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Chatham is the easiest car free day trip in Morris County. The train station sits one block off Main Street, the downtown is dense and walkable, and four free parking lots ring it if you do drive. It is also one of the few places where you can eat dinner inside George Washington’s headquarters and then walk ten minutes to a boardwalk over a federally protected swamp.
First, the thing that confuses everyone. Chatham is two municipalities. Chatham Borough is the small dense one, 2.4 square miles, holding Main Street, the business district and the train station. Chatham Township wraps around and below it, and that is where the open space is: Shunpike Road, Southern Boulevard, Green Village, River Road and the edge of the Great Swamp. They share a ZIP code, a school district and a library, and not much else. In practice: Borough means downtown, Township means trails.
Main Street follows a Lenape trail
The Borough states it plainly on its own history page: the Lenni Lenape used a trail that is now Main Street. That road is Route 124 today, and it was part of the Morris Turnpike from 1801. Watchung Avenue is the old Shunpike, the route travelers used to dodge the turnpike toll.
The densest and most interesting block runs roughly from 220 to 265 Main Street, and if you only have an hour, walk that. The Library of the Chathams anchors it at 214 Main Street, which is unusual and worth noting, because the library is a downtown storefront rather than a municipal building on a side street. Beyond books it runs a Library of Things lending service, a Seed Library, a museum pass program and a New Jersey Room for local history and genealogy.
Eating on Main Street
Fleur de Sel Patisserie Bistro at 265 Main Street is the first stop. Croissants, macarons, eclairs and mille-feuille alongside soups, salads, quiches and gourmet sandwiches, all made by hand from scratch every morning, with Illy coffee. Closed Mondays.
Scoops, The Chatham Creamery at 228 Main Street scoops Gifford’s, a Maine creamery, rather than a generic wholesale brand. They lead with Campfire S’mores, graham ice cream with marshmallow ripple and chocolate crunch. Open until 9 p.m. most nights and 10 p.m. on weekends, and they run a Scoops Bus for parties.
Namkeen at 233 Main Street does Nashville style hot chicken built on South Asian spice. Chatham was one of its earliest locations, and the brand has since grown to eleven locations across three countries, so it is no longer a single location independent, but the Chatham room is where a lot of people first found it.
A Taste of Asia at 245 Main Street is family owned Malaysian and pan-Asian, and the concrete reason to go is the separate Saturday street food menu and Sunday dim sum service, both noon to 2:30 p.m. Closed Mondays. Arminio’s Italian Corner at 236 Main Street has been a BYOB Italian restaurant and pizzeria on the block since 1991.
Chatham Steakhouse at 219 Main Street does prime cuts and seafood, and its own tagline is two blocks from the station, which is the most useful detail in this guide if you are coming without a car. Dinner only, closed Mondays.
Mexican Spice at 149 Main Street is a single location Mexican restaurant inspired by Mexico City, and it closes at 7 p.m., which matters if you are planning a late dinner. Bucky’s Pizza at 465 Main Street does sourdough crust and Detroit style, started during the pandemic out of family Sunday dinners and garden grown ingredients. Their white mushroom pie uses house whipped ricotta, mozzarella, fresh garlic and organic mushrooms.
Off Main, Charley’s Aunt at 8 South Passaic Avenue is the family owned neighborhood tavern, serving Chatham for over 50 years, with local beer on tap including Morristown IPA and SOMA IPA, happy hour seven days, and the kitchen open until 11 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.
In the Township, Hickory Tree Delicatessen at 650 Shunpike Road has been going since 1978, still run by the founders’ daughter and son-in-law, opening at 6:30 a.m. on weekdays. It is the natural stop before a Great Swamp morning.
For newer arrivals, see our piece on Ori’s Cheesesteaks opening on Main Street.
Dinner in Washington’s headquarters
Scalini Fedeli at 63 Main Street has been chef owner Michael Cetrulo’s upscale Italian since December 1995, and it occupies the Jacob Morrell House, which the restaurant dates to 1740. The building served as Washington’s headquarters for three days in late August 1781. Inside are Tuscan vaulted ceilings, Venetian plaster and antique pine floors. The menu highlights are the soft egg yolk raviolo with ricotta and truffle butter and the venison chop in port and balsamic with toasted hazelnuts, spinach and roasted Mission figs.
A block away, Restaurant Serenade at 6 Roosevelt Avenue is French-American fine dining from chef owner James Laird and Nancy Sheridan Laird, which marked 30 years in 2026 and holds the 2000 Robert Mondavi Culinary Award of Excellence.
Two serious rooms in a town of 2.4 square miles is unusual, and it is a large part of why people drive to Chatham for dinner.
The Great Swamp is the outdoor draw
Get the geography right: the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is in Morris County and Chatham Township touches it, but the refuge’s two main visitor facilities are not at Chatham addresses. It is on Chatham’s doorstep rather than in Chatham.
The refuge covers 7,768 acres of wetland, woodland, grassland and open water and exists because of a fight. In 1959 the Port Authority floated a plan to build a jetport there. Local citizens raised one million dollars to buy nearly 3,000 acres, Congress established the refuge in 1960, and it was dedicated in 1964. The eastern 3,660 acres became the first federally designated wilderness area within the Department of the Interior in 1968. Over 244 bird species have been recorded, along with fox, deer, muskrat, turtles and frogs.
The Wildlife Observation Center at 220 Long Hill Road is the one people picture: roughly a mile and a half of boardwalk and trail out over standing water, with an information kiosk, three wildlife blinds and restrooms. It is the best spot in the refuge for photography. The Helen C. Fenske Visitor Center at 32 Pleasant Plains Road in Basking Ridge is the staffed one, with exhibits, native plant gardens and a nature shop, plus the half mile Bockoven Trail and a self guided Nature Detective Trail. It is open Tuesdays and Thursdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Roughly 8.5 miles of wilderness trails run off Pleasant Plains Road and Long Hill Road, foot travel only, and they are muddy, because it is a real swamp. Full details are on the refuge’s own site.
The piece that genuinely is in Chatham Township is the Great Swamp Outdoor Education Center at 247 Southern Boulevard, a Morris County Park Commission nature center adjoining the federal refuge. It opened in 1963 and offers two miles of flat trails and boardwalk over swamp, marsh, meadow, pond and forest. Inside there is a rebuilt model wigwam, live reptiles and insects including a resident turtle, and a wildlife sightings board. Trails are sunrise to sunset, the building is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days. No pets, no bikes, no fishing.
We have covered walking it with local officials before, in our piece on the Walk With the Mayors at the Great Swamp.
Trails closer to town
Chatham Township publishes a public trail map covering several short, easy walks. Loantaka Brook Reservation, with parking at 195 to 215 Loantaka Way, has about seven miles of paved multi-use trail, which makes it the stroller, bike and wheelchair option in an area where most trails are mud and boardwalk. The Giralda Farms Trail is 1.3 miles of crushed gravel, with a separate paved three mile sidewalk loop around the corporate campus that is a well known local running route. The Green Village Conservation Trail is a 1.2 mile forest loop, the Hillside Trail is 0.7 miles of crushed gravel, and the Shunpike Trail is a half mile forest walk next to Long Hill Chapel at 525 Shunpike Road, which is the shortest real trail in town and a good quick stop.
Passaic River County Park runs 847 acres along the Passaic through Long Hill and Chatham Townships, with hiking, fishing, picnicking, canoeing and kayaking, plus cross country skiing and snowshoeing in winter. The picnic site is at 793 River Road.
In the Borough itself, Shepard Kollock Park off Parrott Mill Road is the one to visit, and not only for the covered picnic shelter, ball fields, boat launch onto the Passaic, playground, walking trail and fenced off leash dog area. There is a kiosk here telling the 1781 bread ovens story, and the park is named for the man who printed the New Jersey Journal in Chatham through the Revolution.
Garden Park on Main Street next to Chatham Middle School is the only park on the main drag, with tennis and pickleball courts, basketball, a playground and a walking path, which makes it the natural break point on a downtown walk. Memorial Park on North Passaic Avenue holds the municipal swimming pool, which runs Memorial Day through Labor Day and is open to residents and non-residents. Stanley Park on River Road is tiny but it is river frontage inside the Borough.
The bread ovens, and why Chatham matters
In August 1781 the army camped in Chatham and built large bread ovens. The ovens were a deliberate signal to the British that the Continentals were digging in for an attack on New York. While the bread baked overnight, Washington marched his troops south. It took the British more than a day to realize he had gone. American and French forces surrounded Yorktown on September 28, 1781, and Cornwallis surrendered on October 19.
The town’s name has changed more than once. Sir George Carteret paid for the land in 1680. John Day settled the west bank of the Passaic, built a bridge and a tavern, and the village became known as Day’s Bridge. In 1773 it was renamed Chatham after William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, the British parliamentarian who argued the colonists’ case.
The name Fishawack runs through everything here. The Borough’s own history page renders the full Lenape phrase as the Crossing of the Fishawack in the Valley of the Great Watchung, and notes that Fishawack and Passaic are both variations of what Europeans heard the Lenape call the river. The annual town festival takes its name from it.
In 1779 Shepard Kollock, an artillery soldier with newspaper experience, founded the New Jersey Journal in Chatham to push the patriot cause, and published it here until 1783. It was the only newspaper published in North Jersey during the war.
The Chatham Historical Society was founded in 1924 and marked its centennial in 2024. It has no museum building, running programs instead at The Stanley Center, 94 Fairmount Avenue, a 1903 former church the Borough now owns and rents for weddings, concerts and lectures. The society runs walking tours of the historic Borough and is actively crowdsourcing the town’s Revolutionary story ahead of the nation’s 250th, asking residents for maps, property records and family stories.
The separate Chatham Township Historical Society at 24 Southern Boulevard does have a museum building, but it is open only from 2 to 4 p.m. on the first Sunday of each month, which is the single most important practical detail about it.
One free stop almost no guide mentions: the Historical Society hung archival Chatham train photographs on the blank walls inside the train station, including a panoramic shot of roughly 200 residents on the westbound platform celebrating the first electric train’s arrival from Hoboken on December 18, 1930. In March 2024 they restaged that photo with about 200 present day residents. Both are on the wall, and it takes five minutes.
Shops, theater and the market
Jabberwocky at 261 Main Street is an independent toy, gift and children’s book shop that has been on Main Street for over two decades. YesterToys at 240 Main Street opened in late 2023 selling classic and vintage toys alongside contemporary ones, open Thursday through Sunday with hours that shift week to week, so check their socials first.
The Blue Iris Boutique at 100 Main Street carries designer and collectible vintage womenswear and evening wear, including Alberta Ferretti, Chie Mihara and Iris Setlakwe. Sunnywoods Florist at 251 Main Street is a full service florist and gift shop with a children’s boutique section, and by its own account has been going since 1885.
Chatham Community Players run a full season out of the Chatham Playhouse at 23 North Passaic Avenue, next to the Center Street East parking lot. A real community theater inside a 2.4 square mile borough is not nothing.
The Chatham Borough Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Railroad Plaza South, right at the train station, from mid May through mid November. 2026 is its 20th season. It pulls Saturday foot traffic straight into the Main Street blocks, which is the best time to visit if you want the town at full volume.
The Fishawack Festival is the Borough’s signature street festival, held on a Saturday in early to mid June, with local businesses, artisans, food vendors, community groups, live demonstrations and hands on activities. The Historical Society brings a George Washington reenactor with fifes and drums. There is also a Fourth of July parade stepping off at Hillside Avenue and Main Street at 10:30 a.m. sharp, with fireworks at Chatham Middle School in the evening, weather permitting.
One correction worth making, since it comes up: there is no bookstore in Chatham. The Chatham Bookseller, despite the name, is at 8 Green Village Road in Madison.
Getting there and parking
Chatham sits in eastern Morris County on the Passaic River, which forms the boundary with Union and Essex counties, about 26 miles west of Times Square. NJ Route 24, a limited access freeway just north of the Borough, connects to I-287 to the west and I-78 and the Garden State Parkway to the east.
Chatham Station at Railroad Plaza and Fairmount Avenue is on the NJ Transit Morristown Line, with direct service to Hoboken Terminal and to New York Penn Station. Madison is the next stop west and Summit the next east. The station opened on September 28, 1837 and the line was electrified in 1930. It is one block from Main Street.
Parking is genuinely easy. Four free downtown lots run a three hour limit for non-permit holders: Bowers Lane near the Post Office, Post Office Plaza, Center Street East next to the Chatham Playhouse, and Center Street West near Rotary Park. The train station lot is $8.00 per day by coin, bill, card, Chatham Smartcard or ParkMobile, but enforcement runs only 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, so weekend visitors can use the station lot for free.
For more towns worth a day, see our guide to Morris County towns.
Featured image: Boardwalk, Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge by Andrew Martin, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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