Crosswicks: New Jersey's Oldest Quaker Village
Near Trenton, New Jersey
Crosswicks is one of the oldest English settlements in New Jersey, established by Quakers in sixteen seventy-seven on land purchased from the Lenape. The name comes from a Lenape word for place of the separation, referring to a fork in the creek nearby. The Friends Meeting House, built in seventeen seventy-three, still stands and still holds services, making it one of the oldest continuously used religious buildings in the state.
During the Revolutionary War the church was briefly used as a hospital and a British prison after the Battle of Crosswicks in June of seventeen seventy-eight, just days before the Battle of Monmouth. A cannonball from that skirmish is still embedded in the meeting house wall. Today Crosswicks is a census-designated place of roughly eight hundred fifty residents, remarkably unchanged from its colonial footprint.
