Merusi's Tavern - Roycefield Inn (1933 - 1959)

The colorful Roycefield Inn made a final appearance in the news, and in the consciousness of Hillsborough residents, fifty-eight years ago when the two-story barn and tenant house on the property were destroyed in a spectacular fire.

12 March 1960 Courier News

At the time of the fire on March 11, 1960, the 200-year-old, 95-acre farmstead north of Triangle and west of Farm Road (at that time still called Roycefield Road) was owned by Somerville Poultry Farms - one of the largest producers of eggs in the northeast. An eight-year-old boy lit a match in the darkened barn filled with hay in an attempt to find his friend. 

12 March 1960 Home News

A refugee family of seven from Yugoslavia, who were living in the house and working on the farm, were displaced as the roof of the house, just five feet from the barn, came crashing down. Newspapers noted that the Roycefield Inn, closed since late in the previous year, was undamaged. Nevertheless, the storied tavern never reopened.

Detail from 1945 Hagstrom Somerset County Map

Around 1933, as Prohibition was ending, Mrs. Mary Merusi opened a tavern on the property that in the previous century was the Pierce farm. The widowed Italian immigrant's farm became a popular location for civic groups to have their picnics in the summer, and clubs to hold their dinners in the winter. In 1937 Merusi's Tavern was the site of the first meeting of the newly-formed Innkeeper's Protective Association of Hillsborough Township - essentially a lobbying body for the rights of innkeepers. By the end of the decade, Mrs. Merusi had remarried and within a few years sold the tavern to Charles and Mary Krassy of Manville who incorporated the business in 1941 as The Roycefield Inn.

28 July 1944 Home News

The Krassys did not own the tavern for long as 1943 news articles show the Roycefield Inn as being owned by Michael Mesko and family. Each of the Mesko's four sons was in service to America at this time - the elder three in military service and the youngest - just sixteen - working at the South Somerville Quartermaster Sub-Depot. Because he was unable to find any other labor to work the farm, Mesko sold the tavern to William Von Spreckelson and Otto Schreiver in May 1944. He got out just in time.

29 July 1944 Courier News

On July 27, 1944, forty-six-year-old Robert Westover - a Somerville resident employed at The Belle Mead Army service Forces Depot in Hillsborough - was spending the night out with the thirty-nine-year-old Anna Legedza - a married woman from Manville. They went first to the Amwell Farms Inn on Route 206, and then to the Roycefield Inn. It was there that they ran into Vincent Mullane, 50, also of Manville. Mullane resented the attention being paid to Mrs. Legedza from Westover and asked him to step outside where at least one punch was thrown. Mullane hit the ground and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. 

11 April 1955 Home News

The couple picked up Mullane and put him in the passenger seat of his car while Westover got into the driver's seat and drove to Manville, Mrs. Legadza following in her own car. Police stopped Westover for speeding on Camplain Road and discovered Mullane, who was already dead, slumped in the front seat.  Westover was charged with murder, but in a plea deal three months later received five years probation and a $500 fine on an assault charge.

11 April 1955 Courier News

In the 1950s the Roycefield Inn was owned by Mr. and Mrs. John Askane. It was during this time that the establishment was cited on numerous occasions by the Alcohol Beverage Commission for allowing underage drinking, allowing altercations to take place, and allowing foul language to be used. It was that kind of place - full of payday rowdiness.

11 April 1955 Home News

The tavern next made the headlines in April 1955 when a hooded gunman showed up at the door of the tavern after closing at 2am telling Mrs. Askane that he forgot his keys. When she opened the door, he stepped forward into the light and revealed the hood covering his entire head and a shotgun in his hand. Mrs. Askane slammed the door - the muzzle of the gun shattering a glass pane - and the bandit ran off towards his car pursued by Mr. Askane. Near his car, he fired once at the proprietor, before speeding away towards Duke's Farm.

22 November 1958 Courier News

After what The Courier News described as a "payday brawl" knife fight in November 1958, the Alchohol Beverage Commission warned the Askanes to stop the use of "foul, filthy and obscene" language by customers.

That February 1959 warning letter likely lead the Askanes to close the Inn for good. In May 1960 the Roycefield Inn liquor license was transferred to Lucille Petrock who, according to the Home News, "plans to open a tavern on Amwell Road west of Route 206." I wonder how that worked out.

Foodtown of Hillsborough (1969 - 1990)

William Mazur, an ethnic Pole from what was then the Austrian region of Galicia, emigrated to the United States about 1904 at the age of 16. He learned his trade by working as a helper in a butcher shop in Manhattan, eventually moving to Wilkes-Barre, PA, and then to Manville, NJ by 1916. He opened a butcher shop in the growing Hillsborough Township community which soon became the Manville Provision Company.

Mazur's ads which appeared in the Home News from left to right,
1933, 1955, and 1959

Around 1955 he got into the supermarket business with Mazur's Star Market. The distinguishing feature of supermarkets was that they were "cash and carry." Instead of giving a list to a grocer and paying at the end of the month, shoppers found their own items on shelves and paid at the time of purchase. By 1959, with sons Charles and John on board, they joined the Foodtown family of stores - rebranding the Manville store and opening a Foodtown in Somerville.

Ribbon cutting at the Hillsborough Foodtown - left to right -
co-owners John Plesa and Charles Mazur,
Hillsborough Township committeemen John Guerrera and Elliott Smith,
R.L. Eghertt Refrigeration president and vice president Ray Eghertt and Tom Marshall,
and Mrs. Mazur

Almost exactly seven years after William Mazur's death in October 1961, the cornerstone was laid for the construction of the Hillsborough Plaza Shopping Center at Route 206 and Andria Avenue. The anchor store for the center, which at its opening in May 1969 also boasted a Buxton's, a beauty salon, and a barber shop, was Mazur's third area Foodtown and the first modern supermarket in Hillsborough. Owners Charles Mazur and John Plesa touted the ample parking and seven checkout lines!

South Somerset News 22 May 1969

On November 9, 1977, a fire which is believed to have started in a faulty air conditioning or refrigeration system completely destroyed the interior of the 23,000 square foot store. Most of the food, including the canned food, was ordered by the township's health officer to be removed from the store and buried in the landfill.

Add caption

The renovated store was back up and running by February 1978. Both Charles Mazur and his brother John passed away later that year and operation of the supermarket fell to the Paczkowski family. In 1990 they were unable to negotiate an affordable renewal of their lease at the Hillsborough Plaza and were forced to close Hillsborough Foodtown on Saturday, March 17, 1990.

Fairview School

Hot Lunch Club we're no fake,
See the dishes we can make,
Mix all well is the rule,
Hot Lunch Club of Fairview School

This was the cheery yell shouted by the members of the Fairview School's Hot Lunch Team as they demonstrated their techniques and took questions from the members of the Somerset County Teachers' Association at Somerville High School on April 17, 1920. These Branchburg students attended the "new" Fairview School built in Neshanic Station in 1914, but the original Fairview School was in use long before there was any village at all.

Fairview School, Neshanic Station, circa 1905
The school was sold in 1929

Maps from 1850 and 1860 show us that a schoolhouse was present on the site on Fairview Drive just outside of town even before the mid-1860s construction of the school in the above photo. In the mid 19th century this school was attended by the farm children from all over the southern part of Branchburg Township, and likely by children from Hillsborough as well.

Detail from 1860 map of Philadelphia, Trenton, and Vicinity
Fairview Schoolhouse at center

Amazingly, as the coming of the railroads in the 1860s and 1870s were the seeds that grew these farmers' fields into a thriving commercial center, filled with homes and businesses, Branchburg Township didn't get around to building a new school for the community until 1914. At that time, a new two-story, four-room school was built at the southeast corner of Marshall Street and Chester Avenue.

One of the last classes at the old one-room Fairview School,
circa 1913-14

This new Fairview School had problems right from the start. Despite being a "modern" building, there was still no central heating or indoor lavatories. And worse than that, the state did not approve of the manner in which the school was constructed, and did not allow the two classrooms on the second floor to be used. Those rooms were never finished and remained unfinished through the life of the school.

The "New" Fairview School,
14 May 1938 Courier News

Beginning in 1946, several proposals were put forward to bring the school up to standard, but none were approved. The school was put up for auction in 1950, but there were no takers because of zoning issues. As Branchburg's population began to boom in the early 1950s, the school was again pressed into service for younger grades.

5th through 8th-grade students at the new Fairview School,
1922-23 school year

In 1955, with the thirteen classroom addition to Hillsborough's Consolidated School (HES) not yet complete, the Hillsborough Board of Education rented the two classrooms at Fairview School to ease overcrowding and reduce the number of schools on double shifts.

Fairview School circa 1933.
Photo courtesy of Carlene Kuhl.

In the late 50s, Branchburg Township students overflowed into firehouses, rescue squad buildings, and, yes, the old Fairview School - still in use between 1956 and 1960, despite having been identified years before as inadequate.

2 February 1957 Courier News

The Branchburg Board of Education gave the school to the municipality in 1967, and they, in turn, disposed of the property in a land-swap in 1973, which led to the school's swift demolition.

Asbestos Inn - Pal's Inn - New Hall Tavern (1930 - 1986)

The Asbestos Inn - not to be confused with the Asbestos Hotel - was a roadside tavern on Camplain Road in Hillsborough Township, just over the border from Manville. Said to have opened in 1930 - which seems at least three years too early for a tavern since Prohibition didn't begin to be phased out until the end of 1933 - the name of the establishment was changed at some point to Pal's Inn, probably for owner Charles Palahach.

1937 photo of Camplain Road showing the Asbestos Inn/Pal's Inn,
reprinted in the November 7, 1985, Somerset Messenger-Gazette,
 by way of the Manville History website

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1933 former Manville Police Chief John Jasinski was busy building a "combination residence and dance-hall" for his parents at the southeast corner of Camplain and Sunnymead Roads. Described as "the largest frame structure erected in Hillsborough Township in [the] last several years", the two-story house portion of the building was to be 44 by 22 feet, while the dance hall was planned for 67 by 32 feet, with an upper balcony.

6 August 1933 Home News

The establishment opened in 1934 as New Hall Tavern. A December 1936 shooting at the tavern led to an investigation by the state Alcohol Beverage Commission which uncovered discrepancies in the state license application. Although Frances Jasinski, the sister of the Manville Police Chief, applied for the license and was listed as the owner, she actually had nothing to do with the business and was being used as a "front" by John Jasinski to conceal his ownership. 

19 December 1936 Home News

Their license was suspended for sixty days, and Jasinski was ordered to sever all ties with the business before they could reopen. The New Hall Tavern re-opened after the 1937 suspension and continued for several years. In April 1945 the New Hall Tavern property was sold by Jasinski to Mr. and Mrs. Palahach. They promptly moved Pal's to the new location and began regularly advertising Friday and Saturday night dancing with live entertainment later that year.

1940s Entertainment at Pal's Inn

It would be difficult to find anyone who remembers the acts shown in the collage above - but they were popular entertainers in their day: Gay Young's Trio, The Village Chestnuts, Frankie Bourke's Trio, Charlie Allo and Carol Nye, Joe Zoppi, The Joe Mack Duo, The Three Jacks, and Johnny Carhart were all regulars at the popular weekend nightspot.

Charles Palahach sold Pal's in 1951 to Joseph and Mary Tomco of Manville who ran the place for a couple of years before selling to Edmund and Mary Jankowski in 1953. Almost immediately they decided to take the club in a new direction by introducing the area to country and western music. 

1950s Entertainment at Pal's Inn

Unlike the previous incarnation of Pal's which featured local and regional acts, the Jankowskis were able to book some national acts to appear on the Pal's stage. Big names like Smokey Warren and his Arizona Trail Blazers appeared alongside Paulette Marshall and her Western Dates, Chuck Palmer and his Rhythm Ranch Riders, The Western Capers, and the recently deceased Christopher Villano who performed as Chris Val and the Western Playboys.

Mary Jankowski passed away in 1960, and Edmund married second wife Catherine Vespromi in 1962. They continued to run the business successfully for another decade-and-a-half. Then on August 1, 1986, this small ad appeared in The Courier News:

Within a year the Jankowskis sold the property to Mario Baccarini who remodeled and reopened the establishment as Alfredo's Deli.

Andrew Lane - JC Lane Stores (1870 - 1918)

By the time Andrew Lane came to Hillsborough Township in 1870, the thirty-seven-year-old Readington native had already been successful in two separate careers and was looking to begin a third.

Andrew Lane Store (left) and home (right) circa 1904

He took up carpentry in 1848 at the age of seventeen, and by twenty-one was out on his own building houses. In 1857 he became engaged in farming  - purchasing his own farm in Clinton Township in 1864. It is unclear what convinced Lane that he should move to Neshanic and open a general store, other than the fact that he saw a huge opportunity.

Neshanic Mills area  - detail from the 1873 map

When the firm of Voorhees & Brokaw were looking to sell their mill and store property in what used to be called Corle's Mills in 1870, Lane jumped at the chance to get in on the ground floor of what would soon become the new railroad village of Neshanic Station. Judge Schenck got the South Branch Railroad to cross the South Branch of the Raritan River near his property and build a station just a few years earlier - now the Easton & Amboy Railroad - later to become the Lehigh Valley Railroad - was building across New Jersey, and was set to lay tracks just north of the village. As the Courier News recounted years later:

"The enterprising storekeeper obtained a concession from the railroad to provide its workmen with food, clothing, drugs and other supplies. Local legend has it that a good part of Lane's fortune were the profits from selling the large bottles of "Spring Tonic" that stood on the patent medicine shelf - and later had a resurgence of popularoty during the Prohibition Era."

Lane did so well with the railroad contract, that by 1875 he was able to completely rebuild the old circa 1810 mill and use it as a flouring-mill, saw-mill, plaster-mill, and phosphate-mill.

Lane's Mill circa 1917. Built in 1875, burned down in 1927.

Business was so good that by the end of the decade Lane's brother Gilbert, fifteen years his junior, who had been clerking for him in the store, set up his own store at the northwest corner of Amwell Road across from the Neshanic Dutch Reformed Church.

Andrew Lane from Snell's
1881 History of Hunterdon and Somerset Counties

The great flood of 1896 which washed out all the bridges from Neshanic to Bound Brook, flooding towns and villages along the way, nearly destroyed the store. As the water began to rise, Lane ignored pleas from his clerk to get the merchandise to higher ground. He lost his entire stock - and the mill sustained $2,500 damage (about $65,000 today). Andrew Lane passed away in 1903 and the mill was run for a time by his son-in-law. It was purchased by A. S. Amerman in in 1921, and was lost to a fire in 1927. Amerman later rebuilt a slightly shorter mill on the same foundation.

John C. Lane Store circa 1900

Meanwhile down at the old village of Neshanic, Gilbert Lane had passed away in 1891, leaving the store to his nineteen-year-old son John C. Lane. J. C. Lane ran the store prosperously for another quarter of a century, before it was also burned to the ground in 1918.

10 October 1957 Courier News

Andrew Lane's old store at the corner of Mill Lane remained in the Lane family for decades, and was rented out as a residence for most of that time. It too finally succumbed to a fire on March 15, 1962.

Amwell Farms Inn - Capri's - et. al. (1933 - 2010)

John Trimmer was a huckster. The fifty-seven-year-old from Three Bridges Road in Hillsborough was described as such in the 1920 US Census - which noted that he sold fish and eggs. Traditionally, a huckster is a person who sells small items either door-to-door or from a stall or small store. In Trimmer's case, his store was a roadside stand at the corner of Route 31 (now Route 206) and Hamilton Road.

20 April 1932 Courier News

By the mid 1920s Trimmer's sons John. Jr. and Alfred had joined the business, expanded into trees, shrubs, and nursery items, and called the business Amwell Farms. In 1933, with the repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, New Jersey loosened the laws on beer sales, and many of Hillsborough's long dry eateries applied for liquor licenses. It was probably around this time that the Trimmer brothers sold their store to Willard S. Hafner who remodeled Amwell Farms into Amwell Farms Bar and Grill.

15 June 1938 Courier News

The business took off. By 1936 Hafner was offering live music on Friday and Saturday nights, promising, "Good Food at Reasonable Prices", and advertising in the classifieds for a "Middle-Aged woman (white) for kitchen work in bar and grill. Sleep in. Wages $30 a month and board." In December 1949, Hafner sold out to John Bennett and Edward Lyver who continued the tavern under the name Amwell Farms through the mid 1950s.

Matchbook circa 1958

In 1957 the restaurant was sold to Peter and Mary Pilat who officially changed the name to Amwell Farms Inn. Around 1961 the tavern was purchased by Salvatore Coffaro - of the well-known central Jersey pizzeria family - and his brother-in-law Michael Mastrobuono. 

3 October 1963 Courier News

It wasn't long before the pair changed the name from Amwell Farms to Capri's - which better represented the Italian-American cuisine.

9 May 1969 Courier News

After their retirement in 1973, the establishment retained the Capri name for three years - continuing to offer live music and dancing on Saturday nights. Couples only!

14 February 1975 Courier News

In October 1976 the name was changed to Hillsboro Inn.

2 October 1976 Courier News

Hillsborough residents will remember that at the time that the Hillsboro Inn went out of business in the early 1980s, it had been operating as a Go Go bar.

22 July 1982 Courier News

The site was revived in 1987 by the Charlie Brown's restaurant chain, and was very successful in Hillsborough until the entire company went bankrupt in 2010.

16 March 1997 Courier News

Today, as the corner of Route 206 and Hamilton Road approaches its centennial as a prominent place of commerce, a Chase Bank sits on the site.

The Neshanic Institute

It was December 1869 and the Reverend Peter Davis "P.D." Oakey wasn't feeling well. The well-known fifty-four-year-old clergyman of both the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian denominations on Long Island decided to resign his position at the Presbyterian Church of Jamaica, Queens, and relocate to rural New Jersey for his health.

Ad from 1873 Our Home Magazine

What Oakey's Queens congregation may not have known was that earlier that year he had begun to organize a boys boarding school in Neshanic with the intention of beginning the first term in September 1870. Reverend Oakey was no stranger to New Jersey.  He was born in New Brunswick in 1816 and graduated from Rutgers College in 1841. After a three-year divinity course at the theological seminary in New Brunswick, he was assigned to his first pastorate at the Brookville Reformed Church in Oyster Bay. He moved to the Presbyterian Church in Jamaica in 1850, serving there for nearly twenty years, while also helping to start the church in nearby Springfield.

Detail from 1873 map

The site Reverend Oakey chose for his Neshanic Institute was on a hill overlooking the Raritan River near where the Lehigh Valley Railroad bridge would be built two years later.  Despite the religious background of its principal, the Neshanic Institute was non-sectarian. 

Rare postal cover addressed to a student at the Neshanic Institute, 1872

Not much is known about the school itself other than what can be gleaned from ads that ran in the New York Tribune and other publications. The school was touted as offering the "superior advantage of a good home; pleasant, healthy location; solid instruction."

Neshanic Station 1873 map

According to the 1876 Commissioner's Report on New Jersey Schools, during the previous year, there was one female and two male teachers for the seventeen students - all boys - and there had been nine graduates entering college after the close of the last academic year.

2 September 1874 New York Tribune

Reverend Oakey also found time to preach at the Three Bridges Reformed Church between 1873 and 1876 - the year that he was called back to the Springfield, New York church that he had started years earlier. He closed the Neshanic Institute at the end of the 1876 school year, and the building later was converted to a private residence. Unfortunately, it burned down sometime in the early decades of the 20th century and is not at all remembered today.

Jerry Lewis Cinema - Hillsborough Cinema (1971-1991)

In this era of the of the ultra-mega-multiplex, can there be a child today who could even contemplate a movie theater with just one screen? Yet, for a two decade period not very long ago, thousands of Hillsborough Township boys and girls enjoyed just such a cinema experience at the corner of Route 206 and Andria Avenue.  

24 May 1970 Asbury Park Press

"If you can press a button, you can own a Jerry Lewis Cinema." This was the nationwide sales pitch made by Network Cinema Corporation and Jerry Lewis in 1970 seeking franchise owners for their Micro-Theatre (100 seats) and Mini-Theatre (350 seats) cinema concept. For an investment of between $10,000 and $15,000 - no experience necessary - you too could "make a lot of money."

3 July 1971 Home News

Six months after the successful area launch of a franchise in Basking Ridge, Hillsborough resident Robert Piechota and his partners held the grand opening celebration for their new 350 seat Jerry Lewis Cinema on July 27, 1971. According to The Home News, Piechota, in keeping with the Jerry Lewis family-friendly concept, promised to never show an X-rated movie - and only R-rated movies "if they're in good taste." The very first feature shown was Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man.

21 July 1971 Home News

Franchisees were expected to make money through the promise of low overhead. For instance, film projectors would be able to accommodate giant 60-minute reels - meaning that for a typical movie the projectionist would be able to switch to the second projector just once instead of every 20 minutes, hence the "press a button" idea. In January 1974 the theater was re-branded as Hillsboro Cinema, dropping the affiliation with Jerry Lewis.

27 July 1971 Courier News

The theater continued in Hillsborough for another 17 years, quietly going out of business in 1991. Robert Piechota never left the movie theater business, as he was still the owner of the Montgomery Township theater, and saw that theater through the expansion of the shopping center there. He made his return to Hillsborough with the opening of the multiplex on Raider Boulevard in 2000.