New Jersey, on a drive along the Delaware and Raritan Canal.
Yesterday for about the fourth or fifth time in the last few months I got in my TT, headed across the Verrazano Bridge from Brooklyn, and crossed Staten Island heading for New Jersey to do some exploring. There is a ton to see and do there. Sure there are some dodgy places like Newark and Trenton in NJ but otherwise so many historic sites and very attractive towns and cities. Plus, the countryside can be really gorgeous. Yup, New Jersey. Who knew? (I do not get any promotional fee or other compensation for this endorsement.)
Door-to-door to Rutgers, in New Brunswick, for example, it is about 35 miles, and in good traffic on a weekend morning can be done in less than an hour. That’s close. The plan was to head back to New Brunswick and then cut up to the Millstone Valley Byway and drive along the Millstone River and the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Lots of beautiful old houses, historic old mills, revolutionary war sites, lovely fall colors and more. I took it as far as Kingston (near Princeton) and then turned around.
The one house in the pictures (near New Brunswick and just before I got on the byway) is not just any house – it is the Abraham Staats House and said to be one of the finest surviving buildings from the Dutch settlement of the Raritan Valley in NJ. I did a short tour. I was the only visitor at the time. A car did pull up as I was leaving. It served as the headquarters of General von Steuben during the second Middlebrook Encampment (1779). He was on the side of the Continental Army and not the Crown. Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Steuben – the Baron von Steuben of Revolutionary War fame himself. (A Prussian who helped train the ragtag Continentals.) I took the picture of that portrait above of von Steuben in Philadelphia – it can be seen in the Portrait Gallery of the Second Bank museum there. The British troops supposedly marched right by the house during the Battle of Bound Brook. The part of the house to the right is the original house and dates back to 1740.
I digress. Much of the drive adjoins the wonderful Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park. That one wide angle picture was shooting into the backlight. The church is in a town called Millstone on the river and is the former Dutch Reformed Church dating back to 1766. Most of the names I saw in the tombstones – the names that were still legible – were Dutch.
Walking along the towpath and taking in the beauty by the canal did help a bit in clearing my head (which sure needs it these days like a lot of other people).
