Place:Fair Lawn, Bergen, New Jersey, United States

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Fair Lawn is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States, and a bedroom suburb located northwest of New York City. As of the 2020 United States Census, the borough’s population was 34,940, ^[1] which constituted a 7.7% increase from 32,457 at the 2010 United States Census,^[2][3][4] in turn an increase of 2.6% from the 31,637 counted at the 2000 Census.

Fair Lawn was incorporated as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 6, 1924, as "Fairlawn", from portions of Saddle River Township. The name was taken from Fairlawn, David Acker's estate home, that was built in 1865 and later became the Fair Lawn Municipal Building. In 1933, the official spelling of the borough's name was split into its present two-word form as "Fair Lawn" Borough.^[5]

Radburn, one of the first planned communities in the United States, is an unincorporated community located within Fair Lawn and was founded in 1929 as "a town for the motor age." Fair Lawn is home to a large number of commuters to New York City, to which it is connected by train from two railroad stations on NJ Transit's Bergen County Line, the Radburn and Broadway stations.

Fair Lawn's motto, coined by Jake Janso, is "A great place to visit and a better place to live." Fair Lawn has been rated as one of the top 10 best places to live in New Jersey. According to Nerdwallet, Fair Lawn witnessed a 5.3% increase in its working-age population between 2009 and 2011.^[6]

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The first settlers of Fair Lawn were members of the Lenni Lenape tribe, a peaceful group of hunter gatherers who eventually sold their land to incoming Dutch and Irish settlers and migrated to Pennsylvania. The new colonists turned the region, part of the New Barbadoes Township, into five large farm lots, conjoined by two main roads—Paramus and Saddle River—and named it "slooterdam" (after a V-shaped sluice-like fishing weir built in the Passaic River by the Lenni Lenape). The name stuck until 1791. In the 1800s, these five lots became nine smaller lots, and three new roads—Fair Lawn Avenue, Lincoln Avenue, and Prospect Street—were constructed to encourage mobility between them. Eighty houses were built by 1861, and the renamed Small Lots, now a part of the Saddle River Township and home to multiple vegetable and fruit farms and dairies, became an agricultural community. Berdan Avenue, a new road located near five Berdan family farms, was soon added and Victorian homes were built alongside it and in nearby areas. The grandest of the estates, perched atop a hill by Small Lots Road was David Acker's estate "Fairlawn", from which the township gets its name (Images of America, Page 7).

Rapid suburban development of the town occurred in three sections: the River Road-Fair Lawn Avenue area known as "Memorial Park", the area at Lincoln Avenue and Wagaraw Road known as "Columbus Heights", and the area east of the railroad and south of Broadway, known as Warren Point. The development of this section was catalyzed by the "establishment of a post office, a railroad station, and a trolley to the Hudson River" (Images of America, Page 8).

In the 1900s, Fair Lawn residents were displeased about the schooling situation as part of Saddle River Township; the schools were either dilapidated or too far away for Fair Lawn residents, and citizens felt that they were not getting schools comparable to the tax money they were paying. As such, a movement to separate from Saddle River Township was born. Fair Lawn residents petitioned to the state, asking to incorporate as an independent borough, and in April 1924, the borough of Fair Lawn was voted into existence.

Fair Lawn is home to the following eight sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places:

• Peter Garretson House, 4-02 River Road (1974)
• Irregular pattern between Radburn Road and the Erie Rail Road tracks in Radburn (1975)
• G.V.H. Berdan House, 1219 River Road (1983)
• Richard J. Berdan House, 2407 Fair Lawn Avenue
• Cadmus-Folly House, 19-21 Fair Lawn Avenue
• Naugle House, 42-49 Dunkerhook Road – Built in the 1750s, the house was acquired by the borough.
• Jacob Vanderbeck Jr. House, 41-25 Dunkerhook Road – Constructed in 1754, the house was named by Preservation New Jersey as one of New Jersey's 10 most endangered historic places
• Radburn station, Pollitt Drive (1984)

Other sites, in addition to those listed above, are also considered historic by the Historic Sites Survey Committee of the Bergen County Historic Sites Advisory Board, including:

• Henry A. Hopper House
• George Washington School (Recommended as a National Register possibility, but needs further documentation)
• Fair Lawn, Berdan, and Prospect Avenues, Plaza and Radburn Roads
• Peter Demarest House on Fair Lawn Avenue
• Warren Bronze and Aluminum Factory on Second Street

In July 1982, an NJ Transit train derailed and crashed into a pasta factory, killing the train's engineer. The derailment resulted from a group of teens who had tampered with the tracks. Two of the five youths charged with the crime were convicted of manslaughter for their roles in the incident and were given five-year sentences in a state correctional facility.

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