Charlotteburg, the ironlands, and a name borrowed from a tobacco estate.
The land that became Kinnelon was Lenape country, later folded into vast colonial land tracts. An early settlement here was known as Charlotteburg — named for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, and home after 1765 to the great iron furnace that bore her name.
In the 18th century these highlands were iron country. In 1765 the ironmaster Peter Hasenclever raised the Great Charlotteburg furnace here for the London-based American Iron Company; its works later passed to John Jacob Faesch and to Robert Erskine, who supplied iron to the Continental Army and served as George Washington's Surveyor-General until his death in 1780. The furnace ruins now lie beneath the Pequannock reservoir — the borough's iron century told in full on its own page.
Formed in 1740, Pequannock Township once spanned Kinnelon, Butler, Pompton Plains, Riverdale, and Montville. Kinnelon would remain part of it for nearly two centuries.
In the 1880s tobacco magnate Francis S. Kinney assembled a roughly 5,000-acre mountain estate he called “Kinney-lawn,” with St. Hubert's Chapel on an island in the lake.
By 1921 residents of this neglected corner of Pequannock Township — among them the estate owner Milton Untermyer and the Kinney family — were pressing to break away. On February 20, 1922, Kinnelon incorporated as a borough. Its name was drawn from the Kinney estate, carried forward by Kinney's sons Warren and Morris as a tribute to their mother, while the family's own land took the name Smoke Rise; Warren Kinney served as the first mayor. A native-stone school rose on Kiel Avenue in 1923, and by local accounts the wooded, hard-to-reach borough became a refuge for clandestine stills and speakeasies through the Prohibition years.
Much of Kinnelon's land remains undeveloped by design. In 1900, to secure clean water, the City of Newark bought the roughly 35,000-acre Pequannock Watershed spanning six municipalities, Kinnelon among them; together with the 625-acre Splitrock Reservoir on the Kinnelon–Rockaway line, Silas Condict County Park (dedicated 1964), and Pyramid Mountain, it preserves thousands of acres. The highlands were once worked for ore as well — the Stony Brook (or Pike's Peak) iron mine ran along the west side of Stickle Pond, the old name for Lake Kinnelon, worked anew in 1870 and abandoned by 1880. Kitty Ann Mountain is the borough's highest point.
Kinnelon is really a constellation of distinct communities — Smoke Rise, Fayson Lakes, Lake Reality, and the Miller Road parish among them — each with its own founding story, gathered under one borough.
For most of its early life the borough had no physician of its own at all. That changed in the middle of the twentieth century, when Dr. Helen Miller — an Oregon-born physician trained in New York — settled at L'Ecole, the 1873 Meadtown schoolhouse, and opened a practice neighbors reached by simply knocking on her door. She went on to build Kinnelon its first medical center and a pioneering cancer-detection clinic for women, and willed L'Ecole to the borough as the Kinnelon Museum. A notable resident rather than a founding family, she has her own page in this history.
Notable Residents
Kinnelon's founders cleared the land and built the town. These are a few of the remarkable people who came later and gave it its character — residents who lived here, worked here, and left the place better than they found it.
Physician · 1896–1990
The Oregon-born physician who gave a town with no doctor its first medical center — and a pioneering cancer-detection clinic for women. She lived and practiced at L'Ecole, the 1873 Meadtown schoolhouse she later willed to the borough as its museum.
The name contracts Francis Kinney's estate, “Kinney-lawn.” When the borough incorporated in 1922, Kinney's sons carried the name forward, and Warren Kinney became the first mayor.
Frequently asked
The Kinney family. Francis S. Kinney, a New York cigarette magnate, assembled a roughly 5,000-acre estate here in the 1880s; when the borough incorporated in 1922 it took the family's name, and his son Warren Kinney became its first mayor.
Source: Wikipedia — Kinnelon, New Jersey
In 1922, when the Kinnelon section split from Pequannock Township to incorporate as its own borough — a community of only about four hundred people at the time.
Source: Wikipedia — Kinnelon, New Jersey
Part of Pequannock Township, established in 1740. Before European settlement it was Lenape land; local accounts record that in 1695 acreage here was purchased from the Minisink sachems Onagepouck and Sajapogh.
Source: Wikipedia — Pequannock Township; local history
“One borough, many communities — bound by mountains, water, and a name.”
From the community
Knowledge of this place lives in its families. If you can add a story, correct a detail, or bring forward a name still waiting to be told, we'd be honored to include it. Every submission is read before it's published.
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Sources
Compiled from publicly available sources; where accounts differ, the most widely documented version is used. Community corrections welcome.
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