I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and let me tell you how this whole mountaintop came to belong to you and me — because it comes down to one rich, generous couple and a very grand idea.
Back around the turn of the last century, this high ridge wasn't a park — there was a summer hotel up here, and a lot of private land, and the wealthy came up to escape the heat and take in that enormous view. Among them was a man named Colonel Anthony Kuser — a New Jersey businessman with a real fortune, tangled up with the Prudential insurance company and the early electric and gas concerns. His wife was Susie Dryden Kuser, and her father was the very man who'd founded Prudential. So this was money, old New Jersey money, and plenty of it.
But the Kusers weren't the type to just fence off the finest view in the state for themselves. Back in nineteen twenty-three, they bought up this whole mountaintop — thousands of acres of it — and they gave it to the people of New Jersey, to be a state park, free and open, forever. They even hired the Olmsted Brothers — the most famous park designers in America, the sons of the man who made Central Park — to lay it out beautifully. It was an act of real generosity: taking the top of the state, the single best piece of scenery New Jersey owns, and handing it to everybody. Every time you drive up here for free and stand on that summit, you've got Anthony and Susie Kuser to thank. And they weren't done yet — because next they decided this mountaintop needed a crown.
Photo: Hick518 · CC BY-SA 3.0
