Editor’s note: In late October, Gov. Phil Murphy announced a settlement agreement that would allow the Henry family to retain ownership of the farm while Cranbury officials seek alternative sites for affordable housing developments. The finalization of the deal is contingent on the revision of a rule proposed by the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, which is anticipated by the end of the year.
“The wheels of justice grind very slowly,” my lawyer friend Richard Brockway told me one day in 2003. Brockway was a medical malpractice specialist who investigated my mother Ruth’s mysterious passing at 72. He was an avid blues music fan and part-owner of the Pine Tavern in Old Bridge, a successful restaurant-nightclub.
But the case of the historic Henry Family Farm, which dates back to 1850, began in April of this year and may well be resolved and settled by the end of this year. In April, Andy Henry, the owner of the Henry Family Farm at 1234 Cranbury South River Road, with his younger brother, Christopher, received a certified letter from the Cranbury Township Committee.
The letter informed him that the township was considering using the power of eminent domain to condemn their farmland and build “affordable” housing units. The five-person Mayor and committee then voted unanimously to condemn the property at a jam-packed May 12 meeting on North Main Street.
The number of units initially proposed for the housing project has since been scaled back. More recently, the township council and planning officials are considering other options to meet the state mandated commitment for affordable housing, as Gov. Murphy signed into law a fourth round of affordable housing for the state in March, 2024. Over the last decade-plus, the Henry brothers were offered as much as $25 million from warehouse developers for their farm. They didn’t want to sell then, and they don’t want to sell now.
Both brothers followed their father’s occupational path and enlisted and served in the Air Force for decades. They are now retired Air Force executives, and their father, Charles, was a decorated WW II fighter pilot. They live near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Andy Henry’s wife, Carmen, read him the letter over the phone in April, as ironically, he was making his way back home to do some work around the old farmhouse and check in with farm manager Tom O’Donnell of South Brunswick.
O’Donnell, who was raised in East Brunswick but spent summers on his uncle’s farm in Mississippi, is raising 40 to 60 grass-fed beef and sheep on the 21-acre tract of land, which has forested buffer areas and may be home to an endangered species of falcon. O’Connell has seen several American eagles flying around the property as well.
Upon receiving the news about condemnation proceedings, Henry was shocked. Once word of the plan spread to the community, people packed the town hall on Main Street for meetings in May and June.
Citizens opposed to the project from the Princeton area and around the rest of the Garden State created a GoFundMe page for the brothers’ legal expenses. To date, more than $144,000 has been raised in the campaign to “Save the Henry Family Farm.”
Andy Henry, 72, spent many happy days helping his mother and grandmother as they raised vegetables and finger fruits at the farm, back in the 1960s.
“Using a hand pump to get water out of the ground, you’d crank the pump about three times and the water would start coming out; that just fascinated me as a young child,” Henry recalled over the summer, “and there was an outhouse there we used occasionally before the remodeling and an addition to the farm house in 1958 with some indoor plumbing.”
Cranbury-South River Road used to be a two-lane roadway with a large apple orchard and retail stand across the street, but with all the warehouses that have since been built in Monroe and Cranbury townships, it’s now a busy four-lane highway with lots of truck traffic, given its proximity to Exit 8A of the New Jersey Turnpike. Cranbury-South River Road is actually one of the oldest roads in the state, as it runs from waterfront in Perth Amboy on the Raritan Bay to the Delaware River in Trenton and Bordentown.
“I was there for the first reading of [an ordinance to condemn the property] on April 28th and that’s when I made my first comments,” Henry said.
“The gist of what I said was we’ve owned this property for a long time. We’ve turned down offers to sell from developers over the last 12 years, and we’re very disappointed that this town that I love is trying to take our property,” Henry said. Henry attended Hightstown High School and then attended college in Pennsylvania before enlisting in the Air Force.
The Henry brothers sought out the legal expertise of Tim Duggan, a lawyer with Stark & Stark in Hamilton Township. In response to the initial plan to condemn the farm, the brothers had to file two lawsuits against the township.
Since news broke about the plan in a story by Sue Loyer of the daily newspaper The Home News Tribune, countless media outlets have made Andy Henry, Tom O’Donnell, and the cows and other livestock here nationally famous. They included NJTV News, Channel 7 Eyewitness News in New York and Philadelphia, WNBC, WCBS, CNN, Fox News, Newsmax and dozens of other television and radio outlets. Henry was humbled one day in late summer to get a call from USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who lent her support and said the agency would be sending a letter to the Cranbury Township committee.
“We just want to keep our property and keep it in farming,” Henry explained in July when he was last at the farm. “We’re not opposed to affordable housing, but I don’t believe this is a good place for it, because it’s surrounded by warehouses.”
Jay Taylor, a former mayor of Cranbury Township, spoke out against the plan on May 12, as did countless other Cranbury residents. Many argued it would make much more sense to put the affordable housing units on the other side of Route 130, near the old village itself, where residents could walk or take a short car ride up Main Street to the bank, post office, and local stores.
Henry argued that while the farm never fell into a period of dormancy, “there were a couple of years there where we had some issues finding a farmer, but then we got Tom O’Donnell involved in 2014. The fencing was already up and we’ve been reinforcing parts of the fencing since then.”
While the Henry brothers didn’t want to get litigious, “if we didn’t file a lawsuit, they would have had a much better chance of taking the property by eminent domain,” Henry explained.
Lawyer Duggan was at the farm on October 2 as another bunch of film crews and a small crowd of supporters gathered for a small rally with Jack Ciattarelli, Republican candidate for governor.
U.S.1 asked Duggan for an update on where the case stands as of early October.
“The first lawsuit was challenging the ordinance giving them the right to condemn the property, and that’s been with the court since we first filed to challenge the plan. The same judge has both cases, so he decided to put our challenge to the ordinance on hold until the [second] challenge to the plan itself is done,” Duggan explained.
“He figures it’s better to let the plan go through the process to see whether or not the challenges would be upheld or whether or not the parties can mediate a solution. After we filed the challenge, the next step is to go through court mediation with the Mt. Laurel judges to see if we can reach an agreement. If we can’t, it goes back to the judge,” Duggan said.
“Our position is we’re willing to mediate by pulling our property out and finding another property to build the affordable housing,” he said. Duggan mentioned the final number of affordable units for the property has been scaled back from 265 to either 120 or 130.
“That would only take half the farm, but that pretty much destroys it. You really need the whole farm. I think they thought by trying to take half the property, we would go for it, but Andy and Chris have dug their heels in, and I have dug my heels in.”
For farmer Tommy O’Donnell, who belongs to the Operating Engineers Union and works with every piece of heavy construction equipment you can think of at construction sites around the state, he said having to relocate his cattle there would be next to impossible and very costly.
He owns 50 acres off Route 206 in Columbus where he raises Scottish Highlander cows, and they don’t mix well with the Belted Galloways he raises on Cranbury-South River Road. In addition, he would have to do some costly land clearing at the property he owns in Columbus.
“First of all, I would have to move them, and that is not easily done,” O’Donnell said. “That would take me at least a couple of weeks. More important, I would need a place to take them to. I can’t bring them to the Columbus farm I have, because one with horns in a bunch is not going to be a problem, but when you have a bunch of horns with a bunch of non-horns, there’s going to be wars all over the place,” he said. Every animal on the planet has a pecking order, he argued, and this is most obvious in poultry flocks.
Bottom line, O’Donnell said, “if this goes through, it’s going to cost me a hell of a lot of money.”
Lawyer Duggan made a trip to Washington D.C. in late September with New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture Ed Wengryn and others to meet with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins.
“I learned we’re losing 5,000 acres of farmland a day in the U.S.,” Duggan said, “so that’s why this is so important, it’s not just 21 acres in New Jersey, it’s happening throughout the country. From a national security standpoint, being able to feed ourselves and other people is important, so we can’t have all this farmland dwindling away.”
“We hope to have all of this resolved by the end of the year through the mediation process,” Duggan said.
“We think there are other sites more suitable than this farm, and we have great support from Ed Wengryn, the Secretary of Agriculture in New Jersey, and the state Department of Community Affairs [which oversees affordable housing.] Everybody’s been wonderful in trying to work out a solution, there’s been real bipartisan support throughout this process to try to keep this farm, get it in preservation, yet still meet the [state-issued] mandate for affordable housing.”
