the paddocks at blackwells mills

the farm is known as the paddocks at blackwells mills, and the name places it exactly. blackwells mills is a historic hamlet on the millstone river, its story reaching back to a mill built in 1746 and a bridge across the river from the earliest days of settlement in the 1730s. when the delaware and raritan canal opened in the 1830s, the hamlet became a transshipment point and the surrounding farmers prospered, gaining a dependable way to carry their produce to market. the canal bridge-tender’s house of the 1830s still stands across the water, restored as a community center, museum, and library.

the farm lies within the millstone valley agricultural district, a landscape of some 573 acres listed on both the national and new jersey registers of historic places, recognized for its intact early-nineteenth-century farmhouses, a notable dutch barn, and the enduring rural character of the valley along river road. to farm here is to work inside a place the nation has formally chosen to remember, an agricultural district preserved precisely because it still shows what this valley has long been. the paddocks at blackwells mills is a working continuation of that history, not a museum piece, but the living present of a landscape whose past is written into the public record.

a narrow stretch on the bend of the millstone

the millstone river is a small river with an outsized role. it rises near princeton, runs just under thirty-nine miles gathering more than a dozen tributaries, and merges into the raritan near new brunswick, close to rutgers. for most of its length it runs beside the delaware and raritan canal, and together the river and canal supply drinking water to much of central new jersey. umrit farm sits on a bend of this river, on the narrow band of favored ground where the valley floor meets the higher land, the kind of place, near water, sheltered, and fertile at the margin, that people have always chosen.

that choice is ancient. the millstone valley was a gathering place for the lenape, the region's first people, long before any european settlement, and this bend of the river, with its water, its game, and its ease of passage, was exactly the sort of ground they favored. to farm here is to work land that has been recognized as good, and lived upon, for a very long time.

the lenape presence here was deep and settled, not passing. unami-speaking lenape, the raritan people, lived along these waters; an important indigenous route, the assunpink trail, crossed the valley at kingston; and a documented lenape village stood near present-day millstone. lenape corn-grinding mortars have been found on farms in this very valley, some now preserved at the old dutch reformed church nearby, the tools of a people who tended and drew life from this ground for many centuries before us.

cradled by the wild: sourland mountain and the protected lands

what makes this stretch unusual today is how much protected and wild land surrounds it. just to the west rises sourland mountain, the great diabase ridge of the region and one of central new jersey's largest contiguous forests, wild enough that its wildlife still reaches the farm. black bears are spotted here on occasion; bald eagles range overhead; and there are local accounts, within recent memory, of mountain cats in the area. this is not ordinary suburban farmland, it is a working farm embedded in a genuinely living landscape.

immediately around the farm lie three great blocks of protected open space, an unusual concentration:

duke farms, right at the doorstep, is a 2,700-acre estate in hillsborough, one of the largest privately owned undeveloped parcels in the state. once the estate of james buchanan duke and his daughter doris duke, it was reopened to the public in 2012 as a center of environmental stewardship and conservation science, its restored habitats, grasslands, woodlands, and nine lakes now a haven for wildlife, including a famous, long-monitored bald-eagle nest watched by a live camera followed around the world.

the six mile run reservoir site, about 3,000 acres of forests, wetlands, old fields, and farmland along the canal and river, was assembled by the state of new jersey in the mid-twentieth century for a planned water-supply reservoir. the reservoir was never built, the reservoirs at round valley and spruce run, together with the canal, proved sufficient, and the plan was placed on indefinite hold. the land, meanwhile, was turned over to the division of parks and forestry and is today a broad expanse of public open space, a preserved rural landscape of trails, farmsteads, and vistas where the reservoir would have been.

the delaware and raritan canal state park itself threads through the whole valley, some 6,500 acres of linear parkland along the historic canal and its towpath.

sourland mountain carries a profound human history as well. in the decades after the revolution it became home to some of the region’s first african american landowners, freed people who built a community on the mountain’s hard ground, a heritage preserved today at the stoutsburg sourland african american museum. the ridge that shelters the farm sheltered them too.

the canal: freight route, then recreation, now water supply

the delaware and raritan canal beside the farm has lived three lives, and its story mirrors the way land and water are repurposed over generations. it was dug in the 1830s as a freight route, a direct line to carry cargo between philadelphia and new york by connecting the delaware river at bordentown to the raritan at new brunswick. when rail and road made canal freight obsolete, it might have been abandoned; instead, in 1974, most of the canal system was made a state park, its towpath, once walked by the mules that towed the barges, becoming a beloved trail for hikers, cyclists, and riders. and in its third life it became essential again in a new way: the canal now supplies drinking water to the towns along its path. a nineteenth-century freight ditch is today both a recreational treasure and a working water main, still serving, two centuries on.

sited well: above the flood, sheltered from the worst

there is a quiet wisdom in exactly where the farm sits, the kind of siting that made ground favorable long before anyone measured it. the farm rests at roughly a hundred feet above sea level, on the higher ground of the valley, safely above the floodplain. this matters, because the millstone floods readily. the two iconic low crossings nearby, the blackwells mills and griggstown causeways, close under water again and again, the griggstown causeway going under at just six feet of river stage, as heavy rain upstream pours down the valley. the farm looks on from above, dry, while the low roads by the river disappear beneath the flow.

the farm also sits in the partial lee of the higher ground to the west, the sourland and watchung heights, which take the brunt of some weather before it reaches the valley floor. the practical effect is a place that is neither drowned by the river below nor fully exposed to the weather above, higher and drier than the floodplain, somewhat sheltered by the ridges, positioned to take the valley's advantages without its worst hazards. it is the sort of ground people have always chosen: near the water, but not in its reach; open to the valley, but with the hills at its back.

between two quarries: the living rock, still worked

the geology that shaped this farm is not a dead story, it is worked to this day, on both sides of the farm. to the north lies stavola’s chimney rock quarry, cutting the orange mountain basalt of the first watchung, a lava flow of the pangaea rifting, in operation since the early 1900s and yielding millions of tons of crushed stone a year. to the south lies the silvi quarry at belle mead, working diabase trap rock and argillite, the same hard igneous rock that forms sourland mountain, and the very shale that the intruding magma baked into stone.

so the farm sits, quite literally, between two operations mining the exact rocks its own story is made of, basalt to the north, diabase and baked shale to the south. the ridges on the horizon are not only scenery and history; they are active rock, still rising to use. the farm grows soil from the weathering of these same stones, the slow way, while the quarries take the hard rock, the fast way. both are drawing on the two-hundred-million-year inheritance of the newark basin, each in its own fashion.

land judged worth holding: the six mile run reservoir

among the most telling facts about this ground is one that never came to pass, and yet says a great deal. for more than half a century, the roughly three thousand acres at the farm’s doorstep, the six mile run reservoir site, have been held by the state of new jersey as a strategic water-supply reserve. the story of how that came to be, and why it still matters, is worth telling in full, because it is a measure of how this valley has long been regarded: not as leftover land, but as ground worth acquiring, worth protecting, and worth holding for the community’s most basic needs.

the plan (1950s–1970)

in the late 1950s, new jersey determined that it would need new sources of water for its growing population. state planners studied the landscape and identified the six mile run watershed, the creek and its tributaries, cross brook, middlebush brook, nine mile run, steep hill brook, all draining into the millstone, as a site well suited to become a reservoir. in 1962 the state formally notified somerset county of its intention. through the 1960s the proposal was debated and challenged by citizens and officials, and over those years the state steadily acquired the land, some three thousand acres of farms, fields, and woods. in 1970 the tract was placed under the department of environmental protection’s division of water resources, with the express intent to develop it as a reservoir, flooding the six mile run valley to create a new water supply and a recreational lake for the public.

the pause (1993)

the reservoir was not built. by 1993, other sources, chiefly the round valley and spruce run reservoirs to the northwest, together with the waters of the delaware and raritan canal, were found to supply central new jersey’s needs for the time being. the six mile run project was, in the language of the record, shelved. the land, now the state’s, was transferred to the division of parks and forestry to be managed as open space and parkland, in the words of the state, until such time that the proposed reservoir was deemed necessary. much of it was leased back for agriculture, and so the ground that was bought to become a lake has, in the decades since, continued to grow food, its old dutch farmhouses, granaries, and barns still standing among the fields.

held in reserve, and reviewable, still

here is the part that gives the story its weight. the reservoir was never cancelled, only deferred. the land was never released from its water-supply purpose. by state law, new jersey’s statewide water supply plan, which must be revised at least every five years, is specifically required to address the six mile run site, to identify it among the lands the state holds for water supply that are not presently in active use, and to make recommendations as to their future use for water supply. in plain terms, the reservoir is dormant, not dead: held in legal reserve, re-evaluated on a standing schedule, and available to be revived should the region’s water needs require it. as central new jersey grows and as a changing climate strains water supplies, that revival is not idle speculation, it is a possibility the state is obliged to keep under review.

what it means for this ground

for a farm in this valley, this history carries a meaning worth stating plainly. the state’s long investment in six mile run, acquiring the land, protecting it, holding it in reserve for generations, is a standing judgment that this is viable, valuable ground, worth keeping whole for the fundamental sustenance of the community. water and food are the two most basic of those needs, and this valley has been recognized as capable of providing both. the reservoir held in reserve, and the farms that feed the region in the meantime, are two expressions of the same truth: that this is land the wider community keeps choosing to steward, because it keeps proving worth the stewarding.

the farm’s own work belongs to that continuum. long before the reservoir was proposed, this valley was the breadbasket that fed a revolution; in the interim years the reserved land has gone on growing food; and the farm today, building living soil and raising nourishing crops, is continuing the valley’s oldest vocation, to improve the viability of this place and to draw from it what the community needs. to tend this ground is to take part in a tradition the state itself has affirmed by holding the land in trust: that here, food and water for the people are worth the keeping.

a corridor of learning

there is one more pattern worth naming, and it is no coincidence. the millstone river is bookended, at its two ends, by two of the nation's great seats of learning. it rises near princeton university at its source and merges into the raritan beside rutgers university at its mouth, two universities as bookends on a single small river, with a dense constellation of modern research institutions, laboratories, and schools gathered along and around its course. few valleys anywhere carry so much learning on so short a river.

a landscape of schools

the learning of this valley is not only in its two universities. the corridor holds one of the densest concentrations of renowned schools anywhere in the country. near at hand are the lawrenceville school, founded in 1810 on a seven-hundred-acre campus and among the nation's foremost preparatory schools; the hun school, the peddie school, and princeton day school; long-established institutions such as stuart country day and chapin; the french american school of princeton; and, of course, the waldorf school of princeton, born on the neighboring orchard farm. around them cluster montessori schools, charter schools, and independent and private schools of every description. families have come to this valley for generations precisely to educate their children in it.

and the farm itself belongs to that tradition, not merely beside it but upon it. for more than a century, this very ground hosted a one-room schoolhouse, the “red school house” of school district no. 2, on land conveyed by a neighboring family, the disboroughs, to the school’s trustees, with an adjoining strip added by the laytons in 1865. there the valley’s farming children were taught, generation after generation; the little schoolhouse endured so long, and mattered so much, that later deeds still use it as a boundary landmark. long before the farm grew food and soil, it grew learning, on the same acres. the corridor of education that runs the length of this valley has, quite literally, a chapter written into this farm’s own history.

the watchung range and the cradle of a nation

and rising along the eastern edge of this landscape is the watchung range, whose diabase and basalt ridges do more than frame the horizon, they carry a history at the founding of the nation. washington knew these heights as the blue hills, and they served as a natural fortress for the continental army. behind their shelter he placed the middlebrook encampment, a temporary military village of thousands of soldiers on the ridge in 1777 and again through the hard winter of 1778 to 1779, positioned to watch the british forces on the plains below. new jersey saw more engagements of the revolution than any other colony, and washington wintered his army here more than anywhere else, which is why the state is remembered as the cockpit of the american revolution.

one moment above all marks this ground. it was during the first middlebrook encampment, on june 14, 1777, that the newly resolved flag of the united states, the stars and stripes, was officially raised. the nation's first flag flew over this very landscape. the ridges that shaped the farm's soils, the diabase that stands where the shale wore down, are the same heights beneath which a country was defended and, in a real sense, took its first breath.

and this valley did more than shelter an army, it fed one. so abundant were its farms that the millstone valley was known as the breadbasket of the american revolution, its crops sustaining the continental forces through the war. that is a fact worth pausing on here: the significance of this ground to the nation’s founding was, in large part, agricultural. the very vocation this farm carries on, growing food from this soil, is the vocation that helped feed a revolution.

the revolution’s beginning and its end both ran through this valley. after the battle of princeton in january 1777, the millstone valley was washington’s escape route north to the safety of the watchung heights. and at the war’s close, just downriver at rockingham near rocky hill, washington kept his final wartime headquarters in the autumn of 1783, hosting madison, paine, and boudinot, and there writing his farewell orders to the armies of the united states as word arrived that the treaty of paris had ended the war. two years earlier, the french army under rochambeau had marched this same river road to and from the decisive victory at yorktown.

the nation has formally recognized all of this. the valley is a designated national scenic byway; it lies within the crossroads of the american revolution national heritage area; and its roads form part of the washington-rochambeau revolutionary route national historic trail. layer upon layer of national remembrance is written into the ground the farm works.

a mandate to keep contributing

a valley of the first people and the first flag; of two universities and a corridor of schools; of ancient churches and the largest mandir in the hemisphere; of protected wild land, nesting eagles, and a river that waters a region. this is a cradle, of a nation, of learning, of faith, of stewardship, and the farm sits in the heart of it.

to tend ground here is to accept a kind of mandate: to be worthy of such company, and to keep contributing to it. the farm's work, building living soil, growing food without harm, learning patiently from the earth and sharing what it learns, is offered in that spirit. it is a small parcel in a storied valley, but it means to add something true to a place that has, for a very long time, been where people come to think, to worship, to defend what matters, and to begin again.

a valley born from a breaking continent

some two hundred million years ago, in the late triassic, the supercontinent pangaea began to pull apart. as it stretched, the crust cracked and sagged into a series of long rift valleys down the eastern edge of what would become north america. one of these is the newark basin, and umrit farm sits within it. for millions of years this basin was a subsiding lowland of shallow lakes that filled and dried with the swings of an ancient, monsoon-like climate, each cycle laying down a fresh layer of mud and silt. those layers, compressed and hardened over the ages, became the passaic formation, the red, grey, and black shale, siltstone, and mudstone that is the bedrock of this farm.

the formation is remarkably thick here: between sourland mountain and the sand brook syncline it measures roughly 3,500 metres, over two miles of stacked ancient lakebeds. and because it was laid down in rhythmic cycles just a few metres thick, the rock splits along fine horizontal beds and weathers into thin plates rather than crumbling into deep soil. that single fact, rock that parts into plates near the surface, is why the soils above it are shallow.

fire beneath the mud: the diabase and the basalts

the same rifting that opened the basin also let molten rock rise from below. where magma forced its way between the sedimentary layers and cooled slowly underground, it formed diabase, a hard, dense, dark igneous rock. sourland mountain and the rocky hill ridge are great sheets of this diabase, and the regional pattern is simple to read once you know it: the soft shale wears down into lowlands and valleys, while the resistant diabase stands up as the ridges and mountains that frame the horizon. the farm lies in the sedimentary lowland; the igneous rock rises around it.

where magma reached the surface and erupted as lava, it cooled into basalt, the flows that built the watchung mountains to the north, still quarried today at places like chimney rock. diabase below, basalt above, shale between: three kinds of rock, all born of the same continental breakup, all shaping 

the ice that stopped to the north

far more recently, in the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, great glaciers advanced south across the continent. here is a detail that quietly shaped this farm’s fortunes: the ice never reached this ground. the wisconsinan glaciation’s terminal moraine, the furthest edge of the ice, halted to the north, in the watchung and morris county uplands. so this parcel received none of the ground-up rock and mixed mineral debris that glaciers spread across the land they cover, the fresh mineral wealth that enriches so much northern soil. the farm’s soils had to be made the slow way, from the weathering of the shale below, without the glacier’s gift.

but the glaciers left their mark another way. as the ice melted, torrents of meltwater carried sand and gravel down the valleys and spread them in broad sheets, glacial outwash. where that outwash settled, it built deep, well-drained, stone-poor ground; and as the millstone river later cut down through the valley, it left these outwash deposits stranded as terraces at successive levels, each lower step marking a later stage of the river’s incision.

why this one farm holds several different soils

this deep history is why a single farm carries such different ground within its bounds. two stories meet here:

on the higher ground, where soil formed directly from the weathering shale, the earth is klinesville shaly loam, shallow, stony, and quick to dry, with hard red shale often just ten to twenty-four inches down. it is naturally difficult ground; the soil survey describes it as limiting most crop production. this is the farm’s challenge and, in a sense, its calling.

on the lower ground, along the river, where glacial outwash was laid down, the soil is entirely different, a deep, well-drained loam, classified as prime farmland, more than eighty inches to bedrock. the same farm holds both the shallowest and the deepest soils the region offers, side by side, because one was made from the rock below and the other was delivered by meltwater from a vanished glacier.

and threaded through it all is the millstone river itself, which cut this valley to its present shape and, in flood, once renewed the bottomland with fresh silt. in 1978 that riverbed strip, where the dairy cattle once reached the water, was returned to the state, given back to the river that made it.