10/15/2026
VAN NEST PARK 🌳👽🎣
Van Nest Park spans ~5 acres at 218 Cranbury Road, near West Windsor’s historic “Grovers Mill” community. It overlooks Grovers Mill Pond and features parking, a public restroom, a forested walkway, pavilion, playground, docks, and a dirt canoe launch.
In April 1962, Elvin Van Nest deeded this farmland to the township. Officials soon planned plantings, parking and recreation facilities and filled part of a small pond within the park (centered on where the kids’ playground is now) to enlarge the usable parkland.
The park has hosted children’s summer programs, picnics, Arbor Day plantings,
theatrical performances, and other community events, such as the 1976 bicentennial celebrations. It has, naturally, been the site of commemorations for Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio play, which depicted a fictional Martian landing at Grovers Mill and became one of the most famous events in the history of radio. In 1987, the broadcast’s screenwriter, Howard Koch, visited the park and recounted memories of the iconic broadcast. The larger 50th-anniversary festival the next year included a parade, races, exhibits and discussions; sculptor Thomas Jay Warren unveiled a large memorial plaque in the park and a time capsule was buried, to be opened in 2038.
Later improvements included the installation of a dock in the 1990s and the dredging and ecological restoration of Grovers Mill Pond in 2008 (the dredged material was used to make the cricket pitch mound in nearby Community Park). Permanent public bathrooms were opened in 2014. Scout projects have added a picnic table area, goose fencing and dock restoration, and War of the Worlds interpretive signs. The park remains a popular local scenic spot.
