“Did You know” Department
Garwood Historical Committee
What is with the strange Unami name for our nearby local park and what is the history?
Unami Park is located south where the borders of Garwood, Cranford, and Westfield converge and is presently owned by the County of Union. Its origins were just a wooded area, and the locals 100 years ago called it “Garwood Park”. In 1930 Union County set up a park system and Garwood ceded this wooded area to them. Subsequently, the county park system layout was designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose greatest creation includes Manhattan’s Central Park.
In the early years of the 1900’s during the expansive phase of housing throughout northeast NJ, that wooded area almost became developed. Vintage maps of the woods show roads though it and a few houses within. Roads with names Park Ave, Columbus Ave and Wood Ave. Center Street extended west through the woods into Westfield. Upon making it parkland, the roads became vacated. Of the existing houses, one house was moved over to Pine Avenue, where an old Garwood family, the Hasselman’s lived for decades.
But what about that name? Upon developing the parks within, the County named their parks after indigenous tribes living around this region centuries ago. Our local park is named for the Unami Indians who were a branch of the Lenni Lenape Indians that occupied central New Jersey. The Unami tribe, or as it is translated “people down river,” is the group that called their home Shackamaxon. The full boundaries of the Unami branch’s homeland were the northern two-thirds of New Jersey, the island to be known as Staten, and the adjoining woodland parts of eastern Pennsylvania, down to just below the future city of Philadelphia. One last tidbit of information: Tony Benzinger, the husband of Tina Ariemma, our former Garwood Business Administrator, is a descendant of the Unami Indian tribe.
And now you know the story.
