High Point: New Jersey's Summit and Its Monument

The obelisk on the ridge ahead stands at the highest point in New Jersey, one thousand eight hundred and three feet above sea level, at the northern tip of the Kittatinny Mountains along the Delaware Water Gap.

For most of the nineteenth century, this summit had no particular name. In eighteen fifty-five a surveyor named William Kitchell, working for the State Geological Survey, climbed the ridge and took official measurements, recording what some old maps called Hawk's Nest and others simply labeled Kittatinny Mountain. He named the spring-fed lake at the base Lake Marcia, after his fiancée. The high point itself remained unmarked.

The land changed hands several times before Anthony and Susie Dryden Kuser, a wealthy New Jersey couple, acquired the surrounding acres and began forming a vision for a public park. In nineteen twenty-three, the Kusers donated more than fourteen thousand acres to the state, creating High Point State Park, one of the largest gifts of private land to New Jersey in its history.

Then in nineteen twenty-eight, Susie Kuser proposed something more permanent: a two hundred and twenty-foot granite obelisk at the very summit, dedicated to New Jersey veterans of every war the country had ever fought. The design drew inspiration from the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston. Construction began that year, but Anthony Kuser died in February of nineteen twenty-nine without seeing the work completed. His widow carried the project through.

The monument was dedicated with great ceremony on June twenty-first, nineteen thirty. The inscription reads simply that it was erected to the glory, honor, and eternal memory of New Jersey heroes by land and sea and air.

On a clear day, you can see into three states from the top. New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey spread out below the ridge. The monument anchors a park that in summer blooms with mountain laurel and in winter offers some of the coldest, windiest conditions in the state. It is a place where the Appalachian Trail crosses a summit that most people pass by on the highway below without knowing the ridge is there at all.