Woodbridge tour offers a three-hour walk back in time
The Dunham House has been used as the rectory for the Trinity Episcopal Church since 1873. It was built circa 1700. (Staff photo: Augusto F. Menezes)
Kathy Jost-Keating welcomed about 60 strangers into her home Sunday afternoon.
The 325-year-old house at 12 Freeman St. was the last stop on the Historic Walking Tour of Woodbridge, a two-mile, three-hour trek between churches, graveyards and homes dating back to the township's founding in 1669.
Woodbridge's history has aged well. Each of the 25 sites on the tour are still in use – and not as museums. The former residences of the township's founding fathers and Revolutionary War soldiers are still being called home by new owners and tenants.
“My mother collected antiques, and we were always interested in history,” said Jost-Keating, whose family moved into the home in 1952. The home still has the original fireplaces and doors.
Click HERE to take the walking PHOTO tour.
At 574 Rahway Ave. is the Barron House, built in 1803 for the family whose ancestors first settled the area in the late 1600s. It is now a three-story apartment building.
Bernie McLaughlin explains how a grindstone worked to his granddaughter Jessie McLaughlin, 10, as they stand in front of the Jonathan Dunham house where a grindstone still sits. Woodbridge Township Historic Preservation Commission hosts tours of Historic Woodbridge, starting at the Trinity Episcopal Church on Rahway Avenue.
Over on North James Street is the former Keys Tavern, which was moved in the 1920s from the corner of Main Street and Amboy Avenue, its original location in 1740. George Washington slept there on April 22, 1789, before he went to New York City to take office as president of the United States. Today, it's also apartments.
“I went across the street to the Reo Diner and asked them if I could get an ad for a journal to advertise this building as a historic site. They said they had no idea where it was. What a shame,” said Donald Johnstone Peck, a member of the Woodbridge Township Historical Preservation Commission and a tour guide. “We're very fortunate in Woodbridge to have a 1740s structure still standing.”
The commission was established in 2004. It is charged with finding sites in the township that should be marked as historic. Over the years, many of these sites have been placed on the state and national registers of historic places, which offer their owners tax incentives to preserve the properties.
Restoration can be expensive. The First Presbyterian Church, also known as the Old White Church, cost $3,500 to build in 1803 and $600,000 to restore in 1972, according to commission member Andrew Nagy.
The Trinity Episcopal Church next door is slated to undergo a $500,000 restoration, half of which will be paid through the state Historic Trust. The Trinity site includes the 1711 church; the rectory, which was the home in 1717 of Jonathan Dunham, the first New Jersey grist-mill owner; and the churchyard, a burial site since 1714.
Jeff Keating of Woodbridge takes a closer look at the original charter for Trinity Church which is from King George III and dated 1769.
Other buildings have new lives. The Romanesque revival-style Barron Library, built in 1877 with $50,000 bequeathed by merchant Thomas Barron, became the township-owned Barron Arts Center in 1977. The J.J. Bitting Coal and Feed Depot, built on Main Street in 1910, was saved in 1977 by new owners who turned the building into the J.J. Bitting Brewing Co., a microbrewery and restaurant.
The former Woodbridge Senior High School on Barron Avenue – which opened Sept. 11, 1911, and is now Woodbridge Middle School – still has Depression-era murals in the auditorium.
The Works Progress Administration artwork by Colonia resident Carl C. Lella depicts Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave under the banner, “Our Accomplishments.”
“If efforts aren't being made to save some of these works, we are going to lose them,” said Bruce Christensen, a township historian and a teacher at Iselin Middle School.