By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
Lawrence Township’s three centuries of history has been condensed, in illustrations and words, in a 12-foot-wide panel on a wall across from the Planning and Engineering Department at the Municipal Building.
Sunday afternoon, Township Historian Dennis Waters filled in the rest of the story — with the help of 60 images projected onto a screen — at the Lawrence Historical Society’s annual meeting in the Commons at Lawrence High School.
“Whenever you begin thinking about a timeline, one of the first questions is where to start. Ultimately, the choice of starting point is arbitrary,” Mr. Waters said.
It is well known that the land that later became Lawrence Township was occupied for thousands of years by native Americans before the Europeans arrived in the 1600s, he said, adding that the late 1600s were a complicated time in the colony.
“The Dutch fought the English. The English fought the English. We had dukes of York, and Carterets and Berkeleys and the proprietors of East and West Jersey — most of whom were rich Englishmen who never set foot on this side of the Atlantic,” he said.
Mr. Waters said that’s why he chose to start the Lawrence timeline in 1687 with George Keith, who was sent to the New World to be surveyor-general of East Jersey. His task was to survey the imaginary line between East Jersey and West Jersey, known today as the Province Line.
Since Lawrence was at the east end of West Jersey, it is not surprising that the line that Mr. Keith laid out forms part of Lawrence Township’s border, Mr. Waters said. The Province Line also forms part of the boundaries of Hamilton, Hopewell, Lawrence, Princeton, Robbinsville and West Windsor townships in Mercer County.
By 1697, there were enough people in what is now Lawrence Township that a petition was filed with the Colonial Supreme Court in Burlington to form a township, he said. Maidenhead — Lawrence’s original name — was approved. The name was later changed to Lawrence, in honor of naval Capt. James Lawrence of the War of 1812 fame.
During the American Revolutionary War, armies of all the major combatants — British, French, Hessian and Gen. George Washington’s Continentals — passed through Lawrence on the King’s Highway (Route 206), Mr. Waters said. Lawrence residents also served in the First Hunterdon Regiment, one of four militia regiments created in Hunterdon County. Mercer County was carved out of Hunterdon County in the mid-1800s.
In the early 1800s, the emphasis in the new United States was on economic and geographic expansion, as well as infrastructure improvements, he said. That’s what led to the creation of the Trenton and New Brunswick Straight Turnpike (known today as Brunswick Pike) in 1803, and the Princeton Branch Turnpike (Princeton Pike) in 1808.
In 1830, Lawrence had a population of 1,430 people, along with 339 horses and mules and 710 cattle, according to Thomas Francis Gordon’s “Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey,” Mr. Waters said. There was one store, two saw mills, three grist mills and eight tan vats, along with one Presbyterian church and “a flourishing boarding school and academy” — the Maidenhead Academy, which is now known as The Lawrenceville School.
Lawrence’s transformation from a farming community into a suburb of Trenton started in earnest in 1890, when Joseph Slack and William Wood began selling lots in what would become the Slackwood neighborhood, Mr. Waters said. Other residential developments followed.
The introduction of trolley lines between Trenton and Lawrence, and later Lawrence and Princeton, helped fuel that transformation, he said. The point where the Johnson Trolley Line crossed the farm road on Lewis Eggert’s farm became known as Eggert’s Crossing, he said.
The adjacent neighborhood to the former Eggert farm was originally called Trenton Terrace, but it also became known as Eggert’s Crossing, he said. Soon, it became a center of African-American life in Lawrence — including the Crossing Inn on Albemarle Road, which hosted black entertainers such as Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald, he said.
If trolley lines fueled the first spurt of suburban growth, it was the introduction of sewer lines and the opening of the Trenton Freeway in 1953 that sparked the second wave of development, Mr. Waters said. Farms sprouted housing developments, as well as the campuses of the Educational Testing Service and Rider University.
As the population of central Lawrence grew, the retailers were not far behind, he said. The Lawrence Shopping Center opened in 1960, which also marked the beginning of the end of downtown Trenton as a shopping destination. The opening of the I-295/Route 1 interchange attracted more commercial development — the Mercer Mall and the Quaker Bridge Mall — in the 1970s.
“Most history discussions are a recitation of things that actually happened, but in this case I am going to include something that did not happen. It’s ‘not happening’ had a profound effect on Lawrence — and that is in 1980, after years of protest, the state Department of Transportation officially canceled the proposed routing of I-95 through Somerset County,” Mr. Waters said.
The original plan for I-95 called for it to “peel off” the existing highway in Lawrence, and make its way into Hopewell Township to connect with I-297, he said. After canceling those plans, the DOT spent the money that had been allocated for the highway and spent it on widening and improving Route 1.
“So today’s Route 1 corridor is largely the result of this decision,” Mr. Waters said.
The timeline concludes in 1991, right across Route 206 from Rider University, he said. Trenton’s Adath Israel Congregation opened its doors that year, and became the township’s first stand-alone synagogue. It received an ecumenical welcome from the Christian churches in Lawrence, he said.
More recently, the scope of religious diversity has increased in Lawrence. Those new congregations are not transplants from Trenton, but rather transplants from around the world — Sikh Sabha Gurudwara on Baker’s Basin Road, and the Islamic Circle of Mercer County and the Radha Krishna Temple, both on Lawrence Station Road, he said.
“In fact, if you look up, you will see a series of flags around the room. These flags represent the countries of birth of the students and staff at Lawrence High School. There are more than 40,” he said.
“The Scots-Irish Presbyterians who settled in Maidenhead 300 years ago would no doubt be astonished at what a melting pot our community has become,” he said.
