Duke Farms in Hillsborough, New Jersey
During the summer, when my son is off from school, I like to take him down to my town of Hillsborough, New Jersey. It is great to have him over, and gives me the opportunity to spend more time with him than I might otherwise get under more normal circumstances. So when I have him, we try to make the most of it, and we do things that are, hopefully, fun and creative and rewarding for both of us, at least as much as time and money and circumstances permit.
Yesterday, my son and I went to Duke Farms, right here in Hillsborough. If you are not familiar with Duke Farms, it is an enormous park that used to belong to the Duke family. It began when American entrepreneur James Buchanan Duke bought the property. He was the founder of Duke Power and the American Tobacco Company, as well as benefactor to Duke University. He named that famous university in honor of his deceased father, Washington Duke. Anyway, he decided to take an enormous piece of property and transform it. He rerouted water, making artificial lakes and ponds quite prominent throughout the estate. Also, he brought in quite a few non-native species. All of this took a toll on the local environment, although presumably, they did not really understand all of that back then.
In time, at least part of the property was donated to the state by Doris Duke, who became the second owner of the estate. In fact, it is the Doris Duke Foundation that takes care of the property, and they have not only worked to manage it, but have fought to remove destructive non-native species. There were massive renovations done before "Duke Farms" became a public park. It opened on May 19, 2012.
Duke Farms is beautiful. It reminds me a little bit of the Skylands Botanical Gardens in Ringwood, New Jersey, although it should probably be made clear that they are, nonetheless, different. The manor in Skylands is in much better shape than most of the buildings at Duke Farms, perhaps save for the greenhouses. However, Duke Farms is much larger than Skylands is, unless you take the surrounding woods of Ringwood and include that as part of Skylands. Either way, Duke Farms is enormous, and you probably want to take a map.
Also, there are bike rentals. We saw that we could rent a bike for $6 each, and it probably is both the easiest and quickest way to get around and truly explore the park. My son had something that he needed to do, so given the time constraints, we did not opt for renting bikes. What we did do was a whole lot of walking. And let me again stress the importance of maps here, because it is easy to get a bit lost. We walked around, and while some corners and such are clearly marked, others are not. Also, these signs generally do not give you a sense of how far everything is. We were walking around for a good long while, and got a little out of sorts on a couple of occasions yesterday.
Still, it is a beautiful park, and we were enjoying a beautiful, albeit hot, day. The park is, again, very aesthetically pleasant, with a mixture of both manicured landscapes as well as wilder ones. There are a lot of ponds and/or lakes on the property. It seems that you are never far from water. Again, this enhances the beauty of the place.
At times, this place feels almost reminiscent of Europe. There are parts of it where there are statues resembling the traditional renaissance style. There are the ruins of what once was a mansion on a hill, overlooking what once was an enormous and elaborate found in what must have been the front, a huge pond or lake on one side, woods on the other, and a hill with steps leading down in the back, which reminded me just a little bit of the Gloriette atop the hills on the grounds of the Schönbrunn Gardens in Vienna. As you can see below, there are some formal gardens giving a view of a beautiful glass house. All of it is quite wonderful, and not what you might expect for New Jersey, but making it feel a bit more worthy of the state nickname as the "Garden State."
For what felt like a long time, Duke Farms was closed during the recent pandemic. In fact, I was not entirely sure that it was open. When I checked online, it always seemed to suggest that the park was still closed. Earlier this year, sometime in the spring, my girlfriend and I tried to go, and it was indeed still closed. We took a chance (not a big one, this place is minutes away from where we live) yesterday, and this time, it was open. So we parked in the lot near the visitor center, which used to be a horse barn, and which also bears an unfortunate, eerie resemblance to the Auschwitz building that you see in movies all of the time, and then made the short walk to the park, which is across the street. There is a crossing guard who will top the traffic for you. And then you can begin exploring the park.
In researching this place, I discovered that four of the ten oldest trees in New Jersey are right here in the park. There are also some notable sites, which are the ones that you generally see signs for while on the property. These include the Arboretum, numerous gardens, the Orientation Center (the entrance to the park), and the Blue Boy statue. A good map and some planning should help make your visit more complete and, again, I would recommend renting a bike. Trust me, I have been to this place a number of times over the years, and it truly is enormous. Each time I do research, I still see beautiful places inside of the park that are new to me, that I have never seen before, although I do plan to change that in the near future with another visit, this time on bikes.
Below is what I wrote for this blog after my first visit to this park, back in July of 2012, shortly after it reopened to the public. The pictures are from a more recent visit back in May of 2019, when I went with both my girlfriend and my son. Hopefully, these help either to whet your appetite to make a visit here or, if you already planned it, will help you to know what to expect. And again, there is much more to this park than even I mentioned here. During our walk yesterday, my son and I almost accidentally came on some beautiful parts of the park that were previously unfamiliar. Yes, it really is that large of a park, especially on foot. Don't say you were not warned!
A Visit to Duke's Park in Hillsborough, New Jersey
Originally published on July 12, 2012
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
A water fountain and formal gardens in front of the Trumbauer conservatory.
Some of the Renaissance style marble statues inside the ruins of the barn, near the public entrance to the park.
Not even sure what this is, although I always loved it. Technically, it is part of Duke Farms, although it is outside of the main part of the park, and on the side of the road. These days, you can really only see this in the winter, because it gets so overgrown in the summertime. It always reminded me quite a bit of Europe, though. Took some pictures of it a few years back, and thought that it would be nice to incorporate it in the Duke Farms blog entry, since it is, technically, a part of it, even though, again, it would be difficult to find. It is located on Royce Road. Don't worry if you do not find this, because there are plenty of beautiful places to visit at Duke Farms!
Duke Farms in Hillsborough, New Jersey
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