It Happened in Hillsborough: Where the Heck is Hillsborough?

Forty-four years ago this month (February 1982), the Hillsborough Business and Professional Association
came up with an idea to help foster a greater community identity for the sprawling township: they were
going to sell T-shirts. The front of the shirts, available in yellow, tan, or white for $5.95, featured a large
question mark with the superimposed slogan, “Where The Hell Is Hillsborough.”  

Where The Hell Is Hillsborough?

Almost from the day Hillsborough Township, NJ, received its charter in May 1771, the municipality faced
an identity crisis. The problem was that the 54-square-mile municipality had no town center. Nowhere
to place a pin on a map that said, “This is Hillsborough.”

And that was significant. A survey of state maps from the 19 th and 20 th centuries shows that as the maps
became increasingly crowded with place names for villages, railroad stations, and geographic features,
there was no longer room for “HILLSBOROUGH.” If the name of the municipality appeared on a map at
all, it might be as a remnant of the short-lived (1873-1880) “Hillsboro” station stop of the Mercer and
Somerset Railroad near the intersection of Hillsborough and Willow Roads. When they tore up the
tracks, they forgot to erase the name! But even that recognition soon faded.

The US Postal Service was no help either. By the end of the 1800s, there were as many as nine different
post offices in the town – none of them named Hillsborough! Flip through the Senior photo pages of a
Somerville Pioneer Yearbook from the 1960s, and you would think that none of the graduates of the
regional high school were from Hillsborough, as they listed their addresses as Neshanic, Flagtown, Belle
Mead, South Somerville, or New Center. In reality, there were dozens!!

As the Planned Unit Development in the 1970s surged population to the center of town, the 19th-
century villages lost their crown to new-sprung developments. Finally, in December 2000, the
Hillsborough 08844 post office opened on Amwell Road. Now everyone (nearly) has the same zip code   
and just about all residents identify as living in Hillsborough.
And that should be the end of it, right? All unified now? Nope! In one last twist, after 250 years of
striving to become ONE, congressional redistricting split Hillsborough right down the middle!! Perhaps
we need another T-shirt!

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Gregory Gillette has been writing about local history for 20 years, starting with his Courier News column
“Gillette on Hillsborough” and continuing today with a Facebook page of the same name. He was named
as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.