Accompanied by Governor Livingston, Washington (on April 22) proceeded to Woodbridge where he spent the night at the Cross Keys Tavern, then located on the northwest corner of Amboy Avenue and Main Street, on the site presently occupied by the Knights of Columbus. When George Washington left Mount Vernon for New York to take the oath of office as the first President of the United States, he left Philadelphia on the morning of April 21, 1789, arrived at Trenton that afternoon, and that same night journeyed to Princeton, where he spent the night. This meeting was held on the farm of Moses Bloomfield, a surgeon in the Continental Army, located north of Freeman Street where Barron Avenue runs through Prospect. What may be said to be the first antislavery meeting ever held in the United States was held in Woodbridge on the 4th of July, 1783, seven years after the Declaration of Independence and 6 years before George Washington was inaugurated as President of the United States. In 1758 he established and printed, at Woodbridge, "The New American Magazine," the first periodical of its kind edited and published in the Colony and the second magazine of its kind on the continent. He was a business associate of Benjamin Franklin. Another illustrious son of Woodbridge, James Parker, was born in 1714 and established the first permanent printing house in New Jersey in Woodbridge in 1751. Joseph Dally, in his history of Woodbridge (Woodbridge and Vicinity, published 1873), records that it was so called in honor of Reverend John Woodbridge of Newbury, Massachusetts. It was settled in the early autumn of 1664 and was granted a charter on Jby King Charles of England. The Township of Woodbridge is the oldest original township in the state of New Jersey.
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