So look up again at that great white obelisk on the summit, and let me tell you why it stands there — because it isn't just decoration, and it isn't a lighthouse or a lookout. It's a memorial. A war memorial.
After they'd given the mountain to the state, the Kusers decided its high point deserved a monument worthy of it — and they chose to dedicate it not to themselves, but to New Jersey's war dead. They set to building at the end of the nineteen twenties, and it was no small job hauling stone and steel up to eighteen hundred feet and raising a tower two hundred and twenty feet tall on top of that. They faced it in the hard, pale quartzite of the ridge itself, so the monument is quite literally built from the mountain it stands on. And in June of nineteen thirty, they dedicated it, with great fanfare, to — and I'll say it the way the plaque says it — the glory and honor and eternal memory of New Jersey's heroes, by land and sea and air, in all the wars of our country.
So when you stand at its foot, understand what you're looking at. It's the tallest thing in New Jersey, set on the highest ground in New Jersey — a finger of pale stone pointing at the sky — and every inch of it is a thank-you to the men and women of this state who went off to war and didn't come home. There are grander monuments in the world. There aren't many set higher, or that you can see from three states at once. Give it a long look, and if you're the type, a quiet word of thanks. That's what it's there for.
Photo: Famartin · CC BY-SA 4.0
