09/02/2026
You’ve driven Shunpike Road. Maybe today, even. But do you know why it's called that?
When the Morris Turnpike opened in the early 1800s, it followed a route that will be very familiar to Chatham residents: today's Main Street. The turnpike connected Elizabeth and Morristown, passing directly through Chatham along the way.
Back then, “turnpike” didn’t refer to the road itself—it meant the pike, a wooden bar lowered across the road at tollgates. Pay your toll, and the keeper would turn it aside to let you through.
Naturally, people looked for a way around it.
Drivers who wanted to avoid the tolls began using a route that ran roughly parallel to the turnpike, south of today's Main Street, skirting the tollgates entirely. And that alternate route earned a wonderfully literal name: the Shunpike, for travelers who “shunned the pike.”
The turnpike company had reason to object. It held a legal monopoly over roads for several miles on either side of the Morris Turnpike, making shunpiking illegal as well as popular. Some especially bold toll dodgers would ride right up to the gate, reach for their coin purse as if to pay, then drop the reins as a signal for their horse to bolt through before the keeper could react.
But the workaround road never went away.
Today, it's Shunpike Road in Chatham Township, becoming Watchung Avenue as it enters Chatham Borough—while the road those early travelers were trying to avoid lives on as Main Street.
📚 Historical details from Chatham: At the Crossing of the Fishawack by John T. Cunningham.
🗺️ Map: Chatham, New Jersey, Sanborn Map Company, August 1909. Courtesy of Princeton University Library, Historic Map Division, Special Collections, Firestone Library. No Known Copyright.
