To tell the history of the Woodbridge Avenue / Orchard Heights NPP (Neighborhood Preservation Program) area, you start with the road. 

Woodbridge Avenue has been known by many names–Post Road, Old Post Road, “the road to Bonhamtown”, Woodbridge Turnpike, Metuchen Road–but it began as the Assunpink Trail, the Native American path from the Delaware River to the Raritan Bay. 

The first intersecting road to appear on maps was what would become Raritan Avenue, in 1685. It wasn’t until 1850 that Duclos Lane appeared, and, although there has been a dwelling along what would become Crowells Road since at least 1745, Crowells Road didn’t appear on a map until 1868. 

All other side streets within the NPP area did not appear until the 20th century. 

The first European to lay claim to land within the NPP area’s borders was possibly Benjamin Dunn, just after 1681. (Land ownership is difficult to know for certain, as old land grants tended to describe borders in vague terms, and old maps marked people’s dwellings but not the boundaries of their land. In some cases here, I have included the names of people with buildings very near to the NPP area where it would not be unreasonable to assume that those people might have had use or ownership of land within the area in question.) 

Around 1745, someone named Thompson was living in a dwelling just south of Orchard Heights, a location that would eventually become the Crowell place. 

In 1850, a dwelling belonging to “J. Kirkpatrick'' was noted on a map—the first building to be constructed within the actual NPP area footprint. It was along Woodbridge Ave., on the Triangle side, approximately where 10th or 11th Ave. is now.  

By 1888, the Barlow family would be residing at that spot. 

The Kirkpatrick house would be joined around 1861 by the Murphys (sometimes “Murpheys”), also along Woodbridge, on the south side of the road and a bit further west. 

Even as downtown Highland Park grew, there were no further buildings inside the perimeter of the NPP area until the fin de siècle.  

The area’s relatively wooded, pastoral nature attracted the attention of a New-Brunswick based German-American community chorus: the Aurora Singing Society bought land in Orchard Heights in the 1890s and constructed a music hall for themselves and established picnic groves and a playground. 

Philip Smith brought a hotel to the point of the triangle in 1896, where the Lukoil is now.

Trolley service connected the NPP area to Woodbridge, New Brunswick, and South Bound Brook the following year. 

With the availability of ready transportation came a racetrack and its crowds. 

In 1898 a half-mile oval track was constructed along Woodbridge Avenue, near Duclos Lane; the grandstand and finish line were within the NPP area. 

By 1915, Highland Park had grown sufficiently to need more schools. Land was chosen in the Triangle, and Irving School opened in January 1916.

At the same time, the NPP area got its first shop: Ignatz Schultz opened a grocery at 116 Woodbridge (the building still stands today), and several generations of his family continued to sell Irving schoolchildren sweets and snacks for decades to come. 

In 1919, the Aurora Singing Society sold their land. The buyers opened a 3-acre amusement park on May 30th, 1920, featuring a dance pavilion, a movie house, a carousel, a shooting gallery, a miniature bowling alley, and more. Forest Park’s “vaudeville entrance” was at the foot of Hilton Street. 

At about the same time, the Pisciottas, a family of masons, bought land near the amusement park and began to build houses for themselves and their extended family. They eventually had six homes on what is now Karsey Street and several more along Hilton. Carl Pisciotta became Highland Park’s building inspector in the 1940s and Joanne Pisciotta co-authored two books on the town’s history.

With the shuttering of the amusement park in 1925, Orchard Heights became entirely a neighborhood of homes. 

Other development followed quickly along Woodbridge Avenue: another grocery, a barbershop, a movie theater, an automotive service station. The dance hall from Forest Park was hauled up the hill and was made available for rental for dances and events (the building still exists today, as 168 Woodbridge Avenue). 

On May 26th, 1958, a fire broke out at Ten Broeck Motors, a car dealership located at 211 Woodbridge Avenue. The massive blaze took 100 firefighters to stop and claimed the lives of Highland Park firefighters William Graff and Frank Molimock. It is the largest loss of life for the Highland Park Fire Department in its 123-year history. 

In 1959, the land south of Orchard Heights, known as the “Peach Orchard Tract”--the last large uninhabited section of land in the surrounding area–was developed into garden apartments. 

So, where were these orchards, anyway? 

While I do not have any exact locations at this time, evidence suggests they were mostly in the land to the south of Orchard Heights. They may have been part of the Donaldson Farm, a large portion of which became Donaldson Park in 1936. 

Photographs of the Orchard Heights neighborhood from around 1910 show stands of mature oak trees, not the apple and peach trees of the orchards. But that does not mean they couldn’t have been there, just behind the photographer.