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General Information, Facts & Symbols

The United States of America accepted New Jersey as the 3rd state to enter the union on December 18, 1787.

Abbreviation:
NJ

Capital of New Jersey State:
Trenton

Primary Agriculture:
New Jersey ranks high in the production of almost all garden vegetables. Crops include tomatoes, asparagus, corn, and blueberries. Livestock animals include poultry and dairy farming.

Primary Industry:
New Jersey’s single largest industry is chemicals, as one of the foremost research centers in the world. Many large oil refineries are located in northern New Jersey. Other important industries include pharmaceuticals, instruments, machinery, electrical goods, and apparel.

New Jersey State Nickname:
The Garden State

New Jersey State Motto:
Liberty and prosperity.

New Jersey State Flower:
Violet (Viola sororia)
(Legislation of 1971)

New Jersey State Tree:
Red Oak (Legislation of 1951)

New Jersey State Bird:
Eastern Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis)
(Legislation of 1935)
The Eastern or American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) is a typical North American seed-eating member of the finch family, averaging 4-1/4 inches in length that breeds across southern Canada from British Columbia to Newfoundland and through most of the United States north of the Gulf of Mexico and core Southwestern States.

They molt all but their black wing and tail feathers in the spring, and the bills of both sexes turn orange. The male of the species takes on a brilliant canary yellow plumage with a jet black cap and has a very pleasing call song. A white rump contrasts with the black tail while in flight. Their winter plumage is a duller olive-brown with some yellow still showing on the head.

New Jersey State Insect:
Honey Bee (Legislation of 1974)

New Jersey State Gemstone:
None (Legislation Pending)

Official State Seal:
Depicted to the right is the state seal of New Jersey. The seal of the state of New Jersey is a symbol of the authority and sovereignty of the state and is a valuable asset of its people. It is the intent of the state government to ensure that appropriate uses are made of the state seal and to assist the secretary of state in the performance of the secretary’s constitutional duty as custodian of the seal.

Official State Flag:
Depicted to the left is the state flag of New Jersey. The flag of the state of New Jersey is a symbol of the authority and sovereignty of the state and is a valuable asset of its people. The New Jersey flag is flown over all state buildings just below the country flag of the United States of America.

State Commemorative Quarter:
From the 1999-2008 United States Mint 50 State Quarters® Program
The New Jersey quarter, the third coin in the 50 State Quarters® Program, depicts General George Washington and members of the Colonial Army crossing the Delaware River en route to very important victories during the Revolutionary War. The design is based on the 1851 painting by Emmanuel Leutze, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which currently hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

It was a cold Christmas night in 1776 and the Delaware River was frozen in many places. General George Washington calculated the enemy would not be expecting an assault in this kind of weather. He and his soldiers courageously crossed the Delaware River into Trenton, NJ. Using surprise as their greatest weapon, Washington’s army captured over 900 prisoners and secured the town. Later that night, his army continued towards Princeton, NJ, again taking the enemy by surprise. These two victories proved very important to his army as they gave the soldiers courage, hope, and newfound confidence. The ammunition, food and other supplies confiscated from their captives also helped them survive the brutal winter of 1777.

Quarter Specifications
Release Date: May 17, 1999
Reverse (tails) Side: Crossroads of the Revolution
Engraver: Alfred Maletsky
Standard Weight: 5.670g
Standard Diameter: 24.26mm (0.955 in)
Thickness: 1.75 mm
Edge Detail: Reeded
Composition: Cupro-Nickel Clad
(8.33% Nickel / 91.67% Copper)

Important Historical Figures of New Jersey

Thomas Edison
1847-1931: He opened his own laboratory in Newark, N.J., where he made important improvements in telegraphy and on the typewriter, and invented the carbon transmitter that made Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone practical. In 1876 he moved his laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J., where he invented the first phonograph (1877) and the prototype of the commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb (1879). These and other inventions led to his being internationally known as “the wizard of Menlo Park”, although in 1887 he moved to a larger laboratory in West Orange, N.J. By the late 1880s he was contributing to the development of motion pictures, and by 1912 he was experimenting with talking pictures.

Grover Cleveland
1837-1908: Twenty-second/twenty-fourth U.S. president; born in Caldwell, N.J. Basically self-educated, he was admitted to the bar in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1859 and began to work his way up the political ladder as a Democrat, becoming a reformist mayor in 1881 and New York governor the next year. His efficiency, honesty, and independence from the state political machine took him to the presidency in 1884. During his first term he pursued civil service reform and lowered a protective tariff that was hurting labor. The latter, however, gained him the enmity of big-business interests; their man, Benjamin Harrison, won the close election of 1888. Cleveland came back to beat the ineffectual Harrison in 1892, but his second term was troubled by economic problems and ensuing unrest, during which Cleveland alienated workers and most Democrats. Losing the nomination in 1896, he retired to pursue business interests but he maintained his status as a respected statesman.

Walt Whitman
1819-92: Poet, writer; born in West Hills, Huntington, Long Island, N.Y. He was educated in Brooklyn (1825–30) where his father, a carpenter and farmer, had moved about 1823. He left school about age 12, and after working as an office boy, at age 13 he became a printer’s assistant on several papers around New York City. While exposing himself to opera and theater, he began to contribute occasional pieces to newspapers (including some of the earliest reports of baseball games); at one stage he taught in various schools on Long Island (1836–41). In 1838 he was the founder/editor of a Huntington, Long Island, newspaper, The Long Islander. He continued educating himself through his reading and between 1841–48 contributed to various magazines – both fiction and commentary – and worked as an editor on several newspapers in and around New York City, most especially the Brooklyn Eagle (1846–48); he was fired from this last post because of his outspoken antislavery views. He then journeyed to New Orleans where for three months he wrote for the New Orleans Crescent. On returning to Brooklyn, he continued writing for and editing various newspapers (1848–62), and occasionally helping his father build houses. Meanwhile, about 1848 he had begun writing poetry in earnest. In 1855 he gathered 12 of these relatively long poems and self-published them as Leaves of Grass. Its radically free-flowing style and intensely personal subject matter did not engage the public or critics – although when Ralph Waldo Emerson praised his brave new style and wrote to him, “I greet you at the beginning of a new career,” Whitman stamped that on the cover of an enlarged second edition (1856). In December 1862 he went to Virginia to find his brother who had been wounded in a battle; he stayed in Washington, D.C., to serve as a nurse in hospitals with wounded Civil War soldiers. He obtained a job as clerk in the Department of the Interior in 1865 but was soon fired when it was discovered he was the author of Leaves of Grass, already regarded as scandalous because of its frank sexual allusions. (His second volume of poems, Drum Taps (1865), was more acceptable to the public.) He then found a job in the attorney general’s office (1865–73) but when he suffered a paralytic stroke he moved to Camden, N.J. He continued to write and publish larger editions of Leaves of Grass (his deathbed edition appearing in 1892) and also published the second of his prose works, Specimen Days (1882; his first was Democratic Vistas, 1877). Revered by a small band as “the Good Gray Poet,” he held court in Camden, his reputation actually higher in Europe. It was only in the decades after his death that Whitman came to be recognized as one of the major American creative forces.

James Fenimore Cooper
1789-1851: Writer; born in Burlington, N.J. Raised in prosperous circumstances in his father’s frontier settlement at Cooperstown, N.Y., he attended Yale University (but was expelled for a prank) and spent several years in the navy (1806–11). Living as a country gentleman, he wrote his first novel, Precaution (1820), allegedly after his wife challenged his claim that he could write a better one than what she was then reading. His second, The Spy (1821), is regarded as the first major American novel. He moved to New York City and achieved great popular success with The Pilot (1823) and his first three Leatherstocking tales, The Pioneers (1823), followed by The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827), a series that offered for the first time a heroic vision of the American frontier. From 1826 to 1833 he lived in Europe, where he wrote several American and European romances and other works revealing his deep homesickness for an unspoiled American wilderness. But his return to Cooperstown in 1834 was followed by years of bitter disillusionment with the U.S.A. He wrote many satires and virulent criticism that were largely ignored by readers; he also engaged in libel suits against some of his critics and this only further alienated the American public. The prolific output of his last years included a scholarly history of the U.S. Navy (1839), and, among other novels, two final Leatherstocking tales, The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).

Charles Addams
1912-88: Cartoonist, born in Westfield, NJ. He was a regular contributor to The New Yorker from 1935 onwards, specializing in macabre humour and a ghoulish group which was immortalized on television in the 1960s as The Addams Family.

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