The township became part of the newly created Hunterdon County on March 11, 1714. A record from 1709 indicates that it was used both for a meeting of the Presbytery of Philadelphia and for a session of the Hunterdon County Court.

A meetinghouse was erected on the site of the present Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville in the early 1700s. In 1698, Puritan settlers from Long Island and Connecticut came to Maidenhead and were granted land and established a Presbyterian church. The township was named by the early Quaker settlers after Maidenhead, a Thames River village west of London. What is now Lawrence Township was originally formed as Maidenhead Township on February 20, 1697, while the area was still part of Burlington County in West Jersey on the eastern boundary of the Province Line (on the other side of which was East Jersey). As of the 2020 United States census, the township's population was 33,077, a decrease of 395 (−1.2%) from the 2010 census count of 33,472, which in turn reflected an increase of 4,313 (+14.8%) from the 29,159 counted in the 2000 census. The township is a regional commercial hub for central New Jersey. Located at the cross-roads between the Delaware Valley region to the south and the Raritan Valley region to the north, the township is an outer-ring suburb of New York City in the New York Metropolitan area, as defined by the United States Census Bureau, while also directly bordering the Philadelphia metropolitan area and is part of the Federal Communications Commission's Philadelphia Designated Market Area. Lawrence Township is a township in Mercer County, in the U.S.

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