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When choosing a new hometown, it’s probably a good idea to know which town you’re choosing.
When I first purchased a house in Mendham, I didn’t quite realize that it was one of two towns. Yes, there were two Mendham’s on the map, but I came from California where I didn’t have townships or boroughs, and hadn’t really any thought to the names of towns, or their boundaries, or how that might affect how they operate.
So when we bought our house in Mendham, I thought it was just in Mendham, and that Google Maps was just a little bit confused. Until recycling day…
When we moved here we had a surplus of cardboard and styrofoam.
So I googled “styrofoam recycling Mendham”, and was pointed to a recycling place very close to my house. This is the Mendham Borough Public Works Garage.
I pulled up, and asked where I could drop off my styrofoam. And they answered: “Do you live in the Township or the Borough”? I wasn’t quite sure. I told them I lived in the Oak Knoll neighborhood.
“Oh, that's the TOWNSHIP,” they said. “This is only for BOROUGH residents. You’ll have to leave your recycling on the street and the Department of Public Works will pick it up. But that's only for cardboard and cans. Styrofoam has its own recycling day.”
And, of course, they didn’t know when that was.
So I left the recycling center with more questions than answers. What was Mendham Borough and what was the Township? And why was there a difference? Had it always been this way? And most importantly, I still wondered, when is styrofoam recycling day?
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Welcome to Hometown History. A series about the iconic places and events that make a town someplace people call home - stories that people can tell to their friends old and new about the place they live, did live, or will live: In my case, Mendham TOWNSHIP, New Jersey.
Because there are indeed TWO Mendhams, Mendham Township and Mendham Borough. And in THIS episode, we talk about the Township and the Borough, and the real reasons behind how and why…more than 100 years ago…they split.
If you’re not from New Jersey, the whole Borough / Township thing can be a bit confusing. If you look at a map of Mendham, you’ll notice that the borough is sitting inside of the township, like a fried egg: the borough (the yolk) is surrounded by the township (the egg white). Easy enough, right?
But while it’s pretty easy to picture a fried egg, in reality the lines between Mendham Borough and Mendham Township are extremely subtle. Many people, myself included, might not even know which one they’re in.
There’s a few hints, like the Abner Doubleday sign welcoming you to Mendham Borough, and the fact that homes in the township are often farther apart than they are in the Borough’s center. The biggest giveaway might be the fact that Katie’s kids, who live in Mendham Borough, will attend Hilltop Elementary School in the dead center of Mendham, but my kids, who live in the Township will attend Brookside Elementary school, even though that’s WAY over on the other side of the egg white.
But while this sort of municipal structure might be a headache for parents, it’s not really uncommon here in New Jersey. Like, for example, Princeton, New Jersey. Liz Lempert is the former mayor of the Municipality of Princeton.
LIZ: I served two terms for a total of eight years, from 2013 to 2020.
Liz explained the most basic differences between boroughs and townships, which come down to governance.
LIZ: The Township form of government has five elected officials, and the mayor is chosen by the five people amongst themselves. The Borough has a directly elected mayor and then six council people.
But outside of the way you elect your government, there's really no rules as to how boroughs and townships relate to each other. Liz told me that Princeton’s borough and township essentially worked together across a lot of different departments.
LIZ: So, we had a shared Recreation Department, a shared library. We had a shared Planning Department, shared court system.
In Mendham, things are slightly different. Clearly as I discovered when I tried to go to the recycling center. It would have been much easier if I could have just gone to the place right around the corner from my home. Or if my kids could go to the elementary school that’s closer to where they live.
Now that I understood better the way things worked in Mendham Township and Mendham Borough. I wanted to understand why.
A few weeks after my conveniently inconvenient trip to the recycling center, I learned that a neighbor of mine was a council member for Mendham Township.
JORDAN: My name is Jordan Orlins. I was elected for the Mendham township committee for the years 2020, '21, '22.
Jordan was the perfect person to go to for more information about how we ended up with a borough and a township. Because his goal while serving on the committee was to get the township and borough to merge into one Mendham.
JORDAN: Now, it started as a township going way back, late 1600s is when we first had settlements here, mostly farming, and then later some light industry. It stayed that way for 150 years, all the way to 1906.
Now what happened in 1906? I don’t want to say there was another schism, so I’ll call it a disagreement, around something we all take for granted. You turn a knob, and it works. We use it every day, and hopefully it’s clean. You can even jump in it. That’s right: water.
JORDAN: They say that the split was the result of the need for a water utility and then a water distribution system, primarily for the purpose of firefighting.
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In any town where people are living close together, as they do in what is now the borough, a big hazard to people and property was fire.
In the late 1800s, Mendham Township’s local volunteer fire squad was called The Bucket Brigade, and was composed of a few dozen men, horses, and an apparatus, which is a fire truck. (That’s literally the name, “The Apparatus”. Isn’t that funny?)
But they didn’t have automobiles, so the apparatus was a chassis with wheels that carried buckets, often pulled by horses. The work that these early firefighters did was hard and ehhhh…inefficient, to say the least. You may recall that Hilltop Church was completely burned to the ground not once but twice in the 19th century. And records indicate that after a few unsuccessful firefighting efforts at the turn of the century, Mendham residents realized they needed a better, quicker solution - local infrastructure to get water directly to homes, and to fire hoses.
But this would come at a steep price. The utility was going to cost $40,000, which is upwards of $1.3 Million today. And that didn’t cover the maintenance. The fire apparatus was yet another cost.
Now, residents who lived further out in the township weren’t as threatened by an out of control fire, so they didn’t see the benefit of paying for a local water utility.
The debate over the public utility of water was split between residents of Mendham living in the center of the township and those living in the surrounding areas. The only way to resolve the stalemate was for residents to vote to break away from the rest of the township and become their own thing: Mendham Borough.
So water was a key reason behind why the township and the borough split: water for firefighting, and water for domestic consumption.
JORDAN: But that's really only part of the explanation. It takes a long time for something that dramatic to happen, because even little things require so much cooking, and you need multiple reasons. It's almost always a confluence of a bunch of things.
Jordan knows what he’s talking about. In order to put together a pitch for why Mendham should come back together, he had to uncover what it really was that split it up in the first place.
And Jordan realized, it wasn’t as simple as just water. There were actually a couple other reasons why Mendham split into a township and a borough in 1906.
Music and Railroad SFX
We had the industrial revolution, and we had the civil war. And these things drove huge productivity spikes.
JORDAN: Where America just went crazy. Productivity has never been higher in the history of our country than during that roughly 40-year period directly after the Civil War.
Add to this the pre-income tax cash that titans were making on railroads, and you have the gilded age driving people into the countryside. NJ in general and Mendham specifically benefited from this.
JORDAN: And you have a change in dynamic in the Township, where it was farmers and landowners who exerted a lot of control and power. Now suddenly you have wealthy commuters.
Just like Abner Doubleday, these people came out to Mendham with their wealth and thought “Wow, this is a great place. I’ve gotta get a piece of this.”
In 1892, Frederick Cromwell, a New York financier built a 47-room mansion on Mendham road as a gift for his son Seymour. It was later gifted to the Sisters of Christian Charity.
Richard H. Williams Sr., heir to the Williams and Peters Coal Company fortune, built a Manor House in what is now Brookrace in 1914 as a wedding present for his son, Col. Richard Henry Williams Jr., a decorated World War I veteran.
Then there’s Three Fields on Cherry Lane, a 9,000 square foot French manor style home, built in the late 1920s for Benjamin Duncan Mosser, a banker based in Philadelphia.
But they weren’t all financiers. The Dos Passos estate was built in the 1930s by Cyril Franklin Dos Passos, who was a lepidopterist! That’s right, a butterfly expert.
These folks were coming out to the country for more or less the same reasons people move to Mendham today - for more space, good schools, and the natural beauty of the area.
And while these wealthy bankers and businessmen - and butterfly experts - were building large homes in Mendham, others were building Mendham’s new merchant class. More businesses opened along Main Street to cater to the new wealthy individuals moving to Mendham.
And by the turn of the century, Mendham’s merchants were looking to upgrade the heart of the township - Main Street - to better serve their businesses.
JORDAN: And that growing power within the merchant class said, ‘We need to upgrade. Our shops need a better street up front. We need lights. We need sidewalks because we're competing with an emerging Morristown.’
But water, streetlights, sidewalks? Those things don’t come cheap. And once again, residents living on the outskirts of Mendham Township didn’t really see the point of these upgrades.
So you could think of these diverging economic interests as sort of like little cracks in a log of wood. To really split it, you need a useful tool…like a freshly sharpened ax.
JORDAN: So it was very hard to divest before about 1880. And there was an act at the state legislature that made it possible for a majority of a town to divest itself by referendum
The economic division that was happening in Mendham was happening across New Jersey in the late 1800s. To smooth things over, the state passed a law that would make it easier for towns to form new municipalities. And that was the freshly sharpened ax that Mendham needed.
The law was called The Borough Act Of 1878, officially titled “An act for the formation of borough governments,” with section 2 explicitly spelling out how boroughs could be created.
Here goes…
“That it shall be the duty of the chosen freeholder, or if more than one, then of one of the chosen freeholders of any township in which it is proposed to constitute a borough under this act…
Dear listener, I couldn’t say this without stumbling over my words.
In plain english, this means, if people owning 1/10 the land of the proposed borough vote that they want to become a borough, they can trigger a special election to do it.
This act sparked an explosion of municipalities in NJ.
In the three decades between when this act was passed in 1878, and when Mendham Borough was formed in 1906, 174 new municipalities were created in New Jersey. Bergen county formed 36 in one year alone. The act of creating new boroughs in New Jersey caught on like a fever - so much so that experts named it Boroughitis. And that fever spread to Mendham.
In 1906 Mendham borough split from Mendham Township, creating two separate municipalities.
Sidewalks were paved. Lights were put up. The populations of both towns increased as people were attracted by the schools, trees, and parades.
As the years passed, the borough and township operated many functions separately: school districts, police and fire departments, water utilities, and of course, recycling.
It’s how things have been done for over 100 years now. Until Jordan mounted a bid to get Mendham to come back together at the start of 2020.
JORDAN: Consolidation is something that most folks recognize as a no-brainer. The execution is obviously fraught with difficulty, but the economics makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately for Jordan, the momentum that he had gathered for consolidating Mendham going into 2020 was erased by the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean that Mendham won’t come back together one day. It’s been done before - in Princeton actually.
LIZ: So the first attempt was in the 1950s. I don't think that ever went to referendum.
That's Liz Lempert again, our old friend, the former mayor of the Municipality of Princeton.
Funny story about the name, too.
LIZ: Initially, it broke some of the state computer programs because there was not an option for municipality.
Until 2011, Princeton’s merger didn’t even make it past a local referendum. Princeton tried and tried and TRIED.
LIZ: but there was an attempt in the 1970s, which failed in the borough and passed in the Township. There was another attempt in the 1990s.
And when it did get past a local referendum, it was for several reasons.
LIZ: One was the cost savings, and then another was just efficiency.
Mendham is in a different situation, of course. Our towns have developed side by side, and residents are able to enjoy the same cultural activities year-round: borough residents go to the annual clambake hosted by the township’s fire department, and township residents attend MendhamFest, right next to doubleday field.
Some residents still don’t even realize they live in the township or the borough when they move in, and some don’t find out until later. Jordan only realized when it came time to send his kids to elementary school.
JORDAN: People were saying, “Oh, you're going to end up at the elementary school over in Brookside. No, we're going to the Hilltop.” And that's when we started to learn about the division.
My experience at the Borough recycling center, gave me a glimpse of how civic boundaries operate and touch residents that live within them.
In exploring Mendham’s history over the last several months, I realized that the history of a town is the story of its people. No matter how different we are, we all share this space. we may not all agree on everything at once, we may not even go to the same school or church or get our water the same way - but over time, we can all agree that we live here for the same reasons: it’s a nice place to live and grow, gather, celebrate, and occasionally recycle our styrofoam.
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This episode was written and produced by Ryan Ross and Katie Feather. It was mixed and edited by Katie Feather. Our theme music is La Danse Timide by Howard Harper-Barnes.
Special thanks to Jordan Orlins and Liz Lempert. Additional information provided by the Mendham Borough Library. Information on New Jersey’s era of “Boroughitis” was . taken from the book “New Jersey’s Multiple Municipal Maddess” by Alan Karcher, published by Rutgers University Press.
For more information, visit our website, hometownhistorynj.com - thank you for listening.
Bibliography:
Karcher, Alan; (1998). New Jersey’s Multiple Municipal Madness. Rutgers University Press
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