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A Fabulous Fable of the Supernatural Kind

The saga of the Morristown ghost has been told around campfires and dinner tables in Morris County for generations. Local legend claimed British Loyalists secretly buried stolen Patriot treasure on Schooley Mountain as they fled the oncoming forces of George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Years later in 1788, a former school teacher from Connecticut, Ransford Rodgers, convinced local prominent Morristown families that a ghost was protecting the true location of the treasure and he alone could exercise it. Little did the victims know, Rodgers was perpetuating an elaborate hoax and eventually extorted large sums of money from the embarrassed local elite. The tale has been recounted in various sensational pamphlets and publications ever since, leaving behind a mystery of what is true or myth.

Author Peter Zablocki separates fact from fiction in the story of the great Morristown ghost hoax.

Over 200 images are set in geographical sequence to guide the reader along the famed Henry Hudson trail.

The Central Railroad of New Jersey's Seashore Branch provided rail and boat services from New York City to points along the New Jersey Shore. It discontinued passenger service in 1966, with the last freight train operating in 1983. Official abandonment proceedings sparked the need to keep the right of way for future mass transit needs. This led to interim use. Today, the area is called the Henry Hudson Trail and is one of over 500 parks referred to nationally as a Rail-Trail. This free, ten-mile-long, hiking, biking, and walking trail is administered by the Monmouth County Parks System, and connects several towns of the Raritan Bay shore area. This rare look will enlighten trail users through images of views gone forever, while pointing out structures still in place. Over 200 images are set in geographical sequence to guide the reader along the trail.

Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.

The state, though, was not immune to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the first half of the twentieth century. Former vaudevillians Arthur H. Bell and his wife used the tactics of public theater to advertise and recruit for the organization. At a massive riot in Perth Amboy, thousands of immigrants besieged a few hundred Klansmen, tossed them out of building windows, burned their cars and ran them out of town. The allying of pro-Nazi German Bund groups and the Klan in the lead-up to World War II marked the end of the Klan's foothold. Authors Joseph Bilby and Harry Ziegler chart the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and how New Jersey collectively stood up to bigotry.

During the 19th century, Paterson, New Jersey, grew from an idea of Alexander Hamilton into a manufacturing and commercial powerhouse. Paterson was a city characterized as “an arm of iron in a sleeve of silk.” A major producer of locomotives and the largest source of silk products in the nation became a fast-growing center of business and commerce. The architecture of the period displays a confidence in the city’s long-term future that created a distinctive and noteworthy urban environment. In addition, Paterson was a gateway city for thousands of immigrant families. Although its long-term prominence as a manufacturing center did not endure, the city’s products and people impacted the nation and the world. The photographs in this book, largely from the archives of the Paterson Museum, highlight the city’s progression during its period of greatest growth and prominence. Focusing on the city’s architectural heritage in a variety of building types, the images illuminate the city’s growth, fortunes, and the heritage of a complex community during its most dynamic period. 

Author Richard Polton is a Paterson native trained in architecture, planning, and urban history. He has compiled photographs from the period to reveal the evolution of the nation’s first intentional industrial city’s transforming the ideas of Alexander Hamilton into a vibrant place that reflects its economic prowess. 

For over one hundred years people have been coming to Atlantic City to swim in the ocean, walk on the boardwalk, and get away from their day-to-day lives.....

Return to the halcyon days of the sand and sun as local writers and long-time locals present stories from Atlantic City's heartwarming past.

With the turning of each page, you will journey back into an earlier time.

Have you ever wondered what Verona was like a century ago? Do you enjoy looking through boxes of memorabilia? If you answered yes to these questions, then you will be fascinated with Old Verona. This remarkable new photographic history focuses on the early years of the community and provides vivid images of a time long forgotten. Focusing on the early settlement of Verona and including information on the borough's schools, churches, industry, transportation, and historic homes, the photographs in this book primarily span the period from the 1870s to the 1920s. Old Verona contains little-known information about the borough, including captions relating to Verona Lake's genesis from a mill pond to a recreational hot spot and the railroad tunnel that was abandoned in the 1870s. With the turning of each page, you will journey back into an earlier time.

In 1865, industrialist/inventor Hezekiah Bradley Smith purchased Shreveville, later renamed Smithville, an abandoned textile mill and town located along the Rancocas Creek in Burlington County, for $20,000.

He moved many workers from his Lowell, Massachusetts, plant to the new location, rebuilt the factory, and prepared it for the manufacture of his patented iron woodworking machinery. Smith began to improve the aging housing in the surrounding village. He opened a school and, later, constructed a new school building. Smith erected a boardinghouse for factory workers that contained shops and a concert hall. Through farming on land adjacent to his mansion, he made fresh produce and milk available to his workers. Smith's company also expanded into new industries by working with outside inventors, like George Washington Pressey, who needed a manufacturer for his American Star Bicycle. Later, Arthur Hotchkiss contacted the company to build the world's first bicycle railroad to transport workers from Mount Holly to the Smithville factory. This book captures life in the village and factory, memorializing the intertwining lives of the Smithville workers and H.B. Smith through photographs.

As the largest museum in New Jersey, the Newark Museum of Art has assembled important and highly regarded collections in the fine arts and decorative arts. It has collected specimens of rocks and minerals as well as plants and animals to illustrate the natural sciences. In all of these areas, it has developed innovative exhibitions. Finally, it has designed engaging educational programs that are both inspirational and transformative for people of all ages from the diverse communities that it serves. In many respects, it remains the model of the “new museum” that was imagined at its inception—a place dedicated to objects and the ideas embodied by them. In the words of founding director John Cotton Dana, “A good museum attracts, entertains, arouses curiosity, leads to questioning, and thus promotes learning.”

Montvale is a small borough of approximately 4.5 square miles in the picturesque Pascack Valley in northeastern Bergen County, New Jersey.

How the borough grew from a small farming community to a population of nearly 9,000 in 2019 is told through the use of vintage photographs. Pictures of 18th-century Dutch Colonial sandstone houses, a 19th-century octagon house, a cider mill that made "Jersey applejack," horses and buggies, and antique cars all have stories to tell, as do advertisements and posters. In one for an 1896 social and basket picnic, folks were invited to "bring your team, wife and children," but there would be "no swearing or fighting.'' Turn-of-the-century postcards tell of the hundreds of summer visitors escaping the city heat. After Montvale became the last stop in New Jersey on the Garden State Parkway, the western section of the borough changed from farmland to the headquarters of some of the most prestigious national and international corporations, including Benjamin Moore, KPMG, Sharp Electronics, and Western Union, as well as home to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.