The Historic Community
In 1936, Cornelius C. Vermeule, a local resident, developed this map reconstruction of Raritan Landing based on his own research and family recollections. The numbers on the map correspond to houses and are keyed to a list of owners included in a somewhat fanciful article by Vermeule that was published in the Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society. Click on the map for larger view (77k). |
Until 1977, Raritan Landing was all but forgotten. Except for a handful of local historians and New Jersey specialists, the small 18th/19th century port community on the northern bank of the Raritan River was unknown. Its remains lay silent below the well-groomed lawns of Johnson Park, in the shadow of the Cornelius Low house on the bluff at the head of Landing Lane. In its heyday, Raritan Landing was a center for local trade. Along with New Brunswick, the Landing served as a transshipment point for imports and exports to and from the Raritan Valley.
Bone-handled pocket knife |
Agricultural products and lumber brought by wagon and flatboat from the hinterland were held in warehouses at the Landing or New Brunswick to await transshipment to New York and possibly the Caribbean. Imported goods were off-loaded at both river ports and taken by traders to stores upriver. It is likely that the Raritan Landing traders acted as wholesale suppliers to country storekeepers. The storekeepers paid the traders for their goods and services with the produce they had received from local growers, providing them with the commodities they needed to sell in New York.
 Pocket knife |
The traders lived and worked at the Landing, their houses, warehouses, stores, and artisan shops interspersed along the edges of Landing Lane and River Road, in easy reach of the major transportation routes which, in addition to the river, included the "Road Up Raritan," now known as River Road. By the 1740s, the community included about 70 structures and somewhat more than 100 inhabitants. Documentary sources suggest that economic growth and land speculation were particularly active in the period between 1740 and the French and Indian War. Between 1763 and the eve of the Revolution, the community felt the efffects of oppressive British regulations and may have adhered to boycotts on imported goods. Commercial emphasis seemed to turn to such activities as milling, brewing, and baking.
 Musket balls |
Early in the Revolutionary War, British troops occupied both New Brunswick and Raritan Landing. Losses claimed after the war and an eyewitness account suggest that the community sustained considerable damage, but the community was apparently rebuilt late in the eighteenth century. According to one observer, Landing Lane was lined with "blacksmith shops, cooper shops, stores, and warehouses" in 1825. But transportation developments in the 1830s doomed the Landing. Construction of the Delaware and Raritan Canal and the opening of the railroad, both of which provided direct connections between the hinterland and New Brunswick, virtually ended the Landing's reason to be. By the 1870s most of the community had been dismantled and converted into pastureland.