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Send me the listNew Jersey’s oldest continuously running restaurant is not in Cape May, and it is not in Hoboken. It is on West Main Street in Mendham. The Black Horse Tavern and Pub opened in 1742, which means it was feeding stagecoach passengers thirty four years before anyone signed the Declaration of Independence.
Most of us drive past that history without a second thought. Morris County also has a cider mill that has been pressing apples since 1851, a Morristown bakery that has been making bread since 1898, and a farm market on Mount Kemble Avenue that got its start as a table set up under a mulberry tree. Here are eleven Morris County businesses that are still open today, listed from oldest to newest.
Black Horse Tavern and Pub, Mendham (1742)
The Black Horse Tavern and Pub sits at 1 West Main Street in Mendham and is widely recognized as the oldest continuously running restaurant in New Jersey. It opened in 1742 as a stop on the stagecoach road heading west out of Morristown, in the era when a day of travel ended wherever the horses ran out. The property still holds two buildings. The Tavern is the higher end dining room, and the Pub, which is the casual bar side, started life as the horse stables. The whole place closed in March 2024 for a multimillion dollar renovation and reopened in January 2025, so the room many locals remember looks different now, but the walls are the same ones that were standing before the Revolution.
The Publick House, Chester (1810)
Zephaniah Drake and Jacob Drake Jr. put up a brick hotel at 111 Main Street in Chester around 1810, back when Chester was a stagecoach stop on the route running from New York and Morristown out to Phillipsburg. It has not spent all of those years as an inn. In 1854 William Rankin expanded the building and converted it into the Chester Institute, a classical college preparatory school. It returned to being a hotel and restaurant in 1870 and has been one ever since. It operates today as the Publick House Hotel, an all suite boutique hotel with PH Steakhouse downstairs, which makes it one of the few buildings in the county that has been a tavern, a boarding school and a hotel without ever changing address.
Hacklebarney Farm Cider Mill, Chester (1851)
Hacklebarney Farm Cider Mill at 104 State Park Road in Chester Township was established in 1851 and is now worked by the seventh generation of the same family. The mill presses its own cider, the bakery turns out the doughnuts that draw the October lines, and the farm store and pick your own fields run through the fall. If you are ranking the county by fried dough, it earns its spot on our list of the best apple cider donuts in Morris County.
Verrilli’s Bakery, Morristown (1898)
Leonardo and Antonia Verrilli started baking out of their own house on Race Street in Morristown in 1898. Race Street is Clyde Potts Drive today. When the town bought that land in 1950 to build Manahan Village, their son Dolly bought the corner lot at what is now Martin Luther King Avenue and George Street, and Verrilli’s has been at 3 Martin Luther King Avenue since the early 1950s. It is Morristown’s oldest bakery, it still sells bread, pizza, sandwiches and Italian pastry, and the item people cross town for is the Spudnuts, doughnuts made to order. It is one of the quieter landmarks in our local’s guide to Morristown.
Ort Farms, Long Valley (1916)
The Ort family settled in Long Valley, then known as German Valley, in the mid 1800s. In 1916 Jacob W. Ort came down off his father’s farm on Spring Lane and started his own operation on Bartley Road, running it primarily as a dairy and livestock farm. Ort Farms is still at 25 Bartley Road, it now covers roughly 400 acres, and the New Jersey Agricultural Society has recognized it with a century award for staying in the same family for more than a hundred years. Pumpkins are the fall draw, and the farm turns up every year on our guide to pumpkin picking and corn mazes in Morris County.
The Palace Theatre, Netcong (1919)
The Palace Theatre at 7 Ledgewood Avenue in Netcong opened in 1919 as a silent movie and vaudeville house. Over the next fifty years it showed talkies and hosted high school plays, graduations and local productions for the whole northwestern corner of the county. The Growing Stage, the Children’s Theatre of New Jersey, bought the building in 1995 and has run its full season there ever since. The Palace is listed on both the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, and it celebrated its hundredth birthday in 2019.
Wightman Farms, Morristown (1922)
Albert Wightman and his wife Laetitia bought the first piece of what became Wightman Farms in 1922. Albert planted fruit trees and vegetables and drove his harvest into Morristown to sell it door to door. Before long people started driving out to him instead, and longtime customers still remember buying produce off a table under a mulberry tree across from where the market building stands today. The farm at 1111 Mount Kemble Avenue works over 150 acres, the third generation of the family runs it, and the market stays open year round with cider pressed on site, farm baked pies and doughnuts. It is also one of the orchards on our roundup of apple picking in Morris County.
The Community Theatre, Morristown (1937)
The Community Theatre at 100 South Street opened on December 23, 1937 with a screening of Nothing Sacred. It was the crown jewel of Walter Reade’s New Jersey movie house chain and the first first run theater Morristown ever had. By the 1980s it sat dark and deteriorating for close to a decade. A volunteer effort brought it back, and it reopened as a performing arts center on September 29, 1994 with the Kirov Orchestra of Saint Petersburg and Morristown pianist Alexander Slobodyanik. It took the name Mayo Performing Arts Center in 2011, and in May 2026 it broke ground on a $65 million expansion and theater restoration.
Arthur’s Tavern, Morris Plains (1957)
Arthur McGreevy bought the Brook Tavern at 700 Speedwell Avenue in Morris Plains in 1957. He renovated it into the steakhouse people know now, and it has been Arthur’s Tavern since 1985. McGreevy spent more than sixty years in the restaurant business, served as president of both the New Jersey Restaurant Association and the National Restaurant Association, and was named Restaurateur of the Year in 1981. It is not unusual to see four generations of the same family at one table in the dining room, which is a reasonable definition of a landmark.
Denville Dairy, Denville (1966)
Jack and Lois Fine opened Denville Dairy at 34A Broadway in 1966. Their children Patrick, Richard and Karen run it now, and Richard’s son Tyler is already behind the counter, which puts three generations of the family in the shop. The case holds 28 flavors at a time out of a rotation of 150 to 200, and after sixty years the two that still outsell everything are Oreo cookie and mint chocolate chip.
Riamede Farm, Chester (1974)
The land under Riamede Farm in Chester goes back to the late 1700s, but the date that put it in the state record books is much more recent. In 1974 Lowry and Maria Mead opened the orchards to the public at harvest time, making Riamede the first pick your own apple orchard in New Jersey. It still runs on old seedling apple trees and an unpolished, walk the rows yourself kind of experience, which is exactly why people keep going back.
What did we miss
There are more of these. Every one of the 39 towns in Morris County has a shop, a counter, a garage or a diner that has quietly been open longer than most of us have been alive, and a lot of them never make a list because they have never needed the advertising. If your family has been going somewhere for three generations, tell us where. We will keep adding to this one.
Featured photo: downtown Morristown, New Jersey, by Famartin, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
