It is presumed that the adjacent mill pond was formed around the same time through the damming of the Bear Brook, whose flow through a concrete-walled raceway turned a large wooden water wheel for generations.

[5] On October 30, 1938, Grovers Mill was made famous in Orson Welles' adaptation of The War of the Worlds for his CBS radio program The Mercury Theatre on the Air, in which the community was depicted as the initial landing site for a Martian invasion of Earth.

[6] The radio play's scriptwriter Howard Koch selected Grovers Mill by randomly dropping a pencil point onto a map of New Jersey, and later noted he'd "liked the sound" of the name.

[7] There have been numerous other references in fiction, including The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, the Wild Cards book series, and a town called Miller's Grove in the 1996 The X-Files episode "War of the Coprophages".

An episode of the War of the Worlds TV series takes place in Grovers Mill on the 50th anniversary of the Welles radio drama, and expands on the town's ties to the infamous broadcast.