City Hall & Surveyor General’s Office 5/27/17 • Click on photos to enlarge:                

*Photos by Katherine Massopust

Press Release 5/22/17

PERTH AMBOY – Mayor Wilda Diaz is pleased to host the grand opening of the Surveyor General’s Office Museum on Thursday, May 25, 2017 at 10:00 a.m. (260 High Street)

Mayor Diaz will be joined by local dignitaries, city officials and Perth Amboy school students for a showing of a history video and brief tour of the newly renovated historic site.

The Surveyor General’s Office (SGO) located next to Perth Amboy City Hall at 260 High Street– a two room brick building built in 1852-1854 that once housed decades’ worth of city council minutes, rolled-up maps, old flags and a conference meeting table.

The building is the former home of the East Jersey Board of Proprietors, which governed New Jersey from 1682 until 1702 — long before the independence was declared — and which is the oldest incorporated body in the country.

The board was dissolved in 1998 after 316 years of corporate existence, at which time the building, which also housed the office of the board’s Surveyor General, was donated to the City of Perth Amboy, while its extensive records were transferred to the State Library in Trenton.

The one-story building, listed on the state and national historic registers has transformed into a public museum celebrating the historical and archeological heritage of Perth Amboy, which was the first incorporated municipality in New Jersey.

“The Surveyor General’s Office is an architectural and historical gem, very much like other historic buildings in Perth Amboy, but until now no one has cared for its restoration,” said Mayor Wilda Diaz, who championed the museum effort. “By turning the Surveyor General’s Office into a museum, the city will be able to showcase its extraordinary colonial history and preserve yet another piece of national history.”

Perth Amboy’s history can be traced back to King Charles II, who in 1664 granted the area west of the Hudson, which was a former Dutch colony, to his brother, James, Duke of York, who in turn granted a proprietorship over New Jersey to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret.

During 1682, Carteret’s Estate was sold to 12 new buyers, and these men formed the East Jersey Board of Proprietors.  The East and West Jersey Proprietors were the first British landowners, governing the province for the first four decades of British colonization.

The city is named in honor of James Drummond, Earl of Perth, one of the early proprietors. Perth Amboy was the colonial capital of East Jersey from 1686 until the union of East and West Jersey in 1702, when it became an alternate colonial capital with Burlington until 1776.  A statue of the Earl of Perth stands in front of City Hall.

Before it dissolved itself in 1998 the board sold the SGO to the City of Perth Amboy for $1.00, while its extensive records were transferred to the State Library in Trenton.

At the request of Mayor Diaz, a proposal for the adaptive re-use of the SGO was prepared in 2010.  It proposed a conversion of the building to a museum interpreting the historical role of the proprietors and to display a large and important collection of 17th and 18th-century.

The New Jersey Historic Trust (NJHT) awarded the City a Capital Preservation Grant in the amount of $110,635 out of the Garden State Historic Preservation Trust Fund and it was matched with federal community development block grant funds. The funds were used to restore the two-room, 22- by 35-foot building and to update the interior. The building is also ADA compliant. The work was completed just several months ago.

The museum will serve:

• To interpret the role of the proprietors in the founding of Perth Amboy and the settlement of New Jersey.

• To house an important collection of artifacts from two city archeological sites dating from the 17th and 18th centuries; the artifacts have been in storage for more than 35 years and thus inaccessible to students, historians and the public

On the day of the grand opening, the SGO Museum will display the original silver seal of the City of Perth Amboy dating from 1718. The seal, which has been in a vault for 40 years after it was reclaimed by the Perth Amboy Women’s Club, is believed to be one of the oldest city seals in the nation.

The artifacts from the two archeological sites are particularly noteworthy. Unlike other colonial cities in New Jersey, such as Newark and Trenton, which have been built up, much of Perth Amboy’s historic core has escaped urbanization, allowing archeologists to recover thousands of artifacts.

The artifacts were recovered from the Clarke-Watson house site, dating from 1684, which is one of the city’s first houses; and the King’s Arms Tavern site, which may date from as early as 1692. The tavern was frequented by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Paine.

The artifacts, some of which date from the 1600s, are remarkable for their variety. They include household items such as tableware, cutlery and kitchenware; ironwork such as nails, spikes and hinges; personal accessories such as pipes, buttons and buckles; coins, ceramic tiles and more.

“Properly displayed in an appropriate setting, [these artifacts] can dramatically bring to life the seemingly remote era in which our city, state and country had their beginnings,” the grant application states.

The new museum joins several other city sites of historical significance, including the Proprietary House, commissioned by the Proprietors of East Jersey as the official residence of William Franklin, the last-appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey; Kearny Cottage, the home of Commodore Lawrence Kearny, who initiated the “open door” policy with China in 1842; and the Perth Amboy-Tottenville ferry slip, which opened in to 1684 to help travelers such as Ben Franklin and the Lenape Indians cross the Arthur Kill.

The new city museum will be open three days a week and by appointment for school and other groups, from Wednesday – Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.