Camplain Road School

After Johns Manville relocated their manufacturing plant to the northeast corner of Hillsborough Township in 1912, the population explosion was overwhelming. The number of residents in the traditional farming community doubled in a decade. And they brought their kids.

Camplain Road School circa 1930s

Camplain Road School, an eight-room school erected in 1916, was the second school built in the Manville section of town as the number of schoolchildren increased. The first was a re-build of the school on Main Street called Harmony Plains School in 1912. After the school on Camplain Road was constructed, the schools were renamed Manville School 1 and Manville School 2; the schools didn't acquire their "Road" and "Street" names until after Manville seceded from Hillsborough in 1929.

1868 Hillsborough Township Schools

What distinguishes Camplain Road School, at least for me, is that it was the first new school built in a new area of Hillsborough, i.e. not replacing an older structure, in more than 60 years, at least. In the page above from the 1868 report on New Jersey schools, you will notice the fifteen district schools - sixteen with Branchburg Township's Branchville (South Branch) school added to the end. These were the same schools still serving students in 1916 - minus the original Flagtown (Washington) school that closed in the mid-1870s and the Woodville School that closed around the turn of the century. And all of those schools, in various incarnations, were in service since 1850 or before.

Camplain Road School closed and was demolished in the mid-1970s due to decreased enrollment and the fact that it contained substandard rooms.