Mount Tabor: New Jersey's Victorian Camp Meeting Village

Tucked into Morris County, Mount Tabor is one of New Jersey's most unusual communities, born not from industry or commerce but from religious revival. In the late eighteen sixties, the Newark Conference of the Methodist Church acquired a wooded hillside, naming the site after the biblical mountain of the Transfiguration. In August of eighteen sixty-nine they launched a ten-day camp meeting, with canvas tents pitched on narrow leased lots around a central park.

The idea caught on fast. In time, those tents were replaced by intricate Victorian cottages with fretwork porches and balconies crowded improbably close together, and an octagonal tabernacle rose at the center. By the early nineteen hundreds, the revival spirit gave way to summer resort life, and over the decades the cottages gradually converted to year-round homes.

Today Mount Tabor sits inside Parsippany Township, a walkable village of gingerbread houses that looks essentially unchanged from the eighteen eighties.