MANVILLE — Donna Zambo Snyder, whose family has lived in the former factory town of Manville for three generations, enjoys evening walks though her neighborhood of ranches and Cape Cods, all tidy and well-maintained. After all, in a town as small and close-knit as this, a raised eyebrow from a neighbor carries more weight than a citation from a code enforcement officer.

To the east, her neighborhood nudges a fenced-in expanse of asphalt, a Superfund site that had been contaminated by creosote courtesy of an old wood treatment plant. The creosote pools would freeze in the winter, and local children, including Snyder’s mother, would ice skate on what they dubbed "Stinky’s Pond."

To the north sprawls a Walmart built on the site of the H.W. Johns Manville asbestos factory, which for decades ensured a comfortable living for many of Snyder’s neighbors — and, for some, asbestosis and mesothelioma.

It used to snow in August here, fine white flakes of asbestos. You could hear it in the raspy voices of former Johns Manville workers, in the crosscurrents of coughs at Sunday Mass. But these legacies are not what Snyder, 66, chooses to remember about Manville.

"Growing up, nobody had fences," she said. "You played in everybody’s yard, and you were friends with your neighbors. When I walk at night, I talk to everybody, even if I don’t know them by name. My grandchildren are like, ‘Gee, Grandma, you know everybody.’ I guess that’s my main reason for never leaving. I just never felt the need."

Of Manville’s 1,595 homeowners, 20 percent have lived there for at least 40 years, three times more than the state average. In the U.S., only 5.8 percent of homeowners have stayed put as long, according to the American Community Survey, a Census sampling of U.S. residents.

In New Jersey, only two knots of blue-collar towns have similar distinction: Wallington and Lyndhurst along Route 21 in southern Bergen County, and Camden County’s Runnemede and Bellmawr.

Manville’s demographics match a migratory pattern common to older suburbs and remote rural areas: Young people leave and older people stay in place, said Kenneth M. Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire and a senior demographer with the Carsey Institute.

"Part of the reason that older people stay is because they have much more social capital invested in the area," he said.

"They own homes, have friends, go to the church they have gone to for some time, and have all kinds of social ties that hold them in a place."

One hundred years ago, when hard-wearing, flame-resistant asbestos was still called the miracle mineral, Johns Manville purchased 328 acres of farmland in an area of Hillsborough known as Harmony Plains.

STAYING PUT

From the tenements of Jersey City, the Bronx and Brooklyn, and from the coal-mining towns of Pennsylvania, they came to work in the asbestos factory. And they stayed.

They stayed, even after they learned in the 1960s that asbestos exposure could cause cancer. After Johns Manville filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1982 under the weight of lawsuits and closed the plant for good in 1986. After Hurricane Floyd ravaged the town in 1999, and even as the Raritan and Millstone rivers regularly threaten low-lying areas.

As the flood-prone Lost Valley neighborhood prepared for another onslaught earlier this month, one resident set about emptying her basement. Again. Every time the rivers rise, her co-workers decorate her office door with notes all bearing variations of the same message: "Just sell the house."

But that’s not how most people leave Manville.

"Most of the homes we sell are estate sales. People in this town keep phone numbers like it’s their Social Security numbers," said real estate agent Carl Leone.

"There’s a mystique about Manville, there really is," said former longtime mayor Angelo Corradino. "For a while, we were getting bashed because of Johns Manville and the asbestos it produced, and the asbestosis. We were coming in for some hard times. It was neighbor helping neighbor. We went through four floods, two Superfund sites, and again, it’s just neighbor helping neighbor."

Small towns like Manville foster a strong sense of community that makes it difficult for people to consider moving away, residents said. But there’s another way of looking at the Census numbers: The percentage of longtime residents may be so high because few people want to move in.

Manville is relatively affordable — most houses currently on the market can be had for less than $250,000 — but the oft-flooded Lost Valley does carry a stigma. And the town’s older housing stock might not appeal to some homebuyers, said Rana Bernhard, a real estate agent in Hillsborough. "Somebody coming from a townhouse around the area," she said, "they’re kind of not making a step up from where they came from."

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In affluent Somerset County, Manville is at the low end of the financial totem pole, with a median household income of $54,397, the lowest of any borough in the county, which has a median income of $96,233.

In the 1990s, the ADESA car auction company sprouted on the land once occupied by Johns Manville, followed by the Walmart, a movieplex and a strip mall. But on the main drag, a number of storefronts are empty.

Although the Manville factory was shuttered 25 years ago, Johns Manville emerged from bankruptcy in 1988 and is now a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.

But when the plant, including the formerly grand Asbestos Hotel, was later torn down to make way for redevelopment, Corradino, who was then mayor, got angry anonymous phone calls from residents who still hoped the company would return.

And if it did, manufacturing asbestos products as it did a half century ago, Corradino said, "there would be a line of people down the block, people who would be trying to get employed by Johns Manville knowing it was almost suicide. That’s how loyal they were to this company."

FARMING TO FACTORIES

Dutch farmers settled in this crook of the Raritan River in the 17th century, and it remained agricultural until Johns Manville, the largest asbestos-producing company in the world, decided to build a factory there in 1911.

"Great chance for bakers, grocers, butchers, plumbers and general dealers," proclaimed an ad hawking "absolutely high and dry lots" for $75. Developers ran special excursion trains to Manville from immigrant enclaves around New York and from coal-mining centers.

Poles, Hungarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Slavs and Italians moved in, opening their own churches and maintaining a rural lifestyle. Chickens, ducks and pigs were still a common sight on Main Street well into the 1920s.

Though the immigrants these days are from Mexico, Peru and other points south, Manville remains a Polish stronghold, with Sacred Heart Church holding two Masses in Polish every Sunday, and the town’s two Polish delis stock vast quantities of pierogi, jars of sour cherries and homemade horseradish, as well as several types of head cheese.

It has always been a tight-knit community.

In the 1930s, Manville produced a major leaguer, Johnny "Legs" Welaj, and when he played his first area game as a rookie with the Washington Senators, about 2,500 residents — fully half the town — chartered buses to Yankee Stadium to watch him.

FAMILY TIES

Ask anyone in Manville why they stay, and the reasons don’t vary: It’s affordable. It’s safe. It’s quiet. Everyone knows each other. William Poch’s parents moved to Manville in 1927, when he was 3. He and his bride lived with them after their wedding, then moved to the house right behind their home. They still live there.

"In my younger days," Poch said, "they didn’t even lock the doors. People helped one another. People sat on their porches. They visited one another."

Children who move away often come back to take over their parents’ homes, and those who leave maintain their ties to the town’s churches or social organizations.

Julius Tulner, whose family moved to Manville when he was 4, has moved out a couple of times but always returned. He married last year and moved to his wife’s Lake Hiawatha home, but he still stays with his elderly mother in Manville a couple of nights a week. At Sacred Heart Church’s Ash Wednesday pierogi dinner, you can find him working in the kitchen in his flame-emblazoned apron and chef’s toque.

"I could be out of town for five years and come back, and everybody still remembers me," he said. "When we were growing up, you didn’t cause trouble because your parents knew the police. If you got stopped by the police officer, you knew when you got home your parents knew about it, no matter what."

Staff writer Frederick Kaimann contributed to this report.