Drained Lake Hopatcong reveals mysterious rock bridge to abandoned Liffy Island

• Affectionately known as Pete, William Peterson was the last person known to stay on the island.
• No one knows who built the stone bridge to Liffy Island

JEFFERSON TOWNSHIP — Every five years, a mysterious stone causeway of unknown origin emerges as the waters of New Jersey’s largest lake drain.

Jutting from the shallows of Lake Hopatcong’s northern shore, the strip of stacked stones connects a preserved stretch of mainland with uninhabited Liffy Island. Only when the lake is lowered is the bridge exposed.

That the bridge is typically hidden below water is curious. However, its height is explained by another typically submerged artifact: an ore loading dock off Nolan’s Point.

Who built the bridge remains a mystery. There are a few suspects, said Marty Kane of the Lake Hopatcong Historical Museum.

“Any construction on Liffy Island itself is owed to a Boy Scout camp,” he said. “Other construction in that area is almost certainly attributable to the Brady Coal & Ice Company.”

Story continues below gallery. 

Once a part of the mainland, Liffy Island formed as the lake took shape.

Before it became a mid-19th century economic powerhouse and early-20th century tourist destination, the land now called Lake Hopatcong contained two natural lakes. Little and Great ponds were connected by a streambed near Native Americans' farmland.

European settlers keen on the area’s mining potential raised the water level by 5 to 6 feet in the 1750s to power an iron forge. About 75 years later, a connected lake was raised another 6 feet to help fuel the Morris Canal.

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The canal project further dammed the valley to allow for the transport of lumber, iron and other products. The canal's thirst and the draw of the Musconetcong River kept the water lower than it is today.

Its still massive surface area of 4 square miles allowed ice harvesters such as the Brady Coal & Ice Company to profit each winter.

Backed by the Brady brothers, who have a nearby road, bridge and cove named in their honor, the company operated five area ice houses and controlled 2,750 acres – including Liffy Island. The land around Liffy was mostly used to control the shoreline from competition, but it was also used to harvest lumber, Kane said.

Present day

Today, township officials are hoping to bring some cut lumber back in the form of a boardwalk to Liffy Island.

The poorly-marked trail running from Prospect Point Road to the shore near Liffy Island has already been named the James Leach Boardwalk Trail in honor of the longtime town manager. The much shorter hike down an evenly pitched woods road at the end of Mason Street once open to hikers has been blocked off by a homeowner.

From any entrance, arriving at the bridge requires a hike through quiet forest.

Of the lake’s four largest islands, Liffy is the only one without homes. The area around it is also preserved thanks to the failed North Shore Estates housing project among other circumstances that allowed it to be conserved by the town as Prospect Point Preserve.

When the lake is at normal levels, there appear to be prerequisites for crossing from the mainland to Liffy: a boat, the ability to swim or thick ice. Trust that the roughly 200-foot stone bridge is there, and one can walk across in shin-deep water.

Without the water, walking the bridge seems far less like a leap of faith.

Lakebed muck surrounds the bridge. Prints from white-tailed deer show how sloppy it would be to trudge through. The far-off wetlands, thick with reeds, look even less inviting.

'Scout Island' and Pete 

At roughly 1,000 feet in diameter, Liffy Island provides decent area to explore. After modern refrigeration put an end to the Brady Brothers’ ice business, a Boy Scout organization based in Staten Island laid claim on the pristine stretch of lakefront.

By the time the land was purchased by the group in 1922, most of Lake Hopatcong’s shore was stacked with fishing camps, boarding houses and massive hotels as visitors flooded in on tourist cars along mining railroads.

Liffy Island, then called “Scout Island,” was part of 77 acres known as Camp Aquehonga. In its first year, the camp hosted roughly four dozen scouts for $12, two-week sessions. Tents were slept in. Hikes were taken. Canoes were rowed.

Kane said the boys were brought to the island by boat, but suspects the path to the mainland was most likely built at that time to allow for hiking off the island.

By 1929, the scouts were gone. A new venue in the Catskills, the 12,000-acre Ten Mile River Scout Camps, had become their bastion.

The only hint they were ever there is a small concrete foundation near the island’s south end. That and the camp cook, William Peterson. Peterson decided to come each summer, scouts or not. And he stayed into the early 1970s.

Affectionately known as Pete, Peterson was the last person known to stay on the island. Three separate campfire circles and a mini-keg hint at continued camping, though much more clandestine.

Lowering the lake 

On Saturday, a group of volunteers visited the island for a morning cleanup. Organized by the Lake Hopatcong Foundation, the lake-wide cleanup takes advantage of the five-year lake lowering program. During the 2013 drawdown, about 400 volunteers pulled 1,100 tires, 3,500 bottles and cans and other trash from the lakebed.

“We can get so much more debris out of the lake when it’s low like this,” said cleanup coordinator Donna Macalle-Holly of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation, who had no guesses about the bridge's origin.

The man-made lake is lowered every five years under a state permit to allow property owners to execute repairs on docks and seawalls. The lake freezes over each year anyway, but the lowering requires boat owners to get their boats out earlier. The lowering generally starts at the end of September, allowing for a relatively full boating season.

Drawdowns also provide a reminder for lakefront residents to replace dock address numbers for emergency service programs, are known to kill off nuisance aquatic plants in the shore-side shallows where they are most likely to bother recreational boaters and other lake users and allow lakebed cleanup projects to commence.

It also allows new people to discover the bridge, though Mary Lynne Barker, a regular cleanup volunteer who has lived near the island for more than 30 years said she has yet to be asked about the bridge. Barker also has no idea how it got there.

"Silly me, I just figured that it was always there," she said. "But it does look like it actually had to be done."