Andrew Ten Eyck House: Saved From the Bulldozer

The small brick house at six seventy-one Old York Road in Branchburg was built around seventeen ninety for Andrew A. Ten Eyck and his wife Mary, a Dutch family of Somerset County who had deep roots in the colonial settlement of New Jersey. Used as a tenant farmhouse for over a century after the Ten Eycks, the building retained most of its original Federal-style interior fabric: door and window surrounds, paneled mantels, tongue-and-groove flooring.

When a developer proposed demolishing it in the early nineteen nineties, local residents formed the Branchburg Historical Society specifically to prevent that outcome. They succeeded. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand four and has since been restored as a local history museum.