Long Hill Township: The Adventure Begins at Home

Long Hill Township in central New Jersey is made up of three small towns--Gillette, Stirling, and Millington. Although, Gillette has a small section of the town, Meyersville, that people often consider to be the forth town in the township. Long Hill has no movie theater or bowling alley. Yet, it has over twenty restaurants and a few sections of town for businesses--local and corporate. Long Hill shares an exit on Route 78 with two other towns, and on the whole, is relatively unimpressive with its 12.13 miles of land.

But it's where I grew up, so its simplicity is often something I long for when I'm in other places. My grandparents built their own house in Gillette, and eventually my dad moved onto the street I live on now. Except he lived in a different house. When he married my mom, they settled in across the street from the house he once shared with several roommates. Until I went to college, I had never lived anywhere else. I didn't even go to camp when I was little, so all of my time had been spent bumming around Long Hill and the neighboring towns.

And today started off like many other days in my past. I met my friend, Sharon, for lunch at a local Panera. Sharon and I have been to Panera so many times in the past seven years of friendship, that I've probably spent enough money there to cover my first year of college loans.

I told her that I wanted to start blogging, and that I needed a project. "I don't want to just complain about my life over the Internet. It makes me uncomfortable," I said to her, eating my typical salad with balsamic vinaigrette. "I'm thinking of going to places in New Jersey and writing about them."

She smiled, "I like that idea."

And so it began. We decided to start at home, even though Long Hill was far less exciting than neighboring towns. Our first stop was the Elm Street School in Stirling. There are three schools in Long Hill--Gillette, Millington, and Central. Elm Street School has gone down in local history as the creepy, old abandoned school of the past. My dad went there, back when it was up and running, except he wasn't supposed to. On his first day of kindergarten he got on the wrong bus along with a few other kids from his street and they ended up there, crying, dressed in typical 1950's first day of school attire.

Elm Street School in 2009, however, appeared to be less than exciting. According to some signs we saw laying around, the building is now an office for a surveying company. The only creepy part was the spider web that lined one of the stoops.

We decided to visit a few other spots in Long Hill. We wandered around the back of a restaurant/bar, the Stirling Hotel. It used to actually be a hotel, but now it's a place where locals go for burgers and beer. Many generations of men in my family have gotten drunk in there, and one time, when I was little, a few other younger kids and I found a tree house in the back part of the property. I guess its been taken down since 2002, though, cause Sharon and I had no luck finding it.

We road up Main Street a little further to where Long Hill's old library used to be (it's now relocated to Gillette), in hopes that we could find some old grave stones of ex-Long Hillians that used to be burried and marked by grave stones at the side of the building. But they were gone as well, so we walked into the woods where we used to hang out in middle school.

"One time, in sixth grade, I was walking in these woods," Sharon began. "And these eighth grade boys stopped me and asked me what I was doing. They told me that I wasn't allowed to come back into the woods again, or something stupid like that. And now we're sophomores in college, and eighth grade boys would either ignore or us... or maybe try to hit on us."

"I feel like you know you're an adult when eighth grade boys just completely ignore your existence and don't try to give you a hard time. 'Cause at that point, you're just too old to be bothered with," I said, as we crossed a little bridge over the stream, wandering around and reliving the time when we were twelve.

We still hadn't found anything particularly weird or exciting, so in a last final attempt, we road to the ruins of Archie's house. Archie was this man in Meyersville who sold ice skates and dolls and other miscellaneous items out of partially dillapidated buildings in his back yard until he died. He also had pet deer. There was a car on his property, so I made Sharon take a picture from the passenger's side window, and then we headed back onto the main road to avoid pissing off whoever was in the house.

The first exploration of the Summer of Jersey had been pretty much unsuccessful. I wasn't really expecting much, though. Long Hill will always be my roots and my home, and I will always love it for being simple, but I will always become bored with it for those reasons. That's why I started exploring different towns, and eventually consciously chose to go to college out of state to get away, and see what else is out there.

It's weird to have to admit to myself that I'm slowly outgrowing my hometown and to realize that, perhaps, it's outgrowing me at the same time. The mysteries of the past are gone-- Elm Street School is an office building, the tree house and tombstones are gone, and Archie's dead and there are no more pet deer--and there may be new mysteries someday, but right now the town has purged itself of what I used to love. It's becoming a suburb with no stories, and I want it to be a suburb with a history. I can't even remember which one of us started to change first.

~Sarah

PS- I appologize for the amatuer photography!