Have a Hike with History
By Veronica MacDonald Ditko
An Accidental Anthropologist
You may regard parks as great places to get away and enjoy the scenery. And you should. But most parks in our area have substantial histories too. Harriman Park in Rockland County, NY was once a grand estate with a prison on it and later a Naval munitions depot. More than 70% of its lakes were manmade after it became part the Palisades Interstate Park Commission.
Ringwood State Park was also a series of estates. While some buildings still stand, others have fallen into the nature that surrounds them. But it doesn’t take an archaeologist’s eye to see them.
Taking a walk past St. Luke’s Chapel and shooting range at Ringwood State Park, there is a rock-lined road (Mansion Road) and a path that steers to a sharp right after the Tennessee Pipeline right-of-way. The path leads to the ruins of a once cute Scandinavian house called Windcap. It was built by the family of John Dyneley Prince, a successful writer, linguist and professor at New York and Columbia Universities.
The architect purposely did not put the house on the top of that mountain, but rather on a seat just below the summit, partly to protect it from the elements, and partly to create a breathless view of what is now the Wanaque Reservoir.
We are approaching the best time of year to see the view, now covered with trees, if you hike past the ruins to a rocky ledge. Without the leaves on the trees, the scene is spectacular.
This idyllic house with pointed gables succumbed to a tragic lightning strike in 1911. After the boom of the lightning strike, Prince quickly got family and servants out of the house. The fire spread so quickly, he could not save a manuscript of a book he had worked on for four years. It was due to go to the publisher the next day. Prince later wrote that they were lucky no one died except for a poor Persian cat.
Today you can see the foundations of the house, and in other places along the road, tennis courts, barns, and smaller cottages. Some of these, however, would require a trained archaeologist to notice the foundations of these structures and gentle rise of the land.
These ruins remind me to look deeper into what is around us, just like the ruins all over Elberon, New Jersey where I grew up. Grand estates used to pepper this shore town. You can still see corners of walls or even gate posts to grand entrances. Except now they are surrounded by 1950s suburbia. It’s funny how the developers just left them there. But it’s lots of fun for me to imagine what was once there!
So get out there and explore. You can see so much more in the winter without shrubs and vines and leaves!
Author’s note: I owe all the Windcap stories to historian Nancy Gibbs, who led a hike in late October.
Much enjoyed your article. I would like to correct the statement that there was ever a prison located in Harriman Park. While NYS had proposed one at Bear Mountain it was never built. This was thanks to the opposition of Mary Harriman who agreed to donate some 10,000 acres to the state for a public park in return for the state not proceeding with its prison plans. This donation and the financial support of Hudson Valley’s elite (Perkins, Rockefeller et al) was the true beginning of Bear Mountain and Harriman parks.