Whitehouse Station, An Inn That Named a Town

The name Whitehouse Station traces back to a single building: a roadside tavern built by Abraham Van Horne around seventeen fifty along an old Native American path through Hunterdon County. The inn's white plastered walls led travelers to call it the White House, and the surrounding settlement took the name before the American Revolution. The railroad station, dating to eighteen ninety-two, was designed in the Richardson Romanesque style by architect Bradford Gilbert.

That stone building still stands. The place has never grown into a real town, just a crossroads and a station, but the white-painted inn that Van Horne opened more than two centuries ago gave it a name that stuck.