A patriot's name, a Prohibition speakeasy, and a thousand acres of highlands.
The park honors Silas Condict (1738–1801), a Morris County farmer, surveyor, and Revolutionary patriot who helped draft New Jersey's first constitution, presided over its Committee of Safety, and sat in the Continental Congress. He never lived on this land; the county chose his name to honor the region's Revolutionary history.
For generations these acres were working farmland, passing through a succession of families into the early twentieth century — quiet highland country above the lake basins of what would become Kinnelon.
In 1926, in the thick of Prohibition, John Canty Sr. bought the property and built a larger dam, raising the seven-acre lake that still bears his name — Lake Canty.
In 1933 Canty razed a barn and built a stone clubhouse he called the Casino — a dine-and-dance speakeasy with stained-glass windows, a mirrored mahogany bar, a bandstand, and an ice-cream parlor, said to have served the bootleggers and racketeers of the day. Despite the name it was never a gambling hall, and the wilder organized-crime tales are best treated as lore; the speakeasy itself is documented, and it closed around 1938.
Morris County acquired the first parcel in 1953 and dedicated Silas Condict County Park in 1964, roughly two hundred acres at the start. Decades later, after New Jersey's Highlands Act, the Park Commission expanded it by purchasing former Kinney family land — so the park came to adjoin the old Smoke Rise estate.
Today the park spans about 1,500 acres (the county's pages cite 1,508–1,513) with some ten miles of trails. The Casino, restored in 1993, survives as a county event venue beside Lake Canty — a Prohibition speakeasy turned public gathering place in the highlands above the borough.
The speakeasy
Built by John Canty in 1933 as a stone dine-and-dance speakeasy on Lake Canty — mirrored bar, bandstand, stained glass — it closed around 1938 and, restored in 1993, now serves as a Morris County event venue.
“A speakeasy by a lake — now a thousand acres held in common.”
From the community
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Silas Condict County Park
A Morris County park open to the public, set around Lake Canty (Cantys Lake — GNIS 884136, 41.00344, -74.38563).
Sources
Compiled from publicly available sources; where accounts differ, the most widely documented version is used. Community corrections welcome.
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