Frelinghuysen Township Hall is located at 210 Main Street, Johnsonburg NJ 07846.
Phone: 908‑852‑4121.
Neighborhoods
Beginnings [1]
The township of Frelinghuysen was incorporated on March 9, 1848, with an area of 23.6 square miles and contains rolling hills of 550 to 700 feet above sea level. Its southwestern corner is bounded by Jenny Jump Mountain, rising to peaks of 1100 feet above sea level. It was taken from part of Hardwick Township, and named after noted statesman and educator Theodore Frelinghuysen (Mustin 1931:52). The township is bounded by Hardwick, Blairstown, Hope, Independence and Allamuchy Townships, as well as Sussex County.
Samuel Green, Deputy surveyor, and his companions were probably the first Europeans to appear within Frelinghuysen Township, during their survey of May 1715. They were surveying a line along the Minisink Path from Allamuchy to "the cleft in the hill where the Minisink path goeth through," thought to be near Millbrook. After the Indians abandoned the area (the last recorded in 1742), settlement occurred. On June 8, 1753, the General Assembly selected a little crossroads hamlet in the center of what was then Sussex County to be the county seat. The hamlet became known as Log Goal because of the jail that was built there. However, the location became unfavorable for the county seat, and the public meetings were relocated in 1962 and begun in Newton.
Early settlers in the township included the Green, Armstrong, Kennedy, Thomson, and Vliet families. Most of the township is agricultural, with small farming communities of Shiloh, Southtown and Ebenezer located at crossroads. It has never been a well-populated area of the county, but did have some important communities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Several important Presbyterian churches were organized within the township. The Upper Hardwick Presbyterian Church was organized in the 1750s at Log Goal, and the parishioners erected a log meeting house near the village, and an adjacent cemetery. By 1780, the church decided to build a larger meeting house, and erected one at the intersection of Shaw's Lane with "the Great Road from Newton to Johnsonburg." At the corner of Frelinghuysen Township, Fredon and Green Townships, Sussex County.
The Second Congregational Church of Hardwick was organized within the township on November 1, 1814, the first meeting of the church held in the upper rooms of the Shepard Tavern in Marksboro. It later changed to a Presbyterian form of government, and built the Marksboro Presbyterian Church within that community.
During the twentieth century, there was some resort development in this township. Included in these areas were Lake Wasigan, a man-made lake on the old Van Horn farm, used as a summer camp for girls. In 1929, the Stevens Institute of Technology selected a 400 acres site adjacent to Clover's Pond for a summer school for civil engineering, for which the Steven's Institute erected a school building, mess hall and cabins. It became the Presbyterian Church Camp following World War II (N.A. 1974).
Nearby Towns: Fredon Twp • Hope Twp •