Long Hill Township
Long Hill was named one of 25 Great Towns by New Jersey Magazine in March, 1999.
The Township consists of four communities: the villages of Gillette, Millington and Stirling, and the hamlet of Meyersville. Homestead Park is the name of the first subdivision in the Township developed in the 1920's.
Long Hill Township is located in the most southern part of Morris County, New Jersey. It is bounded by the Passaic River on the south and west, and by the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge on the north. It borders both Union and Somerset Counties.
In colonial times, Long Hill Township was part of the "Lord Stirling Grant" that included much of the area from Summit to Bernardsville, between Morristown and Watchung.
Long Hill Township has a Township Committee form of government. Five members of the Township Committee are elected for staggered three-year terms. The Committee elects a Chairperson to serve as Mayor for one year.
History
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Long Hill Township, Morris County's southeasternmost municipality, covers 12.1 square miles and has a population of about 8,800. Named for a ridge of the Watchung Mountains, the township also encompasses parts of the Great Swamp and the Passaic River valley. European settlers first arrived here during the 1730s. They farmed, established mills on the Passaic River in what would become Millington, and used the natural resources of the Great Swamp. The early trail that became Long Hill Road was their principal highway. These scattered settlements became part of Morris Township in 1740, including a region of southern Morris Township known as "Long Hill". During the Revolution, local men served in the militia, and householders provided supplies to the troops at Jockey Hollow. The Continental Army placed a beacon at a high point on the long ridge to warn of enemy troop movements. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Long Hill was a sparsely populated farming community with centers of activity in the villages of Millington and Meyersville. The latter was named for Kasper Meyer, one of several German immigrant farmers who had arrived here early in the century. Changes occurred after 1866 when the new municipality of Passaic Township was formed from Morris Township. In 1869 the Passaic Valley and Peapack Railroad purchased rights of way in the valley to extend railroad service from Summit to Bernardsville, and the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York bought up 500 acres of farmland near the railroad. Here the company developed the factory village of Stirling, named for the revolutionary general William Alexander, known as Lord Stirling, who once owned land here. The railroad also opened a station to the east on farmland owned by the Cornish family. The line's engineer named it Gillette to honor his fiancee, Rachel Gillette Cornish. Though the railroad brought a new immigrant population to Stirling, Gillette remained rural into the early twentieth century. The area had its own post office and general store. Passaic Township's scenic hills and easy access to transportation attracted wealthy people from the city who built summer homes along the ridge overlooking Passaic Valley. A simpler summer colony was built South of Meversville. At the end of World War 1, Passaic Township covered nearly 33 square miles on both sides of the Great Swamp. The township became its current size in 1922, when northern residents formed the new township of Harding. In 1992 the community changed its name to Long Hill Township. Today, despite commercial and suburban development, Long Hill has many historic structures ranging from eighteenth century farmhouses to the twenty-first century September 11monument. They remind us of Long Hill's legacy as a place of villages, farms, mills, and factories, where working men and women of many nationalities contributed to the development of our nation. | |
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text provided by the Morris County Heritage Commission, 2003 | |
Education
In 2002, 1,030 K-8th grade students in Long Hill Township attend the three schools operated by the Township School District under control of its local Board of Education.
All eighth grade students take the New Jersey "Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment" test. There are 99 middle schools in the state in Long Hill's socioeconomic category ("I" on a scale of "A" to "J"). The results of the 2000 testing at Central School are compared to those 99 schools, and the comparison shows that Central School had:
- the HIGHEST percentage of students rated as "Advanced Proficient" in Language Arts Literacy,
- the 8th highest percentage of students rated as "Advanced Proficient" in Science,
- the 20th highest percentage of students rated as "Advanced Proficient" in Mathematics, and
- the HIGHEST COMPOSITE percentage of students who scored as "Advanced Proficient" among the 99 comparable middle schools in the state.
About 300 elementary school students attend St. Vincent de Paul school in Stirling.
- The (1999-2000) average SAT scores at WHRHS ranked 4th among the 18 High Schools serving Morris County communities.
- 11th graders took the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test in the fall of 2000. 95.9 percent passed the exam. This was the highest percentage among all the public high schools in Somerset County, and would be slotted as the 5th highest percentage among all the public high schools in Morris County.
Demographics
PROPERTY ANALYSIS
| The table below is taken from the Final Report of the 2001 Reassessment. It assigns all the properties in the township into categories according to the use of the land. Details. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GEOLOGY
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Long Hill Township is in the Newark Basin of the Piedmont Physiologic Province. Shales, that were deposited during the Triassic Period, underlie the town. Volcanic activity occurred in the Newark Basin during the early Jurassic Period (181 million years ago). As a result, fissures formed in the earth's surface and flows of basalt occurred on the surface. Later faulting caused the flows to tilt. which resulted in the formation of the Watchung Mountains. A gentle uplifling of the earth in the region caused the streams to erode some of the rock layers. The "softer" rocks, those more susceptible to erosion, such as the Brunswick shale were gradually eroded, leaving the more resistant Watchung Mountains (Jurassic basalt) standing in relief. In Long Hill Township the hard basaltic rocks of the Third Watchung ridge, known as Long Hill, define the topography and drainage patterns that currently exist. Water falling on the north slope of the ridge drains into the Great Swamp, and on the southern slope moves towards the Passaic River. The most recent unit of geologic time, the Quaternary Period (the last 2.5 million years), included four glacial stages. The most recent glacial stage, the Wisconsin Glacier reached its maximum extent in New Jersey about 18,000 years ago and began to recede 11,000 years ago. Because of the great thickness (about 2,000 feet in New Jersey) and extent of the glaciers, much of the soil and large amounts of rock were dragged by or incorporated into the ice. When the climate began to warm, various portions of the glaciers began to melt. The large quantity of sediments and rocks that the glaciers carried were then deposited. The end of the glaciers southern movement in New Jersey is marked by the deposition of the terminal moraine. The terminal moraine in Long Hill Township was deposited atop and alongside the Third Watchung Ridge. This is important because of the superior capacity of the sand and gravel materials in the terminal moraine to permit rain or snow waters to infiltrate down to the underlying aquifers. As a result of the Wisconsin glaciation, a lake known as "Glacial Lake Passaic" was formed in the Newark Basin between the Second Watchung Mountain and the Highlands. Several remnant lakes occupied the lowland areas after the disappearance of Glacial Lake Passaic. Swamps and marshes now occupy those remnant lake basins. These include the Great Swamp, and the wetlands at the confluence of the Dead River and the Passaic River. The sediments left on the slopes of Long Hill after Glacial Lake Passaic receded, now store ground water and release it slowly to the wetlands and the Passaic River. These shallow, unconfined aquifers supply water to a significant number of private wells in Long Hill. This description is extracted from the "Township of Long Hill Well Head Protection Program Phase II: Identification of Well Head Protection Areas and Potential Pollutant Sources, June 2001". The complete report has colored charts which accompany this text. You may read the complete report by contacting the Secretary of the Environmental Commission. |
All information courtesy of LongHillNJ.Org
