Hightstown is a borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, in the Raritan Valley of central New Jersey, roughly equidistant between New York City and Philadelphia. European settlement in the vicinity began in the late 1600s, and the community that became Hightstown was established in the early 1700s, taking its name from early settlers John and Mary Hight. The New Jersey Legislature incorporated Hightstown as a borough in 1853 from portions of East Windsor Township, and the borough later became fully independent. The borough developed as a small commercial and cultural center with a walkable Main Street and a distinctive institutional anchor: the Peddie School, a coeducational college-preparatory boarding and day school established in 1864 on a 280-acre campus. Peddie gives Hightstown a profile uncommon for a borough of its size, drawing students from across the country and around the world. That educational presence, together with the borough's crossroads location, shaped a downtown that has long served as a gathering point for the surrounding farmland and, later, for a growing commuter population. Today Hightstown is a diverse commuter suburb within the New York metropolitan area's outer ring. Its compact footprint of just over one square mile keeps homes, shops, schools, and parks close together, and its location near the New Jersey Turnpike and the Princeton Junction rail corridor makes it a practical base for commuters to the region's employment centers. The borough's Main Street holds an active collection of restaurants and independent shops, and the town is framed by farmland, parkland, and the neighboring township's retail corridors. Its long-standing role as a crossroads, equidistant between the Revolutionary War battlefields at Princeton and Monmouth, underscores its place as a waypoint in central New Jersey. Residents here combine small-town scale with direct access to two of the East Coast's largest employment markets.