History of Sussex Boro

Sussex County, New Jersey

The village was known as Deckertown in honor of early settler Peter Decker. 

1760  --  the first structure on the site of what later became Fort Decker in Port Jervis was the Hayne Trading Post built by German immigrant via Holland  Frederick Hayne.  He married Catherine Decker, daughter of Peter Decker, who later founded Deckertown.

1814  -- Grant Decker, later mayor of Flint, Michigan, born near Deckertown.

1836  -- Hugh Judson Kilpatrick born in Deckertown.  Graduated from West Point in 1861 and served in the Civil War reaching the rank of Major General.  After the war he accepted a position as minister to the Republic of Chile.  He died in Santiago, Chile. 

c. Civil War (1861-1865)  --  a two-story, five-room schoolhouse built. 

by the late 1870s  --  the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad had a line through Stockholm, Beaver Lake, Ogdensburg, Franklin, Hamburg and Sussex. 

1891  --  Deckertown Borough was established by referendum, created from lands in Wantage Township. 

1894-1943  --  the weekly newspaper, the Wantage Recorder, was in print.  Their building was on Sussex Avenue next to Clove Creek.

late 19th & early 20th centuries  --  Deckertown was the commercial and transportation focal point for northern Sussex County.

 1902  --  the town was renamed Sussex Borough. 

1903  --  the Booth Brothers knife factory built in Deckertown after that factory had closed in Stockholm, Hardyston Township.

1903  -- the new Sussex High School erected. (It no longer exists)

1909  --  50 people employed at the Booth Brothers knife factory.  Later the knife factory was sold to a concern in Tideout, Pennsylvania.

1910 postcard  -- the postcard shows one of the larger hotels in Sussex Borough, the Harrison House, located behind the railroad station. (The hotel no longer exists.)

(Source: 2003. Wayne T. McCabe. Images of America: Sussex County. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press.)