THE ESSEX COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Glaciated Triassic Lowlands setting.
Essex County has 126.1 square miles of land in New Jersey. 4 mapped landscape regions meet across Essex County: Glaciated Triassic Lowlands, Trap Rock and Conglomerate Uplands, Passaic Basin Freshwater Wetlands, among others.
Rounded low hills, open valleys and irregular plains form a transition between Appalachian highlands and the coastal plain. The underlying geology mixes metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rocks.
Regional context: Northern Piedmont ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Essex County intersects 4 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Glaciated Triassic Lowlands46.5%
- Trap Rock and Conglomerate Uplands34.5%
- Passaic Basin Freshwater Wetlands10.6%
- Hackensack Meadowlands8.4%
Finding your parcel within Essex County
The atlas lists 32 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Essex County, including Newark, Livingston, West Orange. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Essex County by land and water
The Census records 3.34 square miles of water within Essex County, or 2.6% of its total area. That share is close to Essex County’s 2.6%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Essex County has 176.6 times the land area of nearby Llewellyn Park CDP (0.71 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Bergen County, Hudson County, Morris County, Passaic County, Union County within New Jersey. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.