Franklin Lakes, New Jersey

History

Lenape people of the Minsi group camped in the Clove near Buttermilk Falls, a site later used for horse stables during the Revolutionary War. Through the colonial period and the 1800s the land was farms and mill sites; at one point more than a dozen mills worked the area's streams, and the last, a cider mill, burned in 1972, leaving remnants near Franklin Lake. A run of sandstone farmhouses from that era still stands. The Van Houten-Ackerman House at 1150 Franklin Lake Road, with a key date of 1768, is one of about a dozen houses in the borough listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Stone Houses of Bergen County group, many of them along Franklin Lake Road and Ewing Avenue.

The area was part of the old Franklin Township, which also included what are now Oakland, Ridgewood, Midland Park and Ho-Ho-Kus. It broke away in 1922 after a dispute over where to build a new schoolhouse, and William Pulis, for whom Pulis Avenue is named, became the first mayor. Trains once stopped at Pulis Avenue and at Crystal Lake. The lakes once drew summer visitors for swimming and riding, the Shadow Lakes Club opened as a lakeside resort during the Depression, and in the 1930s the borough had its own small airport, where the fire department ran weekend air shows until it closed in the 1940s.

Franklin Lakes also has a place in the history of American rocketry. In 1942 Reaction Motors, an early company devoted to rocket engines, built a test stand where Kent Place meets today's Dogwood Trail. Over about 16 months it fired liquid-fuel motors meant to help aircraft take off, including a prototype of jet-assisted takeoff, before abandoning the site in early 1944. The site was listed on the National Register in 1979 and is on private land.

What it’s like to live there

Franklin Lakes is a residential borough built around a string of lakes and ponds. Its older routes, such as Franklin Lake Road, Ewing Avenue, Woodside Avenue and Pulis Avenue, still pass a number of sandstone houses from the 1700s and early 1800s that remain in use as homes. Named sections include Urban Farms, with its Mill Gate area, where a windmill from the old Fletcher estate still stands on private land, and the areas around Franklin Lake, Shadow Lake and Crystal Lake.

Newer housing types are coming. Under the borough's affordable-housing plan, reported by NorthJersey.com, an overlay zone covers the Becton Dickinson campus at 1 Becton Drive, the company's headquarters, with townhouses planned on part of its east side, and a separate settlement allows single-family homes and townhouses on a Pulis Avenue site.

The Franklin Lakes Public Library is on De Korte Drive, named for the DeKorte family, including former mayor Richard W. DeKorte. Franklin Lakes Public Schools serves the borough through grade 8, and the Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School District, shared with Oakland and Wyckoff, serves high school students.

Getting around

Franklin Lakes is a driving town. Route 208 crosses the middle of the borough between Wyckoff and Interstate 287 at the Oakland line, and I-287 enters at the western border and heads north toward Mahwah, with an exit inside the borough. County Route 502, made up of Franklin Lake Road and Breakneck Road, runs from Wayne in the southwest corner toward Wyckoff, and High Mountain Road leads south toward North Haledon.

The borough's own passenger train stops are long gone, and the nearest commuter rail stations are in other Bergen County towns. On the NJ Transit Main Line and Port Jervis Line, Ridgewood and Ramsey Route 17 are among the closest; on the fall 2026 weekday timetable, sample morning trains from Ramsey Route 17 reached Hoboken in about 42 minutes and New York Penn Station, by changing at Secaucus Junction, in about 49 minutes, and trains from Ridgewood took about 46 minutes to Hoboken. Hoboken Terminal connects to PATH trains and NY Waterway ferries into Manhattan.

Things to do

The Franklin Lakes Nature Preserve is the borough's largest open space, though its entrance is at 1196 High Mountain Road with a North Haledon address. It surrounds a 75-acre lake that was once the Haledon Reservoir, bought by the borough in 2006. A white-blazed shoreline loop circles the lake, a blue-blazed route follows a dike past a lagoon with floating pontoon bridges, an accessible trail leads to a lake overlook, and a red trail connects to High Mountain Park Preserve. Exposed basalt of the Watchung range, including a stretch called Basalt Beach, lines parts of the shore.

The borough's stone houses make a self-guided drive of early Bergen County architecture, especially along Franklin Lake Road, where the Van Winkle, Van Blarcom, Storms, Ackerman-Boyd and Van Houten-Ackerman houses are all National Register listings; they are private homes and are seen from the road.

The Franklin Lakes Public Library at 470 De Korte Drive runs story times, STEM programs, movies, book clubs and trivia, keeps an art gallery and local history collection, lends museum passes and a Library of Things, and its card works across 78 libraries in Bergen, Essex and Passaic counties.