Cross the Wickecheoke Creek on Rosemont-Ringoes Road heading west and you'll rattle through Green Sergeant's Covered Bridge, timbers overhead, the creek running dark beneath the planks. Head back east on the same stretch of road and you won't touch a single board. You'll roll over a plain concrete bridge sitting right alongside it instead. The last historic covered bridge in New Jersey does not carry the whole road. It carries half of it.
Most people who stop to take a photo assume the bridge is a relic, something the township keeps around for looks while the real traffic moves elsewhere. That's backwards. The covered bridge is still doing its job every single day, just not all of the job. New Jersey once had a real stock of these things spanning its creeks. Now there's one, and it works a split shift with a bridge built a century later. That arrangement, an old structure and a modern one standing shoulder to shoulder, each handling half the load, turns out to be the best description of how the whole township runs.
The bridge that never carries all of you at once
Green Sergeant's Covered Bridge was built in 1872 on abutments that date back to the colonial period, designed by Charles Ogden Holcombe of Lambertville using a modified truss system meant to span the 73-foot, 8-inch clear distance across the creek. It's named for Richard Green Sergeant, whose family owned the mill property nearby and gave the surrounding crossroads its name. The bridge nearly didn't survive. It was damaged in 1960, dismantled, and only stands today because a group of local citizens pushed the state to rebuild it in 1961 using the bridge's original materials rather than let it disappear.
Locals will tell you, sometimes with a laugh, that the name is pronounced "sir-gent," not "sar-gent." Get it wrong at the general store and you'll hear about it.
What most visitors miss is the arrangement right next to it. The covered bridge only takes westbound traffic. Eastbound drivers use the plain modern bridge a few feet away. It's not a museum piece cordoned off from daily life. It's one lane of a two-lane crossing, still doing exactly what it was built to do, just not doing all of it.
What's still doing the actual work
A quarter mile from the bridge sits Sergeantsville General Store, a working country store and deli that's less about nostalgia and more about needing a sandwich or a cold drink before the next stretch of road. It's a regular stop for cyclists working through Hunterdon's back roads, and the dumplings have their own small following among locals who'd rather not admit how often they stop in.
A short drive down County Road 523 gets you to Sergeantsville Grain & Feed, family owned and operated since 1981, and Hunterdon County's only full-line Purina Certified Expert Dealer. It's also a True Value hardware store, which means the same building that sells hoof supplements and poultry feed also sells hand tools and grass seed. This is the crossroads doing the unglamorous work that never makes it onto a postcard: feed for the horses down the road, hardware for whatever broke this week, a sandwich for the ride home.
That's the part of Sergeantsville that has nothing to do with charm. It's just a place where the errands still get run the old-fashioned way, on a Saturday, in person, at a counter someone's known for years.
The stone building that changed jobs four times before it started pouring wine
At the center of the crossroads sits the Sergeantsville Inn, a 300-year-old stone building with a history stranger than most restaurants can claim. It began as a private residence in the early 1700s, in a settlement that was actually called Skunktown before the U.S. Postal Service refused to put that name on a stamp and the town was renamed Sergeantsville instead. Two wings were added in the 1830s and the building became a grain and feed store. Before it ever served a plate of food, it had also been a grocery store, an ice cream parlor, and a pelt trading post.
The restaurant itself opened in the early 1900s and the current iteration has run since 1999, now under chef Sean Gray. The dining room leans into what the building has always been: unpretentious, historic, built for people who live here rather than people passing through. The Philadelphia Inquirer's dining coverage singled out the dry-aged New York strip with house frites and a green peppercorn sauce as a standout, alongside a wine list that punches above what you'd expect from a stone tavern at a rural crossroads.
Two miles west, the same idea took a completely different shape
Keep driving and the road brings you to Rosemont, a hamlet surrounded by open pasture and mature oak trees. The defining stop here is The Pass, a restaurant tucked inside what used to be Rosemont's own general store. Chef Matthew Ridgway runs a prix fixe menu that changes every two weeks, built around French technique rather than tavern comfort. Recent lineups have included Hudson Valley guinea hen pot au feu and poached Nantucket Bay scallops, with foie gras mousse or veal sweetbreads to start. Guests who want the full experience order the chef's choice six-course discovery menu.
It's the same basic building type as the Sergeantsville Inn, an old country store repurposed into a restaurant, in a township defined by exactly two crossroads a few miles apart. One kept its identity as a tavern serving steak and frites. The other reinvented itself as a tasting-menu destination. Rosemont rounds out its own small commercial cluster with Lots of Time Shop for antiques and the quiet grounds of Rosemont Cemetery, which draws its own share of visitors interested in local history rather than dinner reservations.
Here's the pattern worth sitting with. Two hamlets, same township, same general store architecture, same era of construction, and they took entirely different paths. Sergeantsville stayed close to what it always was. Rosemont turned into something else. Neither choice reads as more authentic than the other. They're both what happens when an old building keeps getting used instead of getting preserved behind glass.
Marking the 250th while living inside it
Delaware Township isn't treating any of this as background scenery. The township's Historic Advisory Committee has been actively working on 250th anniversary programming, a project that surfaced in this year's Recreation Commission planning discussions alongside the usual calendar of community events. With the nation marking its own 250th in 2026, a township whose crossroads have spent a century and a half deciding, building by building, whether to keep something doing its original job or let it become something new has a lot of material to work with.
That's really what the bridge is telling you every time you drive over it, or don't. Green Sergeant's Bridge didn't get preserved instead of being used. It got preserved by continuing to be used, on half the road, next to a modern bridge that handles the rest. Sergeantsville kept its tavern. Rosemont turned its general store into a six-course tasting menu. The feed store still sells hardware. None of it replaced what came before. It just runs alongside it, the same way the two bridges do.
If you already live here, none of this is new information about your commute. It's just worth noticing that the crossroads you drive through without thinking has been quietly running two systems at once for a very long time, and the township is about to spend real effort making sure that story gets told properly.
For more on the neighborhood itself, the Delaware Township community guide has additional local detail and listings for the area.
If you're weighing a move into Hunterdon County or thinking about what your own property here might be worth, Fiona Bradshaw knows this stretch of road better than most. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
