Byram Township is a township in Sussex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 United States census, the township's population was 8,028,
The municipality is known as the "Township of Lakes", as there are roughly two dozen lakes and ponds within its borders.
History
Byram Township was created by an act by the New Jersey General Assembly on February 5, 1798, from portions of the now-defunct Newton Township, and was incorporated on February 21, 1798, as one of New Jersey's initial group of 104 townships. The township was named for the Byram family, who were early settlers in the area. Patriarch Jephthah Byram and his family, were believed to have emigrated to the area after the American Revolutionary War. The Lockwood Cemetery, established around 1818, consists of about 30 gravestones and the remnants of a church's foundation. The 1853 Roseville Schoolhouse was moved from its original location on Lackawanna Drive to Mansfield Drive, reopening in September 1986 as the Roseville Schoolhouse Museum.
In 1911, the Lackawanna Cut-Off rail line opened through Byram Township, with a station stop near the current Forest Lakes neighborhood. The Cut-Off was part of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad's mainline from Hoboken, New Jersey to Buffalo, New York. The railroad was important in providing transportation for mines in Northern Jersey. It passes through Byram for a long distance. It runs mainly along Roseville, but as Roseville veers north, the tracks continue west. The line was abandoned in 1980 and the tracks were removed four years later. There is a proposal to reactivate passenger service via NJ Transit in the future, with work underway at the Roseville Tunnel.
In 2001, then-mayor Richard Bowe called for an investigation of weather forecasters due to a snowstorm that had been forecast but never materialized, arguing that forecasters should be held responsible for the "excessive overtime costs" that the township experienced and for losses of local businesses shut in advance of the predicted snowfall.
Mining
<!-- Unsourced image removed: thumb|right|This shows one of the numerous 90 foot cuts in the rock at the Roseville Mine -->Byram Township had a very large mining industry in the past. The largest mine, The Roseville Mine, is located on the current Roseville Road. The mine is in a quadrilateral plot of land, with the southwestern corner created by Roseville Road and Amity Road. The southeastern corner is created by an intersection between Roseville Road and the Lackawanna Cut-off. The Roseville Mine was first excavated in the early 1850s. It was well worked during its life, with production in 1880 alone documented as 67,000 tons of ore. Most of the work was done via a large open cut. This cut as it exists today, is water-filled, with vertical walls as much as high. The Charlotte Uranium mine extracted uranium from the rocks of southwestern Byram. The mine closed in the 1950s, but many remnants are still visible.
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the township had a total area of 22.72 square miles (58.84 km<sup>2</sup>), including 21.53 square miles (55.76 km<sup>2</sup>) of land and 1.19 square miles (3.07 km<sup>2</sup>) of water (5.22%).
Byram Center (with a 2020 Census population of 2,232) is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) located within Byram Township. Lake Mohawk (with 1,824 out of the CDP's total 2010 Census population of 9,916 in the township) is a CDP split between Byram Township and Sparta Township.
Other unincorporated communities, localities and place names located partially or completely within the township include Brookwood East, Brookwood West, Cage Hill, Cranberry Lake, Forest Lakes, Jefferson Lake, Lake Lackawanna, Lockwood, Panther Pond, Roseville, Stag Pond, Tomahawk Lane, Waterloo, Wolf Lake and Wrights Pond.
;Streams
- Lubbers Run runs through the township, intersecting Mansfield Drive. The run is monitored monthly by the Byram Intermediate School's Environmental Club.
- Punkhorn Creek runs through the township, flowing southwest from Lake Bottom, on the north side of and parallel with Amity Road, to Roseville Pond.
Residents of Byram are served by adjacent post offices in Stanhope, Andover Township and Sparta Township.
The township borders the municipalities of Andover Township, Green Township, Hopatcong, Sparta Township and Stanhope in Sussex County; Mount Olive Township in Morris County; and Allamuchy Township in Warren County.