A local history written around 1911 put it plainly: this town sat at one of New Jersey’s two great gateways to the west. The other one was the Delaware Water Gap. More than a century later, you can sleep at the first gateway for considerably less than the second.
Phillipsburg claims the New Jersey bank of the Delaware directly across from Easton, Pennsylvania, where the Lehigh River joins in. It’s the most affordable New Jersey town within driving distance of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, with rent averaging $1,167 a month, and the Gap is about 45 minutes north.
The transport history here is almost comic in its density. A ferry crossed the Delaware from 1739. The Morris Canal opened in 1832 with its western terminus right here, running 102 miles to Jersey City. The Morris, Lehigh, and Delaware canals all met at this spot and swapped coal boats by cable ferry. Then five railroads arrived, each with its own freight yard, and at the peak the town held eight roundhouses and five stations.
Nothing else on our basecamp bargain rankings has this résumé. The first commercially successful diesel-electric locomotive in America was built here by Ingersoll-Rand, whose plant eventually employed around 5,000 people.
What to Expect Visiting Phillipsburg, New Jersey
Railroad heritage is still the local pastime. Norfolk Southern’s Lehigh Line runs about 25 trains a day through town, and the Phillipsburg Railroad Historians have been installing a small-gauge railroad at their site near Cross Street since 1997. Sections of the old Morris Canal are gradually being converted into a public greenway across Warren County.
The town’s earlier layers surface if you look. A floating bridge was thrown across the Delaware around 1800 and promptly washed away; in 1805 the Easton Delaware Bridge Company ran a lottery to fund a wooden arch replacement, which lasted nearly a century before the iron span went up in 1895. As late as 1811, the entire settlement consisted of fifteen families…