It's rarely mentioned outside the Old Bridge area, but Cheesequake State Park owes its unusual name to the long forgotten Cheesequake of 1856. In September of that year, a rare ea'easter blew through Raritan Bay, making landfall in Laurence Harbor. At the time, the area was dotted with highly productive dairy farms, renowned for their cheese-making capabilities. They manufactured so much cheese, they needed to erect huge cheese silos in which to store it. Some of these cheese silos stood over three hundred feet tall, and were visible for miles, often serving as navigational aids for local sailors.

The ea'ester made landfall with punishing winds, and the cheese silos, not built to withstand such an onslaught, began to topple like dominoes, crashing into the earth with tremendous thuds, which were mistaken as earthquakes by startled local residents. These residents came to refer to the incident as the "cheesequake" and "the cheeseocalypse". As salvaging the cheese was deemed impractical, the land owners opted to simply cover the cheese with dirt and garbage. Although it wreaked havoc on local lactose intolerant marine life, the aroma was mostly gone by the mid 1880s. The dairy farms, which moved west decades earlier, lay fallow, until Theodore Roosevelt set aside the site of the "cheesequake" as a nature preserve, which he visited frequently to go clamming in the park's fertile, cheese-nourished mud banks.

Local legend has it that very late on moonless nights, you can visit the site of the silos and still hear the anguished cries of those cheese-entombed workers. The Cheesequake of 1856 led to vast, sweeping reforms in both the cheese and silo-building industries. A small bronze plaque marks the site of the tallest silo and lists the names of the seven hundred and thirty-two souls who lost their lives that day in New Jersey's worst-ever cheese-related disaster.