It Happened in Hillsborough: The First Traffic Light

The three-member Hillsborough Township Committee first asked for it in 1949. They went to the
Somerset County Freeholders to plead their case. Request denied! They tried again in 1950, sending a
letter to the State Highway Department. The state officials just didn’t see the need for one. Manville
finally got one in 1953, at the intersection of Main Street and Camplain Road. What would it take for
Hillsborough to get its first traffic light?

The First Traffic Light

The intersection of Amwell Road and Route 206 wasn’t always the center of Hillsborough that it is today.
For most of the town’s history, it wasn’t even a crossroads! The highway, such as it was, from Princeton
ended at Homestead Road. Travelers wishing to continue to Somerville or points north would turn left
on Homestead, right on Amwell, left at the old Woods Tavern onto a short lane, then right on New
Amwell. After another left turn, they would find themselves finally on the Somerville Road.

Around 1920, all of that changed. The state improved the road from Princeton and continued it north
past Homestead, onto the small lane at Amwell, and (after appropriating part of New Amwell)
northward to about where the northern terminus of the bypass is today. It was called Highway 16 for a
while before being redesignated as Highway 31, and, finally, in the early 1950s, Route 206.
And it was the center of everything. The area became known as Woods Tavern (after the 18th-century
establishment on the northwest corner that burned down in 1932) . As traffic increased in the 1930s and
1940s, so did the collisions; some of them fatal.

What was needed was a traffic light. The opening of the Hillsborough Consolidated School (now
Hillsborough Elementary School) on the northeast corner in 1950, an era when many children still
walked to school, crossing the highway, should have been the impetus for some electric traffic control.
When the school expanded in 1956, the Township Committee tried again with no luck. Even the
completion of the Country Club Homes development across the highway later in the decade couldn’t get
the county or state to budge. They kept insisting no light was necessary.

It wasn’t until October 1965 that the state and county finally agreed. The $31,200 traffic light finally
came online in the first week of March 1966!

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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. A recipient of
the Somerset County Cultural and Heritage Commission History Award for Education/Leadership in
2018, he was named as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.