The term “Culverites” appears in local New Jersey history connected to Schooley’s Mountain, a hill region in Morris County known for its mineral springs. The name surfaces in an amateur genealogical account of the Collver (also spelled Culver or Colver) family, which preserves a fragment of local lore rather than a rigorously documented historical record.

According to that account, one historical description dates the discovery of the area’s mineral springs to the Culverites in 1734, noting that local Indigenous people had known of the springs earlier and tried to keep them hidden from settlers. Notably, even the author who preserved this account admitted uncertainty about the group’s identity, wondering aloud who the Culverites actually were. Collver

The surrounding historical context offers a plausible, though not confirmed, explanation. The same source describes a religious community called the Rogerenes arriving at Schooley’s Mountain from New London, Connecticut, in 1732, led by a man named John Coloer, also rendered as Collver. The Rogerenes were a nonconformist Christian sect originating in 17th-century New England, known for rejecting mainstream church authority and enduring persecution for their beliefs. Their migration to the New Jersey frontier reflected a broader pattern common among dissenting religious groups of the era: relocating to sparsely settled land to practice their faith without interference from established colonial authorities. Collver

Given this context, “Culverites” most plausibly refers to the followers or descendants of this Collver/Culver-led religious community — essentially, the group named for its leader, in the same way religious or social movements are often labeled after a founding figure. If that reading is correct, the Culverites would represent a small, localized offshoot of the Rogerene movement rather than a separate or distinct religious tradition, tied specifically to the settlement and possibly the discovery of the mineral springs that later made Schooley’s Mountain a minor resort destination in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It’s worth being clear about the limits of this record. The primary source is a personal genealogical history page, not an academic or peer-reviewed historical text, and it explicitly flags its own uncertainty about the term. No corroborating scholarly sources, contemporaneous 18th-century records, or additional independent accounts turned up to confirm the group’s size, specific practices, or how long the “Culverite” name remained in use. It’s possible the term was a colloquial or informal label used only within local oral tradition, which would explain why it appears in only one surviving secondary account.

For a genuinely useful report, this is really the honest shape of the answer: the Culverites appear to be a minor, locally remembered name tied to a Rogerene-descended religious community on Schooley’s Mountain, associated with the 1734 discovery of mineral springs, but the historical record is thin, uncorroborated, and admittedly uncertain even to the person who first wrote it down.

If you’re working with a specific source (a family history, an old book, a document) that uses this term, sharing it would let me tighten this up considerably — right now this reflects the full extent of what’s publicly documented.

“Culverites” isn’t a well-documented historical group — the only substantive record I found is a single local-history source from Schooley’s Mountain / Pleasant Grove, New Jersey, and even that source is admittedly unsure who they were.