New Jersey State Boundary Project

As a first step for creating edge-matched statewide parcels, the NJ Office of GIS (NJOGIS) created state, county, and municipal boundaries for NJ around 2007. Since their creation, these GIS-based boundaries have been used throughout NJ during GIS data creation and maintenance. Ultimately this led to NJOGIS working in conjunction with the NYS GIS Program Office Lands and Boundaries Unit and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in 2019 – 2020 to delineate coincident state boundaries. This is the story of how the legal boundaries between the states came to be, how NJOGIS developed the initial version of the NJ boundaries, and how the states worked together to arrive at the final boundaries delineation.

• In 1765 the Province of New Jersey was created by a charter granted by the Duke of York to his friends Sir George Carteret and John Lord Berkley. The name taken from the Bailiwick of Jersey, one of the Channel Islands under British protection.
• The northern boundary of New Jersey was established at the assumed "northernmost branch of the said Bay or River of Delaware, which is forty-one Degrees and forty minutes of Latitude and crosseth over thence in a straight line to Hudson’s River in forty-one Degrees of Latitude."
• The problem was there was no northernmost branch of the Delaware at this latitude. This would lead to almost a century of conflict between New York and New Jersey over the location of the boundary.

• In 1674, Lord Berkley sold his share of New Jersey to Edward Byllynge, who sold part of this share to a group of Quakers. This caused New Jersey to be split into East Jersey and West Jersey from 1674 to 1702.
• Upon unification in 1702, New Jersey became a royal colony.

• The first attempt to survey the boundary between New Jersey and New York was attempted in 1686 using the prescribed latitude points at the Delaware and Hudson Rivers. Both of the Jerseys and New York never formally completed adoption of this survey.
• Beginning in 1720 and continuing off and on until 1765, battles and skirmishes were waged by landowners from New Jersey and New York over the boundary and land rights.

• A royal commission was created on October 7, 1769 to settle the dispute. The legislatures on both colonies ratified the compromise agreement in 1772 and the King of England approved it in 1773.
• Survey markers were placed from the Delaware River to the Hudson River at one-mile intervals. These originals markers were replaced in 1882 with new official markers accepted by both states.

• Since 2002, the vast majority of these markers have been recovered by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), New Jersey Geological and Water Survey (NJGWS) using GPS surveying observations. The other few markers have been recovered using traditional geodetic surveying techniques by the NJGS or participants in the National Geodetic Survey program at various time periods.
• The NJGS maintains a GIS point feature class of these markers which includes the most recent marker recovery information.

• The water boundary between New Jersey and New York consists of the Hudson River, New York Harbor, Arthur Kill, and Raritan Bay.
• This boundary has a controversial past. Up until the early 18th century, New Jersey believed that Staten Island was intended to be part of the land between the Hudson River and Delaware River that was granted to Berkley and Carteret. New York’s contention was that the Arthur Kill was an arm of the Hudson River, so Staten Island was not part of the original grant. New Jersey made several attempts to have the British Crown accept its claim, but eventually gave up.
• There was also a controversy over the claim of Bledsoe’s Island, now known as Liberty Island, and Ellis Island. In 1834, both states ratified an agreement from a bi-state commission regarding the boundary in the Hudson River. This also settled the issues of Staten Island and the above islands. The boundary limits of the islands in 1834 remained part of New York State. This agreement was also ratified by the US Congress in 1834. The mapping of the boundary for Ellis Island and Liberty Island used for NJOGIS Administrative Boundaries was completed by the NJDEP Bureau of Geographic Information Systems (BGIS) in 1999 to support a legal determination that the fill area outside the 1834 boundary of Ellis Island is under the jurisdiction of New Jersey. A similar legal remedy was being pursued by New Jersey for Liberty Island but was abandoned after 9/11.
• An 1887 bi-state commission created an agreement for the boundary between both states in the Raritan Bay.

• The agreed upon turning points from the various water boundary agreements are detailed in the book “ The Story of New Jersey Civil Boundaries 1606 – 1968 ” by John E. Snyder.

• NJOGIS provided the existing New Jersey version of the boundary delineation between New Jersey and New York, along with the recovered boundary monument points and water turning points datasets to the New York State GIS Program Office Lands and Boundaries Unit. After reviewing the boundary delineation and supporting data, New York State requested that the tri-state boundary point between New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania located in the Delaware River be adjusted to correspond with a previous agreement between New York and Pennsylvania. The rest of the New Jersey version of the state boundary delineation was accepted by the State of New York without further revision.
• After the project was completed in 2019, New York submitted the agreed upon boundary delineation to the US Census Bureau’s Boundary and Annexation Program.

• The entire boundary between New Jersey and Pennsylvania lies within the Delaware River.
• In 1783, New Jersey and Pennsylvania ratified a bi-state commission report that determined which state had jurisdiction over the islands in the Delaware River from the Falls of Trenton south to the state boundary with Delaware. The Falls of Trenton is most northern extent of the Delaware River affected by tidal action.
• In 1786, New Jersey and Pennsylvania ratified a separate bi-state commission report that determined which state had jurisdiction over the islands in the Delaware River from the Falls of Trenton north to the tri-state boundary located at the northwest corner of New Jersey.

• In 2019, NJOGIS and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) agreed to work together to delineate a boundary between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
• As a starting point, NJOGIS used “The Story of New Jersey Civil Boundaries 1606 – 1968” which details the information contained in both bi-state commission reports.
• Exhaustive work was carried out using available aerial imagery from various time periods, several decades of USGS Topo maps, tax maps and other historical maps. This included portions of the original map surveyed for the 1786 bi-state commission report to determine which islands from the reports still existed and could be identified. Several islands were found to no longer exist because the accretion of deposited materials filled in the area between the island and mainland or disappeared under the river’s surface through erosion. In addition, many of the islands are no longer known by the names listed in the 18th century reports and had to be cross-referenced between maps of various vintages and other historical information.
• Upon agreement to the jurisdiction of the islands, outward facing island boundaries were delineated to represent shorelines in those locations.
• NJDEP river shorelines data were used to represent all other shorelines.
• The state boundary line was then established by generating a line equidistant from the shorelines of each state.
• The boundary line was then smoothed and generalized to create the final draft delineation.
• New Jersey and Pennsylvania reviewed and approved the boundary, upon which revised polygon data for New Jersey state, county, and municipal boundaries were generated.

• A grant from the Duke of York to William Penn in 1682, established that all land west of the Delaware River and the river itself that lie within the 12-mile circle in the area around New Castle belong to the State of Delaware. The center point of the 12-mile circle is considered to be the pre-1881 New Castle Courthouse. Within this circle, the low-water mark on the east side of the Delaware River from 1874 is the boundary line. The location of this boundary has resulted in a small land area located on the New Jersey side of the river, near Fort Mott in Salem County, to be in the State of Delaware. This area was created by landfill after the state boundary was established. Attempts by New Jersey to have this boundary changed to the middle of the Delaware River failed before the US Supreme Court in 1934.
• Below the 12-mile circle, the main ship channel is the boundary in the Delaware River and Delaware Bay. The turning points for the boundary are detailed in the book “The Story of New Jersey Civil Boundaries 1606 – 1968.”

• When the 1st generation of the New Jersey state, county, and municipal boundaries were created around 2007, the NJOGIS was able to acquire the historical shoreline data from the Delaware Geological Survey that was needed to establish the coincident state boundary.