"Our first object was to secure the bridge over the Hackensack." Thomas Paine wrote those words in The American Crisis, describing the morning of November 20, 1776, when General Washington raced his battered army toward a wooden span at the narrows of the Hackensack River. The bridge at New Bridge Landing was not famous. It was not grand. But in the calculus of the American Revolution, it was the difference between an army that survived and a rebellion that ended. Today, the site straddles four New Jersey municipalities -- River Edge, New Milford, Hackensack, and Teaneck -- a quiet historic park in suburban Bergen County that commemorates eleven separate engagements fought at this crossing during the war.
Long before the Revolution, New Bridge Landing was the commercial heart of the upper Hackensack Valley. A tidal gristmill, powered by an ingenious system that trapped high tide behind a dam and released the water through a wheel as the river ebbed, drew sloops alongside its wharf. Iron from stone furnaces in the Ramapo Mountains arrived by ox-cart and was loaded onto boats for shipment to market. Flour, animal feed, and all manner of goods flowed in and out. The wide Hackensack Meadowlands downstream made New Bridge the nearest river crossing to Newark Bay until 1790, so all overland traffic between New York City and the interior -- farm wagons, stagecoaches, travelers of every kind -- funneled through this spot. The community was settled by the Bergen Dutch, a polyglot agricultural society blending Dutch, Angolan African, German, English, French, Scottish, and Scandinavian traditions. Jan Zabriskie purchased the mill and farm in 1745 and built the oldest part of what is now known as the Steuben House in 1752.
By November 1776, Washington's Continental Army was in crisis. Fort Washington in Upper Manhattan had fallen to the British on November 16. Fort Lee, across the Hudson, was next. In the early morning of November 20, Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis landed roughly 5,000 British and Hessian soldiers in New Jersey for an assault on Fort Lee, then held by about 2,500 to 3,000 American troops. Washington met General Nathanael Greene near Englewood and led a retreat through present-day Fort Lee, Englewood, and Teaneck toward the Hackensack River at New Bridge. The stakes were existential: if the British reached the bridge first, the American garrison would be trapped on the Bergen Neck, the narrow peninsula between the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers. Washington arrived at New Bridge about three quarters of an hour after receiving the alarm. Most of his troops crossed the bridge; others used the ferry or waded through marshy ground near a mill creek. The British, overconfident and dismissive of local Loyalists who warned them that "New Bridge was the key to the peninsula," failed to cut off the retreat.
Washington's crossing was only the first of New Bridge's wartime chapters. The following day, British troops under Major General Vaughan seized the bridge while American engineers scrambled to dismantle it. Over the next four years, the site saw repeated action. In May 1779, Captain Patrick Ferguson attacked Bergen militiamen here. That August, Major Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee staged his assault on Paulus Hook from New Bridge. In March 1780, Bergen Militia and Continental troops ambushed 600 retreating British soldiers during the two hours it took them to repair and cross the span. British friendly fire killed eight of their own during a botched attack on militia sheltering in the Zabriskie house in May 1780. General Anthony Wayne launched his raid on Bull's Ferry from here in July. And in September 1780, Washington established his headquarters in the Zabriskie-Steuben House during the Steenrapie encampment, which gathered nearly 14,000 Continental soldiers along the Hackensack.
After the war, New Jersey confiscated the Zabriskie property -- Jan Zabriskie had been a Loyalist -- and in December 1783 presented it to Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben in gratitude for training the Continental Army. The Steuben House, as it became known, passed through various hands before the state purchased it in 1928 for $9,000. Renovated and opened as a public museum in 1939, it displays period artifacts maintained by the Bergen County Historical Society. Other threatened colonial structures -- the Campbell-Christie House, the Demarest House, the Westervelt-Thomas Barn -- have been relocated to the site for preservation. A New Jersey Transit station on the Pascack Valley Line was renamed New Bridge Landing in 2008, returning the historical name to a commuter stop that had been called North Hackensack. The current drawbridge, installed in 1889 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, still spans the narrows where Washington's army once ran for its life.
Located at 40.9128°N, 74.0322°W where the Hackensack River narrows in Bergen County, New Jersey. The historic site spans portions of River Edge, New Milford, Hackensack, and Teaneck. The Hackensack River and its meadowlands are visible running north-south. The New Jersey Transit Pascack Valley Line passes through. Nearest airports: KTEB (Teterboro, 4 nm south), KLGA (LaGuardia, 12 nm east). Fort Lee and the George Washington Bridge are visible to the southeast.