Towns of My County

Part 1 of a central New Jersey photo essay

For over a year, I’ve been “collecting” photographs of the various small towns in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where I grew up. There’s Flemington, where I’m from, Clinton, and Lambertville—probably the best-known of them. Maybe Frenchtown as well. (Places like Princeton and Morristown are cool, but they’re in other counties.)

Hunterdon is right in the middle of the state—it’s Central Jersey, which absolutely exists—and right in between Manhattan and Philadelphia as well. It has less of the typical New Jersey sprawl, and lots of farmland and classic small towns. I loved growing up there, I love visiting, and I think that pattern of open space combined with small but relatively dense settlements is a far better pattern than low-density suburbia.

That’s one reason I support new housing in these small towns. Many locals feel they’re losing the old small-town character with new development. I think the far greater threat to the genuine character of these towns has been losing their local economies and their status as real cities, and becoming little more than bedroom communities for commuters, surrounded by car-dependent development, with only memories left over from the old days.

But that pattern still exists, and whenever I visit these little towns, I think of how differently we could have done things. I see the unselfconscious mixing of residential and commercial uses—large buildings with ground-floor retail, or homes next to businesses. I see buildings that must have once been hotels or boarding houses, and are now apartments, next to duplexes, next to single-family homes. I see old buildings that were once small downtown supermarkets. I see places where you can leave your car and, theoretically, complete your errands on foot in an environment that feels built for people.

In short, when I see a small town of a few hundred or a few thousand people, I see a tiny city. This seems remarkable to me. And in a multi-part photo series, I’ll be showing you all of these small towns, as well as giving you their population counts.

There are so many of these settlements, a few no longer anything more than a handful of buildings around an intersection, that it is difficult to even make an exact count of the number of small towns in Hunterdon County. But I’ve visited and photographed all of the obvious ones as well as a few edge cases. Enjoy!

Flemington, 4,876

Whitehouse Station, 3,152

Bloomsbury, 792

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Related Reading:

An Embryonic City

A Hint of America’s Lost Urban History

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

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