On a Wednesday evening in August, the grass at the corner of Glenbrook Road and Mountain Way fills with folding chairs and blankets before the Morris Plains Community Band has even finished tuning up. This is Roberts Garden, a shaded arboretum-style park that has hosted the band's free summer concerts for years. Nothing about a lawn chair and a tuba section looks like an anniversary. But this year, almost everything in Morris Plains quietly is one.
The borough turned 100 in January, incorporated as an independent municipality split from Hanover Township back in 1926. Most towns mark a centennial with a single weekend and move on. Morris Plains folded it into the whole calendar instead, and the effect is that ordinary summer routines, the ones residents already do without thinking, have picked up a second meaning. Knowing where that thread runs changes what an evening walk or a Saturday grocery run in this town feels like right now.
The concert nobody planned as a history lesson
The Community Band's opening concert of August, on the 5th, was called Patriotic Fever. It was built around the nation's 250th birthday, but the band paired it deliberately with the town's own hundredth, and brought in the Morris Plains Community Choir to sing patriotic selections by American composers alongside the instrumental program, according to Morris Focus. The following Wednesday, August 12, shifts entirely in mood with Hooray for Hollywood, a set of well-known film scores. Two Wednesdays left in the month after that, weather permitting. The band does not reschedule rain dates. If a night gets rained out, it is simply canceled, which means showing up on the correct Wednesday actually matters this year in a way it might not in a normal August.
That concert series is separate, worth noting, from the Recreation Commission's earlier run of free shows at Roberts Garden that wrapped in July. Morris Plains effectively gets two summer concert seasons back to back, and residents who only know about one are missing half of it.
A parade that already told you this was coming
If August is when the centennial shows up in music, May is when it showed up in the streets. The borough's 40th Annual Memorial Day Parade, held May 23, was billed as the largest in Morris County, with more than 110 units and 15 marching bands moving south on Mountain Way, east on Rosedale Avenue, then north up Speedwell Avenue past the reviewing stand at Franklin Place, according to the Borough of Morris Plains. A Centennial Committee float rode in that lineup specifically to mark the incorporation anniversary, and this year's grand marshals were two Morris Plains firemen, John Boudreau and Michael Shay, who have served the borough as volunteer firefighters for 50 years. The borough had already rehearsed the anniversary once before that, in January, when twelve Borough School students reenacted the 1926 split from Hanover Township in front of the council, debating taxes and representation the way the original petitioners must have, and Mayor Jason Karr handed out commemorative pins afterward, as reported by Morristown Green. None of this required anyone to change their plans. It just meant the year had a spine before summer even arrived.
The dine-around that turns a normal August into a scavenger hunt
Here is the part that actually asks something of residents, and it is running right now. Downtown Morris Plains, the merchant association, is home to 25 restaurants in the borough, and this month it launched something called the Centennial Circuit: eat at 10 or more of them during August and log the receipts to win a prize, according to Downtown Morris Plains. Ten out of 25 is not a low bar for a single month. It means the promotion is designed to send people to places they would not normally pick, the diner they drive past, the steakhouse they save for anniversaries, the counter-service spot they have never tried. With today's date sitting square in the middle of August, there is still time to run the circuit, but not endless time.
What counts toward the ten
The borough's newest name on that list arrived in February, when Ugly Dumpling opened its first Morris County location at 1711 Route 10 in the Briarcliff Commons shopping center, taking over a 5,654-square-foot space previously occupied by Harmon, the health and beauty chain that closed after its parent company's bankruptcy, according to Patch. The chain, known for Shanghai-style soup dumplings made fresh in what it calls its Bao Lab, chose this location to introduce ramen for the first time anywhere in the company. It now sits inside a shopping center anchored by Uncle Giuseppe's, Chipotle, Crumbl, First Watch, Chick-fil-A, and Chopt, which means the stretch of Route 10 running through the borough has quietly become one of the more active dining corridors in Morris County without most people outside it noticing.
That matters for the Centennial Circuit specifically. A promotion asking residents to hit 10 restaurants works differently in a town that only had 15 options versus one that has 25, and a town where a new arrival is already drawing lines is a different kind of dining scene than one running on the same handful of standbys.
Saturdays keep their own rhythm
None of this displaces the Saturday routine that has been running in the borough far longer than the centennial has existed. The Morris Plains Farmers Market sets up on Speedwell Avenue at the Merchant Block every Saturday morning from 9 to 1, a run that goes from June 13 through October 10, and this year marks its 24th season, sponsored by Provident Bank. A bonus Winter Market is already on the calendar for November 21, well past the point most towns' markets have folded up for the year. Twenty-four seasons means the market predates a meaningful share of the borough's current homeowners, and it is the one piece of this summer that owes nothing to the anniversary. It was already doing its job.
The clock on the season
The Morris Plains Community Park Pool closes for the year on Labor Day, September 7, according to the Borough of Morris Plains. That gives the borough about four weeks from today to run out its Wednesday concerts, finish the dine-around, and get in the last of the Saturday market visits before the season's usual markers start closing one by one. None of these things are new inventions. Concerts, a farmers market, a strip of restaurants adding a new name every so often, that is a fairly ordinary description of small-town New Jersey in summer. What is not ordinary is a borough spending an entire year making sure residents notice the hundred years underneath all of it, from a council chamber reenactment in January to a parade float in May to a choir singing on a bandshell in August. Most towns let a founding date become trivia. Morris Plains turned it into the connective tissue for a whole season, and the proof is that you cannot get through a single week of it right now without running into 1926 somewhere.
If you have been in Morris Plains long enough to remember when the market had half as many vendors, or you are new enough that this is your first centennial anywhere, Kimberly Brechka would love to hear what you make of it. And if the idea of a hundred years in one place has you curious what your own home might be worth after however many you have put in, get your free home valuation whenever you are ready to look.
