Mountain Lakes: Lenape Woodland to Hapgood's Discriminatory Dream

These wooded hills in Morris County were Lenape homeland, inhabited for centuries before Dutch and English settlers arrived in the sixteen hundreds. The land stayed in European farm families through the eighteen hundreds as a mix of swampy meadows and timber woodlots.

In nineteen ten, entrepreneur Herbert Hapgood partnered with Boonton surveyor Lewis Van Duyne and began buying up those farms at fifteen dollars an acre. Hapgood was shaped by the Arts and Crafts movement and envisioned something entirely new: a thousand-acre residential park built around seven artificial lakes he would dam and fill from the upland streams. Between nineteen eleven and nineteen twenty-three he constructed nearly six hundred homes in the Craftsman bungalow and Tudor Revival styles that still define the borough's look. Mountain Lakes became an early National Historic District, with nearly the entire town qualifying.

Hapgood also built exclusion into the community from the start. A gentleman's agreement prevented African Americans, Jewish buyers, Latinos, and Catholics from living here, a practice that persisted informally into the nineteen sixties. Mountain Lakes incorporated as an independent borough in nineteen twenty-four. Hapgood's company went bankrupt in nineteen twenty-three, but the community he shaped endures, one of the most intact planned residential suburbs in the northeastern United States.