Manville takes its name from a factory. In the early twentieth century, the Johns-Manville company built a huge plant here in central New Jersey, producing asbestos building materials, and a town grew around it to house the workers, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. The plant closed in the 1980s after asbestos was found to be deadly, and the company was bankrupted by lawsuits. Today Manville is a modest working-class borough of small houses and shops, sitting where the Raritan and Millstone rivers meet.
Those rivers are both a blessing and a curse. Manville lies low, and it has flooded badly many times, most recently in 2021, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida sent water through the streets. Along the Millstone, the Delaware and Raritan Canal, dug in the 1830s to carry coal and goods between the Delaware River and New York, runs past quiet towpaths shaded by trees, now a long state park popular with walkers and cyclists. Nearby in Hillsborough, Duke Farms, the former estate of the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, is open to the public as a nature reserve with meadows, woods and lakes.
The swim needs a caveat. The Raritan and Millstone are not great swimming rivers; they are slow, muddy and can carry runoff after rain, and the canal is off-limits. If you want a dip, the better option is a public lake or a pool elsewhere, or the beaches of the Shore further south and east. Here, a cold drink in the shade by the canal may be the more sensible way to cool off.
Riding around Manville is mostly flat and suburban, with county roads crossing farmland and housing between the rivers. To the west and north, though, the land rises into the Sourland Mountains and the hills toward Somerset and Hunterdon counties, where the roads become more interesting, twisting through forest and past old farms and villages. Watch for deer, potholes and slow traffic around the towns.
Manville and the surrounding towns have fuel, delis, pizza and diners. Heading back toward New York means along Route 206, Route 22 and the busy highways of central New Jersey, which fill with traffic at rush hour.