Which National Park Service site preserves Thomas Edison’s laboratory and home in West Orange, New Jersey?

Thomas Edison National Historical Park preserves Thomas Edison’s laboratory and home in West Orange, New Jersey.

The park includes Edison’s West Orange laboratory complex and Glenmont, the estate where he lived with his family. Edison established the laboratory in 1887, and it operated for more than 40 years. Research there covered electricity, chemistry, photography, motion pictures, phonographs, metallurgy, and battery technology.

The site is also associated with the Black Maria, a rotating studio built for Edison’s motion-picture experiments. It is often described as the world’s first movie studio; the park contains a reconstructed version of the building.

The properties received several designations before becoming one park. Edison’s home became a national historic site in 1955, while the laboratory became a national monument in 1956. They were combined as Edison National Historic Site in 1962, then renamed Thomas Edison National Historical Park in 2009. It is in West Orange, not nearby Edison, New Jersey, the township named for the inventor.