Sidney “Sid” Sussman (1919-2009) was a Bernardsville icon, who ran a small department store in town at various locations for over 60 years. He was also known for his work with the Bernardsville Kiwanis Club and the Fresh Air Fund of New York. From around 1953 to 1977, Sid wrote a weekly column/advertisement in The

During the 1940s, Vallacchi’s Garage at 55 Mine Brook Road (Rte 202), Bernardsville, N.J., was the place to go for a new Kaiser or Frazer automobile.  The Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, founded in 1945, was a successful company at a time when the big three automakers were slowly transitioning to a peacetime economy.   In 1946, while the

Driving east from Far Hills on Liberty Corner Road (before you get to I-287), the land drops off to the right into a deep gorge called Moggy Hollow.   This was once, 19,000 to 14,000 years ago, the outlet to Lake Passaic, a 30-mile-long lake, created when the Wisconsin Glacier blocked the area’s natural drainage system.

Lord Stirling Road in Basking Ridge was once called Building Lane after the ruins of Lord Stirling’s mansion which were known locally as “The Buildings.” The name continued into the 20th century although visible ruins of the mansion were long gone. The change coincided with the introduction of streetlights along the road in 1931. The

When my brother Stuart ‘Budge’ Booth (1939- 2002) was a kid in the early 1950s, he used to go across Maple Avenue and set traps over towards the Great Swamp.  We lived on South Finley Avenue.  In the morning before school he would check his traps, and if there was a fox caught, he would

During the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) reorganized in the South and spread north including to New Jersey.  In the Somerset Hills, there were demonstrations and cross burnings reported in Bernardsville, Basking Ridge and Far Hills in 1923.   The resurgent Klan opposed new immigration to the country, especially of Italian and Irish Catholics.

This 1909 real picture postcard shows the original Far Hills, NJ, Train Station with the freight house on the left.   The station was built in the 1890s when the railroad was extended from Bernardsville to Gladstone.   The current concrete Far Hills station replaced it in 1914, but the original was moved.   Most railroad stations can’t

Bill Hine (1924-1997) was affectionately known as the “village guardian” of Basking Ridge.  His full name was Willard Foster Hine, Jr., and he was born in Westfield.  Bill suffered an oxygen deficiency at birth, which left him unable to work at a regular job.  After his family moved to Spencer Road in Basking Ridge in

This early wood schoolhouse, originally called the Jefferson school, stood on the west side of Lyons Road, north of the triangle in Liberty Corner, NJ.  It was built around 1853 to replace an earlier school, which had burned down.   The building is clearly marked on a map from the 1873 Beers Atlas of Somerset County

In 1902 C. Ledyard Blair, who was then in the process of completing the construction of his Blairsden mansion in what is now Peapack-Gladstone, NJ, proposed changing the name of Peapack to Westminster. Obviously, the suggestion didn’t go anywhere.