Feltville

The story

Feltville is a whole 19th-century village hiding inside a county park in suburban New Jersey. In 1845 the New York stationer David Felt bought 760 acres in the Watchung Mountains and built a self-contained mill town — a printing and bookmaking works on the brook, and above it a church, a store, and rows of workers' houses for about 175 people. Felt ran it so completely that residents called him 'King David.'

When Felt retired in 1860 the mills changed hands and failed, and the village emptied — the first of its two abandonments. In 1882 Warren Ackerman bought the property and reinvented it as Glenside Park, a summer mountain resort, which ran until the fashion for such places faded and it closed in 1916.

The land became part of the Watchung Reservation, one of the country's first county parks, which is why the village survived intact rather than being cleared. Union County has restored several of the buildings; the church, the store, and the frame houses still line the lane through the woods that locals have called the Deserted Village for over a century.

What remains today

Eight original houses, the church, the general store and carriage house, and the mill-era street plan — a National Register historic district in the Watchung Reservation.