Cranbury: The Preserved Village

Cranbury is one of the best-preserved colonial-era villages in New Jersey, a place where the main street looks much as it did in the seventeen hundreds. Quaker and Dutch settlers arrived in the late sixteen hundreds, and the town became a stagecoach stop on the road between New York and Philadelphia. The name likely derives from the cranberries that grew in the surrounding bogs.

The township incorporated in eighteen seventy-two, but resisted the suburban sprawl that swallowed neighboring townships during the postwar decades. A strict master plan kept industrial development away from the historic core. Today Cranbury's downtown, with its white clapboard buildings and inn that dates to the seventeen fifties, draws visitors who want a glimpse of what small-town New Jersey looked like before the turnpike age.