Waterloo Village is a restored 19th-century canal town in Byram Township, Sussex County (west of Stanhope) in northwestern New Jersey, United States.

For canal workers, Waterloo's geographic location would have been conducive to being an overnight stopover point on the two-day trip between Phillipsburg and Jersey City.

[3] Opened in 1831, the Morris Canal's traffic volume, which was primarily anthracite coal from Pennsylvania, peaked during the late 1860s, shortly after the end of the American Civil War.

The village's location, within a short distance of the Lackawanna Railroad (which had to overcome a steep eastbound grade towards New York near Waterloo, slowing freight trains to a crawl as they labored up the hill to Netcong), made it easy for hobos to jump on and off boxcars.

[6] Leach and his partner in the interior design business Lou Gualandi turned it into a living history tourist attraction with working blacksmiths, potters, candle dippers and weavers demonstrated crafts from the colonial historic eras.

Admissions fees being never enough to cover the administrative costs of the attraction, the partners sought out corporate and state grants, but ultimately opened an open-air concert field on the property in 1977 to raise funds.

[12] The Waterloo board of directors subsequently brought in a new management team and throughout the mid-to-late 1990s tried to rebuild trust in the running of the village.

[13][14] Events like this had completely overwhelmed the area's limited access roads and caused considerable friction with the surrounding towns.

[21] Beginning May 2014, the SMS Italian Festival, an annual Non-Profit event supporting the children of St Michael School, began at the village.