Lakeside is a community of 150 log cabins and homes nestled between the western shore of Greenwood Lake and the foot of Bearfort Mountain in the Highlands of Northern New Jersey. Like most lake communities, Lakeside has a rich history, but one that is all but forgotten today.

Northern New Jersey is dotted with lake communities that sprung up in the late 1800s as summer escapes from the heat, smell, and diseases of nearby large cities, where sanitation departments and air conditioning were yet to be developed.

While some reports date Lakeside back to the 1830s, it was not until the Lakeside Inn was built in the 1860s that the community began appearing on published maps.

Guy Sejuine La Tourette, who wrote about his trip here in the early 1870s, described the Lakeside Inn as “a beautiful place half way down the western side (of Greenwood Lake) where summer boarders are taken.” Accord to this account, Lakeside Inn offered nineteenth century guests a tennis court, stables, a livery, and dogs and guides for hunting.

The Inn (later the Lakeside Hotel) also offered a beach and boating. In the early 1900s, Lakeside’s boathouse boasted a 3-story dock and deck. The Hotel’s boathouse is now the Lakeside Community beach house.

Because a fire destroyed the hotel and its records, we have only brief glimpses into Lakeside’s development from a handful of charred papers saved by community resident Mary Ann Schechter. But these few papers tell the story of the community and the country at that time.

The Lakeside Inn’s proprietor in 1901 is noted as John Hagen. By 1914, W.S. Gordon is listed as the proprietor. Gordon and his family would own and develop Lakeside and several neighboring communities in the decades to come.

W.S. Gordon began to develop the area as a summer rental community. After his death in 1928, his sons Stephen and William Gordon took over the business. We have some letters from Stephen from this period, showing how the new Lakeside Company began renting vacation parcels, building roads and supplying electricity and water.

The company also began building log homes on the parcels. A promotional letter from 1933 offers “cottages from $100 to $600 for the season” and “genuine logs cabins for sale at $1,579, complete with the lot.” Most of these cabins were built with Chestnut wood, from trees that died at the turn of the century from a blight that wiped out the stately tree in America. Jim VanHooker, late of West Milford, recalled cutting down Chestnut trees for log cabins with his father in the 1930s, and selling the scrap logs as firewood for $20 a cord “because it burned better than oak.”

Then came the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Scattered correspondence from the hotel reflects this difficult time in America, and in Lakeside. Real estate agents write to tell Stephen Gordon that his prices are too high in the post-crash housing market. Builders offer materials and labor at discounted rates or on speculation, in order to gain Lakeside’s business. And renters and buyers regularly plead for extensions on their payments.

By 1935, the Lakeside Company is struggling, leasing the Lakeside Hotel and grounds to be run by someone else. The company is also leasing large tracts of land for summer camps, such as Trinity Camp for Boys and Furnace Brook Camp. Passenger train service to Greenwood Lake also abruptly ends in 1935, assumedly due to decreased ridership.

However, by the 1950s, Lakeside began to flourish once more. In the post-World War II era, Americans has money and leisure time. Lakeside in the 1950s was now a community offering a variety of attractions, from summer bathing and boating to ski trails in winter. Furnace Brook was also established as a residential community under the Lakeside Company during this time.

Many current homeowners are second- and third generation Lakeside residents. Few reminders remain of sleigh horse rides along frozen dirt roads or summer steamboat trips to arrive at Lakeside.