New Jersey Trivia & Tidbits - Page 11

Looking for New Jersey trivia? Try our list New Jersey little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

New Jersey’s most famous prehistoric volcano was located near Boonton (pop. 8,496). Volcanic eruptions formed the three ridges of the Watchung Mountains.

first appeared: 5/25/2003

Melting ice from a receding glacier formed Jersey Meadows (the Meadowlands) and Lake Passaic. The lake’s waters ultimately drained away, leaving the Passaic River, which cascades over the 77-foot Great Falls in Paterson.

first appeared: 5/18/2003

The Sandy Hook Lightship, reportedly the first outside lightship in the United States, also became the first to employ a steam-powered fog siren (1868) and the first to use incandescent light (1889).

first appeared: 5/11/2003

Founded in 1934 by artist Antoinette Scudder and actor Frank Currington, the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn (pop. 19,765) is large enough to fully accommodate both the New Jersey opera and symphony.

first appeared: 5/4/2003

William Parker Foulke, vacationing in East Haddonfield (pop. 10,800) in 1858, discovered the world’s first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton, later named Hadrosaurus foulkii.

first appeared: 4/27/2003

New Jersey’s 1.1 million acre Pinelands National Reserve is the largest undeveloped area between Boston and Atlanta.

first appeared: 4/20/2003

New Jersey was the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights (Nov. 20, 1789), more than two years before it was ratified for final inclusion into the Constitution on Dec. 15, 1791.

first appeared: 4/13/2003

A recently uncovered amber deposit in central New Jersey was found to contain fossils of a mosquito old enough to have bitten dinosaurs and a feather that is the oldest record of a terrestrial bird in North America.

first appeared: 4/6/2003

The New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, established in 1989 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, honors individuals and corporations that made New Jersey what the institute calls “the invention state.”

first appeared: 3/30/2003

The last royal governor of New Jersey was William Franklin, Ben Franklin’s son. When William remained loyal to the crown, the Colonists removed him from office in 1776.

first appeared: 3/23/2003

Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, a master of flagpole-sitting, a fad of the 1920s, set a world record by perching atop a flagpole for seven weeks at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in 1930.

first appeared: 3/16/2003

The first state to ratify the Bill of Rights was New Jersey on Nov. 20, 1789. In 1998, the state declared Nov. 20 as Bill of Rights Day.

first appeared: 3/9/2003

One of the earliest ferry services for people commuting to their jobs was established in 1811 on the Hudson River between Hoboken and Manhattan.

first appeared: 3/2/2003

One of Princeton’s most famous citizens was Albert Einstein, who lived there from 1933 until his death in 1955.

first appeared: 2/23/2003

Escaping from France after the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon’s oldest brother Joseph Bonaparte—once King of Spain—lived in Bordentown (pop. 3,969) from 1816 to 1839.

first appeared: 2/16/2003

Novelist Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage and a collection of tales called Ghosts On the Jersey Shore, was born in Newark in 1871.

first appeared: 2/9/2003

The famous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, in which Hamilton was killed, was fought on a field in Weehawken (pop. 12,385) on July 11, 1804. Hamilton’s son, Philip, had fought a duel on the same field a few years earlier.

first appeared: 2/2/2003

Dickinson W. Richards, born in Orange (pop. 32,868), won the 1956 Nobel Prize in medicine for the invention of a heart catheter that could be used to chart the heart’s interior.

first appeared: 1/26/2003

The first radio broadcast of a World Series game was transmitted live on radio station WIZ in Newark in 1921.

first appeared: 1/19/2003

Batsto Village, now part of Wharton State Forest, was built around an ironworks founded in 1766. During the Revolution, its furnaces provided the Continental Army with war materials.

first appeared: 1/12/2003

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