The First Farmingdale Hotel

The one-story liquor store at the corner of Main Street and Railroad Avenue belies the history of its location. As far back as the 1860s, the corner was the site of a much larger hotel building,  important to tourists and businessmen alike.

Richard Corlies’s family had owned land on both sides of Main Street for many years when he envisioned the expansion of its commercial district just before the Civil War. As part of this development, he sold a half acre property next to the New Jersey Central Railroad tracks in 1862 – the deed whimsically described it as 20 feet “from the SW corner of what was Jacob Barkalow’s garden fence.” The purchaser was his daughter Elizabeth’s husband James E. Johnston.

The Johnston’s had realized the potential of the spot near the train station and soon built and operated an inn and restaurant. The Johnston Hotel catered to the railway trade like the businessmen drawn by the opportunities to buy the natural fertilizer called marl which was being excavated on the outskirts of town. Farmingdale, renamed from Upper Squankum just a few years before, was also a convenient stagecoach stop for tourists on the way to the seaside. The hotel in the burgeoning little town offered rest for the bone-rattled coach passengers and a stable for their horses. The Johnston Hotel was so successful that by 1873 Charles G. Boud opened the competing American Hotel a bit closer to the railroad station just a block away.

The Johnstons ran the hotel for almost 30 years, finally selling it in 1891. A succession of owners operated this public house until Martha Brower eventually acquired it in 1907. Her husband had purchased the American Hotel from Boud years before, but when Charles W. Brower died in 1906, his widow and son, Charles Chauncey, parlayed their experience and renamed the Main Street location the Brower House Hotel (both hotels are pictured in the second postcard view). Charles managed it and tended bar for eight years until Martha sold it several months before she passed away. Charles left the hospitality business entirely to work as a clerk for William Lutz at his store, on Main Street at Asbury Avenue.

The old hotel had a number of names and owners during the next several decades, including the Radcliff Hotel in 1916 when it was owned by a Trenton couple, Joseph and Annie Radcliff. Unfortunately, they lost it when they defaulted on their mortgage in 1921.

The hotel continued to change hands for 40 more years. At one point it housed the Twin Maple Restaurant and Gift Shop in the 1950s. After almost a century as one of the most prominent businesses in Farmingdale, the decaying structure was finally torn down. Today, the Farmingdale Liquors store occupies the site of what was once the grandest hotel in town.