Newfoundland, NJ, was — I suppose it still is — a quaint little village between such ‘large’ towns as Butler and West Milford.  In the early days, it was barely a stagecoach stop heading from here to there. As the roads were improved, though, and later as the railroad line was built, city folk from such bustling towns as Paterson and New York City read the newspaper articles and saw the ads promising fresh air, and peace & quiet.  And so they came.

Stagecoaches departed from Paterson beginning in 1857. If you caught the 10 a.m. stage — running on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — you were in for a nine-hour ride over sometimes bone-jarring, rutted, and dusty (or muddy) roads through Preakness, Pompton, Bloomingdale, Newfoundland, Stockholm and Hamburg along the Paterson-Hamburg Turnpike, arriving at Deckertown (known as Sussex today)  that same evening.

If you wished, however, you could decide to jump ship (as it were) after about four hours to spend the evening at the stagecoach’s scheduled stop at Brown’s Hotel in Newfoundland, where a weary traveler could get a hot meal and a good bed.  You might decide instead to board a wagon which would take you to another hotel in the area:  the Newfoundland Inn, Idylease, Hotel Bon-Air, the Charlotteburg Hotel, and the Green Pond Hotel, among others.

The railroad, in time, spelled the end of the stagecoach adventure. The much faster and more comfortable ride lured even more city folk into the hinterlands, which helped grow Newfoundland; the little village grew big enough to have its own school and post office.

There’s a lot more Newfoundland history to explore. Here’s what I’ve written so far.