Weird NJ: The Van Slyke Castle Traditional Cache

THE VAN SLYKE CASTLE

The Castle was featured in a Weird NJ letter, and you know me, can't resist a good abandoned ruins, so I came here and said, "This place needs a geocache!" There are three main ways to get to this cache (and I've done all three). I rated this a 2/3, but the terrain difficulty could be higher or lower, depends on your approach. I suggest you park at the top of Skyline Drive and follow the paved path allll the way around to the pond. it is the longest route but the terrain is fairly easy. Alternately you can park there, and bear right at the first pond and follow some trails. It's shorter, but the end involves a fair amount of bushwhacking. If you go that way, be sure to check out N41°02.737 W74°15.534 and you when you look down from the boulders you'll see an animal. It's actually quite startling how realistic the animal looks.

On the other hand you can park at the bottom of Skyline Drive. The hike is marginally shorter then the first way described, but the hike is twice as hard so why do that? (Unless you wanna hit Billy E 9/11 along the way) Follow whatever path you wish till you get to 41 02.535 74 15.763. You can either take the white trail which is a good haul, very uneven terrain, or you can follow the path which leads maybe 2/3 of a mile, making it much longer but also much easier on the legs. (If you parked at the top and bushwhacked, disregard that comment, as you'll hit that same trail so close to the cache it'd be pointless to head for the whitetrail...) Check out the ruins, then head over to the cache. It should be fairly obvious, however the   cache container is covered with camo tape, so you might look in the right spot & think it's not there. Be sure to search with your hands, not just your eyes...

This information comes from the Ramapo park website...

 Ramapo Lake was formed 12,000 years ago during a glacial retreat. When Dutch settlers found it, They named it after the muskrats that lived there -- Rotten Poel (Rats Pond) but the English only heard Rotten Pond and the name stuck. In the later part of the 19th century, Jacob Rogers, the son of the founder of the locomotive industry in Paterson, N. J., assembled a three square mile tract of land around the Pond from a dozen parcels of land. He greatly increased the size of the Pond by placing a stone dam across its outlet. Rogers died in 1901, and his will directed that the property be given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That organization leased and sold it to Howard P. Frothingham, a New York financier and avid fisherman in 1905. It was thought that he would turn it into a first rate game preserve. After changing the name of the lake to "Le Grande Lake", however, he sold two years later to Pliny Fisk, an associate. Fisk was expected to establish a community similar to Toxedo Park on the property. The realization of this scheme, however had to wait the purchase of the property a year and a half later by William Porter. He divided the land between two corporations: The Ramapo Club and Ramapo Park. The former owned the lake and a strip of land around it, and the later, the hilly woodland. This procedure would allow owners of houses on the hills to share the use of the lake. Porter built himself a house (which later came to be known as Van Sly Castle), but his death only a few years later led to the abandonment of the plan. The Club was merged into the park in 1914, and the subsequent history of the corporation is unclear.

    Clifford F. MacEnvoy appears to have gained control of it in the early 1920's. He was a wealthy developer, and was a general contractor for the construction of the Wanaque Reservoir. He built a house on the large mountain northeast of the lake. The state purchased what is now the Ramapo Mountain forest from his estate in 1976.    The history of Van Slyke Castle revolves largely around Ruth A. Coles and her husbands. Coles was a nurse who had the good fortune to care for Charles E. Halliwell, a captain of industry in New York. She became his second wife in the fall of 1906. He died a year later leaving her one and a half million dollars, a large fortune in those days. in 1909, she married William Porter, a stockbroker and close friend of her former husband. At that time, Porter was building a house on Fox Mountain above Le Grande Lake, which he called "Foxcroft". Porter died in an automobile accident two years later before he could realize his development of the former Rogers' tract. In 1913, Cole married her third husband, Warren C Van Slyke, an attorney. He was an assistant to the chief of naval intelligence in World War 1, and later argued the claims resulting from the sinking of the Lusitania. They lived near Jamaica, Long Island. After Mr. Van Slyke's death in 1925, his widow lived year around at Foxcroft. She died in 1940 at the age of 63. Foxcroft was left to her family who promptly sold it. In the early 1950's it became involved in a bitter divorce and was not used. Vandals soon broke in and finally torched the mansion in 1959.