East Brunswick: Township at the Crossroads

East Brunswick Township separated from the old Brunswick Township in eighteen sixty, when farmers along the Old Post Road wanted local control over their roads and schools. For the better part of a century it remained agricultural land, with small communities scattered across its twenty-two square miles. Then the postwar suburban boom hit Middlesex County hard.

Between nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty, East Brunswick's population exploded from under six thousand to nearly thirty-eight thousand. Shopping centers, housing developments, and the Route Eighteen highway corridor replaced the fields almost entirely. Today East Brunswick is one of the larger townships in the county with about fifty thousand residents, and its Korean American community, which grew substantially from the nineteen eighties onward, gives it a distinct cultural identity that its farming founders could not have imagined.