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Send me the listMorris County was an iron county long before it was a commuter county. Ore came out of these hills starting in the early 1700s, charcoal furnaces burned through acres of forest to smelt it, and in 1831 a 102 mile canal opened across New Jersey to move iron and coal between Phillipsburg and Jersey City. Then the industry moved west, the railroads beat the canal, and the state abandoned the waterway in 1924.
The woods took most of it back. Not all of it. Furnace stacks, mine openings, lock walls and canal beds are still sitting out there, most of them on public land, most of them free, and most of them a short drive from an exit you use every week. Here are seven you can walk to right now, plus one more that is on its way.
Split Rock Furnace, Rockaway Township
Below the dam at Splitrock Reservoir, deep in the Farny highlands, a stone blast furnace roughly 32 feet tall is still standing in the woods. It was built in 1862 to smelt local magnetite ore into iron during the Civil War, and it ran for only about a decade before it was abandoned in the 1870s. The original Split Rock tract covered around 3,000 acres and held forges, mines and a village, and traces of that whole operation are scattered through the forest around it.
This is the least developed site on the list. Farny State Park has no visitor center, no restrooms and no staffed entrance. There is a parking area at the end of Split Rock Road that doubles as the trailhead, and from there you follow the road down toward the bridge. Wear real shoes and bring water. Trail and access information is on the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection page for Farny State Park.
Mount Hope Historical County Park, Wharton
Settlers began pulling iron ore out of Mount Hope around 1710, and except for a few gaps the mines here were worked for more than 250 years before closing in 1959. What is left is a 479 acre park whose rocky, pitted landscape is the industry itself: the remains of the Teabo, Allen and Richard mine properties, with visible shafts, passages and slopes cut into the hillside. The Mount Hope Miners Church, dedicated in 1868 and built for the area’s many Cornish immigrant miners, still stands inside the park. It closed in 1984 when the congregation fell below 20 families.
The park sits at 75 Teabo Road in Wharton and is open daily from sunrise to sunset with no admission fee. There is a 2.7 mile marked trail system and close to five miles of trails in total. The Morris County Park Commission is direct about one rule here, and it matters more than usual on old mine ground: stay on the blazed trails. Maps and seasonal industrial heritage tour dates are on the Mount Hope Historical County Park page.
The Hibernia Mine, Rockaway Township
The Hibernia Mine was one of New Jersey’s largest iron producers, worked from the early 1720s until operations ended around 1913. Its second life is stranger than its first. Bats found the abandoned shafts in the 1930s, and by the 1980s more than 20,000 were wintering inside every year, making it the largest known bat hibernaculum in the state. After federally endangered Indiana bats turned up in 1992, the entrance was gated to protect them. White nose syndrome reached the mine in 2009 and wiped out roughly 90 percent of the colony.
You cannot go in, and you should not want to, but there is an observation platform that lets you stand at the gated entrance and see it. The mine sits inside Wildcat Ridge Wildlife Management Area in the southern end of Rockaway Township, off County Route 513, also called Green Pond Road. The same tract carries a well known hawk watch and a network of trails. Background is on the New Jersey Fish and Wildlife page for Wildcat Ridge.
Morris Canal Lock 2 East, Wharton
This one was literally buried. When New Jersey decommissioned the Morris Canal in 1924, the gates and walls of Lock 2 East, known historically as Bird’s Lock, were bulldozed into the lock itself. Nobody was certain what survived. Wharton Borough, working with the Canal Society of New Jersey, excavated the site and found the stone walls remarkably intact along with the original mitre gate doors, which were used to build exact replicas. The lock tender’s house, which had fallen into ruins, was rebuilt.
The finished project took 16 years and $4.7 million in state and county grants, and it was dedicated with a ribbon cutting at the 47th Annual Canal Day Music and Craft Festival on August 20, 2022. The result is the only operational canal lock left anywhere on the 102 mile canal, sitting at the end of a quarter mile watered stretch that is one of the best preserved sections of the Morris Canal in New Jersey. It is all inside Hugh Force Canal Park on West Central Avenue in Wharton, a nine acre Morris County Park Commission property open sunrise to sunset with a towpath, retaining wall, railbed, picnic grove and playground. The full project history is on the Morris County announcement, and park details are on the Hugh Force Park page.
Morris Canal Park, Ledgewood
Thousands of people sit in traffic every day where Routes 46 and 10 meet at the old Ledgewood Circle without knowing that a canal used to climb the hill next to them. Just off Main Street, Roxbury Township’s Morris Canal Park holds the remnants of Inclined Planes 2 and 3 East, a long stretch of dry canal prism, and a canal basin that still holds water. The inclined plane was the engineering trick that made the whole canal possible: instead of a ladder of locks, boats were hauled up the hillside on cradles riding rails. Plane 3 East lifted them 48 feet from a lower basin to a middle one.
The same block holds the King Store, built in 1815 and run as a canal store through the waterway’s busiest decades, and the Silas Riggs Saltbox House, home of the Roxbury Township Historical Society, at the Museums at Drakesville Historic Park on Main Street in Ledgewood. The township and local volunteers have been restoring the planes and the store, and interpretive signs now explain what you are looking at. The Canal Society of New Jersey keeps the deepest history of the canal and its planes.
Kay’s Cottage Ruins on the Black River, Chester Township
In 1920, Alfred and Elizabeth Kay built a country estate called Hidden River Farm on 275 acres in Chester Township. They cut carriage trails down to the Black River and dammed it to make a deep, calm swimming pool. The estate is now the Elizabeth D. Kay Environmental Center, and the Park Commission’s own description of the property is the giveaway: hike through a hemlock gorge and view historic ruins along the Black River. Stone walls, the grotto and the old dam are still down there in the gorge.
The center sits at 200 Pottersville Road in Chester and is open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset with no admission fee. It is one piece of an over 1,600 acre complex of preserved county parkland along the Black River, connected by the Patriots’ Path Blue Spur. Download the trail guide before you go, because the route down to the ruins is short, easy to miss, and not signed for what is at the end of it. Maps are on the Elizabeth D. Kay Environmental Center page.
Cooper Gristmill, Chester Township
Not every survivor is a ruin. Retired General Nathan Cooper bought the mill lot at public auction for $725 and built this water powered flour mill in 1826, fitting it with four sets of millstones, elevators, conveyors and two overshot waterwheels turning on the Black River. It could grind up to 10 tons of grain a day and it anchored a village called Milltown. By 1913 the local paper called it the last operating gristmill in Chester Township, and it spent the next 50 years as a square dance hall and a storage building while its roof caved in. The Park Commission bought it, restored it, and had it running again and open to the public by 1978.
It is now the only restored water powered mill in New Jersey and is listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. Costumed staff run the machinery on guided tours. The mill is at 66 Route 24 in Chester Township, open April 1 through October 31 on Fridays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., closed on major holidays, with general admission of $5 per person. The trails behind it, which connect to the Kay Center, are free. Hours and tour information are on the Cooper Gristmill page.
The One You Cannot Walk Yet: Old Boonton
There was a village here first. The settlement that took its name from colonial governor Thomas Boone in 1761 sat about a mile and a half east of today’s Boonton, and it disappeared when Jersey City built its reservoir. Every structure was moved or bulldozed before the water came in, so there is no intact town under there despite the legends, but stone boundary walls and building foundations remain, and droughts that drop the water level have exposed them more than once.
The reservoir covers 794 acres inside a 1,200 acre watershed property that straddles Boonton and Parsippany-Troy Hills, still owned by Jersey City and closed to the public for its entire history. That is changing. The Morris County Park Commission negotiated a 40 year lease and is building a 7.7 mile trail around it, with a first phase of roughly 2.5 miles in the Parsippany section. When it opens it will be the first public access the property has ever had. Progress is posted on the Boonton Reservoir Trail Project page.
Make a Day of It
The Chester sites pair naturally, since the Cooper Gristmill and the Kay Center are connected by trail, and both are minutes from the cider mills and farms in our roundup of the oldest businesses in Morris County. Wharton gives you the canal lock and Mount Hope within ten minutes of each other. October is the best month for all of it, when the leaves make the ruins photograph well and the bugs are gone, and our guide to where to see fall foliage in Morris County covers several of the same parks.
If you want the history without the hike, the best museums in Morris County tell much of the same iron and canal story indoors, the Bridget Smith House in Mine Hill preserves the immigrant side of the mining era, and Mount Tabor in Parsippany is a whole Victorian village that never got torn down. Know a furnace, mine or canal lock we missed? Tell us, because there are more of them out there than any list can hold.
