Raritan River

New Jersey

At the end of the last ice age, the Hudson River emptied into the sea through this channel.

naturalhistoricalengineering

The Hudson River once ran through here. Toward the end of the last ice age, glacial till plugged the Narrows near Staten Island, and the Hudson could not reach the sea the way it does now. Instead it ran along the Watchung Mountains to what is now Bound Brook, then turned east and used the Raritan's bed the rest of the way to Lower New York Bay. Geologists say that arrangement held from the late Pleistocene into the early Holocene. So the modest river below is running in a channel that once drained a much larger system. The name came much later. It likely comes from the Nariticongs, a branch of the Lenape, the first people known to settle the Raritan Valley. After the Dutch arrived, the region's native people were pushed to sell land near Raritan Bay and move inland along the valley.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
Toward the end of the last ice age, the Narrows was blocked by glacial till and the Hudson flowed along the Watchung Mountains to present-day Bound Brook, then followed the course of the Raritan eastward into Lower New York Bay.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • USS PC-1264 5.1 mi Of all the ships in the wartime U.S. Navy, only one ended up with a crew that was entirely African American, and it is still tied up on Staten Island.
  • Old Bridge Township, New Jersey 6.5 mi Metallica moved across the country to this New Jersey suburb to record their first album.
  • Route 35 Drive-In 7.4 mi Bruce Springsteen played a ninety-minute set in a New Jersey parking lot, then everyone watched a movie.
  • Newark Bay Bridge (railroad) 12.7 mi In 1958 a commuter train ran off the end of an open lift span into Newark Bay, killing forty-eight people.
  • Richmond Tunnel 14.2 mi A brand-new tunneling machine spent two years under New York Harbor and dug only about six hundred feet.
  • Fort Hamilton 14.8 mi The fort guarding New York Harbor was designed by one of Napoleon's own military engineers.