
NPS/Ed Sharron photo
![]() NPS/Ed Sharron photo OverviewMorristown National Historical Park is a park rich in history extending back to the Revolutionary War era. The natural areas served as winter encampment sites for General George Washington's American Continental Army between 1779-1780. On March 2, 1933, Morristown became the third historic park added to the National Park Service, the first titled a National Historical Park, incorporating Ford's Mansion, Jockey Hollow and the site of Fort Nonsense. Morristown National Historical Park's total of 1,705 acres are predominantly deciduous forest, but also includes open fields, and a mixture of wetlands including one permanent pond, numerous seeps, small streams, and a half-mile section of the Passaic River.Its forests are comprised primarily of mixed oak, sugar maple-hardwood, hemlock-hardwood, and chestnut oaks. The park is underlain by Precambrian gneiss and granite rock and Mesozoic siltstone, shale and sandstone sedimentary rock below the extension of late Wisconsinan glaciation, the last glaciation to affect New Jersey. These rock foundations are among the oldest in New Jersey, formed between 1.3 billion and 750 million years ago, and collectively create valleys flanked with high ridges and an erosion resistant environment resulting from the Precambrian rocks. The park has 27 miles of hiking trails winding through mature forests which Washington's Army utilized to construct a "log-house city" of over 1000 soldier huts and successional forests which have regenerated on agricultural fields abandoned in the 19th and 20th centuries. The mosaic of fields and forests found in the park are interwoven with a wide variety of natural resources containing significant plant and animal communities. Long Term Monitoring Programs in the Park
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Baseline Inventories | Complete for Park? | Reports, Documents & Data |
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Water Quality | Y | Baseline Inventory |
Y | Cartographic data sets: U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Department of Agriculture. National Park Service data clearinghouse for mapping information and geospatial resources. | |
Air Quality Related Values | Y | Air Quality in Parks |
Climate Inventory | Y | Weather and Climate Inventory for NETN parks |
Geological Resources Inventory | Y | |
Soil Resources Inventory | Y | NPS - SRI - Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) |
Water Body Location and Classification | Y | |
Vegetation Inventory | Y | Vegetation Inventory and Map |
Species Lists | Y | IRMA Species Search |
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Last updated: November 16, 2018