Waterloo Village: Iron Forge, Canal Hub, Ghost Town
New Jersey
What is now a quiet collection of stone buildings beside the Musconetcong River has lived three distinct lives. In seventeen sixty-one a forge was built here to smelt iron ore. Within twenty years the site had a sawmill, gristmill, blacksmith shop, and three stone homes. It shut down in seventeen ninety-five.
The second life began in eighteen thirty-nine, when General John Smith refounded it as Waterloo Village, intending it to be the transportation hub where rail, road, and canal converged. He succeeded: Waterloo became the midpoint of the Morris Canal, which ran from Jersey City to Phillipsburg. When the canal closed in nineteen twenty-four, the village died again. Today nineteen of the original buildings survive as a state historic site, a ghost town that outlasted two economies.
