Calendar
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General Meeting
January 21, 7 pm
Council Chambers,Municipal Building
675 Corliss Ave

Phillipsburg History Lecture
Dr. Leonard Buscemi
PAHS Meeting
February 18, 7 pm
Municipal Building/675 Corliss Ave

If you have an event that is open to the public and ought to be listed, please send an e-mail to our webmaster with some information about it as well as the date, time and place. It is often helpful to add a phone number for folks who may want additional information.

Welcome to the Phillipsburg area!

If you are from this region you may recognize a few of the buildings above—they include places in Carpentersville, Stewartsville, Finesville and Riegelsville as well as Phillipsburg. Our intention is to cover the history of the Phillipsburg area, not just the town itself. Broadly speaking, that means the western part of Warren County, and we'll often ignore municipal boundaries to call attention to something of note.

You can expect us to focus quite a bit on the architecture of the area—it abounds in old stone barns, Victorian residences, one-room schoolhouses, eighteenth-century churches, stone lime kilns, and delightful steel bridges. We've got some fascinating cemeteries, a few cannons, a couple of red-brick factories more than a century old, the Morris Canal, and even a brownstone townhouse that might have come straight from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. There are more than a handful of places listed on the National Register of Historic Places in this part of the county, and a least one village that is now applying for that designation.

Architecture is not our only concern, of course. There is much history in the railroads, events, genealogies, and even a few tall tales. Some controversies, too—for instance, about how Phillipsburg got its name. We're going to highlight local events—not just those with an historical accent, but things that may be of interest to people whose attention is not solely centered on high school football. Eighteenth-century maps, diaries, newspaper clippings, early music, old postcards and vintage photographs all fall within our purview.

So if you live in Alpha, Greenwich, Lopatcong, Pohatcong—even Easton—or are living elsewhere now but have a connection to this area, please take a few minutes to look around and see what's here, then bookmark this site so you can come back. We plan on updating it frequently.

We are also looking for a few people who can contribute occasionally (or regularly) to this website. We're interested in anything related to the history of the area—an old postcard perhaps, or something about one of your ancestors who lived here. Reminiscenses and anecdotes are fine—it doesn't have to be the product of scholarly research (although we will make serious monographs available at the publications link).

One of the major efforts of the Society is to preserve, research and document the Roseberry house, which was built sometime between 1750 and 1770, we believe. Pamela Backes, Barbara Bond, Gil Greene and Wayne Sherrer have been working on the genealogy of the many Roseberrys for a number of weeks already, and they will be reporting on that eventually. I've already read some fascinating material on a couple of Roseberrys. We're going to work on other families of early settlers, too. We hope to make this site, and the Roseberry Homestead blog a rich source of authoritative information about the early settlement of the area. If you'd like to help out—some of it is library research, much is networking with others who've already done some of the work, and much can be done via the internet—we welcome your participation.

One thing we know for sure is that John Roseberry did not build the house that bears his name. What we are not certain about is who was the client for whom it was built. Obviously a refined person of some taste and judgment, as well as a lot of money. We have a couple of strong candidates, but no conclusive evidence yet. This fragment of a wall painting from the parlor may provide a clue. We will have the pigment analyzed and we'll consult with experts who may be able to tell us when that style of floral motif was fashionable—perhaps even the name of the painter! Frankly, part of the fun is trying to solve a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Again, we welcome your participation. In a month or two we'll sponsor a meeting at which we lay out the evidence we have, the unknowns, doubts and question marks, as well as the direction of our current research efforts. That kind of colloquium can be very stimulating and often productive. We'll let everyone know on this website as soon as we set a date.

Another objective is to provide some kind of map or guide to the historic sites of the area. [Note: there is one such guide but it lists fewer than a dozen sites. See the Publications page.] Maybe there will be several such guides—directions for a driving tour of Finesville and Siegelville, or a walking tour of Stewartsville, for example. Visitors should be able to download such a guide from this website, and maybe even the Chamber of Commerce will distribute it. Again, willing workers will be needed to develop the materials for such a guide.

Several people have suggested that in addition to the school tours that we make a package of materials available to the area schools for use in the courses on New Jersey history. Teachers and curriculum specials will have to take the lead in that, and they'll have the final say about what works and is appropriate, but it is likely to be those of us exceptionally interested in local history that will dig out and assemble the materials from which those lesson plans will be drawn.