An early photo (c.1906) of the teacher and class from Burnt Mills School in Bedminster Township, NJ. The photographer was Peapack-Gladstone resident, Edythe Lane Van Doren (1885-1974). Burnt Mills school was a one-story school in the hamlet of Burnt Mills near the intersection of Burnt Mills and Cowperthwaite roads. On a map of Somerset County
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The Olcott School (built 1905) is conspicuous in this photo that depicts eight men astride a 60-foot windmill, which they likely had just erected at 20 Olcott Avenue in Bernardsville, NJ. The slatted fanwheel and tail are just out of view at the top of the frame. Windmills like these, a common innovation across the
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During our continuing digitization efforts, we found this photograph of the Brick Academy in Basking Ridge, NJ, in a Fire Department scrapbook. The building started life in 1809, as the Basking Ridge Classical School and later became a Bernards Township public school. In 1904, it was auctioned off to the Ancient Order of United Workmen
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Bernardsville School was a one-room schoolhouse that stood along Anderson Hill Road, just north of the old Methodist Cemetery. The building was the original Methodist Church and was sometimes called the Old Methodist Church Schoolhouse although it was a public school. In the early 1880s, after the Methodists built a new church on Church Street,
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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
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We’re deep into back-to-school season and what better way to celebrate than reading a great book about schools? Josephine M. Waltz’s Schoolhouses of Early Bernards Township is a nostalgic look back at the history of familiar and not-so-familiar local schoolhouses. Bernards Township was originally much larger than it is today, so the book covers schools
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Sometime before 1980, Miss Mabel Clark shared this fantastic photo of herself in a class at Maple Avenue School in Basking Ridge, NJ (where the Bernards Township Library now stands). Not only does it provide close-ups of the faces, but the teacher and many students are identified. [on back]7th Grad, Maple Avenue School, 1914Teacher, Miss
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This class photo from the Brick Academy in Basking Ridge, NJ, is interesting on several levels. Although faded, the photograph shows students and teachers from the 1890s when the Brick Academy was used as a Bernards Township public school. Today, when students from Bernards Township and Bernardsville visit the building on their class trips, they
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Archive staff recently found this classic photo of old Bernards Township Public Works equipment. An unknown photographer snapped the photo on Sept. 24, 1948, behind the old Maple Avenue School in Basking Ridge, NJ. The small dump truck and Galion roller both bear the lettering “Bernards Township” on their sides. A young boy sits on
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THSSH has released another Online Collection of documents—this time featuring Bernards High in Bernardsville, NJ. Bernards High was built in 1905. Two years later a class of two–Effie Beekman and Florence Rowell Conklin–became the first students to graduate. Until construction of Watchung Hills High and Ridge High, Bernards was the only high school in northern
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