New Jersey.
The Garden
State.

New Jersey earned its Revolutionary War reputation the hard way. In December 1776, Washington’s army was a broken remnant retreating across the state in freezing rain, pursued by a confident British force. Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls” on a drumhead during that retreat. Then, on Christmas night, Washington crossed the Delaware and struck the Hessians at Trenton. A week later he hit Princeton. Two small victories, but they saved the revolution. New Jersey became the principal theater of the war’s middle years.

New Jersey was genuinely contested territory — not just militarily but politically. The state had a large Loyalist population, particularly in the north and east, and the war here was as much a civil conflict as a revolution. Farms were plundered by both sides. Communities were divided against themselves. After the war, New Jersey was among the first states to ratify the Constitution and the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights, perhaps because its people understood better than most what liberty had actually cost.

The 19th century made New Jersey an industrial and intellectual powerhouse. Thomas Edison built his Menlo Park laboratory in 1876 and his West Orange complex in 1887, inventing the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, and motion pictures from New Jersey soil. By 1920 the state was one of the most heavily industrialized in the country, its chemical plants, textile mills, and oil refineries filling the air along the Hudson and Passaic Rivers with the productive fog of industrial capitalism.

The Jersey Shore became its own civilization in the 20th century. Atlantic City’s boardwalk, built in 1870, was the original American resort — the place where the working class could walk beside millionaires and breathe the same salt air. Asbury Park’s music scene produced Bruce Springsteen. The Shore towns from Sandy Hook to Cape May became a summer institution for millions of New Yorkers and Philadelphians. Even the traffic on the Garden State Parkway every August Friday became a kind of ritual.

Today New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, packing nine million people into 8,700 square miles with a median household income that consistently ranks among the nation’s highest. Newark Liberty International Airport, the Port of Newark, and the financial operations clustered in Jersey City and Hoboken make it an economic engine the country often overlooks because it has the bad luck to sit between New York and Philadelphia. New Jersey has never cared much what the rest of the country thinks, and that too is a Jersey tradition.