New Jersey’s weirdest borders — towns inside towns and land that isn’t ours

I'll admit it. I am a map geek.

Way back before GPS, before maps on your phone or your dashboard, before Garmin and TomTom, before MapQuest — I was just a guy who liked paper maps. You know those maps. The ones that only a special few can ever fold back up properly. Back in what I now call the dark ages of the 1990s, when there was just newspapers and magazines and the occasional paper atlas, I would sit and look at maps for no particular reason other than that I found them fascinating.

That is how I got to know New Jersey. And that is how I got hooked on Jersey's map oddities.

A land battle between two Ocean County towns just ended — and it is a good example of how strange things can get. Seaside Park voted 5-0 to absorb South Seaside Park, a neighborhood that had been part of Berkeley Township but sits on a barrier island separated from the rest of Berkeley by Barnegat Bay. South Seaside Park had no land connection to the town it legally belonged to. Residents wanted out. After years of fighting, they got it. A consulting firm initially projected property tax decreases of 40 to 51 percent for residents. They later revised that to 8 percent after discovering they had counted one figure twice. As a Berkeley councilman put it Monday night — it was like putting a puzzle together without all the pieces.

That description fits New Jersey's entire map. Here are five of the best examples.

Flemington: the town inside a town

Flemington is a borough completely surrounded by Raritan Township. Not adjacent to it. Surrounded. You cannot drive from one part of Raritan Township to another without passing through Flemington. It is a classic enclave — what happens when New Jersey allowed boroughs to carve themselves out of larger townships in the late 1800s and nobody ever straightened out the map afterward.  There are a bunch of these donut hole towns all over NJ.  See Erin Vogt's gallery below!

South Hackensack: three pieces, one town

South Hackensack is a single municipality split into three completely separate non-contiguous sections. The pieces do not touch each other. You have to drive through other towns just to get from one part of South Hackensack to another. Consistently cited as one of the most fragmented municipal layouts in the state — which, given the competition here, is saying something.

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Haddon Township: the patchwork

Haddon Township in Camden County exists in multiple disconnected sections with Haddonfield sitting between them. A patchwork of enclaves that makes local governance genuinely complicated, reflecting the same borough carve-out history that created the Flemington situation. The shapes were never cleaned up. They just stayed.

Six towns named Washington Township

There are six different municipalities named Washington Township in New Jersey across Bergen, Burlington, Gloucester, Mercer, Morris and Warren counties. Not a border problem exactly — but a real confusion problem for residents, mail delivery, emergency services, and anyone trying to give directions. What happens when every town is fiercely independent and nobody ever agreed to coordinate on names.

Killcohook: the Delaware land you can reach without leaving New Jersey

This is the one that stopped me cold the first time I found it on a map.

In Salem County, about seven miles south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, there is a stretch of land physically attached to New Jersey that legally belongs to Delaware. It goes back to 1682 when King Charles II granted William Penn a border defined by a 12-mile circle around New Castle, Delaware — a line that extended to the low-tide mark on the New Jersey side of the river.

For centuries nobody cared because the area was just marsh. Then the Army Corps of Engineers started dredging the Delaware River and dumping material along the Jersey shore, creating solid land that — under the 1682 agreement — automatically became Delaware's. Locals call it "The Baja." No signs mark the state line. You can walk from New Jersey into Delaware without getting your feet wet or knowing you crossed a border.

New Jersey took Delaware to the U.S. Supreme Court three times. Lost every time. The same boundary blocked a $700 million BP natural gas terminal in 2008. Part of the Salem Nuclear Power Plant's Artificial Island also technically belongs to Delaware.

Legend has it that some Jersey politicians once joked with their Delaware counterparts about sending the Battleship New Jersey downriver from Camden to take the land back. Nobody actually launched anything. Delaware still owns it.

I found all of this sitting in my living room with a paper map. Best discovery I ever made without leaving the couch. 

👇Many more NJ map oddities and donut hole towns below!👇