Metlar-Bodine House
This is the older of only two remaining homes from the Colonial era New Jersey community, Raritan Landing, along with the Cornelius Low House.
Peter Bodine was a leading merchant at Raritan Landing, one of the nation’s earliest river-ports, located in the large 1666 land grant called “Piscataway.” His small one room home, with sleeping loft and root cellar, was built in 1728 on a bluff along “The Great Road Up the Raritan” (today’s River Road), about 1/4 mile from his warehouse. The busy commercial center survived numerous British incursions and several battles during the Revolutionary War, thriving until the early 19th century when it was overshadowed by New Brunswick, a boom town and county seat, boasting an interstate canal and railroad connection on the southwest side of the river.
The Bodine House passed through a number of owners before it was expanded in the 1850s and named “Sunnyside” by George Knapp, a New Brunswick businessman. This Greek Revival addition, with its lovely front porch and circular attic window, and a Victorian style rehabilitation twenty years later, significantly improved the property. The entrepreneur George Metlar was a Central New Jersey real estate magnate who, by the late 1800s, owned thousands of acres in Piscataway. In 1890 he purchased Sunnyside allowing his farm manager, John Mason, to reside there.
