Freehold Borough

The first Dutch and Scottish settlers arrived in the 1680s when the Lenni‑Lenape Indians sparsely populated the rich and fertile land. The settlers established a village on the Burlington Path, an Indian rail that crossed New Jersey along the corridor that Route 537 follows today. The village sat at the center of what was soon designated Monmouth County, one of the colony’s original four counties. Here a courthouse was built on the same spot where the Hall of Records now stands.

During the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence was read to a crowd of patriots gathered in front of the courthouse. This was also the location for occasional hangings of unrepentant Loyalists. On the morning of June 28, 1778, the entire British Army, on its way by foot from Philadelphia to New York, was camped in town. The entire Continental Army, led by George Washington, caught up with them.

The first shots of the Battle of Monmouth were fired close to where the high school stands today. The fighting raged back toward Tennent Church, all through the day, resulting in the single largest land battle of the Revolution. When Washington arose the next morning to fight again he found that the British had escaped during the night. Although neither side could say it won, the Americans proved what many had doubted before–that they were equal to their enemy.

Freehold was the trading center for a wide and fertile swath of the county where farmers came to sell what they raised and buy what they didn’t. The railroads that arrived in the middle of the 19th century carried out trainloads of potatoes, the main local crop. The railroads that transported the potatoes also brought in some industries later in the century and at the beginning of the next. The largest by far was the A & M Karagheusian rug mill, whose products adorned floors as illustrious as the United States Supreme Court and Radio City Music Hall.

During the Civil War, the local men raised a regiment and drilled and trained out on the old battlefield. When they returned home, they marched up Main Street in the first of the town’s Memorial Day parades. The regiment was led by the horse that their commander, Major Peter Vredenburgh, was riding when he was killed charging over a ridge against the Confederates at the Battle of Opequon Creek in Virginia. Soldiers marched up Main Street again after the Second World War to which Freehold sent almost 1,000 men and women; proportionately more than any other town in Monmouth County.