As another long-time West Windsor resident, I enjoyed your story about the history of Princeton Junction and the pictures of how it used to be (WW-P News Feb. 4, 2011). We moved into our house in Grovers Mill in early December of 1957 and have remained in the same spot ever since — 53 years in the same house.
The location afforded me the luxury of a commute to work of just a little over one mile. As a research engineer at the newly relocated Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton (ARAP), I was lucky enough to maintain that situation for my entire 40-year career. Why would I move if it took less than five minutes to get to work, and I was doing what I liked to do best.
With that in my personal history, it may be understandable that I’m sometimes puzzled why anyone would want to live over 50 miles away from their job and take over an hour of commuting time to get to it. ARAP built its building at 50 Washington Road in early 1957, added to it over the years, and continued to occupy portions of it until about 10 years ago. It currently serves as the local headquarters for Representative Rush Holt, as well as several small businesses.
When we moved into our house, the Princeton Junction area had just experienced — a month or two before — its first tornado. As there usually is with tornadoes, there was a lot of debate about whether it really was a tornado. But some of the strange damage attests to the fact that it was. For one thing, the roof over my next door neighbor’s front porch was lifted off and deposited on his front lawn. It wasn’t just the shingles, but the entire roof, structure and all. Just lifted off as if someone had used giant crowbars. And there was no other damage to the house.
More dramatically, just a mile away at the Conover and Emmons lumber yard on Princeton-Hightstown Road, the storm picked up a batch of structural lumber from an outside storage rack and hurled several long 2 by 6 beams at least 200 feet across the road and impaled them like arrows in the cinder-block wall of the Bohrens warehouse, which had just been built. It was really weird to see long pieces of lumber sticking out of the wall horizontally 15 or 20 feet above the ground. Bohrens was just to the east of the strip mall building that was just demolished to make way for (wow!) a new Rite Aid.
Life was relatively primitive in 1957: we got our milk delivered to the front doorstep, and we bought our eggs from Mr. Anderson, who lived on Cranbury Road where the Montessori School is now. He raised chickens at the rear of his property along Big Bear Brook. We shopped for groceries at the A & P on Nassau Street in Princeton. The Princeton Shopping Center was not built until the 1960s.
Well, much has changed, and I’ll have to admit a lot is better now than it was then. But I can’t help remembering the old stuff, too, like swimming at the sheep wash on the Millstone River.
But that’s another story.
Dick Snedeker
Grovers Mill
