The Banks of the Raritan

Somerset County announced this week that they were close to finalizing a deal to buy the old Johns-Manville landfill site on the south bank of the Raritan River. The 197 acre property is partly in Hillsborough and partly in Manville. It's difficult to see what the county could use this property for - hard to understand how or why THIS open space parcel should be selected for any kind of future recreational use - but at $700,000 for nearly 200 acres, it certainly wasn't expensive, and may turn out to be a bargain.

The property was used as a landfill by Hillsborough until around 1920, when the township sold it to asbestos manufacturer Johns-Manville. The interesting thing is that not only did Johns-Manville use the site for waste disposal for many decades, but also that the company's factory buildings ended up in the landfill themselves after they were demolished in the mid 90s.

Johns-Manville moved it's factories from Brooklyn to Hillsborough in 1912. The company felt that they had found the perfect site to build a gigantic factory on the farmlands adjacent to the Raritan and Millstone Rivers. Hillsborough was happy to have the company come, looking to encourage industry and bring jobs to the community. What Hillsborough didn't count on was the corporation's complete lack of interest in providing adequate housing for its thousands of employees.

Living conditions were described as squalid - and that was probably being generous. On April 18, 1929, a referendum passed creating the Borough of Manville as its own municipality apart from Hillsborough. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1982 as it dealt with numerous class-action lawsuits stemming from health risks associated with asbestos. A trust company was eventually formed to administer and pay claims. The Manville Trust is still in existence today, long after the company's flagship factory was buried on the banks of the Raritan.