Nutley Was Born in Strife, Strategy and Secession

By John Simko, Nutley Museum Director

Town Hall is the hardest-working building around, serving three towns for more than a hundred seventy-five years in nearly a dozen diverse roles—and donning three distinct hats in the process.

The building began its life as a textile mill, part of the Duncan Essex Mills, which produced wool goods. It was built around 1840.

The mill opened in Belleville, a community created just a few years earlier when it seceded from Bloomfield. About thirty years later it was in Franklin—due to that community’s secession from Belleville in 1874. And about thirty years after that, in 1902, a vote was taken and Franklin became Nutley.