So, I had the opportunity to visit someplace new a couple of days ago, and wanted to capitalize on it.
The place is Duke’s Park, in Hillsborough, New Jersey.
Now, I’ll be honest: I had never really even heard of this place before, and knew nothing about it, really.
These are relatively new grounds, having just opened to the public for the first time in a century just last year – on Earth Day of 2011.
It had been owned by one James B. Duke, who was essentially a giant baron in the tobacco industry at around the turn of the twentieth century. He had opened his estate to the public, but it was costing him a pretty penny to try and minimize the damage that visitors imposed. They picked the flowers and did not show an appropriate level of respect and appreciation for the land. Duke subsequently closed the grounds to the public, claiming “vandals” as the reason.
Unfortunately, for over a century, these grounds remained closed to the public in general.
Until last year, when it was reopened in time for Earth Day.
The park has been designed with an environmental theme to it. This has a little bit of irony to it, because James Duke himself was certainly not friendly to the environment at all. It was a different era, of course, and it was popularly believed that humans were meant to rule over the world, and could reshape it largely according to their whims. Duke certainly did not hold back, importing all sorts of foreign wildlife.
According to Greg Gillette (see the link to his blog down below), it was a point of pride for Duke “to be able to remake their environment to suit their needs, not live in harmony with it. To that end, he drained marshes, destroyed habitat, built dozens of man made lakes, imported all kinds of non-native plant species, and constructed twenty miles of paved roads.”
At some point, he even managed to dry out the Raritan River, in order to accommodate the lakes and waterfalls and such that he had designed for his grounds, in his quest to perfect the landscape to his liking.
Still, this is a different age, and there is a stronger measure of environmental conscience today. The grounds have been restored with an environmental theme to them, which was what Doris Duke wished for the grounds once she passed.
Doris Duke is, of course, quite a famous name. Legends abound about her, and there were numerous myths and legends concerning the grounds, as well. Of course, she was mostly reclusive, keeping to herself, and that almost always proves to be fertile ground for stories and gossip to mushroom. Even the plans for what to do with the land after she was gone remained largely a mystery – until, that is, they were finally fulfilled, with the opening of these grounds to the public last year.
So, the visit. The parking lot stands in the shadow of the Farm Barn, which is now the rather spacious visitor’s center. It even offers food and refreshments, as well as clean bathrooms. I cannot talk about the food that is offered, because that was not part of my visit.
The grounds themselves are huge. There is a map, but the map was not as obvious with the points of interest as perhaps they should have been. The place has a lot that could and should be explored.
The streams and lakes are there, of course. There is a decent amount of wildlife, as well – including a large turtle that I saw, pretty far from the lake. Not sure what she was doing out so far away, all by herself. But it was a site to see.
I was half expecting some hiking trails, having seen all the green woods that surround this place. Plus, the map seems to suggest quite a few woods. But hiking is not something that you should expect on these grounds.
That said, this park does offer a lot. It has a distinctly Old World feel to it, complete with statues and fountains and such, as well as foundations of old, stone buildings that have been tastefully allowed to stand the test of time, and now provide a picturesque backdrop to many areas of these park. This includes an old barn where only the stone walls still stand. But within these walls are numerous statues done in an antique style, lending them a European flavor.
The park is huge, also. The map is not the best, but it is helpful, and it does show you what you should explore on your visit. But it does not give you any sense of scale of how huge some of those things are, nor how beautiful. After seeing it (and never having heard of it before), I must say that it is, perhaps, New Jersey’s best kept secret. It compares in scale to the parks in Ringwood, like Ringwood State Park and the Skylands Botanical Garden, and that’s saying something.
Ultimately, there is only so much I can say about it, and I only visited it once. But here’s something that should be seen not only as a compliment, but as an enticement to make your own visit: it was fascinating and beautiful enough for me to already want to pay another visit.
Below is a fascinating link that I borrowed from in order to obtain much of the information in this article:
http://cnhillsborough.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-dukes-park.html
Below is the link to the site itself:
http://dukefarms.org/
Here is an interesting article from the New York Times about Duke Farms, as well. I found some interesting stuff in it, and perhaps, so will you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/arts/doris-dukes-farm-hillsborough-nj-opening-to-public.html?pagewanted=all
No comments:
Post a Comment