The Morristown Tour

In 1983 I was offered a position as Marketing Manager of HP’s New Jersey Division.  It was a chance to do something different in a role that was more mainstream for our company.  It was something of a remote location, since most of our operations for the electronics test business were located in California and Colorado, with the main concentration around Silicon Valley – Palo Alto and Santa Clara.

Eventually, I said “yes”, and set off to relocate, finding a home in Cedar Knolls, a small residential suburb of Morristown.  I had a clear understanding that Rockaway, NJ, was not in the primary orbit for HP divisions.  Further, most of my colleagues had little knowledge of the area, which is a bit west of New York City. 

But I was born in the state on the shore and had visited New York City enough to know that New Jersey is hardly a remote province.

Though we were off the beaten track for HP, we still hosted visitors from many levels in the company.  Most were steeped in the Silicon Valley / Palo Alto centric view of the electronics industry, where everything of significance originated there, or so it was presumed.

Mostly because I thought the area was interesting, I began to take visitors on a brief tour, when there was time, before we would go out to dinner for the evening.  I quickly realized the tour was more that simple entertainment.  It greatly increased the visitor appreciation for the area, and the stature of our operation by association.

In about the first six months, I had been learning about the area. I was emerging as a resource of local knowledge more so than many of the longtime residents.  The history was fascinating.  Morristown was significant in a very large way for two periods.  First was the Revolutionary War when George Washington and his army spent a winter there.  Later, there was the Gilded Age from 1880 to 1930, when a hundred of America’s richest men, and one woman, made the area a summer home.  Then there were a few enterprises at the origins of the electrical and electronics industry.

Here’s how the tour would unfold, especially spring, summer, and early fall when the days were longer, and the area is beautiful.

At the end of our workday at the Rockaway site, we would set the plan for dinner.  That would be around Morristown, with a good selection of restaurants and near where the visitor would be staying.

The tour would start with a drive down Speedwell Ave, heading toward Morristown center.  On the left, I’d point out a red barn, part of Historic Speedwell village.  In that barn, in the loft, Alfred Vail, an electrical engineer (the first, by some accounts), collaborated with Samuel Morse.  In that barn they developed the first practical working prototypes of the telegraph.  The original mile of wiring they used to test it is still strung in the rafters.

A few minutes later, we’d enter the center square of Morristown.  George Washington and his staff spent a winter in Morristown at the Ford Mansion, while his Army was nearby in Jockey Hollow.  As we started around the square, I’d point out that Benedict Arnold used to drink in a pub in that corner there (the northwest). Then I’d mention that just off the square, in a small white cottage, Alexander Hamilton courted Betsy Schuyler, who he later married.

On the northeast side of the square is a Presbyterian Church with an old cemetery in the back.  Alfred Vail, of telegraph fame, is buried there.  And on the other side of the cemetery, Alfred Ford Jr and Alfred Ford Sr are buried side by side, having died only 12 days apart.  Alfred Ford Jr hosted Washington in his house Park, during the winter of 1779-80.  A small plaque at the foot of their graves notes that “George Washington was in attendance” for their funerals. I remember having goosebumps in reading that plaque, imagining that I was standing at the exact spot where George Washington stood as he paid his last respects. The Ford Mansion and grounds now form the Morristown National Historical Park, which we would drive by.

Before leaving the square, I’d point down a side street to the south, where two blocks away Thomas Nast had his home.  Nast was an editorial cartoonist who gained fame for his Tammany Hall cartoons.  He also gave us Santa Claus as we envision him today, plus the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey.

Just a bit east of the square, along South St, there’s the town hall of the city.  It was originally the home of Theodore Vail, a cousin of Alfred Vail of the telegraph.  Theodore Vail managed a local phone company, the original Bell company, in the early days of the telephone. Then he began to buy up other phone companies and added long distance service between them.  His enterprise grew into AT&T.

From the gilded age there was also Hetty Green, who walked along South Street.  Hetty was the richest woman in the world and was known as the “Witch of Wall Street”.  She was a very savvy and tough businesswoman.  She earned her stature with her business smarts and courage to stand up for herself among men.  Her wealth put her with Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan.

If there was time and daylight, I’d suggest a bit of a drive east to take in a few other sights.  And if that didn’t fit the schedule, I’d make sure to inject the stories into the dinner conversation.

Back in the early days, the Erie Lackawanna Railroad had the “Century Car” as the final car of the evening train coming from New York City daily to the Morristown station.  There, 100 of the richest people in America would disembark to their waiting carriages to return to their mansions.  When the Great Depression hit, on top of the recent income tax, few could afford to maintain their mansions.  Only about a third remain from that golden age. 

We’d head toward Madison, the Rose City, and pass near Florham Park.  Florham is an amalgam of first names – Florence Vanderbilt and Hamilton Twombly.  Florence was the daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Hamilton Twombly was his righthand man and married the boss’s daughter.  Florence and Hamilton wanted to build their home on a 400 acre parcel they owned.  But their architect advised them the parcel was not large enough, so they found a new property of 1500 acres where they constructed their mansion.  It is now the site of Fairleigh-Dickinson University, with the mansion at its core.  It was always worth a side trip to see the estate, which looks like a European palace.

We’d then stop for a moment as we passed an home looking like a small English castle, once the home of George Marshall Allen.  Allen was a publisher and an early pioneer of color publication.  The mansion had been copied from an estate in the UK, with many of the interior features salvaged from English manors slated for demolition, then installed in the home. At the time I was in New Jersey, the estate was the headquarters of General Drafting, known for their high-quality maps you’d find at gas stations.  

Only a mile further down the road was Drew University, which grew up around the Meade Mansion, of the Meade Paper fortune.

Finally, for our electronics industry visitors, there was the quick nod to the east and a mention of Menlo Park, and later West Orange and the Edison Labs.  Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park” (that’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, not California) is well-known for the light bulb and the phonograph. Later, he established a research lab in West Orange. Not many people are aware of the Black Mariah Studio at his labs. You can still visit. In West Orange, Edison developed a motion picture camera and viewing device. The Black Mariah was an indoor movie studio. where he started the movie industry.  The studio was a pie wedge shape with a pivot on the pointy end and on rollers along the circular arc.  The whole studio would be rotated so that the sun would shine through the roof windows onto the stage, no matter what time of day the shooting occurred.  Light was especially critical in the early days of photography.  Of course, it didn’t take long for others to figure out that California had more sun, and more often, than West Orange.

And just to make sure that our Silicon Valley visitors knew that there was important invention before Silicon Valley emerged, I’d point south to nearby Murray Hill, where Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented the transistor in 1947 at the Bell Labs there.

Then it was time for dinner.