Over the weekend I got an amazing email from Tom Schneck. It included this rare photo of his uncle Floyd Shimalla driving around in the first Manville Police car. If you recognize the name Floyd Shimalla that’s because he was Manvilles first constable and is featured in the pretty famous “First Manville Administration” photo that is on display at the Manville Library. I also posted it on this site… you can see it HERE. According to Tom he was also a professional Heavyweight boxer, which I actually was not aware of, but if you ask me is pretty good experience if you are about to serve as the only constable for a brand new town. Anyway, this photo is dated 1929. I’m not sure what that building is in the background there… anyone know? Thanks so much Tom, for this great photo! Here is the back of the photo…

Whelp, it’s been a while since I posted up a new digital issue of the Old Manville News, so here you go. November 28th, 1941. I still feel slightly unaccomplished at not finishing out the whole year of 1941 yet, but this stuff is a lot of work. Anyway we have a few car accidents here, the continued labor negotiations with the Johns Manville plant, and the confirmation of Manville’s great sewage facilities. I hope you enjoy this issue… we are almost up to 1942! Here is a link. Manville News 11-28-1941 OCR

Old Main St. Flood • Click to Enlarge

You know sometimes a photo is just a photo, and this photo is just a great old photo, albeit a blurry one of an old flood. This is Main Street looking south towards the old Weston Station, and the old, long since been replaced crooked tunnel.

I didn’t make this post to talk about floods. I did it to say thanks. I started this blog at the end of 2009 with absolutely no expectations that people would actually care. I did figure that it would generate minor interest from a few folks around the neighborhood, but taking a look at the stats I realized that it’s pretty incredible.

A blog about a tiny town, 2 square miles small, that generates views from every country in the world. Even Today we helped someone in Slovakia find info about their families home in Manville.

Just today viewers also checked in from Indonesia, Phillipines, Canada, Denmark, UK, & Slovakia. I even have a map of the hot viewer areas, and Alaska checks in as much as the mainland. This site has been viewed 128,397 times. Today we hit 1000 comments for only 133 posts. There are 74 subscribing members. All those stats do not even include the people that read through rss feeds and email notifications.

These are all mind boggling statistics, and here’s the best part. The participation from the readers, all the info in the comments, all the submissions, and all the siblings showing the site to their elders to help pass down the information are the very things that make this site great. So I just wanted to take a moment to share those statistics and thoughts… and to just say thanks for continuing to breathe life into this thing. It’s been an awesome ride so far… I’m looking forward to some more good years.

I just got an email from a person in Slovakia doing genealogical research & asking if I would help get some information on the Dobak family. They sent over this photo of the family house on Florida Ave. in Manville. Block 22. It will enlarge if you click on it.

Here’s what I do know… a number of streets, particularly on the North side of town used to be named after states. So I know the following streets former names….

Rhode Island Ave became North 7th ave

Louisiana Ave became North 8th ave

Kentucky Ave became North 9th ave

Here are few important questions…

#1 What is the current street name for what used to be Florida Ave.?

#2 Does anyone know or remember the above house?

First is this great photo of the Chester House. If you enlarge it and go to the right of the photo you can see the old Gamby’s Diner at the future site of Quick Check, and Charlie’s Resturant in the back there.

This next photo is a little further down Main St. Starting at Quigleys Bike Shop. The Quigley’s building in now the home of The Grub Hut, but back in the day it was like the great bike shop in town that was famous for the giant tangled bike heap that sat in the middle of the front room. As a kid I remember being slightly afraid to go in there in fear of a bike avalanche and a slow agonizing 8 year old death. I’m still looking for good photos of that place if anyone has any. Anyway you can see the great Liccardi Motors lot in the back there. I’m not sure what year that disappeared, but I totally do not remember it. Looks awesome though. I’m sure it was an asset to an evening drive down the strip in it’s day. You can also see the old corner Sunoco Station way in the back there. Oh and speaking of great advertising… how about the 24 hour milk dispensary. I wonder whatever became of those amazing old signs.

The next photo is more of a birds eye, and was taken out of one of the JM office windows, where Ranauro worked as photographer. This is the corner of Knopf and Main. You can see Lebbings Garage, Shop Rite, and the Esso station, which I believe may have been run By the Manna Family. This is just a great view of Main St. with plenty to look at.

Remember if you have any photos you would like to share please get in touch with me so we can help preserve our towns history. I can help you get them scanned and digitally archived as well.

The Manville Lanes • Click to Enlarge

I took a walk over to the Manville Lanes today after learning is was all closed up and gutted. My main goal was to try and find a worker so I could attempt to procure the giant sign on the side of the building, but no one was around. It bummed me out so much that that classic old sign, a beacon of my childhood might escape my grasp and end up in a landfill somewhere off the side of 287. As I stood in defeat remembering the way only half those neon letters used to flicker and light up the Manville night sky, it occurred to me that I might take a little walk around downtown Manville and get some photos of some of the great local advertising before it dissapears as well..

Like always the adventure was a rewarding one. I wish I has time to cover the whole town but for now here are a few Gems.

I recently struck up a friendship with the John Krasansky. John has a genius personality that kind of reminds me of Nick Charles in the movie the thin man.  The guy can tell great stories, so I honestly didn’t believe him when he told me there was an old Kay Appliance showroom that closed in the 1950s and was undisturbed ever since. But when I got there I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a 1950s appliance store time capsule. I don’t want to post the address because I think I already shook up the neighbors by taking all kinds of photos over there, but I got this great shot through the window…

You can enlarge the photo by clicking on it. It’s amazing that a place like this exists. And speaking of store that closed down decades ago, leaving room fulls of brand new antiques… The Chabra Professional building used to have a hardware store under it. Apparently they just put some white paper over the windows, hung a few wreaths and called it a day. In all fairness this is a pretty iconic building in town. I love the old sign with the terrible spacing.

The next one is an old ghost sign on Main Street that is now obscured by buildings. I managed a decent photo of it. It’s an ad for M.H. Burke & Co. Which was apparently a Dept. Store in Somerville. I’m glad this thing survived…

The next two photos I got are fairly new, but they are great hand painted signs so I included them. The first one is from the Hair Palace… and it’s just super well done.

The next one is out in front of the jewelry store on Main St. This is just a great diamond painting. I’m not sure if they used cheap paint or if they intentionally left the old rickety paint… either way this is great…

This is another classic Manville sign, I wish they didn’t ruin it with the plexiglass. I guess kids were breaking the neon…

Camplain Liquors doesn’t only have this classic neon, but on the side window they have another great hand painted sign. This one is such a classic too…

Ice Cold Beer, I don’t know anyone who can argue with that. This next one is one of my favorite neons around. The Chester House sign. Tommy recently got someone to give this sign a facelift and fix the neon arrow… it looks great.

And finally the old Kay Electric building has a great old sign painted right on to the building. This one is kind of tucked away…

I managed to get a pretty good shot of one of the old service trucks too… it’s pretty cool the way the old paint preserved the logo a little.

1685 Landowners Map • Click to Enlarge

I was doing a little more digging on the Library of Congress website and I found a great link to a digital book entitled Historical discourse on occasion of the centennial anniversary of the Reformed Dutch church of Millstone. If you are doing any research on the Hillsborough / Manville / Millstone area this is an excellent & detailed record on the earlier settlers of the area. It also includes this great map from 1685, which I have seen in poor photocopied form before… the quality on this copy is great. You can read or download the complete book for free HERE. But for Manvillian purposes we need mostly be concerned with the dealings of John Royce.

Some of you might recognize the name Royce, since the Royce brook is still so called in Manville. The truth is that John Royce was the first official landlord of Manville. Famous for his shady real estate dealings and infringing on (and leasing out) portions of other peoples lands that lay next to his borders. He also leased said lands that he didn’t even legally fully own out to a gentleman name Charles Winder for a period of a thousand years… and then proceeded to sell parts of this leased lands to other parties. It was a nightmare that took the executors of his estate years to get sorted back out. SO you can fairly say that the first Manville landlord, like many more to come… was a crook.

On the receiving end of the shady dealings were Van Vechty & Co., which actually had to shell out money for the disputed areas twice to satisfy the discrepancy in ownership. The deal opened the floodgates 1703 for the Dutch to settle the new lands formerly known as Roycefield & Royceton so named for the former owner. They promptly renamed the area Harmony Plains, which would many years later become part of Manville.

For what its worth it’s a great story and the great story is told in more detail in the book… I extracted the relevant pages and posted them below. The map above opens in a new window, and in my opinion it’s a tremendous help to look at the map while reading to keep your bearings, as most of the property owners lands told in the tale are listed on the map. Anyway here you go… all of these pages will enlarge if you click on them…

Photo by Carl Mydans • Click to Enlarge

It seems like a life time since I put up some good impactful photos on here… and I apologize about that. It seems like I get busier and busier by the hour lately. In a desperate attempt to keep something consistent going here without spending hours warming up a library chair, I checked out the Library of Congress website… and wouldn’t you know it was fruitful. I found these great photos that were Taken by Carl Mydans. All of these are from the mid 1930′s. The photo above of Main Street has actually appeared on this site before, but the quality this time around is a lot better. Also, it’s just a great photo and worthy of a rerun since we have a lot of new folks on here. Here are some more…

This real estate hut was on Finderne Ave. heading out of town. I believe this one was from 1936, you can expand the photo by clicking on it.

I believe this photo is the Federal Creosote Factory, which famously polluted the entire former Rustic Mall and East Camplain Rd section of Manville, leaving “rivers of creosote” under the ground and prompting the closing of the entire mall and a major federal clean up to happen. You can see Main St. and The Manville National Bank in the background.

The old Finderne Ave bridge driving Main street out of town towards Bound Brook. I’m not sure what year the covered part of the bridge was torn down.

I’m not sure where in Manville this exactly is, but this is just a great photo.

This photo is just entitled “inhabitant of Manville” can anyone out there identify this man?

Another old homestead photo, which seems to be related to the photo above. What a great looking well.

This photo is definitely the same barn as the one above with the gentleman standing in front. Again if anyone can identify the man or the address, please educate us.

This last great photo is obviously standing underneath some sort of water tower. My initial instinct tells me its the one on the North side by the High School, but I can not positively identify it. All of these photos were found in the Library of Congress digital archive. I’d love to hear any of your thoughts or additional information, so as always leave em in the comments section. Enjoy!

Hello everyone, I’m still alive. I just archived up another issue of the Old Manville News. The date is November 21, 1941 and guess what… Mayor Polonko wants fair press! This is another searchable issue. Hope you guys enjoy… here is a download link. Manville News 11-21-1941 OCR

The Manville Saw Mill • Photo by Neal Ranauro • Click To Enlarge

A few of these photos will look familiar to some of you. That’s because 3 of them have appeared on here before. The mystery of the Manville Saw Mill has just still not been solved. I decided to look back into Neal Ranauro’s archive and post all of the photos of here. The photo quality is also a little better this time. So let’s talk about this one more time… and please, if you know anything I need help on this one.

Here’s what we know based on Ranauro’s notes. These photos were taken in 1920. The Mill was allegedly located “between The Manville Elks and Christ the King School”. Here are a few more photos, you can click on them to expand them. They will expand twice.

It would make sense to me that a saw mill would exist behind the Manville Elks since there are woods back there, but I don’t recall in any of my 80s childhood adventures through those woods seeing a cleared out space of young trees. The readership on this site has exponentially grown, so I ask you once again…

Do any of you recall or know about The Manville Saw Mill?