Montclair is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States, situated on the cliffs of the Watchung Mountains.
The township of Montclair was part of the homeland of the Lenape Native Americans. They hunted and trapped here, and gathered shellfish at the New Jersey shore. In 1666, English people from Connecticut founded Newark, NJ , and extended the settlement westward including this land. In 1679 Dutch settlers acquired land from the Lenape west of the Passaic River and north of Newark, and other Dutch settlers established farms in what is now the northern half of Montclair.
During the Revolutionary War, First Mountain, part of the Watchung range, provided observation points for following the movements of the British to the east.
The most decisive event for the emergence of Montclair was the coming of the railroads. In 1856, the Newark and Bloomfield Railroad Company inaugurated regular service to West Bloomfield. By changing trains at Newark and taking a ferry from Hoboken, people could travel from the future Lackawanna Plaza in Montclair to New York in an hour and twenty minutes.
By the opening of the 20th century, a richly diverse population characterized the community. A new influx of New Englanders was joined by African-Americans from the South and by Irish, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians and others newly arrived from Europe. Great mansions went up, but so did many modest homes. Between 1880 and 1930, Montclair’s population leaped from 5,147 to 42,017.
Today, Montclair is a wealthy and diverse bedroom community of New York City within the New York metropolitan area, a community of about 39,000 inhabitants.