History
The Belleville Turnpike was created in 1759 as a turnpike made out of cedar logs and was chartered in 1808. It served as a part of the Underground Railroad route for escaped slaves to get to Jersey City. The northern segment of Route 7 was originally a part of Pre-1927 Route 11, which was legislated in 1917 to run from Newark to Paterson. In the 1927 New Jersey state highway renumbering, Route 7 was designated to run from Jersey City to Paterson, replacing Pre-1927 Route 11 between Belleville and Paterson.
In 1929, the routing was amended to run from Route 25 (now U.S. Route 1/9 Truck) in Jersey City to Route 3 in Wallington. Route 7 was extended north in 1949 to continue to Route 6 (now U.S. Route 46) in East Paterson (now Elmwood Park). In the 1953 New Jersey state highway renumbering, Route 7 was legislated onto its current alignment, with the northern terminus moved to the Nutley/Clifton border. The route was also realigned to head south on Washington Avenue between the Newark border and Rutgers Street in Belleville on what was Route 11N, a remnant of Pre-1927 Route 11, making Route 7 discontinuous. County Route 506 used to follow the southern portion of Route 7 but has been truncated to the intersection with Routes 7 and 21 in Belleville.
Read more about this topic: New Jersey Route 7
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)