The Turnpike Series: Phillies & Yankees divide NJ - Part II

Includes Belvidere and Alpha in Warren County and Lambertville in Hunterdon County.

What town in NJ has the best downtown with good rail access?

In our search for the perfect NJ town to live in, my fiancée and I are asking for your help. I want access to rail that puts me in NYC or Philly in a reasonable time. She wants a walkable, cute downtown. A great coffe shop and sports bar would be bonuses. A cool co-ed softball or other adult sports league like a running club would be double bonus.

I will break it up into 3 sections. South, North and we will give the "Central" people their say too, although all of their rail is the same as North Jersey people (all lines lead to NYC). There is a voting bar above. Whichever town wins each section, will move onto the next round. We will go to the winning town and I will video blog the experience.

Civil War related divides . . .

New Jersey was once divided into East Jersey and West Jersey, as I have discussed here before. That eventually evolved into North and South Jersey. But in the early years of our republic, this divide was quite apparent when it came to slavery.

Taken from http://www.westjersey.org:

1) The slavery rates were much lower in South Jersey during the first three generations of the life of the nation (1790 to 1860). At the beginning of this period 92.6% of New Jersey's slaves were in the northern counties. By 1840 it was over 99%.

2) The 1860 popular vote for Lincoln in the Southern Counties as a whole was 55%, but was only 45% in the Northern Counties.

So although some people like to take the Mason Dixon Line and extend it across South Jersey, this early divide was really a kind-of-reverse Mason-Dixon Line.

Why was this? Too complicated, I would recommending further reading the linked westjersey.org site to get the answer.

But there will always be "Central" people trying to dispute that history. It all reminded me of the below clip, which inspired this post:

The above video takes about 4 seconds to begin playing.
The full above episode can be found at: http://www.hulu.com

Finding the line: part I

Thanks for voting - You voted Toms River as South Jersey. It was close! But after exhausting studies, travel and documenting - the bottom counties are what we will call undisputed South Jersey. We're leaving these counties out of the argument for now:
Next: North Jersey

See two clips from the film NOW!

We had a great time at our screening at TCNJ last night. Here was the interview on, "The Early Late Show" to plug the film. Thanks to Matt Owen, Kyle Schimpf, Scott Pioli and the rest of the crew at LTV.