later, the township had put into the New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program more than 2,200 acres. By July 2011, Cranbury had preserved more than 2,800 acres of farmland amounting to 63 percent of the taxable farmland in the agricultural zone. The actual figures for preserved open land in the township were higher, however, because the 2,877 acres of preserved taxable farmland did not include well over 500 additional acres of stream corridors, forested areas, and other vacant land that had been reserved but were not within the farmland tax program. One planner reported that Cranbury was within the top 1 percent of communities in the nation in terms of the ratio of total land conservation accomplished.⁴² The state had paid from 60 to 100 percent of the cost, more than $20 million, and the county also contributed funds, as did some conservation organizations, but so did Cranbury Township, which by the end of 2003 had only $7 million left before it would reach its total state-set debt limit of $30 million.⁴³ One of the most controversial land acquisitions involved the West Property, a major issue in the town in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The approximately 66-acre, L-shaped parcel stretched from Cranbury Brook to near Park Place West. In 1989, John and Ruth West sold the property to Garden State Land Company, which planned to build a smaller version of Shadow Oaks. The developer also contracted with Christopher (“Chip”) Wright of Wright’s Roses for an option to purchase twenty adjacent acres. Both properties were in the Agricultural Preservation Zone.⁴⁴ The Township Committee accepted a clustering arrangement proposal from Garden State Land Company allowing the developer to build thirty-eight single-family homes on the twenty-acre Wright property and in return give to the township the sixty-six-acre West Property



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as open land or for use by Cranbury School. In protest against the prospective housing development, which opponents said endangered the Historic District, eliminated prime farmland, blocked the rural vista at the “sharp edge” of the village, and increased costs, residents who were opposed formed an ad hoc Cranbury Taxpayers Coalition. Pressure from citizens, a lawsuit they filed to “Stop the Swap,” and criticism by candidates running in the township election persuaded the Township Committee to reverse its initial approval of the developer’s plan. Instead, as the protesters had suggested, the sixty-six-acre West Property was obtained by the township through eminent domain at a cost of approximately $1 million.⁴⁵ After Wright’s wholesale rose business had moved to Hightstown, the township in 2001 purchased the Wright property. The greenhouses were demolished, and most of the land remained open. A group of parents organized and appealed successfully to the township to erect a regulation-size baseball field suitable for the Babe Ruth League. When finally completed in 2010, the fence-enclosed diamond was designated a public field, available for use by organized sports teams, adults or juveniles.⁴⁶ Concerned citizens, nonprofit groups, and the township have also sought to create natural preserves, sustain local streams, and provide public access to such greenways. Cranbury Brook Preserve consists of fourteen acres set aside by the township in 2004 from the old Hutchinson farm and West Property as well as land acquired under the Green Acres and Farmland Preservation programs. On the south side of Cranbury Brook, Unami Woods, three acres of old hardwood trees and a habitat for birds, deer, and other wildlife, was acquired through the Green Acres program in 1966. At the southern border of the town, the township in the 1980s obtained forty-six acres along the Millstone River from the developer of Shadow Oaks. More recently, D&R Greenway Land Trust, a nonprofit conservation organization for the preservation of watershed lands and large-scale landscape, helped preserve thirty acres of forested land along Cedar Brook in the northern part of town, and fifty acres along Cranbury Brook. Protecting such tributaries of the Millstone River has also been assisted by the Stony Brook – Millstone Watershed Association.⁴⁷ With $800,000 in funding from the State’s Green Acres program and the Middlesex County Improvement Authority, Cranbury Township in the winter of 2010 – 2011 acquired sixty acres of forested wetlands, a unique

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habitat with a high canopy of trees, located on Plainsboro Road, as a permanent forest preserve. The township began the process of preserving the last forty-oneacre section of the old Reinhardt family dairy and vegetable farm in the spring of 2011. With the acquisition of development rights for the Reinhardt property, expected by the end of the year, all of the farms on Plainsboro Road will have been preserved, creating a contiguous vista of more than 500 acres along that roadway all the way from Cranbury to Plainsboro.⁴⁸ As the foregoing has illustrated, in the past several decades Cranbury has used a variety of means to maintain forested or open land in or close to the village itself, to create nature preserves along streams, and to sustain farmland in the western section of the township.

đĆēĉċĎđđĘ, ęėĚĈĐ ĘęĔĕĘ, Ćēĉ ĈĊđđ ĕčĔēĊ ęĔĜĊėĘ Threats to rural Cranbury, its open land, and rustic character came from a variety of new sources at the end of the twentieth century. In 1987, the Middlesex County Board of Freeholders selected a 140-acre tract in the middle of prime farmland in the Agricultural Preservation Zone as one of four possible sites for a new landfill and incinerator for disposal of the county’s trash and garbage. The proposed location was between John White and Cranbury Neck Roads and the Millstone River. An outpouring of opposition from Cranbury residents, who generated a letterwriting campaign and mobilized expert opinion about historic preservation and pollution’s impact on the environment, quickly convinced the freeholders to “dump the dump,” as the campaign was called, and simply expand the current county dump. The following year, the challenge came from the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, which decided, without consultation with local officials, to build a major service facility and rest area for long-distance truckers on the turnpike within the eastern boundary of Cranbury, two miles from the village. Sixty acres of farmland would be paved over to provide parking for up to 440 tractor-trailer trucks. Concerned about the air pollution generated by so many idling diesel engines and emphasizing that there were already two large truck parking and service facilities only fifteen miles to the south, Cranbury officials and local citizens rallied and,



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ċĎČ. ΈΊ. History is always important in Cranbury, and near the end of the twen-

tieth century, in 1997, the town celebrated its three-hundredth anniversary. Among the loveliest artifacts from that celebration is the Cranbury Tercentennial Quilt, composed of historical images on which nearly a dozen women quilters worked for two years and which continues to be on exhibit at the Cranbury Museum. (Courtesy of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society)

together with the legislature, eventually convinced a reluctant Turnpike Authority to abandon its plan. Instead, a much smaller and less intrusive facility, a New Jersey State Police substation, was located there since some of the land had already been obtained by the Turnpike Authority through eminent domain. At the end of the 1990s, cellular transmission and receiving towers, part of the new wireless telecommunications network being created

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across the United States with the encouragement of Congress, arrived in Cranbury. Nevertheless, the citizenry was able to keep the tall, unsightly structures out of the village and the western agricultural zone. In 2001, opponents, led by the Cranbury Historical Society, helped prevent a cellular phone company from putting an antenna atop the historic water tower that had stood on North Main Street in the center of the village for nearly a century. Instead, the company arranged with the owner of a commercial property in Cranbury’s light-industrial zone to allow a telecommunications tower to be erected just east of Route 130, less than half a mile from the village.

ęčĊ ĉĆĞ ęčĆę čĔđđĞĜĔĔĉ ĈĆĒĊ ęĔ ęĔĜē For many residents, particularly the youngsters, one of the most exciting moments in Cranbury’s history was the day that Hollywood first came to town. On Wednesday, May 11, 1994, a sizable film crew from Paramount Pictures and Sandollar Productions, accompanied by half a dozen trucks, vans, and trailers, spent the entire day shooting a romantic comedy, entitled I.Q., in the village. Since the film was set in the early 1950s, the crew lined Main Street with period vehicles and for authenticity even temporarily removed air conditioners from windows before shooting scenes on the street and in the Cranbury Inn. The stars included a bewigged Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein, Meg Ryan as his niece, and Tim Robbins as her suitor. Rehearsals and filming went on from early morning to late at night and were eagerly watched by Cranburians, young and old. Many local children stayed home from school to watch the action. By the time the movie was released that fall, the Main Street shots lasted only a few seconds, although the dinner scene inside the Cranbury Inn, shot amid the artificial rain, lightning, and thunder, went on for several minutes. Most of the Main Street shots wound up on the cutting room floor, but the experience of having a major motion picture production company whirl into town and film for fifteen hours that spring day was one that many residents of Cranbury would never forget.⁴⁹

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Ċēĉ Ĕċ Ćē ĎĈĔē: ǴčĎĘęĔėĎĈ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ǵ ĜĆęĊė ęĔĜĊė The preservation struggle continued in the new century, but one fight that preservationists lost was their attempt to keep Cranbury’s historic water tower. For more than a century, a water tower stood on four tall legs overlooking the center of the village from behind the Cranbury National Bank building at 32 North Main Street. When it was originally built in 1906, it had a wooden tank, but that was replaced in 1940 by a steel tank painted light green, eventually with the white letters “Historic Cranbury.” The water tower and its sign could be seen for miles, and it became an icon for the village. But after 1999, when the Cranbury Water Company, which had used local aquifers, was sold to Elizabethtown Water Company, the town’s water supply came instead from the Raritan and Millstone Rivers and the Delaware and Raritan Canal via water treatment plants, and the unused and unmaintained water tower slowly deteriorated. Seeing the old tower with its “Historic Cranbury” lettering as embodying “the spirit of and pride in our historic town,” the Historical Society tried for nearly a decade to arrange for its repair or purchase. But the water company would not refurbish it, and the purchase price of $300,000 was deemed unaffordable. When the New Jersey American



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Water Company became the new owner, it dismantled the water tower in 2009. That same year, 2009, when PNC Bank closed the old bank at 32 North Main Street that had been there since 1898, there was some consideration to have the township purchase the structure and its large parking lot for use as a library or other public facility. But the cost was considered too high at a time of fiscal stringency exacerbated by the Great Recession that had begun in 2008. Instead, the building and its parking lot were purchased by a private contractor who said he planned to convert the former bank into an office for his construction company, create retail space for a store, perhaps a bicycle shop, and build his own residence on part of the parking lot.¹ The only remaining bank located in the village itself after PNC Bank closed its downtown office in 2009 was that of the First Constitution Bank at 3 Westminster Place at the corner of North Main Street. The bank’s building had previously contained the offices of a savings and loan association, the Cranbury Building and Loan Association, founded in 1921 with only $1,336 by a group headed by D. C. Mershon, C. Raymond Wicoff, and David Chambers Lewis. The savings and loan association, operating out of the First National Bank building until 1975, had encouraged passbook savings accounts and supported loans for home purchases and improvements. In 1975, with $1.4 million in assets, it merged with the much larger Family Savings and Loan Association of New Brunswick. The combined savings and loan company built its main office in Cranbury that year at 3 Westminster Place, an office subsequently taken over by First Constitution Bank, which continues there to the present.

ĈėĆēćĚėĞ ČėĔĜĘ Ćēĉ ĈčĆēČĊĘ Cranbury grew and began to change somewhat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the increase of housing, the population expanded from approximately 2,000 people in 1980, to 2,500 in 1990, and 3,200 in 2000.² Such expansion meant increased enrollment at Cranbury School. By 1996, it had 582 students. Consequently in 1997, the Board of Education added a new middle-school wing. A few years later, enrollment had



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surged by a further 20 percent, and ten more classrooms and a new gymnasium were built in 2003. The town was quite properly proud of its public school. “Cranbury Prep,” as it was sometimes called, has received numerous awards, including U.S. Department of Education National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence awards. As the Trenton Times noted in a feature story about Cranbury School in 2001, “Fourth graders and eighth graders in this tiny former farming community have the reputation of being among the students who score the highest on New Jersey’s standardized tests. But it is not just the Cranbury School District that reaps the bragging rights from the high scores. The students later helped bolster the Scholastic Assessment Test scores at top-ranked Princeton High School where Cranbury teens attend class after the eighth grade. The Cranbury students outperform most of their peers, even those in the Princeton School District.”³ For most of its history, the public library has been located in the Cranbury School, one of the few public libraries in the country located in a school building. It did not begin that way. The town’s first free public library established in 1906 and open three evenings a week, was in a rented room, first in the Cranbury Press building at 13 North Main Street and subsequently in the American Hotel diagonally across the street. In 1925, at the invitation of the Cranbury Board of Education, the library moved into the school rent free, and it has shared school quarters ever since, starting in the basement of the old school and winding up in the new addition. In 2009, a Cranbury Public Library Foundation was created with the aim of raising $3 million to build a separate, freestanding public library in the open field between Park Place West and Cranbury School. The nature of Cranbury’s population has also experienced changes in recent years. The Census of 2000 indicated that a third of the residents had moved in within the previous five years. By 2000, barely a handful of Cranbury residents were full-time farmers; most farmers had additional jobs. Instead, 60 percent of employed Cranburians worked in management, professional, or related occupations and 24 percent in sales and office jobs. Nearly 90 percent commuted to work; their mean travel time of thirty-five minutes each way was about how long it took to get to the areas in or around New Brunswick or Trenton, or sometimes into Princeton. Two-thirds of the residents over twenty-five years of age had a bachelor’s degree or higher; 28 percent had a graduate or professional

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degree.⁴ The incomes typical in Cranbury enable many of its residents to devote substantial sums to the maintenance and improvement of their historic homes. Cranbury has remained a predominately white community, with 88.8 percent of the residents in the 2000 Census identifying their race as white. The largest self-identified ancestry groups among those white Cranburians in 2000 were Irish (20 percent), German (18 percent), Italian (16 percent), English (13 percent), and Polish (9 percent). In addition, 2 percent of whites also identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. Racial minorities, Asian and African American, had increased from 8 to 11 percent between 1990 and 2000. Among the most significant changes in recent years has been the declining numbers and percentages of African Americans living in the town (blacks dropped steadily from 14 percent in 1970 to only 2 percent in 2000); and the increased percentages of Asians — primarily Chinese and Asian Indians — from virtually none in 1980 to 4 percent in 1990 and more than 7 percent in 2000. Two new places of worship have joined the First Presbyterian and United Methodist Churches within Cranbury in the last three decades. In 1982, Saint David’s Episcopal Church was erected at 95 South Main Street, with a new educational wing added in 1995 and more construction begun in 2010; it replaced Trinity Episcopal Church in Hightstown, which had closed. In 2001, the Chinmaya Mission Tri-State Center, which teaches Hinduism and its body of knowledge called “Vedanta,” was established at a former farmstead on six acres on Cranbury Neck Road in the western part of the township.

ĊĝĎę ΌĆ Ćēĉ ĜĆėĊčĔĚĘĊ ĉĊěĊđĔĕĒĊēę By the 1980s, it was clear that commercial development, already moving down from New York, was reaching southern Middlesex County. The question facing Cranbury was whether the area east of Route 130, the “light industrial” zone, should be developed for office complexes or warehouses or some combination of both. Except for some two-story offices built on Route 130 and the towering, four-story office building erected by Continental Insurance Company on South River and Prospect Plains Roads in 1986, it soon became clear that the commercial market between



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Route 130 and the turnpike, unlike that along Route 1, was not primarily for office complexes but for low-level warehouses. In the late 1980s, the turnpike was widened south to Exit 8A. The fact that this was the northern-most spot on the turnpike that still had extensive open land available, plus the development of new distribution methods and hightech warehouses, made the three townships around Exit 8A desirable for truck-supplied, regional, and even international distribution centers. During the 1990s alone, 35 million square feet of industrial warehouse space was built within a few miles of Exit 8A. The light-industrial zone on the east side of Cranbury combined with parts of South Brunswick and Monroe soon became one of the warehouse capitals of America.⁵ Warehouse development in eastern Cranbury would help to pay for preservation of farmland in the western part of the township. The 1993 Master Plan had encouraged such development because warehouses were seen as providing good sources of property tax revenue. They were also viewed as generating minimal additional automobile traffic in the village itself and making fewer demands on township services — school, police, and fire — than most other forms of development. In keeping with its aesthetic sensibilities, the township maintained high restrictions for companies that wanted to build warehouses in eastern Cranbury. The state fire code already limited the warehouses to a height of 40 feet, and the township, in a deliberate attempt to make the warehouses less obtrusive, required that they be dispersed, set back, and buffered from the roadways by relatively high berms and landscaping, and to the extent possible not be unattractive in design. Consequently, the warehouses in Cranbury were constructed at extra cost by specialized developers like ProLogis and Keystone and rented to companies, such as the Rockefeller Group, Squibb, Tommy Hilfiger, Volkswagen, and Audi, that already had good community-relations programs and were willing to pay extra costs to meet Cranbury’s higher standards. In a major burst of construction, between 1998 and 2005 thirty large warehouses, totaling more than 14 million square feet of storage space, were built in eastern Cranbury. Thereafter the rate of development dropped sharply even before the onset of the financial crisis and the major recession that began in 2008.⁶ Although warehouse construction slowed, a new development occurred in the warehouse area in 2011. In line with the township and county energy-efficient policies, an international solar power company

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leased the roofs of four ProLogis warehouses on Santa Fe Way in Cranbury to install a solar panel farm on their broad flat rooftops. Covering more than one million square feet with 21,000 solar modules, this would be one of the largest single solar projects in North America and would generate an estimated seven million kilowatt hours of electrical power annually for the electric distribution system of Public Service Gas & Electric and other utilities. To limit the impact on the visual landscape, the Cranbury Planning Board required that all permanent equipment not be visible from the public right of way. The surge of warehouse development reflected an expanding transportation and storage sector and indeed a booming American economy beginning in the mid-1990s and lasting for just over a decade. The collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War in 1991 contributed to a new optimism at home and abroad. It was an optimism that would be shattered on a clear, blue-sky autumn day on September 11, 2001.

΍/΅΅/Ά΄΄΅: Ćē ĆĒĊėĎĈĆē čĊėĔ ċėĔĒ ĈėĆēćĚėĞ Terrorist attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, brought shock, pain, and suffering to Cranbury as it did to many other American communities. It also brought recognition of a local American hero. Todd M. Beamer, a thirty-twoyear-old, Michigan-born account manager for the Oracle software company, had recently moved to Cranbury with his wife, Lisa, and their two sons, ages three and one. A third child, a daughter, was due in January. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 flying from Newark to San Francisco for a sales meeting when the plane was hijacked by armed Islamic extremists of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization. In the airliner, the Al Qaeda terrorists killed the pilots and took over the cockpit. The passengers, using cell or in-plane phones, soon learned that two other hijacked planes had smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and a third plane into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. It was believed that United Flight 93, now piloted by terrorists, might be headed for the White House or the U.S.



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Capitol. Todd Beamer told a phone operator that some passengers were planning to try to overpower the hijackers. As the operator heard it, Beamer’s last words to his cohorts were reportedly, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!” The terrorists plunged the plane into the ground in a field outside of Shanksville, east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. None of the forty-four persons aboard survived. Beamer was cited as a hero, and the phrase, “Let’s roll,” became an initial rallying cry in the subsequent fight against Al Qaeda and its supporters. Todd Beamer’s actions and his memory were widely commemorated. Declaring a “war on terrorism” as a result of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush cited Beamer’s heroism and quoted him. Locally, the post office in Cranbury was, by act of Congress, rededicated in his honor in May 2002, and that September the Cranbury Lions Club established an annual scholarship in his name and planted a memorial red oak tree in Heritage Park with a boulder and a bronze plaque. Its inscription reads: ‘Let’s roll.’ These are the memorable words spoken by Todd Beamer, a Cranbury resident, who was aboard United Airlines Flight 93, when it was hijacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001, as he joined with his fellow passengers in a final act of resistance, sacrificing their lives to save countless others. A man described as ordinary to the world, extraordinary to his family, he shall be forever remembered for his uncommon act of bravery. This memorial celebrates the faith and heroism of Todd Beamer — husband, father, son, brother, friend, civilian — an American.

Lisa Beamer, who of all the relatives of 9/11 victims received the most prominent media attention, particularly because of her husband’s famous words, established a memorial foundation to help children who become victims of trauma. She also wrote a book about the Beamers’ lives, his death, and their faith.⁷ She and her three children continue to live in Cranbury, a town that, like the Norman Rockwell painting it still resembled, appeared to be a peaceful haven even in a sometimes frightening world.

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ĈėĆēćĚėĞ, ǴĔēĊ Ĕċ ĆĒĊėĎĈĆDZĘ ĒĔĘę ćĊĆĚęĎċĚđ ĘĒĆđđ ęĔĜēĘǵ •••••

“Our communities are rapidly losing their identities as places we can call home — places where we could live our lives with close bonds to the people and landmarks that make a town, ‘home,’” warned a New Jersey report on development in the state in 1988.¹ The report was correct. Too many towns are in danger of becoming just a name on a map, a direction on a road sign. But Cranbury has avoided that fate and retained a strong sense of identity. That identity comes from distinct factors. The town has a defined and continued vibrant center, the historic village itself, where people meet and community activity takes place. It has its extensively preserved and scenic farmland as well as its lake, streams, and woods, all of which, by linking its residents and visitors with nature, can replenish the soul. A little pocket of tranquility, Cranbury and its aesthetics provide a haven of serenity and peacefulness amid the fast-paced, driven qualities of modern life. Downtown, its continual celebration of its heritage nourishes Cranbury’s hometown spirit. As this book has demonstrated, Cranburians have taken an active role in defining and then maintaining the character and culture of their town and in balancing controlled growth with historic preservation. Annual rituals reinforce the town’s identity and sense of community: the Memorial Day Parade down Main Street, sponsored by the Lions

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ċĎČ. Έ΋. The past comes alive as Civil War reenactors march down South Main

Street amid modern spectators, some sitting in aluminum-framed folding chairs, during the Memorial Day Parade in 2010. (Photographed for this book by Amy P. Chambers)

Club; the Strawberry Festival at the Presbyterian Church the first Saturday in June; the picnic, band concert, and fireworks, sponsored by the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and the Township’s Cultural and Heritage Committee, in Village Park always the day after the Fourth of July; the Cranbury Day street fair the Saturday after Labor Day in September; the biennial House Tours every other October; and skating on Brainerd Lake whenever it freezes in winter. When the holidays in December begin, Cranbury’s Business and Professional Association drapes wreaths and garlands of evergreens above Main Street, and the wooden planters on the sidewalks are festooned with red ribbons and strands of evergreens courtesy of the Woman’s Club, which also sponsors the tree lighting and caroling at Memorial Park the first Friday evening in December. On the first Sunday of that month, the Lions Club holds its annual community pancake breakfast in the school cafeteria, and the Historical Society stages its Traditional Christmas Tea that afternoon at the Cranbury Museum. One

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evening, just before Christmas, Santa Claus appears throughout the village, perched in one of the Volunteer Fire Company’s gleaming red fire engines. Nostalgia for Cranbury still infected a British journalist at Christmastime four decades after visiting the village in the winter of 1954. “I never expected to find, some 40 miles south of Manhattan, beyond the Elizabeth oil refineries, just off the New Jersey Turnpike, a settlement that so enchantingly fitted my preconceptions of old-school America,” Morris reflected in 1997: Hawthorne’s America, Main Street America, Saturday Evening Post America — even, at a pinch, Thoreau’s America. A chief feature of Cranbury was its village pond, which froze over soon after we got there and made everything seem wonderfully Christmasy. I was naïve, I suppose, and saw only the good things around me, but ever since, when I think of the spirit of Christmas I think of Cranbury. I loved everything about it. The village was mostly red-brick and clapboard, as all villages should be at Christmastime, and when the snow was deep, and sparkled on the trees and slithered in the sunshine down the steeple of the First Presbyterian Church (1734), it looked almost a caricature of your ideal American Noë1.²

Cranbury continues to pride itself on its history and nineteenthcentury charm and its success in preserving them. The village’s historic Town Hall (the restored Old School building) and the old homes and shops in the Historic District, as well as the preserved farmsteads, the scenic vistas of farmland and woodlands, the local museum, history center, and historic barn park all offer visual statements about Cranbury’s preservation and celebration of its past as a symbol of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural, small-town America. Historic resources — whether buildings and farmlands, particular neighborhoods or artifacts, great national parks or Revolutionary War or Civil War battlefields — are important to us because they connect us tangibly to our past. They help us to know where we came from and who we are. Historic sites and structures can physically represent aspects of our culture and values and how they have evolved, and can remind us of the regional diversity in the American mosaic. Giving us a sense of connectedness with a familiar past, the preserved village of Cranbury and its adjoining farmland provide an anchor in a rapidly changing and



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ċĎČ. ΈΌ. New uses for old houses. Built around 1850 for Sarah Disbrow as her home, the house in the foreground on North Main Street now provides offices for an attorney and a dentist. The adjacent house, built for Elizabeth DeBow about the same time, now contains a delightfully decorated bakery and café. (Photographed for this book by Amy P. Chambers)

challenging world. “The whole world changes, but when it does, Cranbury changes less,” one resident declared recently.³ Betty Wagner, the township historian from 1985 until her retirement in 2010, noted that an ancient Japanese proverb reminds us that “we enter the future through the gateway of the past.”⁴ While the town offers a restful haven, it is also engaged with the present and planning for the future. Its latest Master Plan was adopted in December 2010. The village is not a museum but a vibrant community. In tune with changing popular needs and desires and in line with current directions in preservation, old buildings are put to new uses in the Historic District. A Victorian house is transformed into a bakery and café. Among other nineteenth-century homes on Main Street, some become a dentist’s office, others a lawyer’s office, some provide an office for an interior decorator, a studio for a photographer, or a shop for a florist.

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A house next to the post office recently opened a window from which ice cream in cones or cups is sold during the summer months; its Main Street patio has become a new social gathering place, especially on sultry evenings. A former pharmacy is now an antique shop, an automobile showroom is transformed into a ballet studio, and the nineteenthcentury Old School building has become the Town Hall as well as an art gallery and a senior citizens’ center. Thus does Cranbury continue architecturally to preserve the past while dealing effectively with present needs and wants. The 300th anniversary of the town was celebrated in 1997 with a series of events that lasted throughout the year. Under the editorship of Lee Nissen, the Tercentennial Committee and a host of local residents prepared a fine, illustrated commemorative book, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, that ran more than one hundred pages and dealt with the histories of three dozen local organizations, institutions, and individuals. Congratulatory letters arrived from President Bill Clinton, the governor, and numerous other officials. One of the most glowing was from Richard Moe, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had worked over the previous two decades with Cranbury and its volunteer organizations to preserve the town and the surrounding farmland. His salute to the town is worth repeating: Cranbury is one of America’s most beautiful small towns. Thanks to the efforts of many people — previous generations, past and present township officials, the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and other members of the community — Cranbury is also one of this nation’s best preserved small towns. At a time when other communities across the country have allowed their scenic and historical assets to be destroyed or degraded, Cranbury has distinguished itself by preserving the town’s beauty and distinctive character for the enjoyment of future generations.⁵

In the twenty-first century, Cranbury, like other small, formerly rural and now suburban communities, will continue to face challenges, including how to balance development with preservation of historic buildings, open land, and the protection of woodlands, wetlands, and local stream corridors. Additionally, there is also the emerging issue of how much local control communities will be able to retain in the face of mounting



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pressures for municipal and regional consolidation of educational and governmental services to limit increases in property taxes.⁶ Cranburians too will have to grapple with such issues, and if the town’s past is prologue to its future, it augurs well for meeting those challenges. For the town has compiled an impressive record of citizen activism, enlightened planning, and impressive results in achieving welldefined goals. It has balanced progress and preservation. That accomplishment, particularly with the major challenges of recent decades, has come from a mixture of forces and leadership. In addition to the municipal committees and the various permanent volunteer organizations in the town, a series of spontaneous groups have often formed among concerned and active citizens. These ad hoc groups were effective because they were united and dedicated to an issue that might have split permanent groups over attitudes or interests. The fact that Cranbury is an established and community-centered town helps this process. It contributes to civic consciousness and a collective spirit. People meet in their various roles — as parents, professionals, volunteers — and many learn not simply to think of others by facile labels, but as individuals with many different interests and needs, and as friends and neighbors. It is a close-knit community where people know each other. Leaders emerge at crucial times with broad visions and practical proposals. The leadership of “the little town that could” has included a wide variety of talented people, elected or not, and the direction of the town has increasingly reflected an activist, concerned, and informed citizenry. “In this town,” said the head of Cranbury Housing Associates, “everyone is involved in something.”⁷ As in the past, the next chapter of the town’s history will be written by far-seeing citizens. These will undoubtedly include people on the Township Committee, Planning Board, and other official entities as well as members of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., and other such volunteer organizations. Cranbury’s history suggests that they will also come from the citizenry itself. They will undoubtedly lead the people of Cranbury in their search for creative ways to assure the preservation of their historic village and the farmland that gave rise to it. Cranbury is one of New Jersey’s quintessential small towns, with its wide, tree-lined Main Street and its spacious older homes. “What distinguishes Cranbury from other towns,” David Nissen, a former Township Committee member, said recently, “is

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ċĎČ. Έ΍. Map of Cranbury in 2011, showing its preserved open space and farmland, which had reached more than 63 percent of the eligible farmland. (Adapted for this book by Virginia H. Swanagan from a township map)

that we’ve managed to stay a small town and we’ve managed to save a lot of farmland.”⁸ “Cranbury is an extraordinary town,” declared Harvey S. Moskowitz, one of the most respected urban planners in New Jersey, when interviewed by the author in 2010. “It has saved its historic village and its farmland despite the pressures on them, while also achieving its other goals, including economic growth. It provides a blueprint that can be used by other communities.”⁹ Nationally prominent historic preservationist, rural conservationist, and author Samuel N. Stokes, formerly a regional director in the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a longtime consultant to the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, agreed, telling the author in 2011, “I know of no other rural historic town in the United States that has faced such enormous development



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pressures and achieved such remarkable conservation and preservations results.”¹⁰ Many of Stokes’s recommendations in his now classic text, Saving America’s Countryside, first published in 1989, reflected what he saw in Cranbury. He suggested thinking broadly and long-term, thinking and acting positively, engaging intelligently in problem solving, and being willing to take some risks. Cranbury also contributed to his principles for successful rural conservation programs in towns and counties with open land. Conservation of natural resources, farmland retention, historic preservation, and scenic protection should be integrated, Stokes wrote. Rural conservation should be linked to the social and economic needs of the community. To be successful, rural conservation programs should involve cooperation of local government and private, nonprofit organizations, rely on more than one technique, and maintain a longterm commitment. At all stages, they should involve the public and do so without alienating or excluding any group: farmers, newcomers, public officials, or the press.¹¹ Cranbury has benefited from good fortune, some active and informed citizens, and some enlightened, bipartisan municipal leadership, advice from acute planners and other consultants, as well as from positive and long-term thinking and action. At the beginning, colonial highways and rich farmland provided the impetus for the village. Later, the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century and U.S. Route 130 and the New Jersey Turnpike in the middle third of the twentieth century were built close enough to the village to be accessible but far enough not to endanger its quaint appeal. Similarly advantageous was the fact that U.S. Route 1 and the turnpike rather than U.S. Route 130 became the main routes across the central part of the state. In preserving much of the historic farmland, it was also beneficial that a long-established town and a well-organized township existed, with a municipal government that could be responsive to townspeople and not just to farmers who owned the open land and might wish to sell it to developers. When a series of periodic crises over housing and land development emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century, Cranburians reacted thoughtfully and effectively. In the 1960s, township officials responded to the opening of the turnpike’s Exit 8A and the onset of rapid suburbanization in the area with careful study, public hearings, and a Master Plan to channel growth. Voluntary organizations emerged

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to confront new challenges. Cranbury Housing Associates began in the 1960s to provide affordable housing for lower-income residents. In the 1970s, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., fought a successful battle, combining local, state, and national support, to obtain governmental recognition of the Old School as a Historic Building, and the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society achieved state and national recognition of the village as a Historic District. In the 1980s, with the widening of the New Jersey Turnpike south to Exit 8A creating greater accessibility and with the state Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel II doctrine encouraging massive market-price developments to provide private construction of affordable housing, Cranbury, like many other towns, was faced by both court and market-driven pressures for extensive and rapid development. The achievement of state and national recognition of the village as a Historic District a few years earlier proved subsequently to be of almost incalculable importance in the town’s ability to preserve its character in the face of legal, political,

ċĎČ. Ή΄. One of Cranbury’s scenic vistas of preserved farmland. On a farmstead

off Old Trenton Road with a wooden barn dating back to the 1840s, farmers had planted adjoining fields in spinach and corn in June 2011. (Photographed for this book by John W. Chambers; courtesy of Robert Diamond)



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and even economic challenges. Through a successful combination of actions — court suits, altered zoning ordinances, and development of a new Master Plan — as well as proactive engagement by citizens’ groups, governmental agencies, and nonprofit organizations, and, by that time, a supportive local press, Cranbury maintained the historic character of the village and preserved much of its open land and farmsteads in the western part of the township. At the same time, through well-considered planning, the town also clustered limited housing development, built its own affordable housing in the village, and encouraged some office and warehouse development in the eastern part of the township. The Master Plan provided a mechanism for raising revenue by developing industry and offices in the east to preserve open space in the west. That system has helped enable historic Cranbury to remain the town it is today. Inspired by the heritage so evident around them, the modern residents of this historic treasure will continue to address with confidence the challenges of the twenty-first century that confront not only Cranbury but so many other towns and communities in New Jersey and the rest of the United States. It is a message of hope from a small town with a great spirit, a spirit that in many ways is a gift to the present from the past.

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The concept for this book was generated in discussions at two meetings of the Board of Trustees of Cranbury Landmarks, Inc. These meetings were on February 17, 1986, and March 17, 1986. The members present on February 17, 1986, were William L. Bunting Jr., Anna Drago, Allan Kehrt, Helen de Forest Lee, Andrew Massie, Kate Shankweiler, Mahbubeh Stave, and Virginia Swanagan. On March 17, 1986, the members present were William L. Bunting Jr., Wayne Comer, Anna Drago, Allan Kehrt, Helen Lee, Kate Shankweiler, Richard Spencer, Mahbubeh Stave, and Norma Swale. After several months of exploring various options, the board agreed at a board meeting on June 16, 1986, to engage the services of James Searing, a new Ph.D. and a lecturer in history at Princeton University. Dr. Searing signed a contract with Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., to prepare a first draft of the history of Cranbury Township. This he did, completing it in 1988. Thereafter, members of the board and others edited and revised the draft. Among those editing and revising the text were William L. Bunting Jr., Anna Drago, Jacquelyn Miller, Mahbubeh Stave, Virginia Swanagan, and Betty Wagner. Then Barbara Carol Thomsen Kerchoff was engaged to do a rewrite. As time passed, some additional material was prepared by William L. Bunting Jr. and others to describe some modern events and challenges to the township’s character. Photographs and other illustrations were collected with the assistance of Clara Amend, Lisa Beach, William L. Bunting, Norma Swale, Audrey Smith, Virginia Swanagan, Mahbubeh Stave, and Roi Taylor.



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In 2005, the revised text of 127 typed pages was presented to Rutgers University Press for critique with the possibility of publication. The resulting report by an impartial, scholarly evaluator indicated that the manuscript needed considerable revision even to be considered for publication. Subsequently, Rutgers history professor John Whiteclay Chambers II, a Cranbury resident and neighbor of William L. Bunting Jr., was asked if he would respond to the scholarly evaluator’s critique and also bring the history up to date. He graciously agreed to do so. Without any royalties or other monetary compensation, Professor Chambers spent three years doing extensive research in archives and other primary sources as well as in numerous secondary sources. He also reconceptualized the meaning of the town’s history, obtained numerous additional illustrations, and wrote the nearly 300-typed-page text for this volume published by Rutgers University Press as well as a nearly 600-page typescript Reference Edition produced in a limited number of copies by Cranbury Landmarks, Inc. The result of that prodigious effort is this book. Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., is a not-for-profit corporation of the State of New Jersey, organized in 1973, whose initial purpose was preserving the Cranbury School building constructed in 1896. That effort succeeded and in 2001 the historic structure was transformed to serve as the municipal offices for Cranbury Township. All of us who volunteered to contribute our time and talent to produce this book hope you will find it enlightening and inspiring. We have endeavored to make it as factually accurate as possible and have provided an archival and suggested reading section at the end for further reading or research.

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Two admirable community organizations have been intimately involved in Cranbury’s recent history and its historical preservation movement. Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., a nonprofit, volunteer organization, one of whose major objectives is preservation of the architectural heritage of the village, originally commissioned this history and is responsible for its publication. The Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, a similar organization dedicated to the preservation of the historic village and its integral connection to the neighboring farmland, made available to me its extensive collection of historical materials on the town. William L. Bunting Jr., in his Afterword, has described how this book came about, and that many people have been involved in its development. In the years since 2008 when I voluntarily accepted responsibility, on a pro bono basis, for preparing this history of Cranbury, I have received assistance in my research, in formatting the manuscript, and in gathering, restoring, or creating the illustrations, digitalizing them and obtaining releases to use them, from numerous individuals, whose valuable help I wish to acknowledge with my sincerest gratitude. Archivists and librarians are treasured by historians the way successful climbers of Mount Everest revere their Sherpa guides. They show us the most effective routes through their collections and how best to reach our objectives. For their assistance in my research, I want to begin by thanking Ronald Becker, Bonita Grant, and David Kuzma at Special Collections and Jennifer Holland at Inter-Library Loan at Rutgers University’s Alexander Library; Steve Tettamanti and Julia Telonidis at the New Jersey Historical Society; Joseph R. Klett, Catherine Medich, and Joanne Nestor at the New Jersey State Archives; Charlene Peacock at the Presbyterian Historical Society; Clifford Anderson, Kenneth Henke, and Cortney Frank at Special Collections at the Princeton Theological



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Seminary Library; Frances Bristol at the United Methodist Church Archives and History Center at Drew University; and most especially and continually, Roi Taylor, director at the Cranbury History Center. I am also indebted to the earlier work done by James Searing and others on this history of Cranbury; and to the authors of several earlier publications, including Ruth Berg Walsh’s Cranbury Past and Present, published in 1975; a two-volume collection of illustrations by Peggy S. Brennan and Frank J. Brennan Jr. entitled Images of America: Cranbury, published in 1995 and 1998; and the work of thirty-six Cranburians, coordinated by Lee Nissen, who contributed articles to the Cranbury Tercentennial Committee’s 1997 commemorative publication, Cranbury, 1697 – 1997. In addition to the primary and secondary source documents from archives and libraries that form the basis for reconstructing and analyzing Cranbury’s history, I also greatly benefited from the insights of a number of current or past Cranburians, whom I interviewed. They include Mark Berkowsky, president of Cranbury Housing Associates; William (“Bill”) Bunting Jr., president of Cranbury Landmarks, Inc.; Elizabeth (“Betty”) Wagner, former president of Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society; Thomas (“Tom”) Harvey, former chair and longtime member of the Planning Board; former Cranbury mayors Rebecca (“Becky”) Beauregard, Alan Danser, Patricia (“Pat”) Scott, and Thomas (“Tom”) Weidner, as well as former Township Committee member Arthur V. (“Bub”) Danser; plus Robert Kugler Jr., longtime resident and son of a former mayor. I also wish to express my gratitude to the more than three dozen Cranburians who shared their knowledge of the town’s history with me. All are listed under interviews in the bibliographical section. I want to thank the Township Committee for granting me permission to use the Cranbury Township Seal as an illustration. My thanks also to Township officials Kathleen Cunningham, Jean Golisano, Greg Farrington, Lorraine Jones, Josette Kratz, and Linda Scott for their assistance on numerous occasions. Douglas Baldwin, computer specialist at Cranbury Public Library, also helped out. Several scholars provided assistance in their area of expertise, among them Samuel N. Stokes, a former regional director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, concerning heritage conservation; Maxine Lurie, professor emerita of history at Seton Hall University, on colonial



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New Jersey; William Gillette, professor of history at Rutgers University, on mid-nineteenth-century New Jersey politics; and Joseph R. Klett, director of the New Jersey State Archives, about colonial deeds and ledgers. I also wish to express my appreciation to Rebecca Hetherington for sharing her extensive research into the family of Charles and Hannah Garrison. All or portions of one or more of my drafts of this manuscript were read by Mark Berkowsky, Frank and Peggy Brennan, William Bunting, Amy P. Chambers, Thomas Harvey, Audrey Smith, Roi Taylor, Bonnie Wagman, Elizabeth Wagner, and Thomas Weidner. I alone am responsible for any errors. My heartfelt thanks goes out to several very talented artists whose original work enriches this book: Clara Amend for the drawings she made for this book of an inn and a gristmill in the colonial period; Nadine Berkowsky for her aerial painting of Cranbury, a detail of which graces the cover and for several small line drawings scattered throughout the book; the late Lee Stang Harr, for her extensive mural of Cranbury’s history, part of which appears in the Preface; the late Don Jo Swanagan for his watercolor of O’Neil’s store, which also appears in the Preface; and Virginia Swanagan for her maps of early Cranbury, the routes to the Battle of Monmouth, and current zoning and land preservation in Cranbury. I want also to express my appreciation to the several people who made original photographic images expressly for this book: Amy Chambers, David Nissen, and Audrey Smith. Hunting and gathering hundreds of images, then painfully whittling the giant pile down to a mere fifty illustrations, the limit for this volume, proved to be a momentous task. But it was only the beginning. Then releases had to be obtained, sometimes from multiple individuals. I greatly appreciate the work of Lisa Beach, Michelle Newman-Dickey, Normadella Swale, and Audrey Smith, who helped me obtain signed releases. Michael Kaster, Lynn Lakner, and Audrey Smith lent a hand in getting the pictures of the two Civil War soldiers. Among the fifty illustrations, some of the century-old photographs were dirty, creased, or torn, and a couple had handwriting on them. All the images needed to be digitally scanned, and particularly needy photographs had to be mended, to the extent possible, using electronic methods. James S. Gilligan, Shaun Illingworth, Marc A. Kropfl, and J. R. Pepper digitized and restored many of the final images, as did my

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wife, Amy P. Chambers, and our daughter, Tacy E. Chambers, and, at the last minute, Marty Tannenbaum of Innovative Document Imaging. The final product, an 84,000-word manuscript, had to be formatted electronically to the precise specifications of Rutgers University Press. Matthew Roth, a talented graduate student in history at Rutgers University, kindly and ably transformed my typescript over the Fourth of July weekend into the fully formatted document the publisher needed, and I am very grateful to him. A good index greatly facilitates the use of a history book. I am indebted to Richard A. Kallen, a longtime Cranbury resident and member of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, for voluntarily helping to create the index for this book, and to Sharon Sweeney, the freelance indexer who completed the work. This book received splendid assistance in the production phase from the highly professional people at Rutgers University Press. I want to express my gratitude to all of them for their help: Alice Calaprice, the freelance copyeditor to whom the press assigned my manuscript; Andrew Katz, who designed and typeset the book; as well as to Marilyn Campbell, Rutgers University Press’s prepress director; Anne Hegeman, production manager; Bryce Schimanski, production coordinator; and Allyson Fields, assistant to the director. Most especially, I want to thank Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press, for her patience with this project, her encouragement, and for all the valuable advice she provided as it came to fruition. Lastly, and most importantly, for their continual encouragement, help, and support in so many ways during this process over the past three years, I want to express my great appreciation and gratitude to my wife, Amy P. Chambers, and to Bill Bunting, my neighbor and president of Cranbury Landmarks, Inc.; Audrey Smith, Township Historian and president of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society; Ginny Swanagan, a member of both the Historical Society and Cranbury Landmarks, Inc.; Roi Taylor, director of the Cranbury History Center; and Elizabeth (“Betty”) Wagner, former Township Historian, former president of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, and beloved advocate of the history and preservation of the best of Cranbury. J.W.C. July 18, 2011

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šŽနœ—œš“Š—¡Šš‹¦¡®ထၹၾႁၿဵၹၿႀၻ . Governor Richard Nicolls’s 1664 letter to the Duke of York, quoted in John T. Cunnningham, New Jersey: America’s Main Road (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), 40. . The details of the 1698 deed are recounted later in this chapter. Deed dated March 1, 1698, in “Colonial Deeds, East Jersey Deeds, Patents and Commissions,” Liber [Book or Volume] C, 160, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, N.J. Hereafter, “East Jersey Deeds,” with volume and page number. . Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer, The Grants, Concessions, and Original Constitutions of the Province of New Jersey, 2nd ed. (Somerville, N.J., 1891), 102; Wheaton J. Lane, From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and Transportation in New Jersey, 1820 – 1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939), 17, 36 – 39, 42 – 43. . Deed dated March 1, 1698, “East Jersey Deeds,” Vol. C, 160. . Archives of the State of New Jersey, ed. William A. Whitehead et al., Series 1 (Newark, N.J., 1880 – 1931), Vol. 21, 512. Hereafter, New Jersey Archives. . Deed dated May 8, 1699, “East Jersey Deeds,” Vol. C, 160 – 161. . Board of Proprietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey, The Minutes of the Board of Proprietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey (Perth Amboy, N.J.: Board of Proprietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey, 1949), Vol. 1, 9 – 10. Hereafter, Minutes of the Proprietors. . Deed dated Dec. 17, 1700, “East Jersey Deeds,” Vol. C, 160 – 161. . Meeting of Dec. 17, 1700, in Minutes of the Proprietors, Vol. 1, 236. . Deed dated Oct. 15, 1701, in “East Jersey Deeds,” Vol. C, 162. . Will of George Rescarrick of Cranberry Brook, March 21, 1714; proved and inventoried Dec. 1, 1720, Vol. A, 1984; and will of Rescarrick’s son, also named George, proved June 13, 1729, Vol. B, 124, both in New Jersey Archives, Series 1, Vol. 23, 381. . Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 22.



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. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), Journalist, 1706 – 1730, 1:22 and 216 – 218 for explanation of recent findings. For comparison, see Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs: Parallel Text Edition, ed. Max Farrand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 54 – 61. . Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Lemay and Zall, 22. . Advertisement, “Burlington Stage-Waggon Reviv’d,” New York Weekly Gazette and Weekly Post Boy, Oct. 1, 1753, Cranbury Historical Center. Hereafter CHC. . Joseph G. Symmes, Historical Sketch of the First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, N.J. (Trenton, N.J., 1869), 10 – 20. . Records of the First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, New Jersey, 1744 – 1891,” bound typescript, n.d., p. 2, New Jersey Historical Society, Newark, N.J. . Hannah Calder’s Diary, 1759, quoted in Lane, From Indian Trail to Iron Horse, 84. . Reported in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” undated copy in “Business and Industry, Cranbury Inn,” file, CHC. . John A. Grigg, The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22, 86 – 100. . David Brainerd, journal entry, June 18, 1745, in Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd, reprinted in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Norman Pettit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 7:296 – 297. . Brainerd, journal entries, Mar. 24, 1746, and May 3, 1746, in ibid., 7:376 – 377; 7:389 – 390. . New Jersey Archives, Series 1, Vol. 6, 406 – 407; and Minutes of the Proprietors, Vol. 3, 237. . Edwards, Life of the Rev. David Brainerd, 402. . New Jersey Archives, Series 1, Vol. 24, 301 – 302, 377, 387, 402. . For the basic documents on the Ashfield affair, see New Jersey Archives, Series 1, Vol. 7, 612 – 631, and Vol. 8, 124 – 128. . Minutes of the Provincial Congress, 16. . F. Dean Storms, History of Allentown Presbyterian Church, 1720 – 1970 (Allentown, N.J.: Allentown Messaenger, 1970), 42, 53. . John Whiteclay Chambers II, George Washington in Cranbury: The Road to the Battle of Monmouth, 2nd ed., updated and expanded, plus illustrations and documents (Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, 2010). . Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Knopf, 2004). . Abbé Robin, New Travels through North America (reprint of original translated American edition, Philadelphia, 1783; New York: New York Times, 1969), 41.



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ªœန’ŽŠ–“š‘œŠ—Š££“Œ“šŽ¤ŽŽš¤’ဖŽš¤§¡®“——Š‘Žထ ၹၿႀၼဵၹႀၾၽ . Return of the Whole Number of Persons within the Several Districts of the United States .  .  . (Philadelphia, 1793), http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/ documents/1790a-01.pdf, accessed Dec. 17, 2010. . Thomas F. Gordon, A Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey (Trenton, N.J., 1834), 124. . John W. Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey . . . with Geographical Descriptions of Every Township in the State (New York, 1845), 319 – 321. . David Chambers Lewis, “Cranbury — As It Was in the Early 1800s,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 2, 1912. . Diary of John Quincy Adams, Vol. 39, 178, Nov. 8, 1833, http://www.masshist .org/jqadiaries, accessed June 28, 2011; and accounts of the accident in the Newark Daily Advertiser, Nov. 8 through Nov. 23, 1833. . Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, Walking Tour: Historic Cranbury (Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, 2006) and its supplement insert, “Architectural Styles in Cranbury.” . “North Main Street, 107,” CHC; and Laura Bowering Mullen, interview with the author, June 15, 2011. . Petition from 1836 and Report of New Brunswick Presbytery Committee, Aug. 7, 1838, both in MS C85, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. . Minutes of the Trustees of the First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury in regard to the memorials from the Trustees of the Second Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, Jan. 12, 1839, Mar. 21, 1840, Jan. 11, 1841, and Feb. 6, 1841, Trustee Minute Books and Session Records, First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J. . Quoted in “Methodist Church Will Celebrate Anniversary,” [its 96th in Cranbury], unidentified newspaper clipping, Sept. 19, 1941, on the website of the Cranbury United Methodist Church, www.cranbury.umc.org/CUMCphotos .html. Accessed June 11, 2010. . Constitution of the Female Charitable Society of Cranbury, Adopted August 23rd, 1817 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1817), 1, Special Collections, Alexander Library, Rutgers University. . Rev. Joseph S. Van Dyke, “50th Anniversary of the Second Presbyterian Church,” manuscript sermon, 1888, CHC. . M. O. Rolfe quoted in W. Woodford Clayton, History of Union and Middlesex Counties, New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1882), 870. . Paul Sher, “Party Battles in Middlesex County, 1789 – 1824” (M.A. thesis, Rutgers University, 1937), 1 – 2, 124 – 158.

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. Walter R. Fallaw Jr., “The Rise of the Whig Party in New Jersey” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1967), 112, 126, 131 – 140, 423. . The 1840 census statistics for South Brunswick and Monroe Townships are from “Cranbury, New Jersey, Vital Statistics,” prepared by Ruth Walsh for the Frances Hopkinson Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution, 1974, typescript, CHC. . Rev. Joseph Ellsworth Curry, 200th Anniversary of the First Presbyterian Church, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1734 – 1934 (n.p., 1934), 18. . John B. Hill, The Case of Jacob and Essau Considered: A Sermon Preached in the M.E. Church at Cranberry, N.J., July 13, 1851 (Trenton, N.J., [1851]), Special Collections, Alexander Library, Rutgers University. . New Jersey Historical Commission, “Steal Away, Steal Away . . .” A Guide to the Underground Railroad in New Jersey (Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Commission, n.d. [2002]), 3, 9; Robert W. Craig, [New Jersey] Historical Preservation Office, to Betty Wagner, May 2, 1994, CHC; Roi Taylor to author. . “True American,” broadside, n.d. [1860], Princeton University Library, reprinted in Ruth Walsh, Cranbury: Past and Present (Cranbury, N.J.: Privately printed, 1975), 126. . “New Jersey Election: Great Is Camden and Amboy [Railroad] and Fusion Is Its Profit! The State Sold Out to Monopoly,” New Brunswick Fredonian, Nov. 7, 1860, 2. . “Middlesex County Official [Results],” New Brunswick Fredonian, Nov. 12, 1860, 2. . David Martin, ed., The Monocacy Regiment (Hightstown, N.J.: Longstreet House, 1987), 297 – 299. See also the Web site of the reenactors: http://www .14thnjvols.com. Accessed Apr. 16, 2010. . Marcus Stults to “Dear Ma,” April 10, 1864, reprinted in Bernard A. Olsen, Upon the Tented Field: An Historic Account of the Civil War as Told by the Men Who Fought and Gave Their Lives (Red Bank, N.J.: Historic Projects, 1993), 230. . Martin, ed., Monocacy Regiment, 64, 268. . Handwritten note, unsigned, n.d., along with trunk full of Marcus Stults’s personal effects, in the possession of the Cranbury Museum. . Jerry Pevahouse interview with the author, May 1, 2011; Joseph Bilby, “9 July 1864: The 14th New Jersey Infantry at the Battle of Monocacy,” in Martin, ed., The Monocacy Regiment, 167 – 192, 269; and B. Franklin Cooling, Monocacy: The Battle That Saved Washington (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Pub. Co., 1997).



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’¡ŽŽနŽªœªš£’“ŠšŠš¬žŠš“š‘Š¡–Ž¤ထ ၹႀၾၾဵၹႀႁႁ . Clayton, History of Union and Middlesex Counties, 682, 688, 862. The 1875 population figure is from the New Historical Atlas of Middlesex County, New Jersey (Trenton, N.J., 1876), 82. . Symmes, Historical Sketch of the First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, 29. . “Local: items and Comments,” Hightstown Gazette, Jan. 6, 1870, 3. My thanks to Linda Cholewiak at Hightstown Library for helping with this source. . Election results from State of New Jersey, Manual of the 103rd Session of the Legislature of New Jersey, 1879 (Trenton, N.J., 1879), 164. . Virginia Swanagan to the author, May 20, 2011. . William Cole Hoffman, oral history, April 24, 1974, CHC; and Brent Barlow interview with the author, June 8, 2011. . “Firm Celebrates Fiftieth Anniversary,” Cranbury Press, Apr. 14, 1916. . “The Grand Concert: It Was the Best Ever Given in Cranbury,” Cranbury Press, Mar. 2, 1900, 1; and “Hon. James H. Goodwin Passes Away,” Cranbury Press, Mar. 27, 1914, 1. . “Hats in Abundance,” notice in Cranbury Press, Mar. 27, 1914, 1; Susan Danser, Emma Harder’s granddaughter, interview with the author, June 22, 2011. . This history of the bank is taken largely from H. Stanley Judd, “Formal Opening Tomorrow of Cranbury’s Newly Remodeled Bank,” Cranbury Press, special supplement, Mar. 20, 1953, 1 – 8. . “North Main Street — 10,” CHC; Don Jo and Virginia Swanagan, interview with author, June 12, 2010. . “Katzenbach Rite Scheduled Today,” Cranbury Press, Apr. 25, 1974, 1, CHC. . Entry for Thursday, Oct. 29, 1885, in “Journal. Author — Unknown Woman Teacher, 1885,” CHC. . For a new perspective on the WCTU under Frances Willard, see Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873 – 1900 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), xiii – xix, 3 – 14, and passim. . “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Cranbury, New Jersey,” handwritten manuscript [1972], 1, CHC. Names of members taken from entries in the First and Second Minute Books of Cranbury W.C.T.U., 1890 – 1902, CHC. . “W.C.T.U.” Cranbury Press, Oct. 4, 1985, 3; Historical Sketch of Middlesex County, WCTU, 1886 – 1905, leaflet prepared by the county chapter, CHC; “Hannah S. C. Garrison,” Methodist Church, New Jersey Conference . . . Minutes, Official Journal — Seventieth Session, 1906, 142 – 143. . J. F. Heilenman, “Charles Ford Garrison,” Methodist Church, New Jersey Conference Minutes, Official Journal, Seventy-Ninth Session, 1915, 158 – 59; see also “A Recent Cranburian [Rev. C. F. Garrison],” Cranbury Press, Mar. 22, 1912, 8.

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. Historical Sketch of Middlesex County, WCTU, 1886 – 1905, 3 – 4; “Mrs. C.  F. Garrison,” Cranbury Press, Dec. 1, 1905; death certificate of Hannah S. C. Garrison; Rebecca Hetherington to the author, June 7, 2011. . Minutes of the Foundation of the Cranbury Township Temperance Alliance, 1882, CHC. . “Rev. Garrison Leaves Allentown,” Allentown Messenger, Mar. 21, 1912. . Ibid.; and obituary, “Rev. Charles F. Garrison,” Cranbury Press, July 10, 1914, clippings included in Rebecca Hetherington to the author, June 7, 2011. . J. F. Heilenman, “Charles Ford Garrison,” Methodist Church, New Jersey Conference Minutes, Official Journal — Seventy-ninth Session, 1915, 158 – 159.

œ¦¡နŽ˜Ž˜‹Ž¡“š‘¤’Ž¦¡›œ¤’ŽŽš¤§¡®ဓ œªš“š¡Šš£“¤“œšထၹႁၸၸဵၹႁၺႁ . This section draws on a number of oral histories at the Cranbury History Center, especially those of William Cole Hoffman, 1974; Alma M. F. Stults, 1974; Stella LaBaw, 1979; Francis Bradley L’Hommedieu, 1982; Wayne Stahl, 1991 – 1992; and James F. Eiker, 1995. . Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and Past (New York, 1939), 570. . Election results from State of New Jersey, Annual Returns of the General Election of 1896 (Trenton, N.J., 1896), 24, 45; and ibid., Annual Returns of the General Election of 1904 (Trenton, N.J., 1905), 53, 89. . John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890 – 1920, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 188 – 190. . State of New Jersey, Annual Returns of the General Election of 1912 (Trenton, N.J., 1913), 84 – 85. . “Bunker Hill-10” and “Frances Bradley L’Hommedieu” files, CHC. . Population statistics from State of New Jersey, Manual of the Legislature of New Jersey . . . 1921 (Trenton, N.J., 1921), 224. . Constitution and By-Laws of the Cranbury Vigilant Society (Cranbury, N.J., 1925), and Minutes, 1901 – 1926, entries for Feb. 28 and Mar. 2, 1901, Special Collections, Alexander Library, Rutgers University. . Resolution of Nov. 23, 1987, Township Committee Records, DocuSave Records Management, Box 906459, accessed by the author Nov. 1, 2010, with the help of Kathy Cunningham and Jean Golisano. . Clayton, History of Union and Middlesex Counties, 868 – 869; and “An Historical View of the Cranbury Inn Restaurant,” www.thecranburyinn.com/index/html, accessed May 19, 2010; additional information about the inn’s history from Gloria Ann Young (“Gay”) Ingegneri, July 1, 2011.



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. Richard P. McCormick and Katheryne C. McCormick, Equality Deferred: Women Candidates for the New Jersey Assembly, 1920 – 1993 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for the American Woman and Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, the State University, 1994), 20, 47 – 48.

“¨ŽနŽ¡Ž££“œšထŠ¡ထŠšŽŒœ¨Ž¡®ထၹႁၻၸဵၹႁၽႁ . “Marina Agnes Hall Wilson, interviewed by Danielle Bing,” Nov. 1, 1996 in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury, 1697 – 1997 (Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, 1997), 35. . John W. Ervin, oral history, July 24, 2009, used with the permission of the Rutgers Oral History Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. . State of New Jersey, Manual of the Legislature of New Jersey . . . 1921 (Trenton, N.J., 1921), 224, 494; Manual . . . 1937 (Trenton, N.J., 1937), 217, 527; Manual . . . 1941 (Trenton, N.J., 1941), 719. . Based on statistics from the 1932 to 1944 presidential elections derived from the biennial Manual of the Legislature of New Jersey in that period. . Reba Thomas Davis, “J. S. Silvers & Bro. Company, Cranbury and Hightstown, NJ,” 1 – 4, typescript history, June 5, 1974, CHC. . “Dr. Joseph E. Curry, Cranbury Pastor for 40 Years, Killed by Auto,” Cranbury Press, Nov. 9, 1934, 1. . “Laurels for Cranbury,” New Brunswick Sunday Times [a Sunday edition published by the Home-News], Feb. 20, 1942; and “County Proud of Its Agriculture: Cranbury Known as ‘Potato Capital,’” unidentified clipping [New Brunswick Sunday Times?], Aug. 11, 1950, CHC. . Alma M. F. Stults, oral history, May 4, 1974, CHC. . Roi Taylor to the author, June 15, 2010. . New Jersey State Employment Service cited in Cindy Hahamovich, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870 – 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 132. . U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens (Tolan Committee), Hearings before the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens, 76th Cong., 3rd sess., 1940 – 41 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), Part 1, 46, 86, 70 – 78, 102 – 103. . Interview sometime around 1985 by John W. Chambers with Gerald H. Miller, M.D. “Murder Committed on Katona Farm [on Plainsboro Road],” Cranbury Press, Sept. 2, 1938, 1; and “Another Cutting Case,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 26, 1960, 1. . “Citizens Protest Colored Conditions,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 11, 1939, 1. . “Raiders Chase and Paint Farm Hands,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 18, 1939, 1.

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. “[Cranbury Lions Club] Resolution,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 18, 1939, 1. . “Cranbury Condemns,” editorial, New Brunswick Home News, Aug. 19, 1939, 4. . Elisabeth Strother to Walter White, “Investigation at Cranbury, New Jersey, Aug. 15, 1939,” typed report, Aug. 17, 1939, 3, 5, in NAACP Papers, Part 1, Box C-362, “Cranbury, New Jersey” Folder, Library of Congress, photocopies in “African-American Migrant Workers, Cranbury Incident” file, CHC. Hereafter Strother, “Investigation at Cranbury,” with date. . “State May Limit Migrant Workers,” Newark Evening News, Aug. 18, 1939, 17. . Editorial from the Trenton Times reprinted as “Migratory Workers,” in the Cranbury Press, Aug. 25, 1939, 1. Other newspapers carried similar sentiments. The Cranbury case is also covered in Hahamovich, The Fruits of Their Labor, 136 – 137. . “Protest Attack on Potato Pickers,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 22, 1939, 1; Strother, “Investigation at Cranbury,” Aug. 15, 1939,” and David W. Anthony to Frederick Morrow, NAACP, Aug. 27, 1939, CHC; David W. Anthony, “The Cranbury Terror Case,” The Crisis 46 (October 1939), 295 – 296, 314 – 315; Jean Yatrofsky, state secretary, Workers Defense League of New Jersey, “Jersey Joads: The Story of the Cranbury Case,” mimeographed booklet, May 15, 1940, 2 – 5, copy in Special Collections, Alexander Library, Rutgers University. . “Arrest 10 for Attack on Negroes,” New Brunswick Home News, Aug. 26, 1939, 1; ”Police Seize 10 for Jersey Raid on Negro Shack,” New York Herald-Tribune, Aug. 27, 1939; and “Arrested Raiders’ Names Withheld,” New York Daily News, Aug. 27, 1939, CHC. . “Protest Attack on Potato Pickers,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 22, 1939, 1. . “Get Suspended Terms for Cranbury Assault,” New Brunswick Home News, Sept. 29, 1939, 1, 24; for a later uncollectable award, see “7 Negroes Win $9,000 for Jersey Assault,” New York Times, May 11, 1940. . Wayne Stahl, oral history, June 17, 1992, 6,CHC. . “Interview with Marina Agnes Hall Wilson. Interviewed by Danielle Bing” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 3. Memories of the 1939 racial episode resurfaced in debates over race relations in the Cranbury public schools in 1969 – 1970, as well as in January 1992, when a gang of youths in New York City painted two black teenagers with white paint. David Dinkins, New York City’s first black mayor, had grown up in Trenton in the 1930s, and he said the 1992 episode reminded him of the racial attack in Cranbury in 1939. “New York Mayor Dredges Up Cranbury Racial Incident from Five Decades Past,” Cranbury Press, Jan. 15, 1992, 1A; and editorial, “Ugly Racism Can Hit Even ‘Nice’ Towns,” Cranbury Press, Jan. 22, 1992, CHC. . Quotation is from Alfred Baker Lewis to Walter White, Sept. 30, 1939; the accusation is in “Say White Student Led Cranbury Mob,” [Newark] New Jersey



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Herald-News, Nov. 4, 1939, 1, clipping, photocopies of both in the “AfricanAmerican Migrant Workers, Cranbury Incident” file, CHC James Morris, As I Saw the U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 14 – 15. Edward R. Murrow, “Harvest of Shame,” CBS Reports, Nov. 25, 1960, 55 minutes, rereleased on videocassette in 1991. Beverly and Craig Gilbert oral history Nov. 15, 2006, CHC. Simon Marcson and Frank Faslick, Elementary Summer Schooling of Migrant Children (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1964). “Store Helps Migrant Workers,” New York Times, July 27, 1975. Sally Edwards interview with the author, June 21, 2011. Eugenie McE. Bunting, oral history, April 4, 1995, CHC. William L. Bunting Jr. to the author, May 17, 2011; see also “Memories of Lucy, the DAR and German POWs in Town,” Cranbury Press, Mar. 7, 1997, 11A. James F. Eiker, oral history, Oct. 18, 1995, CHC. “Students Hear from ‘The Greatest Generation,’” Trenton Times, Feb. 14, 2000, A3; “Memorial Service for Lieutenant Carl J. Snyder Conducted by Rev. D. J. Spratt,” unidentified clipping, June 8, 1945, CHC. T. S. Walker, P. E. Schmiediche, and R. J. Hijmans, “World Trends and Patterns in the Potato Crop: An Economic and Geographic Survey,” Potato Research 41, no. 2 (1999): 241 – 264. Jill Stults, interviewed by the author, Sept. 27, 2010. “An Era Closes in Cranbury,” Cranbury Press, Feb. 21, 1990, 1A. Census figures from Cranbury Township, Planning Board, “1993 Master Plan: Cranbury Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey,” prepared by Moskowitz, Heyer & Gruel, P.A., Table V-1, Population Change, p. V-3, CHC. John T. Cunningham, This Is New Jersey, 4th ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 139. “Typical Eastern American Found by British Reporter in Cranbury,” unidentified clipping [Cranbury Press], April 2, 1954, CHC. James Morris, Coast to Coast (London, 1956), published in the United States under the title, As I Saw the U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 10 – 11. Ibid., 11. Mrs. W. Lyman Bunting, quoted in a newspaper clipping, headline missing, Cranbury Press, June 3, 1949, CHC. Quotes from Morris, As I Saw the U.S.A., 12 – 16. Ibid., 16 – 17. Ibid., 12, 15. See such complaints in the Cranbury Press, Nov. 14, 1969; Nov. 21, 1969; Feb. 20, 1970. William L. Bunting Jr. to the author, Sept. 2, 2010, May 20 and May 27, 2011.

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“¬နŽŽ¤“š‘Žª’Š——Žš‘Ž£ထၹႁၾၸဵၹႁၿႁ . Isard’s study is summarized in “Looking to the Future,” Cranbury Press, Mar. 20, 1953, special supplement, 5; for his background, see “Walter Isard, Economist Who Studied How Regions Evolve, Dies a 91,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 2010. . “Logan Named Cranbury’s First Full-Time Policeman,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 17, 1961, 1; “Cranbury’s Cop Chief Will Retire,” New Brunswick Home-News, Jan. 11, 1991, B1 – B2; and Marilyn Logan interview with the author, Jan. 9, 2010. . Lisbeth (“Beth”) Veghte interview with the author, Oct. 28, 2010. . Dick West, “Cranbury in the Sixties — A Decade of Change,” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 28. . “Marina Agnes Hall Wilson interviewed by Danielle Bing,” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 30 – 37; see also oral histories of Fred Nixon, Nov. 17, 1994, and May 31, 1995; and Myna Wilson Doggett, May 17, 1973, and Oct. 24, 2000, CHC. . Viola Phares Nixon, oral history, May 17, 1973, CHC; and “Around Cranbury [a feature story on Shadrach Douglas’s 85th birthday],” Cranbury Press, Jan. 9, 1985, 14A. . Becky Beauregard, quoted in “A Legacy of Service: Cranbury Mourns Myrna Doggett,” Cranbury Press, Feb. 15, 2002, 1A, CHC. . Myrna Wilson Doggett, oral history, Oct. 24, 2000, CHC. . “The Cobbler of Cranbury,” New Brunswick Home News, June 91, 1991, D8; “Brothers Engage in a ‘Sole-ful’ Occupation,” Cranbury Press, Apr. 3, 1998, 1A, 11A. . Clinton Douglas quoted in “Cranbury Community Action Group Formed to Help Relieve ‘Growing School Tensions,’ ” Cranbury Press, Oct. 3, 1969, 1. . “Blacks Want Principal and Teacher Fired from Jobs,” Cranbury Press, Nov. 14, 1969, 1. . See, for example, letters to the editor in the Cranbury Press issues of Oct. 3, Dec. 12, Dec. 14, 1969, and Feb. 20, 1970. . “Curriculum Statement Released by Schoolmen,” Cranbury Press, Dec. 5, 1969, 1. . “Wilson-Frisch-Abrahams Win [School] Board Seats in Local Election,” Cranbury Press, Feb. 13, 1970, 1. . I am indebted to Peggy Spahr Brennan, Cranbury School Class of 1949, for this information about Ulysses Douglas. . U.S. Conference of Mayors, Special Committee on Historic Preservation, With Heritage So Rich: A Report (New York: Random House, 1966); the National Historic Preservation Act of October 15, 1966, Public Law 89 – 665, 16 U.S. Code, 470.



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. Robert E. Stipe and Antoinette J. Lee, eds., The American Mosaic: Preserving a Nation’s Heritage (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee, International Council on Monuments and Sites, 1987). . “Cranbury,” Encyclopedia of New Jersey, ed. Maxine N. Lurie and Marc Mappen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 182. . Barbara Thomsen, open letter [attempting to save the Updike Farm from development], Aug. 19, 2002, CHC. Thomsen’s memory was a bit off on the chronology. . Audrey Smith, “Cranbury School,” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 53; and John W. Chambers, “Cranbury School and Education in the 1890s,” presentation, June 7 1997, at the Cranbury School Centennial Homecoming Celebration, CHC. . “School Expansion Program,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 11 and 18, 1964, 1. . “School Board Reviews Results of Last Election,” Cranbury Press, Oct. 1, 1965, 1, 8. . National Register of Historic Places, 1966 – 1988 (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1989), 434; the building was added to the State Register of Historic Places a month earlier on May 6, 1971. . Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., “Board of Trustees,” Dec. 1, 1976, CHC. . List provided by William L. Bunting Jr. to the author, Sept. 2, 2010. . “Cranbury Township Journal: Fighting for Control of a Landmark,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 1990, New Jersey Section, 2. . Wayne Stahl, oral history, Nov. 29, 1991, CHC. . “Administrator Retiring Nov. 30,” Cranbury Press, Nov. 26, 2010, 1A, 15A. . “Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society,” 9, red-and-black leather ledger, Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society Archives, plus “History of Cranbury House Tours,” handwritten by Sara Hoffman, n.d., both in CHC. . Ruth Berg Walsh, Cranbury: Past and Present (Cranbury, N.J.: Privately printed, 1975), 340; Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society Newsletter, Aug. 28, 1968, 1, included in black binder, “Minutes Aug. ’68 — Nov. ’72,” Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society Archives, CHC. . Certificate of Incorporation of the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, Sept. 23, 1967, 1, CHC. . Walsh, Cranbury: Past and Present. . Jacqueline S. Bencze, “History of [Cranbury Historical and Preservation] Society re: National Register,” typed chronology, Nov. 14, 1980, CHC; and Lyn Green, “The Cranbury Historical & Preservation Society,” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 64 – 65. . “State Adds Cranbury Area to Historic List,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 17, 1979, 1A. . Quotation from “Statement of Significance” in the Nomination Form, January

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1979, prior to page 1 of Item Number 8, “Cranbury Historic District,” in “Historic District: Nomination Forms for National & State Register of Historic Places 1975 & 1979” folder, CHC. “Cranbury Registered as Historic District,” Cranbury Press, Nov. 7, 1980, 1A; see also The National Register of Historic Places, 1966 – 1988 (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1989), 434; and online at http://nrhp.focus.nps.gov. Accessed Aug. 30, 2010. Thomas Weidner, quoted in “Historic Cranbury,” Newark Star-Ledger, Mar. 22, 1981, 1. Quotation from the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society Newsletter, Aug. 1968, 2; nominations of Sara Perrine Hoffman in minutes of the meeting of officers and trustees, May 15, 1970, 2 – 3, “Minutes Aug. ’68 — Nov. ’72,” black binder, in Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society Archives, both in CHC. “Cranbury Honors Betty Wagner for ‘Historical’ Efforts,” Cranbury Press, May 11, 1994, 1A, 10A, CHC. Betty Wagner, quoted in “Citizen of the Week: ‘Great Motivator’ Recognized,” New Brunswick Home News, Sept. 11, 1983. Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997 (Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, 1997). “Parsonage Barn Dedicated,” Cranbury Press, Nov. 12, 2010, 8A; Alvin Lewis Updike, oral history, March 2, 1979, CHC. See, for example, newspaper clippings as well as letters, such as Constance M. Greiff to Jeremiah Ford, Nov. 20, 1978, which illustrate these concerns, in “Cranbury Fire Company” file, CHC. Terry Karschner to Elizabeth Waggoner [Wagner], Sept. 17, 1979, in “Cranbury Fire Company” file, CHC. Greg DeAngelis, “Cranbury Volunteer Fire Company,” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 78 – 79.

Ž¨ŽšနŠ¨“š‘Š“£¤œ¡“Œ“——Š‘Žထ¡Ž£Ž¡©“š‘ ¤£ Š¡™—Ššထ ၹႁႀၸဵၹႁႁႁ . “An Ordinance Concerning Zoning,” Oct. 22, 1951, amending the 1939 zoning ordinance, Cranbury Township Committee Archives, DocuSafe Records Management, Box 906459, accessed by the author, Nov. 1, 2010. . Alice and Austin Lentz, “The Story of the Evans Tract, Cranbury, N.J.,” typescript memoir, 1991, CHC. In the early 1900s, the First Presbyterian Church had sold lots from the Parsonage Plantation to owners who built their own houses on Symmes Court, but the Evans Tract project was much larger. Virginia Swanagan called this distinction to my attention.



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. New Jersey, Department of Labor, Bureau of Farm Placement, New Jersey Farm Labor Report (Trenton, N.J.: Bureau of Farm Placement, 1963). . This paragraph draws upon the author’s reading of the Cranbury Press from 1959 to 1961 as well as the author’s interviews with Robert Kugler Jr., Oct. 22, 2010; Thomas Weidner, Oct. 5 and 24, 2010; Arthur V. Danser, Oct. 23, 2010, and Allan A. Danser, July 4, 2010. See also Robert Kugler Jr., “Community Organization,” Rutgers Research Paper, June 1965, copy in Robert Kugler Oral History file, CHC. . “Future of Farming Discussed at Meeting Thursday,” Cranbury Press, June 24, 1960, 1. . “Large Development for Cranbury?” Cranbury Press, Apr. 14, 1961, 1; “First Building Planned for Forsgate Industrial Park,” Cranbury Press, Apr. 21, 1961,1. . “Planning Board Reports to Cranbury Residents,” Cranbury Press, June 23, 1961, 1, 8. . Charles K. Agle to Cranbury Planning Board, Apr. 22, 1965, CHC. . Comprehensive Master Plan of Cranbury Township, Cranbury, New Jersey, December 1967, 1 – 2, booklet of a dozen pages, CHC. . Mayor Richard West quoted in Thomas Brown, “Cranbury — Zoned as a OneClass Town,” unidentified, undated newspaper clipping [Trenton Times, 1967], CHC. . Arthur V. Danser, interview with the author, Oct. 23, 2010; see also “Farmers Vow Fight over Land Use Law,” Cranbury Press, May 15, 1981, 1A. . “Year of the Doers and Defenders: Cranbury Wrestles with Zoning Issue,” Cranbury Press, Jan. 1, 1982, 1A. . Thomas Weidner’s handwritten recollections written in Nov. 2010 and given to the author on Dec. 1, 2010. . Statement prepared by the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and read by Betty Wagner at Cranbury Township Committee Meeting, June 22, 1981, 1 – 4, CHC. . South Burlington NAACP v. Mount Laurel Township, 67 N.J. 151 (1975), often referred to as “Mount Laurel I”; and South Burlington NAACP v. Mount Laurel Township, 92 N.J. 158 (1983), known as “Mount Laurel II.” . “Decision Reached in Housing Cases: 816 Units Needed in Cranbury, 774 in Monroe by 1990 to House Low and Moderate Incomes,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 1, 1984, 1A. . “Statement of Tom Weidner, Cranbury Township, July 1984,” typescript, copy attached to Thomas P. Weidner to Amy R. Piro, Deputy Chief Counsel, Governor Thomas H. Kean, Counsel’s Office files, Bill Files, 1984 – 85 Legislative Session, S2046, Conditional Veto April 26, 1985, folder 5 of 6, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, N.J.; see also Harry Sayen, “‘Fair Share’ Housing Could Spell Doom for Cranbury,” Princeton Packet, Aug. 14, 1984.

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. “Cranbury Sauce,” editorial, Trenton Times, Sept. 7, 1984. . J. Jackson Walter, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation, to Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, March 26, 1985, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., Records, CHC. . Samuel N. Stokes, “Planning for Historic Preservation in Cranbury, New Jersey,” unpublished paper, Dec. 18, 1984, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., Files, CHC; and Stokes, interview with the author, Dec. 13, 2010. . Richard S. Walling, “Mount Laurel Decision Threatens Historic Preservation,” New Jersey Law Journal, May 2, 1985, 5. . Thomas P. Weidner to Amy R. Piro, March 12, 1985, in Governor Thomas H. Kean, Counsel’s Office files, Bill Files, 1984 – 85 Legislative Session, S2046, Conditional Veto April 26, 1985, folder 5 of 6, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton, N.J. Hereafter Governor Kean Counsel’s Office files . . . April 26, 1985. . W. Cary Edwards, Chief Counsel, Amy R. Piro, Deputy Chief Counsel, et al., to Honorable Thomas H. Kean, Governor, April 8, 1985, Memorandum recommending conditional veto of Senate Committee Substitute (SCS) for S-2046 and S-2334 with Assembly Committee Amendments (“Passed Bill” Memo), 12, with approval check mark by the governor, in Governor Kean Counsel’s Office files . . . April 26, 1985, folder 4 of 6, New Jersey State Archives. . Governor’s Conditional Veto of SCS for S-2046 and S-2334 of April 22, 1985, N.J. Laws of 1985, Chapter 222, New Jersey State Archives. See also, “Governor Seeks Mount Laurel Compromises,” Cranbury Press, Apr. 24, 1985, 1A, 4A. . New Jersey Fair Housing Act, Laws of 1985, Chapter 222, New Jersey State Acts 52:27 D-301, at 966 – 994. . “Housing Associates Marks 25th Year,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 7, 1988, 1. . Cranbury Housing Associates, “1972 Annual Report,” 3, CHC. . Mark Berkowsky to the author, July 7, 2010. See also the CHA Web site at http://www.cranburyhousing.org/history.htm. Accessed June 30, 2011. . Samuel N. Stokes with A. Elizabeth Watson, Saving America’s Countryside: A Guide to Conservation, for the National Trust for Historic Preservation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), xii – xiii, xvi, 38 – 39, 238 – 239, Frank A. Wright’s quotation on 239. . “Hippies, Yippies = Yuppies,” Cranbury Press, Mar. 27, 1985, 1A, 17A; the houses in Shadow Oaks in the early 1980s had cost $175,000 to $250,000. . “A Single-Family Project in a 19th-Century Setting,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 1995. . “Hagerty Senior Citizens Housing Project,” one-page typescript, CHC. . Harvey S. Moskowitz, interview with the author, Oct. 29, 2010. . Cranbury Housing Associates Web site, http://www.cranburyhousing.org/ history.htm; accessed May 1, 2010. . Cranbury Housing Associates, “History of CHA & Affordable Housing in



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Cranbury, June 30, 2008,” Tables “Summary of Cranbury’s Affordable Housing Obligations and Compliance, One & Round Two Compliance,” 5 – 6, CHC. See also “Profile of Selected Housing Characteristics, Cranbury,” from Table DP-4, U.S. Census of 2000, accessed May 11, 2010. Mark Berkowsky, presentation to the Township Committee, Feb. 8, 2010, www .cranburytownship.org/Presentation_Web_presentation_of_ Feb-8 – 2010; accessed May 11, 2010. “Christie Issues Conditional Veto on Affordable Housing Compromise Bill, Favoring Original,” Newark Star-Ledger, Jan. 25, 2011, 12; “Christie to End Affordable Housing Panel,” Newark Star-Ledger, June 30, 2011, 33. On the Farmland Preservation Project and a list of preserved farmland in Cranbury, see www.nj.gov/agriculture/sadc/farmpreserve/. Lyn Green, president, Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, to Gov. Thomas Kean, Dec. 15, 1987; and similar by others, CHC; New Jersey DOT, Public Hearing for the Proposed Route 92 Freeway, Dec. 17, 1991 (Trenton, N.J., 1991); “Route 92 Plan Loses Funding,” Asbury Park Press, Nov. 30, 2005. “Stults Farm History,” www.stultsfarm.com/about.php. Accessed May 14, 2010. “Cranbury Votes to Preserve Farmland,” Cranbury Press, May 25, 1991, 1A. Shelley S. Mastran, “The Cranbury Preservation Project Final Report, submitted to the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society,” May 2002, 2, CHC. Definitions of eligible and preserved land and farmland may vary. Mastran calculated 75 percent of farmland in the agricultural zone had been preserved, putting Cranbury in the top 1 percent nationally, she reported. An earlier tabulation is in “Town Exceeds Farmland Goal: Aggressive Approach Results in Preservation,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 10, 2001, 1A, 7A. For the 63 percent figure, I am indebted to Lorraine Jones of the Cranbury Tax Assessor’s Office, who made the calculation for me from figures in the township’s 2011 Assessor’s Field Book and online. In July 2011, Jones reported that there were 2,877 acres of preserved farmland among the 4,592 acres in Cranbury in the farmland preservation program for tax purposes, or a preservation ratio of 62.65 percent (35 percent of all the land in Cranbury Township). Those 2,877 acres did not include 354 acres of preserved vacant land that was not in the farmland tax program, nor did they include other open land that was not qualified as farmland for tax purposes, such as stream corridors preserved through the Green Acres or other programs. Nor did the 2,877 acres include the 80-acres of forested wetlands on the north side of Plainsboro Road preserved by the township in early 2011. The actual percentage of preserved land in Cranbury, therefore, was even higher than 63 percent. Lorraine Jones, interview with the author, July 5, 2011. New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program, Overview, and Table of Preserved Farmland, www.nj.gov/agriculture/sadc/farmpreserve/ and www.cranburytownship.org; accessed May 12, 2010.

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. “Finances and History Regarding the Proposed Acquisition,” fact sheet and accompanying map, from Cranbury Taxpayers Coalition, William L. Bunting Jr., “West Property” file, CHC. . “Cranbury Gives Up on West Tract Deal,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 30, 1992, 1A. “West Property Change Eyed,” Cranbury Press, Aug. 15, 2008, 1A, 5A. . “Cranbury Babe Ruth Field Sees First Ball Games,” Cranbury Press, May 21, 2010, 3A. . D&R Greenway Land Trust, www.drgreenway.org; accessed Nov. 8, 2010; William Rawlyk, D&R Greenway, interview with the author, Nov. 15, 2010. . “All Farms on Plainsboro Road Preserved in 500-Acre Vista,” Cranbury Press, Mar. 25, 2011, 1A, 6A. . “ ‘I.Q.’ Crew Hits the Bricks in Cranbury,” Cranbury Press, May 18, 1994, 1A, 5A.

“‘’¤နœšŠœš¤“š‘¤’ŽªŽš¤®ဖŊ¡£¤Žš¤§¡®ထ ၺၸၸၸဵၺၸၹၹ . “Cranbury Approves Sweetwater [Construction Company] Project at Old PNC Bank,” Cranbury Press, Nov. 5, 2010, 1A, 10A. . State of New Jersey, Manual of the Legislature of New Jersey, 1981 (Trenton, N.J.: Edward J. Mullen Pub., 1981), 915; and ibid., 2001, 972. . “Close-Knit Feeling Key to Cranbury’s [Educational] Success,” Trenton Times, Mar. 11, 2001, A1, A12. See also Audrey Smith, “Cranbury School,” in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury, 1697 – 1997, 53 – 54; and http://education .state.nj.us/rc/historical.html. . U.S. Census Bureau, Census of 2000, “Profile of Selected Social Characteristics” and “Profile of General Demographic Characteristics,” Geographic Area: Cranbury Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey. . “I-95’s Exit 8A Is a Magnet to High-Tech Warehouses,” New York Times, May 2, 1999, XI-1, 4. . Cranbury Township, “Warehouse Summary, May 2006,” and a “Permit Query Report 07/01/10,” for 1998 construction, lists the individual warehouses. Gregory J. Farrington, Cranbury construction official, provided listings; the author did the aggregate tabulations. . Lisa Beamer with Ken Abraham, Let’s Roll!: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Pub., 2002), 187, 214; “Cranbury Family Mourns Its Hero,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 28, 2001, 1 – 2; “Beamer Memorial Set for Saturday,” Cranbury Press, Sept. 13, 2002, 1.



œ¤Ž£¤œŠ‘Ž£ၺၺၺဵၺၺႁ

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“šŽန¡Šš‹¦¡®ထဣšŽœ˜Ž¡“ŒŠဠ£ œ£¤ŽŠ¦¤“§—˜Š——œªš£ဤ . “The Preliminary State Development and Redevelopment Plan for the State of New Jersey” (Nov. 1988), Vol. I, 12. . Jan Morris, “Those Places You Never Forget,” New Choices (Oct. 1997), 32; Betty Wagner called my attention to this article. . Constantine Katsifis, quoted in “Parents Want New CSA [Chief School Administrator] to Value Close-Knit Town,” Cranbury Press, Jan. 21, 2011, 7A. . Betty Wagner, introductory letter to “Fellow Citizens,” Jan. 6, 1997, in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 1; “Cranbury Honors Its Retiring Township Historian,” Cranbury Press, Dec. 10, 2010, 1A, 16A. . Richard Moe, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation, to Betty Wagner, chairperson, Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Oct. 28, 1996, reprinted in Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury 1697 – 1997, 4. . “Christie: Property Tax Cap will Force Towns, Schools to Consider Mergers,” Newark Star-Ledger, June 16, 2010, 1; Shelly S. Mastran, “The Cranbury Preservation Project: Final Report, submitted to the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society,” May 2002, CHC. . Mark Berkowsky, quoted in Robert J. Salgado, “A Rural Town Fights to Keep Its Way of Life,” New York Times, June 19, 1988, New Jersey Section, 1, 8. . David Nissen, quoted in “A Chip Off the Old Block Party,” Newark Star-Ledger, July 2, 2010, 13, 23, a story about Cranbury’s summer block parties. . Harvey S. Moskowitz, now retired from Moskowitz, Heyer & Gruel, PA, Florham Park, New Jersey, interview with the author, Oct. 29, 2010. . Samuel N. Stokes to the author, Jan. 18, 2011; see also his “Remarks to the Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society,” Cranbury, N.J., Mar. 16, 2001, CHC. . Stokes, Saving America’s Countryside, xii – xiii, xvi, 3 – 5, 38 – 39, 238 – 239, 264 – 268.

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ĘĔĚėĈĊĘ Ćēĉ ĘĚČČĊĘęĊĉ ėĊĆĉĎēČ •••••

Because space limitations in the current volume preclude the inclusion of the more than six hundred endnotes and more detailed coverage and extensive bibliography in my original nearly 600-page, 130,000-word history of the town, Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., is reproducing that original preproduction manuscript as a separate edition in bound, photocopied pages, under the title Cranbury: A New Jersey Town from the Colonial Era to the Present: Reference Edition. Copies of this Reference Edition are available at the following places: Cranbury History Center, Cranbury Museum, Cranbury Public Library, Cranbury Town Hall; Special Collections at Rutgers University’s Alexander Library in New Brunswick; the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark; and the New Jersey State Archives and Library in Trenton.

¡Œ’“¨Ž£ Cranbury: The Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society Archives; Cranbury History Center; Cranbury Landmarks, Inc. Archives; Cranbury Public Library; and Cranbury Township Archives Madison: United Methodist Archives and History Center Newark: New Jersey Historical Society Archives New Brunswick: Special Collections, Alexander Library, Rutgers University Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society Archives Princeton: Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library Trenton: New Jersey State Archives

š¤Ž¡©“Žª£‹­¤’Ž¦¤’œ¡ထၺၸၸႀဵၺၸၹၹ Brent Barlow, Rebecca Beauregard, Frank J. Brennan Jr., Peggy Spahr Brennan, William L. Bunting Jr., Lillian Conley, Kathleen Cunningham, Elizabeth Willcox



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D’Agostino, Alan A. Danser, Arthur V. Danser, Susan Danser, Robert Diamond, Sally Edwards, John Fabiano, Gregory J. Farrington, Jean Golisano, Linda Harding, Thomas B. Harvey, Gay Ingegneri, Lorraine Jones, Gerry Kearney, Josette Kratz, Robert Kugler Jr., Carl Liedtke, Carol Lindenfeld, Marilyn Logan, Roberta Marlowe, Louis Mitchell, Harvey S. Moskowitz, Laura Bowering Mullen, Jerry Pevahouse, William Rawlyk, Linda Scott, Patricia Scott, Audrey Smith, Mahbubeh Stave, Samuel Stokes, Don Jo Swanagan, Virginia Swanagan, Roi Taylor, Lisbeth Veghte, Elizabeth Wagner, Thomas Weidner, Peter Wise, Betty Lou Ziegler

Žª£ŠŽ¡£ Cranbury Press, Hightstown Gazette, Hightstown Village Record, Newark News, Newark Star-Ledger, New Brunswick Home News, New York Times, Princeton Packet, Princeton Press, Trenton Gazette and Republican, Trenton Times

¡Š—“£¤œ¡“Ž£ Oral Histories, 1973 – 2000 (transcripts at Cranbury History Center) Clara Amend, Eugenie McE. Bunting, Myrna Wilson Doggett, James F. Eiker, Sara Perrine Hoffman, William Cole Hoffman, Stella LaBaw, Frances Bradley L’Hommedieu, Fred Nixon, Viola Phares Nixon, Elizabeth and Mary Perrine, Arthur Romweber, Wayne Stahl, Alma M. F. Stults, Emma Chamberlin Forman Stults, Stanley and Dorothy Stults, Marina Agnes Wilson, Alvin Lewis Updike Oral Histories, 2005 – 2009 (Rutgers Oral History Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.) John Ervin, Mary B. Moore (Mrs. Harold Liedtke)

ŽŒœ˜˜ŽšŽœœ–£Ššœœ–—Ž¤£ Brennan, Peggy S., and Frank J. Brennan Jr. Images of America: Cranbury. 2 vols. Dover, N.H.: Arcadia/Chalford, 1995 – 1998. Burroughs, Emma Mershon, for the Lions Club. Cranbury, N.J., History of Cranbury: 250 Years. Cranbury, N.J.: Lions Club of Cranbury, 1948. Chambers, John Whiteclay II. George Washington in Cranbury: The Road to the Battle of Monmouth, 2nd ed. Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, 2010. Clayton, W. Woodford, ed. History of Union and Middlesex Counties, New Jersey, with Biographical Sketches of Many of Their Pioneers and Prominent Men. Philadelphia, 1882. Clemens, Paul G.  E. The Uses of Abundance: A History of New Jersey’s Economy. Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1992.



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Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society. A History of Cranbury, New Jersey. Cranbury, N.J.; Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, 2007 ———. Walking Tour: Historic Cranbury. Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, 2006. Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, Cranbury, 1697 – 1997. Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Tercentennial Committee, 1997. Cunningham, John T. New Jersey: America’s Main Road. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966. Duany, Andrew, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. Suburban Nation: The Rise and Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000. Fishman, George. The African American Struggle for Freedom and Equality: The Development of a People’s Identity, New Jersey, 1624 – 1850. New York: Garland Pub., 1997. Gillette, William. Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854 – 1865. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Gordon, Felice D. After Winning: The Legacy of the New Jersey Suffragists, 1920 – 1947. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Grigg, John A. The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hahamovich, Cindy. The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870 – 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Hand, Susan C. New Jersey Architecture. Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1995. Harrison, Charles H. Tending the Garden State: Preserving Agriculture in New Jersey. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Hodges, Graham Russell. Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613 – 1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Karasik, Gary, and Anna M. Aschkennes, Middlesex County: Crossroads of History. Sun Valley, Calif.: American Historical Press, 1999. Karnoutsos, Carmela Ascolese. New Jersey Women: A History of Their Status, Roles, and Images. Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1997. Kraft, Herbert C. Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage, 10,000 b.c. – a.d. 2000. Stanhope, N.J.: Lenape Lifeways Books, 2001. Lurie, Maxine N., and Marc Mappen, eds. Encyclopedia of New Jersey. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Mappen, Marc. Jerseyana: The Underside of New Jersey History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University press, 1992. Mitnick, Barbara J., ed. New Jersey in the American Revolution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

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Moe, Richard, and Carter Wilkie. Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Morris, James. As I Saw the U.S.A. New York: Pantheon, 1956. New Jersey Historical Commission, “Steal Away, Steal Away .  .  .” A Guide to the Underground Railroad in New Jersey. Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey Historical Commission, n.d. [2002]. Schwartz, Helen. The New Jersey House. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Stokes, Samuel N., with A. Elizabeth Watson, et al., for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Saving America’s Countryside: A Guide to Rural Conservation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 2nd ed., with added author, Shelley S. Mastran, 1997. Walsh, Ruth Berg. Cranbury: Past and Present. Cranbury, N.J.: Privately printed, 1975.

 ŽªŽ—Ž¨Šš¤Ž‹“¤Ž£ Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society and Cranbury Museum. www.cranburyhistory.org; www.cranburyhistory.org/musum. Cranbury Lions Club. “Welcome to Cranbury, New Jersey.” www.cranbury.org. Cranbury School. www.cranburyschool.org/cbnj. Cranbury Township official web site. www.cranburytownship.org. Crossroads of the American Revolution Association. www.revolutionarynj.org. National Park Service. “Crossroads of the American Revolution in New Jersey.” www.nps.gov/crossroads. New Jersey Department of Agriculture. Farmland Preservation. www.nj.gov/ agriculture/sadc/farmpreserve. New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Green Acres Program. www.nj.gov/dep/greenacres.

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ĎēĉĊĝ •••••

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. Boldface entries denote street addresses. A&P Company, 131 abolitionists, 63 – 68; Anti-Slavery Society, 64 Adams, John Quincy, 50 affordable housing, 150, 191, 194 – 202, 204 – 205, 230; and builder’s remedy mechanism, 195 – 196; and Cranbury Housing Associates (CHA), 159, 180, 197, 201 – 202, 204 – 207, 230 – 231; Cranbury Township’s program for, 200 – 202, 206 – 208; and Fair Housing Act (1985), 199 – 200; and housing quotas, 194 – 195, 198, 200 – 201, 206 – 207; New Jersey Council on Affordable Housing (COAH), 199 – 202, 206 – 207; Parkside rental units, 206; Village Senior Housing, 206 African Americans, 16 – 17, 66 – 67, 73, 111, 136, 156 – 158, 163 – 164, 218. See also blacks African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, 66 – 67, 136 Agle, Charles K., 190 agribusiness, 46, 130, 144 – 145 agricultural products and services, 50 – 51, 52f, 80 – 81, 91 – 92, 92f; apples, 28, 132, 144, 185 – 186; blacksmiths, 11, 15, 22, 52, 77, 79, 93; chicken-processing plant, 142, 158, 185; corn, 80, 144 – 145, 230f; fertilizers, 80, 128 – 130, 133 – 134, 144; fruits and vegetables, 24, 28, 41, 50 – 51, 80, 132, 144 – 145, 144f, 154, 209, 209f, 210, 230f; grains, 11, 17, 21 – 22, 24, 28, 35, 48, 50, 80, 92, 154; during Great Depression, 126 – 130; hay and straw, 41, 79, 88, 92, 110, 129; hay-pressing facility, 79, 92; insecticides, 145; peaches, 28, 51, 52f, 80; potatoes, 80, 129 – 130, 132 – 135, 143, 154; slaughterhouse, 81; soybeans, 209; tanneries, 44, 52, 81; tinsmiths, 77, 82; tomatoes, 80, 144, 144f; wheat, 50, 80, 132, 145, 209;



wheelwrights, 22, 52, 82, 86. See also farmlands and farmers alcoholic beverages, 19 – 22, 28, 53, 103 – 106; and drunkenness, 19, 21, 32, 103 – 104, 110, 136; and malt houses, 22; and Prohibition, 106, 124 – 125, 127; and stills, 22; and temperance movement, 103 – 107, 124 – 125 Aler, Sam, 122 Allentown, 12, 19, 34, 36f, 37, 68 Amend, Clara E., 8f, 21f, 170 American Equal Rights Association, 103 American Hotel, 81 – 82, 217 American Party, 64 American Repertory Ballet, 88 – 89, 122 American Revolution, x, 33 – 42, 53 – 54, 56, 70, 89, 224; Continental Army, 34 – 40, 36f, 39f; “Cranbury troop of horse,” 35; George Washington in Cranbury during, x, 37 – 39; Monmouth, Battle of (1778), x, 35, 36f, 38 – 39, 39f, 40 – 41, 70; as “the Presbyterian rebellion,” 34 – 35; Princeton, Battle of (1777), 34; service records of, 175 American Spice Mills, 59, 83 – 85, 85f, 93, 97, 130 – 131, 178; coffee, 83 – 84, 130; flavor extracts, 83 – 84 American Steam Coffee and Spice Mills, 83 – 84. See also American Spice Mills apartment houses and complexes, 82, 88, 96, 153, 187, 189 – 190, 194, 206 – 207 Applegate (Appleget) family, 15, 69, 73, 79, 88 Applegate, Abijah, 76 Applegate, Charles, 93 Applegate, Thomas, 15 Applegate, W. Earl, 169 Applegate Court, 205 Appleget, Daniel, 87f

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ၺၾၺ architecture, ix, xi, 53 – 58, 93 – 98, 116 – 119; American Four Square (Prairie Box), 117 – 118; bungalow, 118 – 119; Cape Cod cottage, 118 – 119; carpenter Gothic style, 63, 94, 95f; Colonial Revival, 116 – 118, 146, 186; Craftsman’s style, 118; Dutch Colonial Revival, 116 – 117; Federal-style houses, 54 – 55, 55f, 56 – 57; “folk Victorian,” 81, 96; Gothic Revival, 58, 94 – 95, 95f, 96; Greek Revival, 13, 54, 58 – 59, 81; and historic preservation, 165 – 166; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 147; Mediterranean, 118; Queen Anne, 96 – 97, 97f, 98, 159; ranch style, 186; schoolhouse, 169 – 170; split-level, 186; Tudor Revival, 117; Victorian Italianate, 81, 96, 100; Victorian Vernacular, 55, 55f, 93 – 95, 95f, 96, 225, 225f Argento, Charles, 164 Armstrong, Donald N., 169 – 170 Asbury, Francis, 60 A. S. Cole & Son, Co., 82 – 83, 83f, 109, 127, 177 Ashfield family, 16 Ashfield, Lewis Morris, 32 – 33 Ashmore, Anthony, 5 – 6 Asians, 218 As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 139, 147 – 150, 166, 224 Assunpink Trail, 5 automobiles, 79, 113, 119 – 123, 120f, 129 – 131, 148; Buick, 133; Dodge, 122; garages and repair shops for, 122 – 123; Overland, 122; Plymouth, 122; Willys-Knight, 122 bands and bandleaders, 86 – 88, 87f, 93, 95f, 96, 112 – 113, 124; bandstands for, 113, 151f, 155, 179 banks and bankers, 44, 46, 81, 84, 92 – 93, 108, 145 – 146; First Constitution Bank, 216; during Great Depression, 126, 128 – 129, 133; and historic preservation, 166 – 167, 216; Midlantic Bank, 146; PNC Bank, 146, 216; and segregation, 150; and time capsule, 146. See also First National Bank of Cranbury Baptist churches, 3, 13 – 14, 18f, 28, 60, 159 – 160 Barclay family, 15, 167 Barclay, Charles, 33 Barclay, David, 15 Barclay, Ezekiel S., 91, 92f, 134, 144 Barclay, John, 15

šŽ¬ Barclay, Robert, Sir, 15 Barn Park, 181, 224; corncrib, 181; wagon house, 181 baseball fields, 112, 113, 155; and Babe Ruth League, 112, 211; Delany Field, 112 Basse, Jeremiah, 6 Beamer, Lisa, 221 Beamer, Todd M., 220 – 221 Beauregard, Rebecca (“Becky”), 159 Belcher, Jonathan, Governor, 32 – 33 Bencze, Jacqueline Sullivan (“Jackie”), 174 Bencze, Stephen, 190 – 191 Bennett and Clayton, 128 Bennett Place, 158, 206 Bergen family, 104 Bergen, P. R., 86 Bergen, William H., 76, 87f Bergen and Van Horn general store, 86 Bergen Drive, 206 Berkeley, John, Lord, 2 – 3 Berkowsky, Mark A., 197, 207 Bethel (House of God), 24, 26 – 27; plaque commemorating, 24 Bicentennial Celebration (1976), 146, 166, 175; Cranbury Bicentennial Quilt, 179 black churches, 66 – 67, 136, 159 blacks, 156 – 161; in American Revolution, 39; black children, 64, 136, 139 – 140, 141f; black servants, 56, 64 – 65; black slaves, 3, 16 – 17, 43; black soldiers, 69, 73, 143, 161; black students, 163 – 164; black women, 104, 140, 156 – 160, 164; as business owners, 157 – 158, 160 – 161; and civil rights movement, 150, 162 – 164; Cranbury Community Action Group, 162 – 163; and Cranbury Housing Associates (CHA), 201; entertainments of, 112; free blacks, 16 – 17, 43, 64 – 67; during Great Depression, 126 – 127, 135 – 140, 141f; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 150; as labor contractors, 135 – 136, 139; as migrant workers, 135 – 140, 141f, 149, 157, 201; as ministers, 136, 159; and racial violence, 137 – 139; on School Board (Board of Education), 157, 164; as teachers, 140, 163; in temperance movement, 104; in twenty-first century, 218; voting rights of, 102 – 103; during World War II, 140, 143. See also names of black individuals Blain, James, 26 Bodine (Bodin) family, 14

 Bordentown, 19, 48 – 49, 67; Trade School, 164; Washington House, 10 Bordentown and South Amboy Turnpike Company, 48 Bowne, Maria, 81 Boy Scouts, 171, 173 Bradley family, 69 Bradley, John J. (“Jack”), 59, 118, 130 Brainerd, David, Rev., x, 22 – 25, 25f, 26 – 27, 60f; on municipal seal, 22, 23f, 180 – 181 Brainerd, John, 27 Brainerd Cemetery, 22, 41, 66, 73 Brainerd Drive, 185 Brainerd Institute, 22, 96, 99 – 100, 106 – 108 Brainerd Lake, 21 – 22, 82, 106, 110, 110f, 120f, 185; boating on, 113, 114f, 155, 157 – 158; dam, 21, 82, 110f, 113, 120f, 155; dredging of, 156; fishing in, 155; “house on the lake,” 116, 117f; ice skating on, 113, 147, 148f, 149 – 150, 155, 223 – 224; public access to, 155; sailing on, 113; Village Park on, 155 – 156, 179 British journalists, 139, 147 – 150, 166, 224 Brokaw, Isaac, 52 Brown, Edward A., 76 Browne, John, Dr., 10 Bryan, William Jennings, 114 Buhler, Christopher, 88 Bull, William S., 115 Bunker family, 63 Bunker Hill, 22, 60f, 63, 154; 6 Bunker Hill, 63, 94; 10 Bunker Hill, 59, 118; 13 Bunker Hill, 117 Bunker Hill School, 63, 100, 158 Bunting, Eugenie McEdward (“Gene”), 140, 142, 149 Bunting, William L. Jr. (“Bill”), 95f, 142, 151, 170, 174, 197, 198f Bunting, William Lyman Sr., 140 Burlington, 3 – 6, 8, 10 – 11, 17 – 19, 56; Blue Anchor, 18 Burns, Allen E., 170 Burr, Aaron, x, 56 – 57 Burroughs, Emma Mershon, 175 Burroughs, George C., 77 Bush, George W., 221 business district, 22, 43 – 44, 51 – 53, 81 – 93, 98, 110, 127 – 129; appliance stores, 82, 88; bakeries, 88, 225, 225f; barbershops, 88, 112; beauty parlors, 158; black-owned businesses, 157 – 158, 160 – 161; bookstores, 171 – 172;

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butcher shops, 127; cabinetmakers, 52, 82; confectioneries, 89; coopers, 22; creamery, 81; dance studios, 88 – 89, 122, 226; dentists, 225, 225f; druggists, 82; dry goods stores, 82; florists, 123, 154, 158, 225; funeral homes, 82 – 83, 83f, 127; furniture stores, 82, 83f; garment industry, 84 – 86; general stores, 22, 28, 52, 79, 82 – 84, 86 – 88, 93, 111f, 123, 157, 171; gift shops, 177; grocery stores, 80, 84, 123, 130 – 131, 134; hardware stores, 89, 167; harness shops, 82, 89; hatters, 52; ice cream shop, 226; interior decorators, 225; leather goods, 82; livery stables, 81, 111, 129; lumber businesses, 82; meat markets, 171; milliners, 82, 89 – 90, 90f; pet shops, 172; shoemakers and repair shops, 52, 57, 160 – 161; specialty shops, 88; tailors, 52, 82, 89; tobacco shops, 82, 112 – 113; variety stores, 82; watch repair shops, 89, 98, 99f C&H Garage, 158 Calder, Hannah, 19 – 20 Calvinists, 3, 14 Camden, 49 – 50, 80, 144f Camden & Amboy (C&A) Railroad, 45f, 48 – 50, 51f, 69, 100, 147; western line, 78, 79f Campbell family, 15, 104 Campbell, John, 62 Campbell, Joseph, 80 Campbell Company, 80, 144f Campbell’s Tavern, 20 canals, 44, 48, 80; barges on, 48 Cape May, 67 caregivers, 159 – 160 carpenters, 70, 82, 160; apprentices, 6; carpenter-builders, 54, 63, 94 Carteret, 206 – 207 Carteret, Elizabeth, Lady, 3 Carteret, George, Sir, 2 – 3 Catholics, 35, 127 CBS Reports, 139 – 140 Cedar Brook, 211 cell phone towers, 213 – 214 cemeteries, 14, 22; Brainerd Cemetery, 22, 41, 66, 73; grave markers in, 16, 158, 176; old Baptist Cemetery, 14; Westminster Cemetery, 59 censuses, 176; federal (1790), 16, 43; federal (1840), 64; federal (1920), 119; federal (2000), 217 – 218; Middlesex County

ၺၾၼ censuses (continued ) (1737 – 1738), 16; Middlesex County (1840), 64 Central Garage, 122 – 123 Chamberlin family, 104 Chamberlin, Albert, 91, 92f Chamberlin, Elizabeth (“Lizzie”), 92f Chamberlin, J. Edward, 132 Chamberlin & Barclay, Inc., 91, 92f, 128 – 130, 133 – 134, 143 – 144, 158, 189 Chamberlin Brothers, 86, 88; Chamberlin Hall, 88; plate-glass windows, 88 Chambers, Amy P., 223f, 225f Chambers, David, 34 Chambers, John W., 55f, 230f Charmed by Claire, 88 children: black children, 64, 136, 139 – 140, 141f; in colonial era, 29, 31; cooking potatoes, 135; and Fresh Air Fund, 149; and I.Q (movie) filming, 214; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 148 – 149; memorial foundation for, 221; of migrant workers, 136, 139 – 140, 141f, 171 Chinmaya Mission Tri-State Center, 218 Christiansen, Christian, 143 Christiansen, Paul J., 161 Christie, Chris, 207 Christmas, 102, 223 – 224 Christopher, Mary, 177 churches, x, 3, 43 – 44, 53, 82, 102, 116; and baptisms, 17, 27, 43, 65; in Bethel, 24, 26; black churches, 66 – 67, 136, 159; and Civil War, 70; evangelical traditions, 61; funerals in, 82; records of, 176. See also names of churches Church of England, 15, 34 – 35 civic participation, 190, 199 – 201, 205, 211 – 214, 227, 231 civil rights movement, 150, 162 – 164, 194 Civil War, 64 – 66, 68 – 73, 71f, 224; Appomattox Courthouse, 73; Cold Harbor, Battle of, 70 – 71; Company B (28th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment), 69; Company H (14th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment), 69 – 73; Gettysburg Battlefield, 165; Monocacy River Valley, Battle of, 71 – 72; monuments, 66, 73; Petersburg (Va.), 70, 72; Reconstruction, 102 – 103; reenactors of, 223f; Spotsylvania, Battle of, 70; Sumter, Fort, 69; Wilderness Campaign (Va.), 70 – 71. See also Union Army Civil War Drill Room, 69 – 70, 122

šŽ¬ Clarke, Benjamin M., 52 Clarke, David, 88 Clarke, James, 52 Cline, Hannah S., 104. See also Garrison, Hannah S. C. Clinton, Bill, 226 Clinton, Henry, Sir, 35, 36f, 39 – 40 Cold War, 150, 220 Cole family, 104 Cole, Alexander S., 82 – 83 Colles, Christopher, 18f colonial era, ix – x, xf, 1 – 42, 229; and Brainerd, David, Rev., x, 22 – 27, 23f, 25f; and Cranbury, 4 – 8, 11 – 17; and Cranbury Brawl, 31 – 33; daily life in, 28 – 31; and European settlers, 1 – 7, 14 – 17; and Franklin, Benjamin, ix – x, 9 – 11, 9f, 19; French and Indian War, 26 – 27; King George’s War, 26; and Native Americans, ix, x, 1 – 7, 22 – 27, 23f, 25f; Royal Charters, 12; royal governors, 4, 6, 32 – 33; transportation in, 17 – 22, 18f, 29. See also American Revolution; churches; gristmills Colonial House, 82 Combs family, 16 Combs, James, 64 Combs, Jonathan, 33 commercial development, xi, 146, 152, 184 – 186, 188, 195, 218 – 220; light industry zone, 185 – 186, 203, 214, 218; warehouse development, 203, 208, 218 – 220, 231 Congregational church, 3, 35 Congress, U.S., 42, 124 – 125, 152, 214; National Historic Preservation Act (1966), xii, 165, 174; rededication of post office, 221; women in, 125 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 138 Conley, Lillian S., 91f Conover family, 14, 16, 73, 174 Conover, Clifford, 185 Conover, Harmon, 52 Conover, James H., 76, 87f, 113, 114f, 116, 117f Conover Farm, 114f, 185 conservation, xii, 191, 208, 210 – 211, 229. See also farmland preservation; historic preservation Constitution, U.S.: Eighteenth Amendment (1917), 106, 125; Nineteenth Amendment (1919), 125; Twenty-first Amendment (1933), 125 Continental Congress, 33, 38, 40

 Continental Insurance Company, 218 corporations, 153; Audi, 219; Carter-Wallace pharmaceutical company, 153, 186; David Sarnoff Research Center, 153; Forrestal Research Center, 153; General Foods, 186; ProLogis Company, 219 – 220; RCA Space Center, 153; Rockefeller Group, 219; Squibb, 219; Tommy Hilfiger, 219; Volkswagen, 219; Western Electric Research Center, 153. See also names of corporations Corson, William M., 81 Corson’s Tavern, 81 – 82 Country Crossing, 204 courts. See judicial system Covenhoven family, 14, 16 Cox, Mary, Mrs., 60 Cox, Williams M., 132 cranberries, 4, 75 Cranberry, as early spelling of village name and decision to change spelling, 75 Cranberry Tavern, 8. See also Rescarrick’s Inn Cranbury, 1697 – 1997 (Cranbury Tercentennial Committee), 180, 226 Cranbury Bargain Basement, 140, 141f, 171 Cranbury Bookworm, 171 – 172 Cranbury Brawl, 31 – 33 Cranbury Brook, 1, 4 – 8, 11, 15, 17, 18f, 21, 24, 37, 52, 58, 97, 120f, 208; Cranbury Brook Preserve, 211; West Property on, 210 – 211 Cranbury Building and Loan Association, 216 Cranbury Business and Professional Association, 223 Cranbury Cobbler, 160 – 161 Cranbury Community Action Group, 162 – 163 Cranbury Day, 156, 223 Cranbury Estates, 186 Cranbury First Aid Squad, 159; 1957 Cadillac ambulance of, 183 Cranbury General Store, 157 Cranbury Greene, 204 – 205 Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society (CHPS), 22, 109, 178f, 198f, 226 – 228, 230; and affordable housing, 196 – 198, 200; Barn Park, 181, 224; and cell phone towers, 214; Cranbury History Center, 100 – 101, 112, 180, 198f, 207; Cranbury Museum, 49, 58, 174, 176 – 178, 178f, 179, 223; establishment of (1967), 156, 174 – 176; and farmland preservation, 191, 193; and Gristmiller’s House, 180; and Historic District, xii, 53 – 54,

šŽ¬

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175 – 176, 179, 181, 183, 197, 202 – 204, 206, 211, 224 – 226, 225f, 230 – 231; Historic Preservation Committee, 197; July 4th celebration, 223; library of, 179 – 180; and Old School Building, 169 – 170, 173 – 175; protest petition to state legislature, 196; Traditional Christmas Tea, 223; Walking Tour guide, 54 Cranbury Historic District. See historic preservation Cranbury Housing Associates (CHA), 180, 197, 201 – 202, 204 – 207, 227, 230 – 231; board of, 159, 202 Cranbury Inn, x, 20, 53 – 54, 68, 124, 127, 214; Tap Room, 124 Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., 198f, 226 – 227; and affordable housing, 196 – 197, 200; and Barn Park, 181; and farmland preservation, 191, 193; and Gristmiller’s House, 180; and Old School Building, 156, 170 – 173, 230; protest petition to state legislature, 196. See also historic preservation Cranbury Lions Club, 128, 137, 142, 149 – 150; Citizenship Award, 177; Memorial Day Parade, 222 – 223, 223f; pancake breakfast, 223; scholarship, 221 Cranbury Manufacturing Company, 84 – 86 Cranbury Museum, 49, 58, 174, 176 – 180, 178f; Cranbury Tercentennial Quilt in, 180, 213f; library’s beginnings in, 179 – 180; “Sara’s Garden,” 178; Traditional Christmas Tea, 223 Cranbury Mutual Fire Insurance Company, 76 – 77, 84 Cranbury Neck Road, 121, 122f, 133, 181, 186, 212; Chinmaya Mission Tri-State Center on, 218; Stults Farm on, 145, 208 – 210, 209f Cranbury News, 77 Cranbury Paint and Hardware, 88 Cranbury: Past and Present (Walsh), 175 – 176 Cranbury Press, 47f, 77 – 78, 154, 176; on Fresh Air Fund, 149; on Garrison, Hannah S. C., 104; on Goodwin Band, 87; on growth corridor, 153; on historic preservation, 168; on Main Street traffic, 119, 121; on migrant workers, 136 – 137; on racial tensions, 162 – 163; on zoning ordinances, 192 Cranbury Press Building, 77 – 78, 142, 217 Cranbury Public Library and Foundation, 217 Cranbury Red Cross chapter, 142

ၺၾၾ Cranbury School, 143, 151, 177, 211, 216 – 217; and baseball field, 112; as “Cranbury Prep,” 217; and migrant workers’ children, 139 – 140; National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence award, 217; racial tensions at, 162 – 164. See also historic preservation; Old School Building Cranbury Station, 45f, 49 – 51, 51f, 53, 78 – 79, 79f, 91 – 92, 112, 113, 121; and Chamberlin & Barclay, Inc., 128, 130, 134, 143 Cranbury Station Road, 88, 135, 154; 6 Cranbury Station Road, 94; 15 Cranbury Station Road, 185 Cranbury Taxpayers Coalition, 211 Cranbury Township: affordable housing program, 200 – 202, 206 – 208, 230 – 231; area of, xi; assessors, 76, 86; bird’s-eye view of, 107f, 108; Board of Recreation Commissioners, 155; Citizens Committee for the Master Plan, 191; Citizens Committee on Planning, 188 – 190; commissioners of appeal, 76; Committee on the Preservation of Historic Sites, 170; Cultural and Heritage Committee, 223; Historical Preservation Advisory Committee (HPAC), 202; incorporation of (1872), 74 – 76, 100; maps of, 228f; Master Plans, 156, 190 – 194, 202 – 203, 205, 219, 225, 229, 231; mayors of, 125, 159, 175, 190 – 192; municipal offices, 76, 171 – 173; Municipal Seal of Cranbury Township, 22, 23f, 180 – 181; Park Planning Committee, 155; permit office, 171 – 172; Planning Board, 175, 179, 185, 188, 190 – 191, 193, 200, 202, 204 – 206, 220, 227; Police Department, 121, 136, 154, 180; population of, 74, 119, 127 – 129, 136, 143, 146, 154, 168, 216 – 217; as Potato Capital, 133; Public Works Department, 155, 161; School Board (Board of Education), 106, 156 – 157, 163 – 164, 167 – 171, 173, 177, 216 – 217; tax collectors, 76, 171; Temperance Alliance, 105; Tercentennial Committee, 179 – 180, 226; Tercentennial of (1997), xii, 156, 179 – 180, 213f, 226; time capsule, 146; Town Hall, 23f, 146, 172f, 173, 224, 226; town meetings and public hearings in, 188 – 190, 193, 229; township administrator, 173; Township Attorney, 192; township clerks, 76, 86, 171; Township Committee, 23f, 76, 81, 125, 132, 136, 154, 169, 173, 187 – 188, 192 – 194, 196, 199 – 202, 206, 210 – 211, 227; Township

šŽ¬ Historian, 175, 179, 193, 198f, 225; and transfer development credits (TDC), 193 – 194; Village Planning Area, 204; welcoming signs of, 22, 102; zoning ordinances, 153, 185 – 197, 201, 204, 208, 214, 218 – 219. See also Cranbury village; farmlands and farmers; historic preservation Cranbury Vigilant Society, 120 Cranbury village, 4 – 8, 11 – 17, 74, 82; maps of, 18f, 45f; population of, 43 – 44, 64; variant spelling of, 4, 45f, 75. See also Cranberry; Cranbury Township Cranbury Volunteer Fire Company, 77f, 78, 150, 181 – 183, 189; 1934 Dodge fire engine of, 183; bucket brigades, 78; centennial of, 183; Hand Pumper of, 183; and Santa Claus, 224 Cranbury Walk, 204 Cranbury Water Company, 78, 215 Cranbury Woman’s Club. See Woman’s Club of Cranbury “Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area, The,” 42 Crossweeksung, 23. See also Crosswicks Crosswicks, 19, 23 – 24, 67 – 68 Crosswicksung Trail, 4 Cubberly Court, 205 Cunningham, John T., 146 – 147 Curry, Joseph Ellsworth, Rev. Dr., 131 D&R Greenway Land Trust, 211 D’Agostino, Elizabeth (“Betty”), 124 D’Agostino, Maurice J. (“Doc”), 124 Daneer, E. T., 86 Danser family, 122 Danser, Alan, 192, 199 Danser, Arthur V. (“Bub”), 192 Danser, Frank, 158, 203 – 204 Danser, Gertrude Harder, 90, 171. See also Harder, Gertrude Danser, Oscar, 167, 204 Danser, Ralph, 90, 122 – 123 Danser, Sarah H., 85f, 90f Danser, Susan A., 85f, 90f Danser Drive, 205 – 206 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), 175 Davis, Hampton, 138 Davis, Rebecca Thomas, 130 – 131 Davison family, 73, 104

 Davison, John S., 83 – 84, 98 Davison, William, 35 Davison & Silvers, 84 DeBow, Elizabeth, 225f DeBow, James, 35 Dehart, Cornelius, 35 Delaware and Raritan (D&R) Canal, 48, 215 Delaware River, 5 – 6, 10, 17, 19, 36f, 37, 48 Democrats, 76, 98, 125, 129, 137, 207; and Civil War, 64, 68 – 69; and New Deal, 127; in Progressive Era, 114 – 115; on Township Committee, 132, 169, 192, 199 depots. See Cranbury Station DeWitt blacksmith shop, 93 Dey (Dye) family, 14 – 16, 69, 73, 88, 104 Dey, Elias, 99 Dey, Gordon, 145f Dey, Hannah Disbrow, 53 Dey, Harvey, 79, 79f, 112 Dey, Harvey S., 120 Dey, John, 52, 88 Dey, Raymond, 137 Dey, Richard C., 76 – 77 Dey, William, 87f Dey Farm, 145f Dey Road, 54, 122, 145f Diamond, Robert, 230f Dickey, John M., 170 Dinner Belle restaurant, 158 Disbrow, Samuel Jr., 77 Disbrow, Sarah, 225f discrimination, racial, 159 – 160, 162 – 164. See also prejudices Ditmar family, 16 Ditmus family, 159 Ditmus, Lewis F., 67 Doggett, Ernest L. Sr. (“Pete”), 159 Doggett, Myrna Wilson, 157, 159 – 160 Douglas, Clinton, 162 – 163 Douglas, Sadie, 158 Douglas, Shadrach, 158 Douglas, Stephen A., 68 Douglas, Ulysses, 164 Douglas’s (Crosswicks), 19 Douglass College, 102 Downs, Charles A., 143 Downs, Sarah Jane Corson, 104 Drago, Anna, 170 Drago, Francesco, 170 Drew University, 106

šŽ¬

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Dubell, Margaret H., 178f Dujue, Monte, 160 Dujue, Pierre, 160 – 161 Duncan family, 15 Duncan, John, 88 Duncan’s general store, 86, 88 Dutch barns, 124 Dutch Neck, 58 Dutch Reformed church, 35 Dutch settlers, 2 – 3, 5 – 7, 14 – 15, 64, 124 Dye, Franklin, 132 Early, Jubal, 72 East Jersey, 2 – 5, 7, 9, 15; Proprietors Office (Perth Amboy), 5 East Windsor, 153, 187, 190, 208 – 209 Eastwood, Harbackkuch, 31 education, 61 – 63, 66 – 67, 75, 99 – 101, 103, 168; and black history course, 163; for developmentally disabled, 107; for migrant workers’ children, 136, 139 – 140, 141f; and WCTU, 105 – 106. See also schools Edwards, Jonathan, Rev., 27 Edwards, Sally, 140, 141f Edwards, W. Carey, 199 – 200 Ehrlich, Charles, 89 Eiker, James F., 112 – 113, 116, 128 Eiker, Kenneth E. (“Ken”), 151 elections: and bond issues, 168 – 169; election boards, 125; judge of elections, 86; national, 68 – 69, 114 – 115; School Board (Board of Education), 103, 106, 157, 164; state, 199; township, 76, 86, 125, 129, 168, 211 electricity, 77 – 78; electric floodlights, 113, 147; electric lights, 123; rural electrification projects, 123; solar panel farm for, 220; streetlights, 86, 110 Elizabeth (city of ), 5, 15, 19, 37, 69 Elizabethtown Water Company, 215 Elm Street, 60f, 63 elm trees, x, 22, 59, 60f, 98; Dutch elm disease, 155 Ely, Franklin D., 143 Embly, John, 81 eminent domain, 211, 213 Enclave, the, 205 English settlers and ancestry, 2 – 4, 6 – 7, 14 – 15, 28, 64, 218 Englishtown, 36f, 38 Englishtown Road, 36f, 38

ၺၾႀ entertainments, 111 – 113; concert series, 155; dance floors and pavilions, 124, 127, 155; dominoes, 112; euchre (card game), 112; jukeboxes, 127; movie theaters, 123; pool tables, 112; sleigh races and rides, 82, 112 – 113 Episcopal Church, 218 Ervin, John W., 127 Evans, Amy, 174, 176 – 178, 185 Evans, John W. (“Jack”), 185 Evans Drive, 185 Evans Tract, 154 – 155, 185 – 186 Everingham, Emma Perrine, 89 – 90. See also Harder, Emma Everingham Everitt, Frank B., Rev., 131 Ewart, James C., 132 farmhouses, 94, 95f, 122f, 179; of Conover, Clifford, 185; of Danser, Oscar, 167; of McKnight, Charles, Rev., 12 – 13, 23; as Underground Railroad station, 68; of Updike family, 181, 186. See also farmlands and farmers farmlands and farmers, ix, xi – xii, 43 – 46, 45f, 93, 122f; Agricultural Preservation Zone, 193 – 194, 203 – 204, 208, 210, 214, 219; and Barn Park, 181, 224; bird’s-eye view of, 107f, 108; and cash crops, 50, 80, 121, 132; and Civil War, 70; in colonial era, 4, 23f, 24, 27 – 31, 34 – 35, 41; Conover Farm, 114f, 185; and credit, 133; and crop rotation, 80, 209; Dey Farm, 145f; and farmstands, 132; during Great Depression, 126, 128 – 130, 132 – 140, 141f; and growth corridor, 152 – 153; and historic preservation, ix, xii, 166, 181, 186, 191 – 194, 197 – 200, 202 – 203, 205, 208 – 212, 219, 222, 224, 227 – 229, 228f, 230f; and housing developments, 146, 154, 185 – 194, 203 – 205; Hutchinson farm, 211; mechanized farming, 130, 133 – 134, 140, 144 – 145, 145f; and migrant workers, 134 – 140, 141f, 145f, 149; mixed farming, 51, 80, 132 – 133, 144; and mortgages, 133; on municipal seal, 22, 23f, 180; and Native Americans, 24, 27; New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program, 203, 208 – 211; parsonage farms, 59, 66; “Pick Your Own” farms, 145, 208 – 209, 209f, 210; potato farming, 80, 121, 129 – 130, 132 – 140, 141f, 143 – 145, 145f, 149, 154; and prisoners of war as farm workers, 142; and railroads,

šŽ¬ 49 – 51; Reinhardt farm, 212; and rural electrification projects, 123; and sale of development rights, 203, 208, 210, 212; “scientific farming,” 80; Stults Farm, 145, 208 – 209, 209f, 210; and superhighway construction, 208 – 209; and transfer development credits (TDC), 193 – 194; truck farming, 51, 132, 145; in twenty-first century, 217; Updike farm, 158, 181, 205; wheat and corn production, 50, 80, 132, 144 – 145; during World War II, 142 – 143. See also agricultural products and services Farmstead Way, 23 Farr family, 122 ferries, 5, 10 – 11, 47, 51, 56; Amboy Ferry, 11, 18 – 20; Coryell’s Ferry, 36f, 37; Redford’s Ferry, 10 fire company. See Cranbury Volunteer Fire Company firehouses, 21, 76, 143, 147 – 150; Cranbury Fire Company Museum, 182 – 183; iron ring as fire bell, 78, 116; new firehouse, 182 – 183; old Cranbury Firehouse, 159, 181 – 183; war memorial area near, 155 fire hydrants, 78, 110 fire insurance, 76 – 77, 84 fires, 84, 130, 182, 201 Firestone Tire Company, 186 First Constitution Bank, 216 First National Bank of Cranbury, 81, 84, 87, 92 – 93, 126; bank building, 93, 145 – 146, 166 – 167, 215 – 216; drive-up windows for, 167; renovation of, 166 – 167; takeover of, 146 First Presbyterian Church, x, 58 – 59, 111f; academy of, 13f, 44, 62 – 63, 100; blacks attending, 159; blood drive held at, 142; Book of Communicants, 17; in colonial era, 3, 11 – 14, 12f, 13f, 17, 18f, 24, 28, 34, 41, 58; elders of, 14 – 15, 58, 177; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 148 – 149, 224; merger of Presbyterian churches, 118, 131; and migrant workers, 136, 139; parsonage of, 12f, 13, 54, 66, 174, 181; Parsonage Plantation of, 181; Records of the Trustees, 17; Royal Charter of, 12; and slavery issue, 65; Strawberry Festival, 223; and temperance movement, 105; in twenty-first century, 218 Flammer, Robert, 178 Flatroc (nonprofit educational organization), 171

 Fleming, J., Miss, 89 Forman family, 174 Fort Dix, 140, 142 Four Seasons at Historic Cranbury, 205 Franklin, Benjamin, ix – x, 9 – 11, 9f, 19 Frazier, Ella Groves, 183 Frazier, John W., 108, 183 Free and Accepted Order of Masons, 101; Apollo Lodge No. 156, 101 Freehold, 36f, 37, 89, 160. See also Monmouth Court House freeholders, 76, 86, 125, 127, 132, 212 Freeman family, 16 – 17 Fresh Air Fund, 149 Frisch, Gladys, 174 Frito-Lay, 144 Garden State Land Company, 192, 203 – 204, 210 Garrison family, 104 – 108 Garrison, Charles Ford, Rev., 104 – 108 Garrison, Frances Elizabeth (“Beth”), 104 – 105 Garrison, Hannah S. C., 104 – 106 Garrison, Phillip, 104 – 105 Garrison, S. Olin, Rev., 107 gas lamps, 82 – 83 gas stations and pumps, 122 – 123; AMOCO (American Oil Company) station, 122; ESSO (Eastern Seaboard Standard Oil) station, 122; Exxon, 122; Sinclair Oil station, 123 gazebo bandstands, 151f, 155, 179 Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey, A, 44 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 102 George Davison Road, 205 George’s Road, 5, 7 – 8, 17, 18f, 60, 122 German settlers and ancestry, 89, 218 ghost stories, 124 Gibson, Mark M., Rev., 136 Gilbert, Beverly, 140 Golden Age Neighbors Club, 149, 171, 173 Golubieski, James, 170 Goodwin, James H., 86 – 87, 87f, 88, 93, 95f, 96, 112 – 113 Goodwin Band, 86 – 88, 87f, 112, 113, 124 Goodwin’s general store, 86 Gourgaud Gallery, 173 Grant, Ulysses S., 70 – 72 Great Awakening, 22, 27; Second Great Awakening, 60 – 61

šŽ¬

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Great Depression, 114, 126 – 131, 133 – 140, 147; script money during, 128 Great Post Road, 4, 7 – 8 Great Recession, 216, 219 Green family, 16 greenhouses, 154, 211 Griggs family, 69 Griggs, Jennie Cox, 132 Griggs, R. Stanley, 132 Griggs property, 154 Gristmiller’s House, 180 gristmills, 43 – 44, 51 – 52, 58, 81 – 82, 110f; in colonial era, 11, 17, 18f, 21, 21f, 28; demolition of, 159, 180; millpond, 21; mill site, x, 182; on municipal seal, 22, 23f, 180; Upper Room in, 159 Grover, John, 88 Grover’s general store, 86, 88 Groves family, 104 Groves, Anna, 91f Groves, Charles, 183 Groves, John G., 77 Groves, Marie, 91f Groves, Rose Ella, 91f Grubbs, Thomas, 11, 21 Gulick family, 14, 104 Gulick, Ann Amanda Stults, 86 Hagerman, Jacob, 52 Hagerty, Susan, 174 Hagerty, William (“Bill”), 123, 127 Hagerty’s road house, 127 Hagerty’s Sinclair Oil station, 123 Hagerty the Florist, 123, 154 Half-Acre Road, 153 Hall, Marina Agnes, 157. See also Wilson, Agnes Hall Hall, Mary, 15 Halsted, Jefferson, 52 Hamilton, Alexander, x, 37, 56 Hand, Frank, 158 Handley, Richard, 53 Hanlon, Patrick, 31 Harder, Charles S., 182 Harder, Emma Everingham, 89 – 90, 90f Harder, Frank, 89, 90f Harder, Gertrude, 89 – 90, 90f Harold O’Neil’s Store, xif Harr, Lee Stang, xf Harris, Robert, 151

ၺၿၸ Harrison, John, 5 – 7 Harvest of Shame (television documentary), 139 – 140 Harvey, Thomas B., 202, 206 Haverkamp, Robert, 180 Hays, Mary (“Molly Pitcher”), 40 Henry, Mary, 65 Henry, Symmes Cleves, Rev., 65 Heritage Park, 155, 167, 204; memorial in, 221 Hight (Hite), John, 14 Hightstown, 35; Agriculture Association, 80; Bennett and Mount, 128; and blacks, 158, 162; bypass for, 209; churches in, 14, 60, 67, 136, 159, 218; in Civil War, 68; Exit 8 on Turnpike, 146; High School, 151, 164, 168; Masonic Lodge, 101; and migrant workers, 136, 138; and railroads, 50, 78, 92, 130; State Police Barracks, 120; theaters in, 123; Wright’s Roses in, 211 Hightstown Gazette, 75 highways and roads, ix, xii, 44 – 48, 45f, 47f; accidents on, 121, 131; blinking warning lights on, 121; bypasses, 128, 209; in colonial era, 4 – 8, 11, 17 – 19, 18f, 229; construction of, 121, 127 – 128, 146, 165, 208 – 209; as dirt roads, 108, 110 – 111, 111f, 119 – 121, 122f; during Great Depression, 127 – 128; interstate, 165; and “Jersey barriers,” 121; macadam roads, 47, 47f, 111f, 121; traffic circles on, 121, 127, 185; traffic lights on, 121; turnpikes, 44, 46 – 48, 47f, 52, 68, 80. See also names of highways and roads Hill, John B., Rev., 67 Hinduism, 218 Hispanics, 218 Historical Society. See Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society (CHPS) Historic District. See historic preservation historic preservation, ix, xi – xii, 113, 150, 153, 164 – 167, 226 – 231; and affordable housing, 150, 180, 191, 194 – 202, 206 – 208; Agricultural Preservation Zone, 193 – 194, 203 – 204, 208, 210, 214, 219; Committee on the Preservation of Historic Sites, 170; “Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area, The,” 42; of farmlands, ix, xii, 166, 181, 186, 191 – 194, 197 – 200, 202 – 203, 205, 208 – 212, 214, 219, 222, 224, 227 – 229, 228f, 230f; funding for, 165, 170, 181, 190, 197, 203, 208, 210; Historical Preservation Advisory

šŽ¬ Committee (HPAC), 202; Historic District, xii, 53 – 54, 175 – 176, 179, 181, 183, 197, 202 – 204, 206, 211, 224 – 226, 225f, 230 – 231; historic markers, 111f; Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), 202; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 147, 166; National Historic Trail, 42; New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program, 203, 208 – 211; of Old School Building, 167 – 172, 172f, 173; outdoor plaques on buildings, 53, 78; purchasing development rights for, 203, 208, 210, 212; and streetscape, 58, 167, 182 – 183, 204, 208; of water tower, 215 Hite, John, 32 Hoffman, I. C., 111f Hoffman, Isaac, 83, 87f Hoffman, Joseph, 177 Hoffman, Margaret, 177 Hoffman, Sara Perrine, 175 – 178, 178f Hoffman, William, 177 Hoffman, William Cole, 83, 109 – 110, 112, 177 Hoffman, William F., 143 Hogarty, Ann, 174 Hoke, Ellen, 173 – 175 Hollywood, 214 Holmes, John C., Dr., 93 Hopewell, 36f, 37 Horner, Timothy, 53 horses, x, 48 – 49, 53, 79f, 81 – 84, 89; in American Revolution, 35, 41; in colonial era, 8, 11, 19; and fire companies, 77f, 78, 183; and funeral homes, 83; hitching posts for, 111f; horse races, 81 – 82, 112, 113; and potato farming, 134; and rural mail delivery, 98, 99f; theft insurance for, 120; at turn of century, 108, 110, 113, 129 – 130. See also stage lines; wagons hotels, 52 – 53, 68, 79, 81 – 82, 123 – 124, 130, 217; “temperance hotels,” 82, 105. See also names of hotels and inns House of Doctors, 54 – 55 housing development, 146, 150, 152 – 153, 164 – 168, 184 – 202, 229; and affordable housing, 150, 180, 191, 194 – 202, 230; and builder’s remedy mechanism, 195 – 196, 200 – 201; citizen opposition to, 190, 199 – 201, 205, 211; clustered housing, 203 – 205, 210, 231; Country Crossing, 204; Cranbury Greene, 204 – 205; Cranbury Walk, 204; Enclave, 205; and Evans Tract, 154 – 155, 185 – 186;

 and farmlands, 146, 165 – 166, 185 – 194, 208; and Griggs property, 154, 186; Parkview, 204; Shadow Oaks, 192, 203 – 204, 210 – 211; and sprawl, xii, 165 – 166, 193, 204; subdivisions, xii, 153 – 154, 184 – 186, 203 – 204; and suburbanization, ix, xi – xii, 129, 144, 146, 153, 203 – 206; transfer development credits (TDC), 193 – 194; and Updike farm, 205; West Property, 210 – 211; zoning ordinances for, 150, 153, 184 – 197, 201, 204 Huff, J. Schuyler (“Jack”), 192 Hughon (sachem), 6 – 7 Huguenots, 3, 14 Hutchinson farm, 211 iceboxes, 113 icehouses, 81, 113, 114f, 116, 117f incinerators, 212 indentured servants, 6, 10, 16, 31, 46; slaves as, 56, 64 – 66 Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF). See Odd Fellows Indians. See Native Americans industry, 74, 80, 85, 129 – 131, 142, 185 – 187, 189. See also corporations Ingegneri, Gloria (“Gay”), 124 Ingegneri, Thomas (“Tom”), 124 Inian, John, 5 inns. See hotels; tavern-inns insurance companies, 76 – 77, 84, 129, 183 inventions and inventors, 46, 49, 158 – 159 I.Q. (movie), 214 Irish, 3, 31, 218. See also Scots-Irish Isard, Walter, 152 – 153 Italian ancestry, 218 Jackson, Andrew, 64 Jamesburg, 146, 162 Jefferson, Thomas, 64 Jefferson Road, 23 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 159 Jenkins family, 16 Jersey City, 2, 51, 78, 125, 137 Jewell family, 16 Jews, 127 John Bull (locomotive), 49 – 50, 51f Johnson, Walter, 174 Johnson, William R., 76, 145f Johnstone, James, 28 John White Road, 212

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Jones, Lou Ida, 158 J. S. Silvers & Bro. Company, 84, 118, 130 – 131. See also American Spice Mills judicial system: and affordable housing, 194 – 199, 207; appeals, 196 – 199; chief justices, 27; court records, 176; grand juries, 32; and historic preservation, 168 – 169, 192, 194; and housing development, 184, 192, 194 – 199; judges, 138, 151, 196; justices of the peace, 37, 76, 124; lawsuit to “Stop the Swap,” 211; Mount Laurel I and II cases, 194 – 200, 230; municipal court, 124, 151; New Jersey Supreme Court, 194 – 195, 199, 207, 230; probate records, 16 July 4th celebration, 223 Kasperek, Larry, 141f Katzenbach, Edward J. Jr., 98 Katzenbach, Marie Louise Hilson, 98 Katzenbach, Nicholas deB., 98 Katzenbach, Wendy, 125 Kean, Thomas H., 199 – 200 Kehrt, Allan, 170 Kennedy, John F., 98 Kenze family, 69 Keystone, 219 King, Martin Luther Jr., 163 Kingston, 36f, 37 Korean War, 150 – 151, 161; and Combat Infantry Badge, 151; Osan-Ni Air Force Base, 151; and Second Infantry Division, 151 Kugler, Robert, 189 Ku Klux Klan, 139 LaBaw family, 73 LaBaw, Stella, 111 LaBaw Street, 205 Lafayette, Marquis de, x, 37 – 39 Lakeview Apartments, 88 landfills, 212; citizen opposition to, 212 land titles, 2 – 4, 6 – 7, 16, 31; and Native Americans, 6 – 7, 26 – 27 Lane, Aaron, 52 Laning, John, 81 Lasche Brothers’ General Store, 123, 157 Latinos, 218 Lawrence Township High School, 168 Lawrie, Gawen, 4 Lawrie’s Road, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 10 – 11, 13f, 15, 17 – 21, 18f, 48

ၺၿၺ Lawson, Edgar, 178f Lawson, Edgar H., 178f Lears, John C., 64 Lee, Charles, 38 – 39, 39f Lee, Helen de Forest, 170 Lee, Robert E., 70, 72 – 73 Lenape Court, 205 Lenape Indians, 1 – 2, 178; Unami Lenape, 1, 6 – 7, 22 – 23, 23f, 24 – 25, 25f, 26 – 27; wigwams, 25f Letteridge, John, 31 Levitt brothers, 146 Lewis, David Chambers, 48, 76 – 77, 216 Lewis, Jan, 97f L’Hommedieu, Frances Bradley, 123, 178 libraries, 77, 179 – 180, 216 – 217 Liedtke, Frederick (“Fritz”), 122 Liedtke, Mary, 99 Liedtke Drive, 205 Lincoln, Abraham, 68 – 70 Lindenfeld, Irme, 157 liquor trade, 82, 103, 105 – 106, 124 – 125; distillers, 82; liquor licenses, 82, 105, 127 Little family, 17 Livingston, William, 38 Logan, Kenneth, 154 Logan Drive: One Logan Drive, 154 Long Island, 3, 5 – 6, 14 – 15 Longstreet family, 14, 174 Lott, John, Dr., 55, 65 Lower Road, 5, 17 – 18 low-income housing. See affordable housing Lumoseecon (sachem), 6 – 7 Lutherans, 35 Mack, Dorothy (“Miss Mack”), 124 Madison, James, 34 Main Street, ix, x, 13f, 48, 51 – 55, 80 – 93, 98, 154 – 155, 227; beautification of, 102; bypass for, 128; as dirt road, 110 – 111, 111f, 119 – 121; drinking fountain on, 106; holiday decorations on, 223; horse races on, 81 – 82, 112, 113; ice cream sold on, 177, 226; I.Q. (movie) filmed on, 214; Memorial Day Parade on, 222 – 223, 223f; paving of, 121, 127 – 128; preservation of, 182 – 183, 190; traffic on, 121, 128, 148, 219. See also North Main Street; South Main Street Mamie’s restaurant, 157 – 158 Manalapan, 38, 58, 87f

šŽ¬ manses. See parsonages manufacturing, 46, 74, 83 – 87, 142 Maplewood Avenue, 15, 17, 48, 59, 86, 90, 111, 159; 2 Maplewood Avenue, 158; 8 Maplewood Avenue, 78; 10 Maplewood Avenue, 78, 155; 14 Maplewood Avenue, 155; 18 Maplewood Avenue, 157; 27 Maplewood Avenue, 70; 40 Maplewood Avenue, 118; 62 Maplewood Avenue, 116; black community on, 126, 138, 157 – 162, 164; Civil War Drill Room on, 69 – 70, 122; First Aid Squad headquarters on, 183 Maplewood Garage, 88, 122 Marsh, Thomas, 191 Masons, 101, 149; Masonic Lodge, 101 Massie, Andrew, 170 Massie, Andrew H. Jr., 191 master plans. See planning Matthau, Walter, 214 McHenry, James, 36f McKinley, William, 114 McKnight, Charles Jr., 34 McKnight, Charles, Rev., 12 – 13, 23 – 24, 34 Memorial Day, 161, 178f; Parade, 222 – 223, 223f Memorial Park, 21, 73, 102, 223; Cranbury War Memorial, 115, 143, 161 Mercer County, 74, 87, 130, 132 Mershon (Marchand) family, 14, 175 Mershon, D. C., 216 Mershon, George B., 93 Messeroll, David P., 76 Methodist Church, x, 60 – 61, 82, 96, 104 – 108, 107f, 218; blacks attending, 159 – 160; camp revivals, 197; Fellowship Hall, 61; parsonage of, 60 – 61, 104; Sunday School, 61, 159 M’Ghee, Robert, 31 Middlesex County, ix, xi, 74 – 75, 119, 130, 146, 166; Agricultural Board, 210; Board of Freeholders, 86, 127, 132, 179, 212; censuses of, 16, 64; and Civil War, 68 – 73; in colonial era, 3 – 5, 14, 28, 32 – 35, 37, 41; copper refineries in, 126; County Welfare Director, 137; Courthouse, 105, 176; Farm Bureau, 132; during Great Depression, 126; Improvement Authority, 211; landfills and incinerators in, 212; map of, 45f; potato farming in, 80, 132; in Progressive Era, 114; and slavery issue, 63 – 65; tercentennial of (1983), 179; WCTU in, 104 – 105; women elected in, 125. See also names of towns in Middlesex County

 Middleton, Enoch, 67 – 68 Middletown, 3, 15 Middletown Point, 34 migrant workers, 110, 134 – 140, 149, 157; and Cranbury Housing Associates (CHA), 201; fighting among, 154; improvements for, 139 – 140, 141f; and racial violence, 137 – 139; thrift store for, 140, 141f, 171 mills and millers, 82, 180; sawmills, 58, 82. See also American Spice Mills; gristmills Millstone Brook, 7, 18f Millstone Park, 155, 204 Millstone River, 1, 204, 211 – 212, 215 Millville, 104, 106 Moe, Richard, 226 Monmouth, Fort, 161 Monmouth County, 34, 69, 80, 87, 130, 133 Monmouth Court House, 36f, 37, 39. See also Freehold Monmouth Patent, 15 Monroe Street, 86. See also Maplewood Avenue Monroe Township, 12, 24, 38, 43 – 44, 64, 74, 81, 160, 189 – 190; Forsgate Industrial Park, 189; Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in, 159; Rossmoor retirement community in, 133, 146, 187; warehouse development in, 219 Montin, George, 67 Moody family, 164 Moody, Charles, 111 Moore, Harry, 87f, 98, 99f, 137 Morgan, Mary, 173 Morris, James, 139, 147 – 150, 166, 224 Moskowitz, Harvey S., 203, 205 – 206, 228 Mount family, 15, 69 Mount, John, 105 – 106 Mount Holly, 36f, 37 Mount Laurel I and II, 194 – 200, 230; appeal of Mount Laurel II, 196 – 199; and builder’s remedy mechanism, 195 – 196, 200 – 201. See also affordable housing Mount Olivet Baptist Church, 159 Mouret, Emily, Mrs., 89 movies, 119, 123, 147; I.Q. (movie), 214; silent films, 111f, 123 Mrs. Wakeley’s Candy Shop, 89 Muirhead family, 15 Mullen, Laura Bowering, 55f murals, historic, xf, 124 Murrow, Edward R., 139 – 140

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Nagurny, Peter, 154 National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, 165, 198 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 137 – 138, 194 – 195 National Historic Preservation Act (1966), xii, 165 National Historic Trail, 42 National Hotel, 81 National Register of Historic Places, xii, 165, 170, 175, 191, 197 National Trust for Historic Preservation, 165, 226, 228; Crisis Grant from, 197 Native Americans, ix, x, 1 – 7, 28, 155; in American Revolution, 39; and Brainerd, David, Rev., x, 22 – 23, 23f, 24 – 25, 25f, 26 – 27, 60f; Delaware Indians, 2; Indian arrowheads, 177; sachems (chiefs), 6 – 7; trails of, 4, 5, 17, 19. See also Lenape Indians nature preserves, 204 – 205, 210 – 212, 222, 226; Cranbury Brook Preserve, 211; and Green Acres, 208, 211; Unami Woods, 211; and watershed lands, 211, 226; and wetlands, 208, 211 – 212, 226 Newark, 61, 132; race riots in, 162 New Brunswick, 47 – 48, 64, 68, 78, 113, 119, 123, 152, 164; in colonial era, 5 – 7, 17, 19, 23, 33, 35; commuters to, 188, 217; Family Savings and Loan Association, 216; Saint Peter’s High School, 179 New Brunswick Home News, 137, 179 New Deal, 124, 127, 130, 133 New Jersey: Assembly, 21, 32, 34, 86, 125; attorneys general of, 98; Board of Agriculture, 132; Bureau of Farm Placement, 186 – 187; and Civil War, 68 – 69, 73; in colonial era, 1 – 5, 9 – 11, 14, 19 – 21, 26, 32 – 42, 36f; Committee of Correspondence, 33; Council on Affordable Housing (COAH), 199 – 202, 206 – 207; Department of Agriculture, 133; Department of Environmental Protection, 182; Department of Transportation (DOT), 208 – 209; diversity in, 3, 14; Fair Housing Act (1985), 199, 207; Farmland Preservation Program, 203, 208 – 211; fire code of, 219; Governor’s Council, 26, 32 – 33; governors of, 115, 199 – 200, 207, 226; Green Acres, 208, 211; growth corridor in, 152 – 153, 229; Historic Preservation Office, 68;

ၺၿၼ New Jersey (continued ) Historic Sites Commission, 170; Historic Trust (1967), 174; and “Jersey barriers,” 121; Jersey shore, 130; Medical Society, 37; Municipal Land Use Law, 184; Progressive Era in, 114 – 115; Provincial Congresses, 33 – 34; public schools in, 62 – 63; and railroads, 48 – 50, 51f, 100; Register of Historic Places, xii, 166, 174 – 175, 191; and slavery issue, 63 – 68; State Archives, 5, 175; State Board of Education, 98; state constitution, 62 – 63; State Police, 120, 137 – 138, 213; State Superintendent of Public Schools, 62; Supreme Court, 194 – 195, 199, 207, 230; temperance movement in, 103 – 106; tercentenary of (1964), 165 – 166, 173; women’s clubs in, 102 – 103 New Jersey American Water Company, 215 – 216 New Jersey Black Giant chickens, 134 New Jersey College for Women, 102 New Jersey Conference Women’s Home Missionary Society, 104 New Jersey Poets and Writers Association, 171 New Jersey Turnpike, xii, 68, 128, 146, 152, 190, 224, 229; Exit 8 and Exit 8A (“JamesburgCranbury Exit”), 146, 187, 219, 229 – 230; truck stops on, 212 – 213; Turnpike Authority, 146, 212 – 213 newspapers, 30 – 31, 44, 67, 69, 201; and newsstands, 112. See also names of newspapers Newton, William, 52 New York City: in colonial era, 2 – 3, 7, 9, 11, 18 – 20, 29, 34 – 35, 40; commuters to, 188; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 147 – 148, 150; Manhattan, 2 – 3, 7, 9, 11, 85, 147 – 148, 224; markets in, 132; New York – Philadelphia corridor, 47 – 48, 47f, 128, 186, 189, 195 New York Herald Tribune, 149 New York Journal, 31 New York Times, 141f New York Weekly Gazette, 11 Nickles, John, 31 Nicola Court, 205 Nicolls, Richard, Colonel, 2 9/11 terrorist attacks, 220 – 221 Nissen, David, 209f, 227 – 228 Nissen, Lee, 180, 226 Nixon, Fred, 157 – 158 Nixon, Richard, 162 Nixon, Robert, 35

šŽ¬ Nixon, Samuel, 67 Nixon, Viola Phares, 157 – 159 North Main Street, 17, 53, 60f, 85f, 225f; 1 North Main Street, 97, 97f, 98, 159; 5 North Main Street, 88; 6 North Main Street, 54 – 55; 10 North Main Street, 76, 81, 96; 11 North Main Street, 93, 112; 13 North Main Street, 77, 142, 217; 14 North Main Street, 81; 21 North Main Street, 60; 22 North Main Street, 82; 23 North Main Street, 63; 29 North Main Street, 88, 122 – 123; 30 North Main Street, 98, 101; 31 North Main Street, 89 – 90, 98, 99f, 171; 32 North Main Street, 93, 108, 215; 33 North Main Street, 88; 39 North Main Street, 123; 43 North Main Street, 86; 46 North Main Street, 171; 54 North Main Street, 171 – 172; 55 North Main Street, 112; 60 – 62 North Main Street, 123, 157; 63 North Main Street, 160; 65 North Main Street, 98; 66 North Main Street, 89; 79 North Main Street, 123; 82 North Main Street, 91f, 183; 85 North Main Street, 59; 86 North Main Street, 118; 88 North Main Street, 118; 95 North Main Street, 96; 107 North Main Street, 54 – 57; 128 North Main Street, 119; 135 North Main Street, 116; elm tree on, 22; numbering sequences for buildings on, 99; traffic signal on, 121 Norton, Mary T., 125 Odd Fellows, 101, 115, 149; Lady May Rebekah Lodge No. 94, 101; Middlesex Lodge No. 90, 101; Odd Fellows Hall, 98, 101, 123, 159 office complexes, xii, 153, 165, 203, 218 – 219, 231 Old Cranbury – Hightstown Road, 67, 127, 131, 142, 158, 201, 205 – 207 “Old Reliable” brand name, 129, 134 Old School Building, 139 – 140, 156, 177; as Historic Landmark, 169 – 170, 172f, 230; on municipal seal, 22, 23f, 180; preservation of, 167 – 173; Save the Old School Committee, 168 – 170. See also Cranbury School Old School Education and Community Center, 171 – 173; at Town Hall, 23f, 146, 172f, 173, 224, 226 Old Tennent Church (Manalapan Twp.), 87f Old Trenton Road, 13, 23, 112, 121, 123, 137, 142, 157 – 158, 203 – 205, 230f Oliveira, Elias J., 145f

 O’Neil’s Grocery Store, 123 oral histories, 109, 112 – 113, 156 – 157, 159 – 160, 176, 180. See also names of people giving oral histories orchards, 8, 28, 34, 41, 51, 57, 154, 185 – 186; Eastview Orchards, 132 Order of the Eastern Star, 101; Brainerd Chapter No. 132, 101 Osgood, Frances, 173 Ostergaard, Magnus W. (“Bill”), 161 outhouses, 107f, 108, 180 Owens, John, 158 Owens, William, 87f Pack, Mike, 142, 158 Pangburn, Stephen, 33 – 34 Paramount Pictures, 214 Park Place East: 4 Park Place East, 58, 177 – 178; 9 Park Place East, 96 Park Place West, 14, 59, 84, 85f, 161, 206, 210 – 211, 217 parks, 190, 206; Barn Park, 181, 224; Heritage Park, 155, 167, 204, 221; Memorial Park, 21, 73, 102, 115, 143, 161, 223; Millstone Park, 155, 204; Thompson Park, 24; Village Park, 155 – 156, 179, 206, 223 Parkside rental units, 206 Parkview Drive, 204 Parsonage Lane, 13 parsonages: First Presbyterian Church, 12f, 13, 54, 66, 174, 181; Methodist Church, 60 – 61, 104; Parsonage Barn, 181; Second Presbyterian Church, 59, 98 – 99, 102, 118 Perrine (Perrin) family, 14 – 15, 69, 73, 104, 133, 175 Perrine, Arthur E., 133 – 134, 178 Perrine, Clarence, 87f Perrine, Daniel, 30 – 31 Perrine, Elizabeth, 178 Perrine, Harriet, 177 Perrine, Isabel, 14 Perrine, James, 60 Perrine, James R., 143 Perrine, John, 14 Perrine, Mary, 178 Perrine, Matthew, 14 Perrine, Peter, 53 Perrine, Sara Isabel, 177. See also Hoffman, Sara Perrine Perrine, Symmes H., 177

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Perrine, Symmes H., Mrs., 177 Perrine, William D., 79, 92 Perrine, W. P., 78 Perrine Band, 124 Perrineville Road, 24 Perth Amboy, 119, 206 – 207; in colonial era, 3 – 8, 10 – 11, 14 – 15, 17 – 20, 28, 31 – 32; “Pleasant View” mansion in, 56 Petty family, 79, 104 Petty, John, 59 Petty, Nelson, 89 Petty Road, 204 Phares family, 159 Phares, James, 85f Philadelphia: African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in, 66 – 67; and Burr, Aaron, 56 – 57; in colonial era, 4, 9 – 11, 18 – 20, 29, 31, 34 – 35; and Franklin, Benjamin, x; New York – Philadelphia corridor, 47 – 48, 47f, 128, 186, 189, 195 “pink house,” 171 – 172 Pin Oak property, 201 Piro, Amy R., 199 – 200 Plainsboro Road, 54, 100, 132, 159, 186, 208, 212; traffic signal on, 121 Plainsboro Township, 75, 119, 153, 190, 208, 212 planning and planners, xii, 227; 1961 report, 189; Citizens Committee for the Master Plan, 191; Citizens Committee on Planning, 188 – 190; and expert testimony, 188 – 189, 191, 196 – 198; and historic preservation, 164 – 167, 188 – 189, 196 – 198, 210; Master Plans, 156, 190 – 194, 202 – 203, 205, 219, 225, 229, 231; and professional planners, 190 – 192, 203, 205 – 206, 228 – 229; and town meetings/public hearings, 188 – 189, 191, 193, 202; Township Planning Board, 175, 179, 185, 188, 190 – 191, 193, 200, 202, 204 – 206 police: citizens’ posse as, 120; constables, 32, 121; and murder or homicide cases, 154; State Police, 120, 137 – 138, 213; township police, 121, 136, 154, 180, 189, 193 Polish ancestry, 218 pollution, 165, 212 – 213 postal routes, 4, 7 – 8, 19; post houses, 53, 124; postriders, 8 postcards, 183 post offices, xf, 59, 79, 89, 158, 160, 226; in colonial era, 19 – 20; meandering, 98 – 99, 99f; in Odd Fellows Hall, 98, 115; postmasters/

ၺၿၾ post offices (continued ) postmistresses, 19, 75, 89, 98 – 99, 138; rededication of, 221; and rural mail delivery, 98, 99f; variant spelling of name, 75 potato farming, 80, 121, 132 – 140, 143 – 145, 145f, 149, 154, 209; and Bakers potatoes, 134; and Chamberlin & Barclay, Inc., 129 – 130, 133 – 134; and Colorado potato beetle, 145; decline in, 143 – 145; and migrant workers, 134 – 140, 141f, 145f; and potato chips, 144, 145f; and seed potatoes, 129, 134; and Snowflakes potatoes, 134 Predmore (Pridmore), John, 11, 18, 20, 32 Predmore’s Inn, 8f, 11, 18, 18f, 19 – 20, 32 prejudices, 127, 150, 159 – 160, 162 – 164 Presbyterians, x; benevolent society, 61; blacks as, 159; Council of Women for Home Missions, 136; Female Charitable Society of Cranbury, 61; mission society, 27; National Missions Board, 136; “the Presbyterian rebellion,” 34 – 35; Presbytery of Monmouth, 65; United Presbyterian Women, 177. See also First Presbyterian Church; Princeton Theological Seminary; Second Presbyterian Church preservation. See farmlands and farmers; historic preservation; Old School Building Pricket (Prickett), Joseph, 5 – 7 Prince, Jacob, 89 Princeton, xii, 5, 19, 28, 40 – 41, 68, 152; commuters to, 188, 217; High School, 168; in As I Saw the U.S.A. (Morris), 148, 150; School District, 217 Princeton Ballet School, 88 – 89, 122, 171 Princeton Packet Company, 78 Princeton Theological Seminary, 61, 65 Princeton Turnpike, 100. See also Plainsboro Road Princeton University (originally the College of New Jersey), 12, 27, 28, 34, 115, 124, 130 Progressive Era, 114 – 115, 119 Prohibition, 106, 124 – 125; repeal of, 124 – 125, 127 proprietors, 2 – 5, 7, 15 – 16, 18, 31 – 33; Board of Proprietors, 24, 31 – 32 Prospect Plains Road, 70, 128, 171, 218; 269 Prospect Plains Road, 68 Prospect Street, 118; 1 Prospect Street, 96; 5 Prospect Street, 94 – 95, 95f, 96; 9 Prospect Street, 118

šŽ¬ Public Service Gas & Electric, 220 Puerschner, George, 112 Puerschner, George, Mrs., 112 Puerschner’s, 112 – 113 Quakers, 3, 19, 35, 64, 67 quilts: Cranbury Bicentennial Quilt, 179; Cranbury Tercentennial Quilt, 180, 213f; quilting bees, 30 quit rents, in colonial era, 2 – 4, 6, 31 race relations, 137 – 139, 150, 161 – 164; and racism, 163 – 164 railroads, 44, 47f, 78 – 81, 84, 92, 113, 229; accidents on, 49 – 50; Amtrak, 78; Camden & Amboy (C&A) Railroad, 45f, 48 – 50, 51f, 69, 78, 79f, 100, 147; charters for, 48 – 49; cow-catchers, 49, 51f; John Bull (steam locomotive), 49 – 50, 51f; Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), 78, 79f; taxes on, 100; T-shaped iron rail, 49; wooden ties, 49 Raritan River, 3, 5 – 6, 10, 17, 215 Rathgeber, Peter, 88 recreational facilities and programs, 155 – 156, 190 – 191; baseball fields, 112, 113, 155, 211; basketball court, 155; campouts, 156; canoe races, 155; “Dirt Mountain” (dirt-bike riding), 156; sledding, 156; soccer fields, 155; tennis courts, 155 Rees, John, 31 Reeves, Clarence, 158 Reid family, 16 Reinhardt farm, 212 religious revivals. See Great Awakening Republicans, 76, 86, 125, 129, 152, 207; and Civil War, 64, 66, 68 – 69; and historic preservation, 192, 199; in Progressive Era, 114 – 115 Rescarrick, Anne, 7 Rescarrick, George, 7 – 8, 10, 17 – 18, 20 Rescarrick, George Jr., 7 – 8 Rescarrick, Mary, 7 Rescarrick’s Inn, 7 – 8, 8f, 10 – 11, 17, 18f, 20 Resides Line (stagecoach company), 48 restaurants, x, 82, 84, 88, 124, 130, 157 – 158; cafés, 225, 225f; luncheonettes, 172 retirement communities, 133, 146, 187, 205 – 206 Revolutionary War. See American Revolution Rickett, James R., 72 Riggs, Joseph, 31 roads. See highways and roads

 Robbins, Tim, 214 Robin, Abbé, 40 – 41 Robinson, James P. (“Jimmy”), 161 Robinson, Juanita, 161 Rochambeau, Count de, 40 – 42 Rocky Brook Garden Club, 149 Rolfe, M. O., 62 Romweber, Art, 171 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 127, 129 Roosevelt, Theodore, 115 Rossmoor retirement community, 133, 146, 187 Route 1 (U.S.), xii, 19, 48, 128, 147, 190, 208, 219, 229 Route 25 (N.J.), 121, 127 – 128 Route 27 (N.J.), 19 Route 33 (N.J.), 208 Route 92 (N.J.; proposed), 208 – 209 Route 130 (U.S.), xii, 146, 158, 185 – 186, 192, 200, 214, 229; affordable housing on, 207; bypass, 128; commercial development along, 203, 218 – 219; construction of, 127 – 128; Cranbury Circle on, 127, 185; Cranbury Greene on, 204; as Lawrie’s Road replacement, 17, 48 Route 133 (N.J.), 209 Route 206 (N.J.), 208 Route 535 (Middlesex County), 17, 48 Rue (la Roue) family, 14, 69, 73, 104, 167 Rue, Clara, 167 Rue, Joseph, 31 Rue, Matthew A., 52, 76, 85 Rutgers University, 156, 190; College of Agriculture, 80, 133; Douglass College, 102; Extension Division, 171 Ryan, Meg, 214 Ryan Drive, 207 Saint David’s Episcopal Church, 218 Sandollar Productions, 214 Sandy Hook, 36f, 37 Santa Fe Way, 220 Save the Old School Committee. See Cranbury Landmarks, Inc.; historic preservation; Old School Building Saving America’s Countryside: A Guide to Rural Conservation (Stokes), 202, 229 savings and loan association, 77, 167, 216 sawmills, 58, 82 Schanck, Harry L., 121 Schanck, William H., 120f, 144f

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Schenck family, 14 Schenck, Garret, 14 Schenck, Lucas, 34 Schnell family, 88 schoolhouses, 94, 100, 106 – 108; Bunker Hill School, 63, 100, 158; Central School, 107f; North School, 63; South School, 13f, 63, 100. See also Old School Building schools, 44, 154; in Bethel, 24, 26 – 27; bus drivers for, 121, 163; and civil rights movement, 150, 162 – 164; crossing guards for, 154, 159; for developmentally disabled, 107; Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf, 98; and migrant workers’ children, 139 – 140; parochial schools, 13f, 44, 62 – 63, 179; principals/superintendents of, 62, 100, 139, 163 – 164; private schools, 22, 62, 96, 99 – 100; public schools, 61 – 63, 75, 100 – 101, 106, 139 – 140, 162 – 164, 216 – 217; summer school, 139 – 140; vocational schools, 164. See also Brainerd Institute; Cranbury School Scots-Irish, 12 Scott, Harry, 111 Scott, Leroy, 144f Scott, Patricia (“Pat”), 125, 192 Scott Avenue, 86, 111; 1 – 5 Scott Avenue, 82 Scottish settlers, 3, 14 – 15, 64 Scudder family, 104 Second Presbyterian Church, 44, 60f; chapel of, 59, 60f, 62, 90, 131, 159; closing of, 131; elders of, 58, 87; founding of, 58 – 59; merger of Presbyterian churches, 118, 131; monument at site of, 131; parsonage of, 59, 98 – 99, 102, 118; Session House, 62; sexton’s house of, 131; Sunday School, 59, 60f, 131; and temperance movement, 105; Westminster Hall/House, 59, 62, 131 segregation, 69, 104, 150, 162 senior citizens: center for, 171, 173, 226; housing complex for, 206 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 220 – 221 septic systems, 110, 194 Serpentelli, Eugene D., Judge, 196 sewer system, 110, 189, 191, 193 – 194; and indoor toilets, 158 – 159 Shack, Christine, 140 Shadow Oaks, 210 – 211 Shady Brook Lane, 205 Shankweiler, Kathryn (“Kate”), 140, 169 – 170 Shankweiler, Raymond (“Ray”), 169

ၺၿႀ Sharbell Company, 205 Silvers family, 69, 73, 122 Silvers, Ezekiel, 76, 82, 84, 99, 130 Silvers, John S., 84, 85f, 93, 97, 97f, 118, 130, 159 Silvers, Lydia, 84 Silvers, William, 84 Silvers, William Russell, 130 Silvers Lane, 204 Silvers mansion, 97, 97f, 98, 108, 159 Sing Sing prison (N.Y.), 49 Skillman, A. T., 88 slaves and slavery, 43, 46, 63 – 68, 102; and abolitionists, 63 – 68; in colonial era, 3, 16 – 17, 26, 31; and Native Americans, 26; runaway slaves, 31, 66 – 68; slaves as indentured servants, 56, 64 – 66 Smeltzer, Christine (“Chris”), 173 Smith, Audrey, 172f, 198f Smith, Elizabeth (“Betty”), 179. See also Wagner, Elizabeth (“Betty”) Snedeker family, 14, 69, 73, 104 Snedeker, Garret (“Gentleman Garret”), 14 Snedeker, Isaac, 35 Snedeker, Jacob, 52 Snediker, William, 99 Snow, John S., 143 Snowden, Gilbert Tennent, Rev., 13, 54, 55f, 57 Snowden, Isaac, 54 – 55, 55f Snowden House, 54 – 57, 174 Snyder, Carl J., 143 solar power company, 219 – 220 South Amboy Township, 10, 43, 48 – 50, 74 South Brunswick Township, 16, 43 – 44, 63 – 64, 68 – 69, 74, 81, 100, 187, 190; Forsgate Industrial Park, 189; School District, 62 – 63; warehouse development in, 219 South Main Street, 79, 110f, 112, 122f, 127, 133, 135; 1 South Main Street, 185; 2 South Main Street, 78, 181; 4 South Main Street, 118; 6 South Main Street, 180, 207; 12 South Main Street, 111f, 123; 14 South Main Street, 111f, 123; 15 South Main Street, 177; 21 South Main Street, 53 – 54, 123 – 124; 22 South Main Street, 13, 41, 58; 25 South Main Street, 147; 39 South Main Street, 96; 40 South Main Street, 62; 46 South Main Street, 13; 50 South Main Street, 116; 52 South Main Street, 118; 53 South Main Street, 37; 54 South Main Street, 118; 95 South Main Street, 218;

šŽ¬ Memorial Day Parade on, 222 – 223, 223f; numbering sequences for buildings on, 99; traffic signals on, 121 South River, 19 South River Road, 17, 70, 122, 218 Spencer, Richard, 170 spice mills. See American Spice Mills spinning wheels, 27, 30; spinning bees, 30 Spotswood, 28, 68 Spratt, David J., Rev., 136 stage lines, 8f, 18 – 20, 46 – 48, 47f, 53; stage boats, 11, 20; stagecoaches, 20, 46, 47f, 48; stagecoach shuttles, 47f, 50, 79, 79f; stage wagons, 8, 11, 18 – 20, 47f, 50, 79, 79f Stahl, Martha, 167 Stahl, Wayne, 99, 138, 172 Station Road. See Cranbury Station Road Stave, Mahbubeh, 117f, 140, 170 steamboats, 44, 46 steam locomotives, 49 – 50, 51f Steuben, Friedrich “von,” 40 Stevens, John, 49 Stevens, Robert L., 49 Still, William, 67 Stillwell, Hamilton, 139 Stites family, 15 Stites, Abigail, 15 Stites, Hezekiah, Dr., 15, 37 – 38 Stites, John, 15 Stites, John, Dr., 15 Stites, Mary, 37 – 38 Stites, William, 15 stock market crash (1929), 126 Stockton Drive, 204 Stokes, Samuel N., 197 – 198, 202, 228 – 229 Stony Brook – Millstone Watershed Association, 211 Story House, 18f Strawberry Festival, 223 Stults (Stoltz) family, 16, 69, 73, 104, 209 Stults, Albert, 87f Stults, Alma Flock, 134, 143 Stults, Clifford, 134 Stults, Emma, 170 Stults, Henry, 70 Stults, Henry H., 76 Stults, Jill, 209 Stults, John Marlin, 89 Stults, Lemuel, 87f, 171 Stults, Marcus Aurelius, 69 – 71, 71f, 72 – 73

 Stults, Mary, 70 Stults, Mary Ann, 70 Stults, Peter, 35 Stults, R. M., 77 Stults, Stanley C., 133 – 134, 143 Stults, Stanley C. Jr. (“Kip”), 145, 209 Stults, Symmes Henry, 69 – 73, 71f Stults, Thomas, 70 Stults, William, 76, 81 Stults Farm, 145, 208 – 209, 209f, 210 Stults Inn, 81 suburbanization, ix, xi – xii, 129, 144, 146, 153, 184, 203 – 206, 229; and sprawl, xii, 165 – 166, 193, 204. See also housing development suffrage. See voting rights Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, A (Colles), 18f Suydam, William, 47f Swale, Norma, 170 Swanagan, Don Jo, xif, 77 Swanagan, Virginia H. (“Ginny”), 18f, 77, 228f Symmes family, 104 Symmes, H. C., Dr., 55 Symmes, Joseph Gaston, Rev., 65 – 66, 70, 73, 75, 105 Symmes Court, 174, 181; 6 Symmes Court, 118; 7 Symmes Court, 117; 8 Symmes Court, 118; 10 Symmes Court, 13 Taft, William Howard, 114 – 115 tavern-inns, 44, 76 – 77; in colonial era, 6 – 7, 8f, 9 – 10, 17, 18f, 20 – 21, 28, 35; description of services in, 20 – 21, 52 – 53. See also names of taverns and inns taxes, 33, 136, 154, 165; ability of township to collect, 43, 74; and farmland preservation, 210 – 211; property taxes, 169, 171, 186 – 189, 219, 227; and railroads, 100; and “ratables,” 146, 208, 219 taxi business, 158 Taylor, Anne, 174 Taylor, LeRoy, 148f Taylor, Roi, 112, 135, 148f teachers, 100 – 101, 104, 140, 177; black teachers, 140, 163; boarding in private homes, 62 – 63; and racial tensions, 162 – 163; special education teachers, 162 – 163. See also names of teachers telephones: Farmers and Traders Phone

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Exchange, 123; and “party lines,” 123; poles and lines, 110, 147; telephone operators, 123 television, 113, 139 – 140 “Temperance Inn,” 82 temperance movement, 103 – 107, 124 – 125 Tennent family, 12, 24 Tennent, Gilbert, 12 Tennent, William, 12 Tennent, William Sr., 12 Thanksgiving, 20 theaters, 111f, 123 theft insurance, 120 Thomas, Jonathan, 11 Thomas, Reba, 130 – 131 Thompson family, 16 Thompson, Arnold, 159 Thompson, Mahlon M., 87f Thompson Park, 24 Thomsen, Barbara F. (“Babs”), 167, 170 Thornton, Clarence, 157 – 158 Thornton, Mamie, 157 – 158 thrift stores, 140, 141f, 171 tobacco shops, 82, 112 – 113; wooden Indian statue, 112 toll roads. See turnpikes Torbert, Richard (“Dick”), 174, 177 township offices. See Cranbury Township transportation, 146, 152; in colonial era, 17 – 18, 18f, 19 – 22, 29; in early nineteenth century, 44, 46 – 50, 47f, 51f; in late nineteenth century, 74, 78 – 81, 79f, 85, 89. See also canals; highways and roads; railroads Trenton, 48, 69, 89, 104, 123, 136, 152, 162; commuters to, 188, 217; highways and roads to, 5, 19, 47 – 48; and railroads, 78, 113 Trenton and New Brunswick Straight Turnpike Company, 47 Trenton State Normal School, 177 Trenton Times, 137, 196, 217 Truxtun, Mary, 57 Truxtun (often misspelled as Truxton), Thomas, Commodore, 55f, 56 – 57 tuberculosis, 27, 89, 90f Tubman, Harriet, 67 turnpikes, 44, 46 – 48, 47f, 52, 80; bankruptcy of, 48; tolls on, 48. See also New Jersey Turnpike twenty-first century, x, 166, 205, 215 – 221, 226 Twin Rivers apartment complex, 187

ၺႀၸ Unami Lenape, 1, 6 – 7, 22 – 27, 23f, 25f. See also Lenape Indians Unami Woods, 211 Underground Railroad, 66 – 68 undertakers, 82 – 83, 83f Union Army, 66, 69 – 73; Army of the Potomac, 70; Colored Troops, U.S., 69; 14th New Jersey Infantry Regiment, 69 – 73; Third Division, 72; 28th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment, 69 Union Line (stagecoach company), 48 Union Navy, 69, 73 United Airlines Flight 93, 220 – 221 United Methodist Church. See Methodist Church United States Hotel, 53, 82, 123 – 124 Updike, Alvin, 181, 186 Updike, H. William, 181 Updike farm, 158, 181, 205 Upper Road, 5, 19, 47 – 48 Urban League, 194 – 195 Valentine family, 17 Van Arsdale, Isaac, 52 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 50 Vanderveer, R. M., Mrs., 89 Vanderveer’s Hotel, 68 Van Dyke family, 104 Van Dyke, Joseph S., Rev., 59, 99 – 100 Van Kirk family, 16 Van Ravesteyn, Adrian, 124 Van Ravesteyn, Marjorie, 124 Van Treuren, William G., 144f Vaughan, Edward, Rev., 7 – 8 Veghte, Lisbeth (“Beth”), 155 Victorian styles, 55, 55f, 81, 93 – 96; “folk Victorian,” 81, 96; Queen Anne, 96 – 98, 97f, 159; Victorian Italianate, 81, 96, 100; Victorian Vernacular, 55, 55f, 94 – 95, 95f, 96 Vietnam War, 161; Bronze Star recipient, 161 Village Park, 155 – 156, 179, 206, 223; footpath through pawpaw tree to, 155; tree nursery on site of, 155 Village Senior Housing, 206 Vineland Training School, 107 Vogt, Jean D., 143 Voorhees family, 16, 73, 79, 104 Voorhees, Abraham, 53 Voorhees, Elias, 67 Voorhees, Garret G., 52

šŽ¬ Voorhees, Garret P., Dr., 55, 58 voting rights, 66, 102 – 103, 106, 124 – 125, 129, 162 Vredenburgh, Camp, 70 Wagner, Elizabeth (“Betty”), 159, 179 – 180, 193, 196 – 197, 198f, 225 Wagner, William (“Bill”), 179 Wagoner, Henry, 81 wagons: freight wagons, 46, 48, 50, 84, 85f; ice cream wagon, 177; rural mail delivery, 98, 99f; shuttle wagons, 47f, 50, 79, 79f; sprinkling wagons, 111; stage wagons, 8, 11, 18 – 20, 47f, 50, 79, 79f Wakeley family, 104 Wakeley, L., Mrs., 89 Wakeley, Samata (Mrs. W. A.), 89, 99 Walker, William, 177 Walking Tour (Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society), 54 Walsh, Ruth Berg, 18f, 175 – 176, 193 warehouse development, 203, 208, 218 – 220, 231 War for Independence. See American Revolution war memorials: Civil War monuments, 66, 73; Cranbury War Memorial, 115, 143, 161; near firehouse, 155 Washington, George, 35 – 36, 36f, 39f, 40 – 42, 155; in Cranbury, x, 37 – 39; and Mount Vernon, 165 Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route of 1781, 42 water service, public, 78, 110, 189, 191, 193 water tower, 73f, 107f, 108, 148f, 214, 215 – 216; “Historic Cranbury” lettering on, 73f, 215 Weeks, Dora, 158 Weidner, Thomas (“Tom”), 175, 192, 196, 199 Wesley Place, 61 West, John, 210 West, Richard (“Dick”), 156, 190 – 191 West, Ruth, 210 Western Missionary Society of New Jersey, 61 West Jersey, 2 – 4, 9 Westminster Place, 59, 62, 155, 167; 3 Westminster Place, 131, 216; 6 Westminster Place, 60 – 61, 104 West Property, 210 – 211 West Windsor, 153, 190 Wetherill family, 15

 Wetherill, George, 15 Wetherill, John, 33 – 35 Wetherill, Thomas, 15 Wetherill, Thomas Jr., 15 Whigs, 34, 64, 69 Whitaker family, 104 White, Walter, 137 Wicoff, C. Raymond, 116, 117f, 137, 216 Wicoff, Joseph Clayton, 182 Wicoff, Raymond, 87f Wikoff family, 174 Willard, Frances, 103 – 104 Williamson, David, 31 wills, 7 – 8, 16; and Native Americans, 27; unregistered, 16 Wilson, Agnes Hall, 126, 157, 164 Wilson, James, 18 Wilson, Joseph, 126, 157 – 158, 164 Wilson, Lizzie, 160 Wilson, Myrna, 159. See also Doggett, Myrna Wilson Wilson, Woodrow, 115, 125 Wincklhofer, Joseph Thomas (“Judge Wink”), 124 Wincklhofer, Mary, 124 Windsor family, 88 Wise Potato Chips, 144 With Heritage So Rich (national report), 165 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 103 – 106; drinking fountain, 106 Woman’s Club of Cranbury, 102, 105, 149 – 150, 173 – 174, 177; “Friendly Town” committee of, 149; Historical Committee, 173 – 174; holiday activities of, 223; House and Garden Tours, 173 – 174, 179, 223 women: and benevolent societies, 61, 101 – 102; black women, 104, 140, 156 – 160, 164; in colonial era, 16, 29 – 30; and Douglass College, 102; as elders, 177; Female Charitable Society of Cranbury, 61; in garment industry, 85 – 86; and housekeeping, 91, 91f; and “Itinerant Sisterhood,” 104; Lady May Rebekah Lodge No. 94, 101; as merchants, 89 – 91; Order of the Eastern Star, 101; in politics, 103, 125; “Reading Circle” of, 102, 105; as reformers, 61, 102 – 106, 124 – 125; on School Board (Board of Education), 157, 164, 177; and Seneca Falls (N.Y.) convention (1848), 103; and Soldiers Aid Society,

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70; as teachers, 100 – 101, 104, 140, 177; as telephone operators, 123; and temperance movement, 103 – 104; United Presbyterian Women, 177; voting rights of, 102 – 103, 106, 124 – 125, 129; and women’s clubs, 101 – 102, 104 – 105, 149 – 150, 173 – 174, 177; during World War II, 140, 143. See also names of women Woodview Drive, 186 Workers Defense League (WDL), 138 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 127 World War I, 115 – 116, 124 – 125; Armistice, 115 – 116; memorial, 115 World War II, 61, 121, 126, 139 – 140, 142 – 143, 145, 147; and blood drives, 142; Cranbury War Memorial, 115, 143; and draft deferments, 142 – 143; Local Draft Board, 143; Okinawa, 143; and prisoners of war as farm workers, 142; and test “blackouts,” 142; veterans of, 143, 177; and “Victory Gardens,” 142; and war bonds, 142; War Price and Rationing Board No. 6, 142 Wright, Christopher (“Chip”), 210 Wright, Frank A., 202 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 117 – 118 Wright, Fretwell, 18 Wright, Norman, 170 Wright’s Roses, 154, 158, 170, 210 – 211 Wyckoff family, 14 Wyckoff, Arthur, 14 Wyckoff, Cornelius, 14 Wyckoff, Eleanor, 14 Wyckoff, Peter, 14 Wycoffs Mill, 82 Wynnewood Drive, 186 Wynnewood Estates, 186 Yates, Peter, 56 Zeigler, Richard, 174 zoning, 150, 153, 184 – 197; Agricultural Preservation Zone, 193 – 194, 203 – 204, 208, 210, 214, 219; and Cranbury Housing Associates (CHA), 201; exclusionary zoning, 194 – 197, 199; light industry zone, 185 – 186, 208, 214, 218 – 219; rural zone, 185, 191 – 194, 203 – 204, 208, 210, 214; scattered-site zoning, 191 – 192; six-acre zoning, 192 – 194, 203 – 204; threeacre zoning, 204; Village Planning Area, 204. See also planning

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ĆćĔĚę ęčĊ ĆĚęčĔė •••••

John Whiteclay Chambers II is professor and former chair of the Department of History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. He is author, coauthor, or editor of numerous books and articles, including George Washington in Cranbury: The Road to the Battle of Monmouth, 2nd ed., revised, updated, and expanded (Cranbury, N.J.: Cranbury Historical and Preservation Society, 2010); Conflict Resolution and United States History, 2 volumes (New Brunswick/Piscataway: New Jersey Center for Civic and Law-Related Education, 2007); The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); World War II, Film and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); The Eagle and the Dove: The American Peace Movement and United States Foreign Policy, 1900 – 1922, 2nd edition (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991); To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1987); and The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890 – 1920, 2nd edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). He reviews books regularly for the Washington Post. He received his doctorate in American history from Columbia University and taught there for ten years before joining the Rutgers University faculty in 1982. Among his professional awards are Outstanding Teaching Awards at Barnard College and Rutgers University, a Rockefeller Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship to Italy, Visiting Lectureship to the University of Tokyo, and a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Chambers, a resident of Cranbury since 1986, wrote this book for Cranbury Landmarks, Inc., a nonprofit historical preservation organization, on a volunteer, pro bono basis, without any royalties or other compensation.