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Throughout the 19 th century, industrialists harnessed the Rockaway River to run grist mills for making flour, to operate the bellows that created the intense heat needed to forge iron, as well as power the trip hammers and rolling mills that shaped iron into useful products.

One of Boonton’s water-powered mills, ca.1885. In 1765, David Ogden appointed his 20-year old son Samuel as the company’s manager, and the younger Ogden secretly imported an illegal rolling and slitting mill in violation of English Parliamentary Law that forbade colonists from manufacturing certain goods. The Ogdon family ran the ironworks for generations.

The settlement acquired the name Boone-Town in 1761 when Newark lawyer David Ogdon purchased the ironworks and named the area in honor of the Colony’s new Royal Governor, Thomas Boone. NJHGC collections.įounded in 1747, the village of Old Boonton was situated 1.5 miles downstream of modern-day Boonton on a rocky but mostly level plain that, by the 1800s, supported a series of small and medium-sized farms, private residences, and a healthy iron refining and nail making industry. Excerpt from “Among the Nail-Makers”, a Harpers Magazine article that documented the life and work of Boonton residents during 1860. Over the following decades, more settlers arrived from Newark and points east, and they slowly built the facilities to exploit the natural resources abundant to the region. When the Proprietors of West Jersey completed its first land survey of the region in 1715, only a few European settlers were recorded along the Rockaway River downhill from what is now Boonton. North Jersey History & Genealogy Center collections (NJHGC).įor thousands of years, native Lenape residents lived along the hills and mountains of northern New Jersey. “Indian Habitations in Warren and Hunterdon Counties”, by Max Scrabisch, 1914-15.

Map depicting known Native American settlements along a portion of Northern New Jersey. One of Morris County’s oldest communities - and the onetime site of colonial-era homes, industrial-era factories, and vast fields of farmland - now rests 60 feet beneath the surface of the Jersey City Reservoir.Īmong the structures that stood upon this site was Samuel Ogden’s 4,000-acre estate that once welcomed American generals during the Revolutionary War. Moy, North Jersey History and Genealogy Center

Instal the last version for ios The Lost Village