It’s probably thought of by most West Windsor residents as our “main drag,” the most important road in the township, especially to the “locals.” Officially, it is State Highway No. 571, from end to end. In fact, it’s known as “571” all the way from Princeton — where it starts — to Toms River — where it ends. In the process, it traverses three counties: Mercer, Monmouth, and Ocean.
But within West Windsor it has several other names. As it leaves Princeton it’s known as Washington Road as far as the railroad overpass. Beyond that it’s called either Hightstown Road or Princeton-Hightstown Road, depending on which sign you see. (Curiously, a sign that was apparently erected by the state at the corner of Nassau Street and Washington Road in Princeton not long ago refers to it mistakenly as Washington Street, just a few feet above the older sign that says Washington Road. It was once known as Washington Street — more than a century ago.)
The West Windsor portion of 571 has served the community in many ways over the years and has undergone several physical changes in the process. Before my arrival in West Windsor in 1957, only a portion of it was paved on the east side of Route 1. The paving ran out near Pierson Avenue in Penns Neck. Beyond that the road was low-traction gravel and dirt all the way to the train station.
The present railroad overpass bridge had been built by then (about 1940), but on the other side all the way to Hightstown, the road was crushed rock and asphalt or tar (maybe an early version of macadam) — just one lane in each direction without any shoulders. And its route followed what are now called Hendrickson Drive and McGetrick Lane. Their lanes and width are the same now as they were then.
There were only a few houses fronting on the road then, maybe half a dozen on the way from Princeton Junction to East Windsor. I remember the gravel portion very well because one of the first times I drove to Princeton Junction from Princeton in 1951, I failed to slow down enough before making the left turn to go over the overpass, and my car did a “180” on the gravel. No harm done, but very scary.
On the north or west — or Princeton — side of Route 1, Princeton University owns most of the land on both sides of Washington Road all the way to Lake Carnegie. That portion of the road is distinguished by the famous Princeton elms. In about 1925 a university benefactor had American elm trees planted at regular intervals along both sides of the road. There were 76 all together, exactly 50 feet apart. They were sometimes referred to as the “elm alee.” I don’t know, but perhaps the number 76 was chosen as an allusion to 1776.
The elms provided an impressive entranceway into Princeton. They still do, though many have died, and some have been replaced by trees of another species. The variety of American elm used was developed and grown at the Princeton Nurseries in Kingston, and it turned out to be resistant to Dutch elm disease, which had killed millions of American elms.
During the 1950s the university started planting a second row of trees on both sides, about 30 feet farther from the road than the originals. There are also some new, much smaller, elms that were planted several years ago in observance of Arbor Day. (Contrary to what is stated on a website devoted to the elms, the originals were not planted close to the sidewalk. The only sidewalk there was not installed until 30 years after the elms were planted.)
It is interesting to note that some of the trees in the second row on the west side of Washington Road began to grow high enough to interfere with overhead utility wires. As a result, over the past few decades, they have been trimmed to the point that they don’t even look like trees anymore — just a few random branches sprouting out of a tree trunk. But the wires are safe. One wonders why the trees were planted directly below the wires in the first place, or — if the trees were there first — why the wires were put directly above them.
Another attractive feature of Washington Road in West Windsor is the university’s planting of forsythia bushes, whose yellow blossoms are a familiar harbinger of spring each year. Unfortunately, the lack of maintenance along the alee in recent years makes you wonder if the university feels any responsibility for its overgrown appearance, especially at the Princeton end.
In the years following World War II and into the ’50s it was possible for Princeton University students to get rides to New York or Philadelphia by hitch-hiking on Route 1 near what is now the Penns Neck circle. During the war it had become commonplace for drivers to pick up servicemen in uniform and give them a ride almost anywhere they wanted to go. And after the war, many drivers continued to pick up hitchhikers, even though, in the Princeton student case, they were not in uniform. (It did help if you were carrying books, however.) I’m not sure what the train fare to New York was in the late ’40s — probably a couple of dollars — but if you could save that much, it was worth standing on Route 1 for a while with your thumb out.
I did it several times to go home to Brooklyn for the weekend. The process started on Washington Road in Princeton near Prospect Avenue, where many drivers were willing to take students out to Route 1 and drop them off. Once I left Princeton with one nickel in my pocket. I got a ride all the way to lower Manhattan by way of Route 1 and the Holland Tunnel, walked a couple of blocks to the subway, used my nickel in the turnstile and was home in 10 minutes. No problem. Hitchhiking didn’t work going the other way, however, so I took the train back to Princeton on Sunday night.
Hightstown Road in Princeton Junction was known during the ’50s mainly for Shafer’s Tydol service station, the Conover and Emmons lumber yard, and Ellsworth’s Liquor Store. These occupied three of the four corners at the intersection with Cranbury Road. And that’s all there was. At Shafer’s you could get your car serviced, or buy milk, comic books, or newspapers. You could also get eggs there, but we bought ours from Mr. Anderson on Cranbury Road. He raised chickens on his property along Big Bear Brook where the Montessori School now stands.
One of the most exciting things that ever happened in that area was the “tornado” in the fall of 1957, a couple of months before we moved to Grovers Mill. No one was quite sure if it really was a tornado — it might have been what is now called a microburst — but it did some very strange damage. The most amazing thing was that it picked up pieces of framing lumber (2x6s, I think, more than 10 feet long) that were stacked in the yard at Conover and Emmons, hurled them at least 50 yards in the air across Hightstown Road, and impaled them in the side of the cinder-block Bohren’s warehouse on the other side.
The timbers stuck out of the wall of the building as if they were arrows shot from a giant bow. I’ll never forget how strange they looked sticking out of the wall more than 10 feet off the ground. The same storm lifted the roof off the front porch of my neighbor-to-be’s house and set it down on his front lawn. No other damage.
There’s a lot more to the story of Washington Road/Hightstown Road/Route 571, including some other businesses that have been there for a very long time. And we can’t forget the Princeton Hospital Fete. We’ll get to those another time.
