Beverly: Delaware River City
Near Trenton, New Jersey
Beverly is one of the smallest cities in New Jersey, barely a square mile on the east bank of the Delaware River. English settlers arrived here in the sixteen seventies, drawn by the river landing, and the town was named after Beverly in Yorkshire, England. It incorporated as a borough in eighteen fifty and became a city in eighteen fifty-seven, a designation it retains today despite having fewer than three thousand residents.
That quirk is pure New Jersey: cities are defined by legal charter, not population size. Beverly's waterfront once bustled with ferry traffic crossing to Burlington, Pennsylvania, and later with small manufacturing. The Civil War era ironclad warship designer John Ericsson, who built the Monitor, is said to have tested models in the Delaware near Beverly.
Today the city is quiet, its Victorian streetscape intact, and the river still its defining feature.
