Hightstown: Crossroads Borough

Hightstown takes its name from John Hight, an innkeeper who, with his wife Mary, ran a tavern here at the crossroads of two colonial roads in the seventeen fifties. The location made it a natural stop between Trenton and the Shore, and when the Camden and Amboy Railroad came through in eighteen thirty-four, Hightstown became one of the first towns in New Jersey to have rail service. It incorporated as a borough in eighteen fifty-three.

In the nineteen thirties the federal government built the Jersey Homesteads, a cooperative resettlement community just outside town, for garment workers displaced by the Depression. Ben Shahn painted a famous mural there. That community was later renamed Roosevelt, after the president.

Hightstown today has about five thousand residents and a tight Victorian downtown.