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For the safety of
your pet and the enjoyment of this area by other park users,
you are
asked to adhere to the County ordinance that dogs be restrained by a
leash.
Walk down Cataract
Hollow Road to the first bridle trail crossing and turn left on that
trail.
Turn right onto the first hiking trail and follow it to the Village
cemetery.
The first settler of this area was Peter Willcocks, an Englishman
who moved to this area around 1736 from Long Island. Peter built a
dam across the Blue Brook to harness the brook‟s water to power a
saw mill which he constructed. Clearing the trees from the sur-rounding
forest, Willcocks produced lumber which was purchased by settlers
developing farms in the surrounding frontier countryside. In the
fields created by the removal of trees, the Willcocks family farmed
the land for the next century, attracting other settlers, such as
the Badgley and Raddin families.
Of the five headstones seen in our cemetery today, only one is
original. The others were placed here in the 1960's to replace
stones that are missing. Two of the headstones are for the same
person, John Willcocks. None of the stones stand over the actual
grave of the person shown. It is believed that about two dozen
peo-ple were buried in the Willcocks family plot.
At the far left is a headstone commemorating Phebe Badgley
Will-cocks. Phebe Badgley met and married Peter Willcocks while
still living in Long Island. When she and Peter moved here to the
sec-ond Watchung Mountain, her brothers and sisters came with them
and settled in an area on the First Watchung Mountain which today is
the Scout Camping Area behind the Trailside Nature & Science Center
on the other side of the park.
The original stone near the right, and the newer stone to the right
of it, commemorate John Willcocks, one of five children of Phebe and
Peter. The old stone bears a fairly typical Puritan-influenced
design called the Death‟s Head by archaeologists. This style
originated in New England and is typical of 17th and 18th century
tombstones throughout the Northeast. Although the dates on the
stones would seem to indicate that Phebe and her son died on the
same day, we currently believe that Phebe died in June of 1776, but
her death was not recorded until after her son‟s death.
In addition to the resort business, Ackerman
also was involved in raising fancy cattle. He used Felt‟s vacant
mill as a stable for his cattle, and built this road as a quick way
to get his cattle up to the former farm fields for grazing. The
abandoned mill was torn down in 1930 after it was deemed to have
become a safety hazard.
Continue along
Cataract Hollow Road,
stopping in front of
the third small cottage (#12).
As with the other houses
we have seen, these three small cottages were divided down the
middle. Though smaller, the 1850 federal census suggests that these
cottages housed from 6 to 12 people each. House #12 gives us the
best glimpse of a true mill worker‟s house, with both of the
original entry doors still intact. The back yards of these cottages
revealed many interesting archaeological features, including a
two-seat privy, a thick spread of scattered arti-facts, walkways
corresponding with those of the Commons area de-scribed above, and a
well, the top of which can still be seen be-tween the two
westernmost cottages.
During the conversion from mill town to summer resort, the interior
partitions were opened up to make these single-family dwellings. A
water supply and a steam laundry were constructed at a spring-fed
pond further out along this road. Electric lights were installed
along the resort streets. With indoor plumbing and electricity,
residents of the village no longer needed oil lamps and chamber
pots, so such materials were taken into the back-yards and dumped
into the no-longer used privy. This privy, excavated in 1999,
contrasts sharply with that described above in the east side of the
village. Its vault is constructed of loosely laid basalt without
mortar, and it is about twice the size and depth of the privy near
Felt‟s office. It was also very poorly maintained, since one of its
walls partly collapsed in the 19th century and was never repaired,
and perhaps never cleaned, since the artifacts within it represented
every time period of the vil-lage‟s occupation. Clearly, a different
set of standards was main-tained by Felt and his workers.
Continue along
Cataract Hollow Road a
short distance to its
end at Masker’s Barn.
Many of the summer resort visitors were from New
York, Orange, and Newark. A barn was built here in 1882 to house
horses and the buildings here in Feltville, you need to use your
imagination to visualize the buildings as they were first built in
1845, without the large porches and roof dormers that you see now.
In 1998, the Feltville Archaeology Project excavated a privy vault
behind this building. Few of the artifacts recovered in this
excavation dated to Felt‟s time, indicating that this privy was
probably meticulously cleaned during its lifetime. The privy itself,
however, tells a more interesting story. It was constructed from cut
and mortared sandstone blocks and its vault remains pristinely
intact today. This privy, and the fact that it was well maintained
throughout the time of its use, indicates an investment of time,
labor and care, which is un-common in the nineteenth century
countryside of central New Jersey, and indicative of an interest in
the future of the village which could only have come from Felt
himself.
Continue walking down
Cataract Hollow Road to the next building
(Building #2—the
Church/Store).
This building was built by David Felt to serve
as the general store for his mill town. Six hundred acres of fields
around this site were being farmed, with the crops that were
harvested being sold to the village residents through this store.
The mill workers were pre-sumably also able to buy meat from
livestock that Felt raised, as well as the fruits of his apple and
peach orchards. However, it is interesting to note that bone remains
from the meals of some of Felt‟s workers which were recovered from
another privy excavated in 1999 indicate that meat was more often
obtained through local hunting and fishing, and contemporary
descriptions of the village discuss gardens surrounding each of the
workers‟ houses. By 1851, a Post Office was established in this
building, as well.
David Felt ruled Feltville with a beneficent but stern hand, and
earned for himself the paternalistic nickname “King David”. Village
residents were required to attend religious services each week in a
church on the second floor of this building, but were allowed to wor-ship
and practice religion in accordance with their own beliefs. Felt
provided a priest, minister, or rabbi each week to conduct the
ser-vices, and eventually hired a non-denominational minister,
Austin Craig, to remain in full-time residence. Craig later became a
presi-dent of Ohio‟s Antioch College, and his collected sermons and
let-ters have been published in two volumes.
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