Wayne Township

Book excerpt: Using over two hundred historical photographs, Wayne Township offers a unique view of a town that has undergone great change in its lifetime. Wayne was traversed by Native Americans for thousands of years before Dutch businessmen and farmers settled there c. 1695. This book illustrates how Wayne's twenty-first-century landscape of busy retail centers, transportation highways, and residential neighborhoods was once a fertile, cultivated valley. The images in this book reveal Wayne's economic and cultural past, including the farmsteads, barns, gristmills, sawmills, blacksmith shops, and churches that made up the Wayne Township region years ago. Wayne Township provides clues to a past rich in history in the images of more than thirty existing historic structures and lost architectural treasures, and reveals legends, folk tales, ghost stories, and historical fact. The book tells many stories, including those of Arent Schuyler's exploration of the valley and George Washington's formulation of war-winning strategies at the Dey Mansion. It explores early industry in Wayne-the iron furnace at Pompton Falls, the brick manufacturing and powder works in Mountain View, and the arrival of the railroad in the area. Pictured are famous twentieth-century residents Albert Payson Terhune and his collies, Cecil B. DeMille, LeGrand Parish, and the horse Preakness.