Llewellyn Park: Lenape Mountain Country Becomes America's First Suburb

The eastern slope of Orange Mountain in New Jersey was Lenape territory for more than ten thousand years. The Hackensack clan of the Lenni Lenape, who called themselves the Original People, used the mountain's forests for hunting and its streams for water. Old Indian Road in modern West Orange still traces one of their ancient trails.

Dutch and then English colonial settlement pushed the Lenape off these hillsides during the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, and by the early eighteen hundreds the land held a modest farmhouse and woodlot. Then in eighteen fifty-three a New York merchant named Llewellyn Haskell hired the architect Alexander Jackson Davis to do something no one had attempted: turn farmland into an exclusively residential romantic landscape, far from the city's smoke, where curved roads would follow the natural terrain and fifty acres of forested ravine would be shared common land. By eighteen sixty Haskell had spent one hundred thousand dollars landscaping five hundred acres.

Llewellyn Park became the first planned residential community in the United States, setting the template for every suburb that followed, and the model Thomas Edison chose when he moved his laboratory to West Orange in eighteen eighty-seven.