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There is a neighborhood in Parsippany-Troy Hills where the houses sit sixteen feet apart, the streets curve around a park instead of a grid, and several of the buildings are octagons. Most people in Morris County have driven within a mile of it without ever turning up the hill.
Mount Tabor is roughly 350 homes on a wooded slope, about 220 of them inside a historic district listed on both the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. It looks like Cape May got lost and settled in the middle of Morris County. The reason it looks that way is one of the better stories in the county.
It started as a tent city in 1869
Mount Tabor was founded in 1869 as a Methodist camp meeting ground. Every summer, worshippers came out from the cities for ten days of services and fellowship on a wooded hillside, deliberately chosen as a retreat from the heat and noise.
They slept in tents, pitched on individual rented plots. Those plots were 25 feet by 16 feet, and that single decision is why the town looks the way it does today. When families started replacing canvas with wood, they had to build inside those same tiny footprints.
Small lots created the gingerbread
You cannot build wide on a 25-by-16 lot, so Mount Tabor built up, and it built ornate. If a cottage could not be bigger than its neighbor, it could at least be more elaborate, and the result was an arms race in decorative woodwork that produced the gingerbread trim now associated with camp meeting communities across America.
By 1900 more than 200 cottages covered the hillside and Mount Tabor was a full summer resort. Then the Depression and World War II did what economics usually does: families who could no longer afford two homes moved into the summer one year-round. The seasonal retreat quietly became a permanent neighborhood, which is what it still is.
Trinity Park and the octagons
Trinity Park was laid out between 1873 and 1885 as the center of everything, and it still functions that way. The cottages ring it, and so do several octagonal buildings that tend to stop first-time visitors mid-step.
The former Ebenezer Pavilion is now the local library branch. The 1873 Bethel, enclosed in 1886, serves as a community hall. The 1885 Tabernacle still hosts the large gatherings it was built for. The fountain in the park is a faithful replica of the 1875 original.
The Richardson History House
If you want to actually go inside one of these cottages, there is exactly one way to do it on a normal weekend.
The Richardson History House is a museum run by the Mount Tabor Historical Society, occupying one third of a triple cottage built in 1873. The triple cottage exists because three men who owned adjacent tent lots decided to join their buildings together to make the most of the small plots, producing what amounts to a Victorian townhouse.
The museum’s third belonged to J. Smith Richardson of Jersey City, who served as treasurer of the Camp Meeting Association for 22 years until 1907. It is the only cottage in the old section of Mount Tabor that has never been sold outside the family. The Morris chair the association gave Richardson on his retirement is still in the parlor.
The house came to the Society in 2007 as a bequest from Evelyn Blackford Clark, Richardson’s great-niece, who had lived in it since 1948 and wanted it to become a history house. Since 2011 the Morris County Historic Preservation Trust has put more than $400,000 into its restoration, matched by $80,000 the Society raised itself, covering everything from a slate roof replicating the original pattern to a full front porch rebuild using the original baluster design.
Hours: the second Sunday of each month, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., plus by appointment. Admission is free, donations welcome. Call 973-975-0001 to arrange an individual or group tour.
The one day a year you can see inside the houses
The Mount Tabor House Tour is on Saturday, September 26, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is the annual chance to walk through private cottages in the historic district rather than admire them from the sidewalk, and it is the single best day to visit if you only visit once.
The Historical Society also runs a fall program on Saturday, October 10 at 10 a.m., built around the spooky season, and the Mount Tabor Craft Market on Saturday, November 7 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Richardson History House tours are also part of Morris County’s free Pathways of History weekend in October, with dates still to be announced. Check the Historical Society’s events page before you go.
Just going for a walk
You do not need an event. Mount Tabor is a residential neighborhood and the streets are public, so a walk around Trinity Park and up the surrounding lanes costs nothing and takes about half an hour. The Historical Society publishes a walking tour if you want to know what you are looking at.
Two things to keep in mind. These are people’s homes, not exhibits, so stay on the streets and sidewalks. And the streets are narrow, built for an era with fewer cars, so park considerately and expect to walk a bit.
Go in October if you can. A hillside of Victorian gingerbread under Morris County fall color is not a thing you forget, and it is about fifteen minutes from Route 46.
More like this: all 39 towns in Morris County and what is happening in September.
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