Shem Systems Corporation has scanned in the Bound Brook chapter from a book titled Historic Somerset, compiled by J.H. Van Horn, and published by the Compiler for the Historical Societies, New Jersey in 1965. We wish to thanks the Somerset County Historical Society for granting us permission to put this content onto our website.

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On a map of New Jersey by Adriaen Vander Donck, dated 1656, the Raritan River is shown from its mouth to its north and south branches, and there the river is given its present name. From this it is reasonable to assume that Dutchmen were the first Europeans to visit the site on the north bank of the Raritan's big bend, which was to become the Borough of Bound Brook.

Bordering the site on the east and west was waterpower in abundance and on the south a spacious waterway flowing to the coast. Equally, if not more important, the place was a suitable location for a trading post; for among the early Dutch were those who came to barter with the natives. They hoped to return to Holland made rich in the fabulous fur trade of those times. Here then was a location that lent itself to what was uppermost in mind; a crossroads, so to speak, of Indian trails merging from the north, south and west - a mart in the wilderness, ready-made.

At this point on the Raritan we find that a tract of land was transferred by the first recorded land title deed in the county. It was executed on May 4, 1681; parties to the same were two Raritan (Lenni-Lenape) Indians, the grantors, and Governor Philip Carteret with others, the grantees. Though there was no acreage stated, and some of its then meets and bounds have long since disappeared, it is known that the area included what is now the Borough of Bound Brook.

For a settlement no larger than this village of one and six-tenths square miles, much has taken place. From its earliest to present times it has been a prominent stop on routes of trade and travel. Its most eventful days were those of the Revolution. Then, the village was the oldest and largest settlement in the county; with a church, a tavern, a blockhouse, and thirty-three houses.

Some of the events that occurred in this vicinity were of such importance as to be included in our national history, but it is the local incidents of which we write, and these are described in the accounts that follow.

Getting now to more recent times, we find that by 1800 New Jersey was becoming prosperous from its production of flour, leather,
lumber, iron, and livestock. To reach the markets there was need for roads, and it was then that the era of the turnpike was on its
way. In 1806 construction was started on the original New Jersey Turnpike, a toll highway from New Brunswick to Phillipsburg via Bound Brook and Somerville. Next, in 1808 a turnpike from Perth Amboy through Metuchen joined it at Bound Brook, when traffic through the village was at times amazing. By 1841 the Elizabethtown and Somerville Railroad (later the Jersey Central) had built its tracks as far west as the Yellow Tavern, a temporary station 1/4-mile east of the Borough of Bound Brook. For the village, this must have been a momentous event. Not only was it an invaluable utility to the neighborhood, but it laid the way for Bound Brook to become a New York City commuters' town.

During the period 1886-1890, the area saw the introduction in New Brunswick of the horse-drawn streetcar. In 1895 its conversion to an electric system, known as the Brunswick Traction Company, took place. In 1897 it commenced the extension of its system from New Brunswick via the Albany Street Bridge, the River Road, Bound Brook and Somerville, to Raritan. However, progress was rudely interrupted. Another concern, the New York-Philadelphia Traction Company, attempted to block the project. It went so far as to employ an engineering concern of Maryland to construct two miles of a finished electric rail system over part of the right-of-way then in dispute. This was accomplished by working hundreds of imported Negro laborers on a Sunday, when the law was nowhere near to intercede. At once litigation started that resulted in the New Brunswick company's preventing further hindrance or interruption. Finally, that company bought up the assets of the New York-Philadelphia Company, and in 1898 the line was in operation, end to end.

By 1904 similar projects resulted in additional street railway service from New York City through Newark to Bound Brook and on to Trenton. That form of transport lasted until 1931 when the auto jitney came in vogue; and though unauthorized and uncontrolled, it served well the many short-distance riders of the times. In turn, the jitneys gave way to the motor buses of today, which, as we know, adjust themselves to current needs, whatever they may be.

There was a time when the Jersey Central, Baltimore and Ohio, Philadelphia and Reading, Lehigh Valley and Port Reading Railroads together moved more than a hundred fast passenger, coal, and heavy freight cars through the borough daily. This traffic, over three parallel rights-of-way but 200 feet in width called for rail roading at its best. On the western edge of town the tracks crossed Main Street at two points within a quarter-mile. Here it was that serious accidents frequently occurred, either through the driver's fault or from the fractious horses frightened by the noise. The solution to this dilemma was not an over or an underpass, but a simpler one - swinging one block of West Main Street from east and west, 90° north and south, where traffic from the east took the main road going west by a right turn and a next left. Soon thereafter the road east and west out of West Main Street, known as the Easton Turnpike, became the Shun-Pike; and the shunt, in 1926, became Columbus Place. Thus the dog-leg on West Main Street was a lifesaver, and will no doubt remain.

Recognized as a town in 1869, Bound Brook was separated from Bridgewater Township and incorporated as a borough in 1891; and in all its years there were but two fires that did extensive damage - one in 1881 and the other in 1896. It was the latter that caused the greater loss, including the historic Presbyterian church in East Main Street.

From earliest Colonial days the stream Bound Brook was the name given the more prominent of the minor branches emptying into the Raritan. Among the Records of New Jersey that name was used in numerous deeds defining local land ownership. Authentic evidence shows it was Bound Brook and not Green Brook that emptied into the Raritan, thus refuting the name applied to it on some maps of today. Evidence to that fact we note below:

Grants and Concessions of New Jersey, 1664-1702, shows, among the laws passed at the General Assembly in the Town of Perth Amboy in 1688, " ... an act dividing the County of Middlesex into two counties.... Be it therefore enacted by the Governor's Council and Deputies now in General Assembly and by authority of the same, that the said uppermost part of the Raritan, beginning at the mouth of the Bound Brook where it empties itself into the Raritan River, and to run up the said brook to the meeting of the said Bound Brook with the Green Brook, and from the said meeting, to run upon a northwest line into the hills; and upon the southwest side of the Raritan, to begin at a small brook where it empties itself into the Raritan about 70 chains below the Bound Brook and from thence to run upon a southwest line to the uttermost line of the Province, be divided from the said County of Middlesex and to thereafter be deemed taken, and to be a County of the Province, and that same county be called the County of Somerset."

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Acts of Parliament

"A sketch of the operations of His Majesty's Fleet and Army. . . . Published according to an Act of Parliament, 1777, shows Bound Brook emptying into the Raritan."

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Maps o f the Revolution

" A map laid down chiefly from actual surveys received from the Right Honorable Lord Stirling and others, and delineated for the use of His Excellency General Washington, by Robert Erskine, F.R.S., 1777," shows Bound Brook emptying into the Raritan.

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State Surveys o f New Jersey

From the New Jersey Geologic Atlas, 1914, ..... Middlebrook and Bound Brook, which drain the southern slope of the First Mountain, the Washington Valley and a little of the inner slope of the Second Mountain, enter the Raritan at Bound Brook."

So it was in 1688, that the name Bound Brook was officially applied to the stream, and in course of time a settlement grew upon its western bank that also took that name. Why, and when the name of the stream was changed from Bound Brook to Green Brook is not known, but whatever the reason it was not justified and should be restored to keep the record straight.