There is a corner of Morris County where the very place names give the secret away. A village called Hibernia sits in the hills above Rockaway, and Hibernia is the old classical word for Ireland. You cannot drive Green Pond Road without passing a clue. The story of the Irish in Rockaway, New Jersey is written into the map itself, carved out of iron ore and faith and the long memory of people who came to mine the hills and stayed to build a county.
The Place
Rockaway is two things at once, and visitors are forgiven for the confusion. There is Rockaway Borough, a compact town of roughly 6,700 people gathered around the Rockaway River, and there is Rockaway Township, the largest municipality in Morris County, sprawling north into wooded ridges. The borough sits about thirty-five miles west of Manhattan, far enough to feel like its own world.
The name comes from the Lenni Lenape, not the Irish. But what the land held beneath it, magnetite iron ore in seams running through the highlands, would pull in waves of immigrants for more than two centuries. Rockaway Township was incorporated in 1844, and by then its furnaces and forges were already old.
Today the median household income in the borough sits above $107,000, and the median age is forty-seven. It is comfortable, leafy, and quietly proud of a past that most of its commuters barely glimpse.
How It Became Irish
To understand the Irish here, you have to start underground. Morris County was iron country before it was anything else, and the iron is what brought the Irish in.
The Iron That Called Them
Ore was being dug from the Hibernia deposit as early as 1722, generations before the United States existed. In 1765 a furnace was raised at Hibernia, later known simply as the Hibernia Furnace, and during the Revolution it cast shot and ordnance for the Continental Army camped not far away.
The earliest miners were Dutch, English, and Welsh. But as the nineteenth century deepened and the mines went deeper with it, the labour that filled the shafts changed. The Irish, fleeing famine and scarcity at home, came to dominate Morris County’s mining workforce. They went down into the dark at Hibernia, at Mount Hope, at Split Rock, and they named a village after the country they had left.
Hibernia, the Irish Village
The Hibernia mines were worked from pre-Revolutionary times until 1916, and over their long life they yielded more than five million tons of ore, placing the district among the top three iron-producing areas in the entire state. A railroad climbed the valley to carry the ore out. Around it grew a mining settlement of company houses, a school, and churches.
It was hard, dangerous work, and it was Irish work as much as anyone’s. The mines finally drowned. Flooding underground and cheaper ore arriving by rail from the Midwest shut the operation down around 1913, and the deep shafts filled with water for good.
What remains of Hibernia is small. The 2020 census counted only 208 residents in the place itself. The old Methodist Episcopal church on Green Pond Road has served since 1970 as a branch of the Rockaway Township library, a quiet afterlife for a building that once gathered miners on a Sunday.
The Parish and the Parade
Faith followed the Irish out of the mines and down into the borough. The Church of St. Cecilia was established in Rockaway in 1875, and the parish was formally constituted in 1881, part of the Diocese of Paterson. It still stands on Church Street, the spiritual anchor for generations of Catholic families whose surnames ran heavily to the Irish.
By the second half of the twentieth century the mines were long gone, but the descendants remained, and so did newer arrivals. In 1974 a group recognised how many people of Irish descent were living and settling in the area, and founded the Irish American Association of North West Jersey. They met at first in a parish school in nearby Wharton.
Then in 1977 the association bought the former Mt Pleasant School on Richard Mine Road in Rockaway Township and made it their home. It became, and remains, the centre of Irish cultural life for the whole north-western corner of the state.
Reviving the Saint’s Day
The Irish of Morris County could claim a remarkable pedigree for their patron saint. On 17 March 1780, encamped through a brutal winter at Jockey Hollow in Morristown, General George Washington granted his troops the day off in honour of St. Patrick and in recognition of his Irish soldiers. It is remembered locally as the first St. Patrick’s Day observance in the new nation.
Two centuries later, the Irish American Association revived the tradition. On 17 March 1979 they staged the first modern Morris County St. Patrick’s Day Parade, a one-mile march down Main Street in Wharton before a few hundred spectators. It grew fast. By 1988 the parade fielded fifty-six units and over 1,500 marchers, and Wharton’s streets could no longer hold it.
In November 1990 the association joined forces with the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Morris County, and on 16 March 1991 the parade stepped off in Morristown for the first time, with 3,000 marchers and thirteen bands. Leading them, as it had since 1981, was a hand-painted banner of St. Patrick commissioned from Carmelite nuns in Ireland.
The Landmarks
Irish American Association of North West Jersey, 352 Richard Mine Road, Rockaway. The former Mt Pleasant School, bought by the association in 1977, is the beating heart of the community. Inside its old classrooms there are step-dance lessons, adult ceili dancing, Irish language and music classes, and traditional sessions through the year.
Church of St. Cecilia, Church Street, Rockaway. Founded in 1875 with the parish established in 1881, St. Cecilia has gathered Rockaway’s Catholic families for nearly a century and a half. It belongs to the Diocese of Paterson and remains an active parish at the centre of the borough.
Hibernia, Green Pond Road, Rockaway Township. The village named for Ireland, where Irish miners worked the shafts until the waters took them around 1913. The old Methodist church here has been a library branch since 1970, and the hills still bear the scars of the mine cuts.
Wildcat Ridge and the Hibernia mine cuts. Above the village, the wooded ridge preserves the railroad cut and traces of the iron operation that drew the Irish in the first place. The old Hibernia mine is now famous chiefly as one of the largest bat hibernation sites in the region, the shafts left to nature.
The Morris County St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Morristown. Born in Wharton in 1979 and brought to Morristown in 1991, the parade is the year’s great gathering of the north-west Jersey Irish. It draws thousands of marchers each March, pipe bands and dancers and civic groups under the Carmelite banner.
Muldoon’s, Rockaway. An Irish pub in the borough itself, serving the American and Irish staples that keep the tradition fed between feast days. It is the kind of place where the parade is replayed and the next Feis is planned over a pint.
The Dublin Pub, Pine Street, Morristown. A short drive from Rockaway, the Dublin Pub opened in 1973 and decked its walls with murals of Dublin’s streets, Irish lampposts, and a menu of beef stew and corned beef and cabbage. It has anchored the county’s Irish social life for half a century.
Where They Came From
The Irish who reached Rockaway and its hills came in the great nineteenth-century outflow, the famine generation and those who followed. They were drawn not by farmland but by labour: the mines needed strong backs, and Ireland had a surplus of men with nothing left to lose at home.
Many came by way of the ports and the canal and rail lines that fed Morris County’s industry. Some had mined or quarried in the old country; most learned the work in the dark of New Jersey. Around them clustered the institutions of home, the parish church above all, and later the social hall.
The figures still echo. In Rockaway Borough today, Irish ancestry accounts for around 9.4 per cent of residents, the second largest group after Italian, with a further 6.1 per cent claiming Scotch-Irish roots. In a town of fewer than seven thousand people, that is a deep and durable presence.
Rockaway Today
The mines are silent and flooded, and most of Rockaway’s residents now commute to office parks or to New York rather than descend a shaft. The Irish presence is no longer a wave of arriving miners but a settled inheritance, carried in surnames, in parish rolls, and in the Saturday classes on Richard Mine Road.
That inheritance is unusually well tended. The Irish American Association keeps the language and the dancing alive, runs its Feis each September, and shares the running of one of the region’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parades. Few American suburbs have so deliberately preserved the cultural machinery of their heritage.
And the name still does its quiet work. Drive past Hibernia, glance at Richard Mine Road, step into St. Cecilia on a Sunday, and the Irish story of Rockaway is there for anyone willing to read it. It is not a museum piece. It is a living thread, running from the famine ships to the iron seams to a school hall full of children learning to dance.
For families across America with roots in the Morris County mines, Rockaway is a fixed point. It is the place the Irish came to dig, and the place a surprising number of them never left.
You can trace this same Irish thread through other neighbourhoods that Atlas of Home has mapped, from the Irish of Pennsport in Philadelphia to the Irish Channel in New Orleans, Irish Savannah, and the Irish of the Mission District in San Francisco. New Jersey has its own crowded map of homelands too, including the Turkish community in Clifton and Turks in Paramus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is there a place called Hibernia near Rockaway, New Jersey?
Hibernia is the classical Latin name for Ireland, and the village earned it from the Irish miners who worked its iron shafts. The Irish in Rockaway, New Jersey were so central to the mining economy that one settlement carries the old name of their homeland to this day. The mines there operated from before the Revolution until 1916.
How large is the Irish community in Rockaway, New Jersey?
In Rockaway Borough, Irish ancestry accounts for roughly 9.4 per cent of residents, making it the second most common ancestral group after Italian. A further 6.1 per cent report Scotch-Irish roots. For the Irish in Rockaway, New Jersey, that adds up to one of the most established heritage communities in Morris County.
What was the role of the Irish in Morris County’s iron mines?
Although the earliest miners were Dutch, English, and Welsh, the Irish came to dominate Morris County’s mining workforce through the nineteenth century. They worked the Hibernia, Mount Hope, and Split Rock operations, which together produced millions of tons of iron ore before flooding and Midwestern competition closed them in the early 1900s.
What is the Irish American Association of North West Jersey?
Founded in 1974, the association bought the former Mt Pleasant School on Richard Mine Road in Rockaway Township in 1977 and made it the cultural centre for the region’s Irish. It offers step-dance, ceili, music, and language classes, hosts an annual Feis each September, and co-organises the Morris County St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Why does Morristown hold one of America’s oldest St. Patrick’s Day traditions?
On 17 March 1780, General George Washington granted his Continental Army troops at Jockey Hollow in Morristown the day off to honour St. Patrick and his Irish soldiers, an event remembered as the first St. Patrick’s Day observance in the new nation. The modern Morris County parade began in Wharton in 1979 and moved to Morristown in 1991.
Can I still visit the Hibernia mine area?
The village of Hibernia survives as a small community within Rockaway Township, and the surrounding Wildcat Ridge preserves the old railroad cut and mine workings. The Hibernia mine itself is now sealed and known as a major bat hibernation site, while the former Methodist church serves as a library branch.
If your family’s story passed through Rockaway, or any of the places the Irish have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the famine-era counties of Ireland to the iron shafts of Hibernia, to wherever you are now.