LLEWELLYN PARK 
WEST ORANGE, ESSEX CO., NEW JERSEY 
THE FIRST AMERICAN SUBURBAN COMMUNITY 
By SAMUEL SWIFT 
L IKE Pierre Lorillard’s much later experi¬ 
ment at Tuxedo, Llewellyn Park, on the 
eastern slope of the Orange Mountains, 
was not primarily the result of a real estate 
speculation. Its moving cause was the de¬ 
sire of Llewellyn S. Haskell, to found a quiet, 
picturesque community in which retired mer¬ 
chants or professional men could make the au¬ 
tumn of their lives as beautiful as the Orange 
mountainside itself, when the leaves turn 
ruddy in the fall of the year. An ardent lover 
of nature, Mr. Haskell had always shunned 
the turmoil of city existence, even in a day 
when trolley cars and elevated railways were 
unknown. Born near New Gloucester, Maine, 
in 1815, he was by 1842 settled in Philadel¬ 
phia. Several years later, he removed to 
New York, and became 
the head of a large chem¬ 
ical firm. To whatever 
city his business took him 
to live, Mr. Haskell made 
his dwelling place in a 
suburb, and to the last he 
derived an intense satis¬ 
faction from constant as 
sociation with trees and 
hills, with fields and 
streams and the open air. 
On February 20, 1853, 
Llewellyn H askel 1 bought 
twenty-one and one-half 
acres of what was then al¬ 
most useless land on the 
side of the Orange Moun¬ 
tains. With him were 
soon afterward associated 
Levi P. Stone, Egbert 
Starr, Edwin C. Burt, 
John Burt, James Burt, 
Charles J. Martin, D. A. 
Heald and Joseph How¬ 
ard, and each purchased 
adjacent ground, as the 
nucleus for a proposed 
park or reservation. The 
beauty of the site had 
impressed Mr. Haskell at his first visit. The 
mountain range, rising six hundred feet above 
tide water, runs nearly north and south, 
roughly paralleling the Hudson River, about 
twelve miles away. From the summit of the 
ridge eastward, one overlooks the rolling 
valley in which lie Orange, West Orange and 
East Orange, with the city of Newark, at 
the foot of the long slope, carrying the eye 
to the edge of tidal marshes extending to 
Bergen Hill, the final barrier to the Hudson 
and New York. The tall buildings of the 
latter city and the towers of Brooklyn Bridge 
did not loom on the horizon until long after 
Haskell’s time, but the high ground of Long 
Island, the central hills of Staten Island, and 
the broad waters of Newark and New York 
bays were then, as now, 
plainly visible in clear 
weather from this lofty 
perch. They were and 
are yet seen over a fore¬ 
ground of sharply de¬ 
scending mountainside, 
astir in the summer with 
leafy boughs and diversi¬ 
fied, in winter, by the 
forms of naked branches, 
contrasted with the per¬ 
petual green cloaks of firs 
and spruces, of pines and 
hemlocks. The view 
westward from the ridge 
embraced a narrow valley, 
watered by streams, with 
a second range of equal 
height bringing the sky¬ 
line up to the level of 
the observer’s eye. 
Uncommonly desir¬ 
able, in spite of its rough¬ 
ness, this region seemed 
to Llewellyn Haskell, and 
so, by adding to his origi¬ 
nal purchase other tracts 
of woodland, and per¬ 
suading his friends to buy 
327 
THE RELATION OF LLEWELLYN PARK 
TO THE CITY OF ORANGE 
Tinted portions show tracts of the Park privately held 
