Virtual Program

New Jersey, you may have noticed, has some weird road intersections. When George Musser, Jr,, lived in Boston, he thought of weird roads almost affectionately: they were old cow paths and battle routes. Why don’t we take the same pride here? For a historian, weirdness is golden: it reveals a past that has survived straightening, squaring off, and culverting. In this talk, George will share his efforts to read the landscape for clues to our colonial and Native heritage. Over the past couple of years, he’s been diving deep into manuscript archives to map northern Essex County—Montclair, Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, and parts of adjoining towns—from the first European settlement to the mid-19th century. He’s pieced together over 3,000 deeds, patents, and wills in a ginormous jigsaw puzzle, while filling in pieces lost to fire, neglect, and bad handwriting. Why did a woman in the early 1800s build a cabin as far as possible from every road? How did a landowner think he’d get away with selling the same land twice, to different people? Why did the Continental Army deploy a unit at what is now Bay Street Station? Why do we call it “Bay” Street? How did the Great Boiling Spring, our local version of Yellowstone, end up behind a laundromat in Newark’s North Ward? Instead of cursing our crazy-quilt geography, you will come to love it.

George Musser is a science writer and a former trustee of the Glen Ridge Historical Society.

You can watch this program at noon or 7 pm.

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