Waterloo Village
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Waterloo Village
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Smith's General Store at Waterloo Village, with the Morris Canal in the immediate background
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| Nearest city | Byram, New Jersey |
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| Coordinates | 40°54′56″N 74°45′22″W / 40.91556°N 74.75611°WCoordinates: 40°54′56″N 74°45′22″W / 40.91556°N 74.75611°W |
| Area | 70 acres (28 ha) |
| Built | 1820 |
| Architectural style | Late Victorian |
| NRHP Reference # |
77000909 (original) 15000176 (increase) |
| NJRHP # | 2593 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | September 13, 1977 |
| Boundary increase | April 28, 2015 |
| Designated NJRHP | February 3, 1977 |
Waterloo Village is a restored 19th-century canal town in Byram Township, Sussex County (west of Stanhope) in northwestern New Jersey, United States. The community was approximately the half-way point in the roughly 102-mile (165 km) trip along the Morris Canal, which ran from Jersey City (across the Hudson River from Manhattan, New York) to Phillipsburg, New Jersey, (across the Delaware River from Easton, Pennsylvania). Waterloo possessed all the accommodations necessary to service the needs of a canal operation, including an inn, a general store, a church, a blacksmith shop (to service the mules on the canal), and a watermill. For canal workers, Waterloo's geographic location would have been conducive to being an overnight stopover point on the two-day trip between Phillipsburg and Jersey City.
It is currently an open-air museum in Allamuchy Mountain State Park. As part of the State Park, it is open to the public from sunrise to sunset. The village is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Although opened in 1831, the Morris Canal's traffic volume, which was primarily anthracite coal from Pennsylvania, peaked during the late 1860s, shortly after end of the American Civil War. Up until that time, the local railroads — the Lackawanna Railroad's Sussex Branch and Morris and Essex Railroad — had only supplemented the canal's operation, rather than actually competing with it. Both the Sussex Branch and the Morris & Essex Railroad ran within a short distance of the village. After the War, however, the canal's traffic began to quickly shift over to the much faster and more reliable railroad. It was expected that during most winters the canal would be frozen solid, and thus impassable during the time when its chief commodity was in greatest demand.
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