CROSS CASTLE

I received E-Mail that said:

Checked the list for New Jersey and didn't see Cross Castle there. It was in West Milford off Clinton Road. I have attached a pic.

Once upon a time there was and actual castle in the woods off of Clinton Road. Most who remember it liken the edifice to something out of a fairy tale or Gothic English novel, rising from the mist. Clinton, or Cross Castle is how most locals remember it, named for the man who had it built – Richard J. Cross, but Cross himself and his family called the place Bearfort, after the mountain range it was nestled in. In 1905 Cross bought heavily forested land around Newfoundland, NJ, and began construction of the castle-like mansion. Its walls, which have intrigued so many people over the years, were 3-stories high. You can see remnants of the concrete today. Cross died in 1917, and the family sold the property to the City of Newark in 1919. A fire eventually destroyed much of the remaining wooden structure, leaving the stone walls intact as a place where hikers, teenagers, and the occasional Satan worshippers could congregate. Those walls, eventually painted over with graffiti and picked apart for souvenirs, were knocked down in 1988 when the Newark Watershed Commission deemed the structure unsound. –Joanne Austin

Information from http://weirdnj.com/stories/clinton-road/

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Information courtesy of Katrina Price.