WHEN YARDVILLE WAS SAND HILLS

I wrote the following mini article on the early years of Yardville for the Mercer Messenger when they devoted an issue to various towns and villages in Hamilton Township. Following is a transcription of that article, copied from the original typewritten pages.

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SAND HILLS
by Tom Glover

In the very early years of old Nottingham, the area we know of today as Yardville was called Sand Hills. Anyone familiar with the topography of the area will readily see where the name originated. Yardville has a very interesting and romantic past. The remarkable growth of Hamilton Township over the past one hundred years makes it very difficult to envision the area as it was. Today, (1997) the very busy U.S. Route 130 (formerly route 25) runs through the town, with an immense volume of traffic at all hours. How different it is from the rural Sand Hills of the past.
If we could go back to take a privileged peek at the little farm village, we would see a sleepy little town surrounded by vast farmland, and lush forests. From center city Trenton, some five miles away, to the nearby settlements of Newtown (today's Robbinsville), Crosswicks and Allentown, the area was basically open fields, forests and farms.
Sand Hills was one of the terminals served by the stage coach line which plied its way from Camden to South Amboy. It is said to be one of the very earliest lines in the history of rapid transportation. Just a small amount of imagination is needed to conjure up the image of the Sand Hills villagers of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds as they waited in anticipation for the mail to arrive via the stage. According to historical accounts, the stage passed through Sand Hills at a point pretty close to today's route 130. At the approach of the stage, a watchman rang a bell to herald the arrival of the mail. The stage slowed down to a speed which would allow one of the stage coach operators to drop off a sack of mail, and then proceed northward to South Amboy, or south to Camden.
On those occasions where there was a passenger for the stage, the pickup and departure point was the old hotel, which was the center of village activity. Over the years, that old hotel has remained an historic link with Hamilton's past. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was operated as Zwirlein's; one of the many gathering places for sportsmen who participated in the grotesque sport of pigeon shooting. Organized shooting matches were held regularly, and it was not an unusual sight to see one of the Kuser boys firing in the thick of the contest. In the early part of this century, the old hotel came into the proprietorship of the Widman family, whose descendants are still with us here in Hamilton. More recently, the old hotel was under the proprietorship of William Binder.