Union Grove, NJ

If you blink, you will miss it. Union Grove is a tiny enclave off Pottersville Road between Pottersville and Peapack-Gladstone. Farms and residences line Union Grove Road, which forms one side of a triangle with Pottersville Road and Lisk Hill Road. To the north, the defunct Rockaway Valley Railroad line once connected the region and its peach crops to the Jersey Central line at Whitehouse and markets farther east.

The Union Grove Schoolhouse is still there, on Schoolhouse Lane across Pottersville Road from Union Grove Road. The schoolhouse, which closed in 1930, is listed as a historic property in the Bedminster Master Plan of 2003. It notes that the schoolhouse was built on land conveyed to the Trustees of School District #12 by David C. Gaston in 1861. 

While there was a railroad, it was not always easy to navigate the connections needed to arrive in Union Grove. A teacher at the Union Grove School described her odyssey, retold by Howard E. Johnston in his book, The Rockaway Valley Railroad Story, published in 1958.

“Mrs. A. G. Miller of Ten-Mile-Run had graduated from Trenton State Teachers College in 1894 and was assigned in September to teach at Union Grove…she boarded the Philadelphia & Reading Ry. at Belle Mead for the run to Bound Brook, thence change of trains, to take the Central to Whitehouse. Here her adventures really began as she waited for a Rockaway Valley train to take her to Union Grove. The ‘wait’ stretched into hours and all day, while peaches and more peaches rolled by the station. Finally, around 1 a.m. a coach was procured and the journey started. Every so often the passenger train moved into a siding while more fruit rolled by. When the spirit moved them, the train would proceed to the next switch. The few passengers were obliged to sit in the darkness, since there were no lights, and fortunately Mrs. Miller was accompanied by her brother, age 18. The conductor had to collect the fares carrying a lantern. Finally at 2 a.m. “the passenger varnish” arrived at Pottersville, where Mr. Charles Hoffman, the station agent, obligingly put up Mrs. Miller for the night.”

In more recent times, U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams (1919-2001) lived in Union Grove on the corner of Lisk Hill and Pottersville roads.