It Happened In Hillsborough: The First Municipal Building

As you exit the doors of Hillsborough’s municipal building today, you are steps away from Amwell Road.
About 35 years ago, the four-lane highway known as the Amwell Road Bypass was built, relegating the
original Amwell Road that you are looking at to little more than a side street. But in the 1700s, THIS was
the main highway between New Brunswick and the towns on the Delaware River.

The First Municipal Building

Where the YMCA is today was the crossroads where the Amwell Road met the road to South Branch. At
this crossroads, like many others in colonial times, there was an inn. The inn was where Hillsborough’s
governing body met. In those days and into the 1800s, they met once a year. And the meeting always
took place at the inn or at the home of one of the committeemen. There were very few publicly owned
buildings in the township.

As the 20 th century began, Hillsborough’s three-member township committee was meeting once a
month at the Neshanic Hotel across from the Neshanic Reformed Church. They met there for decades –
until 1934. In January of that year, township resident Clement Clawson, Jr., son of the famous inventor
of the slot machine, came to the township committee with an idea. It was the middle of the Great
Depression, and Clawson was the Somerset County Emergency Relief Coordinator. He was also the local
administrator for the short-lived Civil Works Administration – a Depression-era federal jobs program like
the WPA.

He told the committee that if they secured land and paid for an architect and building materials, the
federal government would pay all the labor costs to construct Hillsborough’s first municipal building.
The catch was that time was of the essence; Clawson knew that this program might be halted at any
time.

The committee dawdled for months until days before the deadline. Clawson had to personally tour the
committee members around town before they found a property on Amwell Road (now East Mountain
Road). They offered to buy a piece of the property almost on the spot. The application with the CWA
was approved, and the Municipal building was dedicated on September 22, 1934.
The building served as the seat of government until 1991, when the new building was completed. The
idea for this building – which houses the administrative offices of the township, the library, the police
station, and the board of education – is attributed to longtime Hillsborough mayor and assemblyman
Pete Biondi, and the building was rededicated in his honor in 2012.

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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.