New Jersey

Named for an island

New Jersey is named for the Isle of Jersey, a British island in the English Channel. In a grant dated June 24, 1664, James, Duke of York, handed the land between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to Sir George Carteret and John, Lord Berkeley, two supporters of the Stuart royal family during the English Civil War. The deed said the tract would be called “New Caesarea or New Jersey.” Carteret had served as bailiff of Jersey, and the name honored his home island, which old maps also labeled with its Latin name, Caesarea.

Two Jerseys, then one

For its first decades New Jersey was really two colonies. East Jersey was governed first from Elizabethtown and then from Perth Amboy, and West Jersey from Burlington. They were united as a single royal colony in 1702, but government business kept moving back and forth between Perth Amboy and Burlington for most of the next century.

Crossroads of the Revolution

New Jersey sat between British-held New York and Philadelphia, and more than 600 battles and skirmishes were fought on its soil, earning it the name “Crossroads of the American Revolution.” Its first state constitution, of 1776, let property-owning single women and free Black men vote, until an 1807 law limited voting to white men. On December 18, 1787, a convention at Trenton ratified the US Constitution unanimously, making New Jersey the third state.

Trenton

Trenton had a brief moment as a national capital, when the US Congress met there in November and December 1784. On November 25, 1790, New Jersey made it the state’s single capital, and the first State House there was finished two years later. That building, much enlarged, is still in use, making it one of the oldest state capitols in continuous use. The capital page tells the story.

The Garden State

New Jersey’s nickname has a disputed origin. It was long credited to Abraham Browning, who was said to have used it in an 1876 speech at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, but the State Library notes that the phrase is not in his speech and appeared in print as early as 1862. In 1954 the Legislature put “Garden State” on license plates over Governor Robert Meyner’s veto, and in 2017 it became the official state slogan.

The state has no official song, and its motto, “Liberty and Prosperity,” comes from the Great Seal rather than a law. The state flag puts the state’s coat of arms, with three plows between the goddesses Liberty and Ceres, on a field of buff, a color George Washington chose for New Jersey’s Revolutionary regiments.

Goldfinches, violets and a dinosaur

New Jersey has 26 official state symbols, and students campaigned for many of them. The eastern goldfinch became the state bird in 1935 and the common meadow violet the state flower in 1972; the northern red oak is the state tree. The horse is the state animal, the honey bee the “State Bug,” and Hadrosaurus foulkii, dug up in Haddonfield in 1858, the state dinosaur. Newer symbols honor New Jersey inventions and institutions: Thomas Edison as state inventor, the Seeing Eye dog, the soil microbe that gave the world streptomycin, the battleship USS New Jersey and, since 2023, cranberry juice. See them all on the New Jersey symbols page.

Land and people

New Jersey covers 8,723 square miles, 47th among the states, and had about 9.55 million residents in 2025, 11th in the country. With 1,298 people per square mile of land, it is the most densely populated state. It borders New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, and faces the Atlantic Ocean along its eastern shore. Newark, with about 324,000 people, is the largest city, followed by Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth and Trenton.