Dover, New Jersey

Dover was long an iron town. John Jackson built an iron forge here in seventeen twenty-two, and the furnaces never really stopped from that point on. The Morris Canal, completed in the eighteen thirties, made Dover a port town, carrying Pennsylvania coal east to New York and returning with manufactured goods.

At its industrial peak, the town ran rolling mills, machine shops, boiler works, knitting mills, and a hosiery factory. Dover was formally incorporated as a town in eighteen sixty-nine. The iron age eventually faded, and today Dover is a small northern New Jersey town of about eighteen thousand, its canal basin converted to a public park, its industrial past visible mainly in the bones of the old mill buildings along Blackwell Street.