Painting of the Morgan Section of Sayreville by H & H Wiley Courtesy of the Sayreville Historical Society.

After many months of down time, the Morgan-NJ.org web site is now finally back up!  This is the first  installment of many new and many updated postings from before the dark days.

Morgan, New Jersey is not really a city or a town but rather a political subsection of the Borough of Sayreville and named for the family which purchased the property just a little over 300 years ago.  It is located on the western shores of Raritan Bay, bordered to the north by the City of South Amboy and by Cheesequake Creek to the south.  The western border seems to be not quite well defined though it is, I’m told, generally understood to be somewhere around present day Route 35

The original “Five Hundred acres of Land & marsh” was purchased by Charles Morgan III on May 7, 1710 and appears to have remained in the family for some 200 years.  Now a long established bedroom community, it was once a sparsely populated wooded area and even before that time, was presumably the home to the Lenni Lenape tribe.  Since then, Morgan gained a railroad, which is still very much in use, a state highway also very much in use.  For a few decades, there was a trolley line.  For some fifty years, there was a thriving beach community which was the first stop in New Jersey’s fabled “Jersey Shore.” There were markers showing the border between New York and New Jersey. For a few hundred years there was a historic inn with the legend of the hanging of a spy. Within an eleven month time period, there was the expedited building of one of the largest munitions plants of its time, or ever, and its deadly sudden and total destruction.  The bluff overlooking the bay was used during the Revolution as a way to monitor enemy ship movements. One member of the Morgan family was killed during the revolution and is buried next to his father and brother all of whom were part of the Middlesex County Militia – the brother also later being a member of the US Congress House of Representatives. There is one school, two cemeteries, no places of worship I can think of, a brick road, a few marinas – even after Hurricane Sandy, a channel with two jetties, two road bridges and one railroad bridge over Cheesequake Creek, a gas pipeline leading under the bay, a number of small businesses but mostly houses and the remains of “The Woods.”  If Facebook and the initial response to this web site are guides, Morgan is also very fondly thought of by the many people who either grew up there or spent a good portion of their lives there.