We could probably call 2024 The Year of the Drone in Hillsborough. For a few weeks, especially in December, it seemed that every night we were all looking up in the sky. Social media posts were filled with descriptions and fuzzy photos of the invaders. Not an occasion of hysteria, as some claimed (there really was increased drone activity), but still, an ultimately benign phenomenon. During the Cold War era, scanning the night sky was a much more serious matter.

World War II Airplane Spotters’ Posts

Aircraft observation posts, also known as spotters' posts, were key elements of local civil defense beginning during World War II and continuing throughout the Cold War of the 1950s. There were at least three such posts in Hillsborough Township.

In the summer of 1941, Professor C. Elliott Smith, who headed defense initiatives in the township, offered his farm on East Mountain Road as the site for Hillsborough's first observation post. William Funkhouser was the chief observer at the post, which typically required between 30 and 60 volunteers working in two-hour shifts to facilitate the necessary 24-hour, 7-day-a-week operation.

Volunteers were required to complete a course in which they were taught to identify aircraft by sight and by engine sound. Nearly everyone was eligible to serve except men of draft age who would necessarily leave a hole in the duty roster when they were called up - teenaged boys and Boy Scouts were especially encouraged. The buildings themselves were basic affairs - 10 or 12 feet square, insulated against the cold, and sometimes with electricity. Most important was a direct telephone line so that sightings of unidentified or enemy aircraft could be passed along to civil defense authorities.

Hillsborough's second observation post was on the Hamilton Dairy Farm, which today is the site of the Courtland development off of Duke's Parkway East. This post actually belonged to Somerville, whose volunteers initially operated out of a milk house on the farm and stood watch in an open field. More than 20 Somerville merchants donated materials to eventually build a proper shelter, which included a rooftop observation deck with a chest-high windbreak.

Much like the Somerville Post, the third facility in Hillsborough, located in Blackwell's Mills on the Van Cleef estate, was operated as Bound Brook's official post. After World War II, Hillsborough's post was moved from the Smith farm to the old municipal building (now the Department of Public Works). Spotters' posts continued to operate throughout the 1950s, although encouraging volunteers to join became increasingly difficult, as evidenced by the 1955 ad above.

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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.