The History of Fardale Streets
By Charles Anderson, The Old Station Timetable, January 1978.
It would be impossible to find Chapel Road on a 1936 map of Mahwah because, although the street is shown, it was called St. Moritz Ave. It was named for an estate at the end of Fardale Ave., later a sandpit, site of a murder and now a development of small homes. It was quite a show place with a fine house, outbuildings, a barn and an extensive orchard. The house burned and the abandoned barn became a haven for squatters who had to be evicted by the police.
The chapel for which the street was renamed is still in use. The land for it was given by the Bogert family as was the Lutheran Cemetery land. The chapel was built as a non-denominational place of worship and Mrs. Hopper, a Bogert, taught Sunday School there. Her house is still being lived in on Campgaw Road. For some time the chapel stood unused until Peter Tissing opened it for a while. Later John Van Brookhoven and John Van Gelder conducted a successful Sunday School program which expanded to church services conducted by visiting preachers, the first of whom was Mr. Klaus, a lay reader in the Pentecostal Church in Wyckoff. The first wedding held in the chapel was that of John’s son, Henry Van Brookhoven, to Cornelia Tissing in 1939.
Fardale Ave. was once Campgaw Road, same name as the present Campgaw Road but separated from it by several farms. On it stood Fardale School #6,now part of the Fardale firehouse. Classes were small with pupils going to School #2 after 6th grade.
Morris Ave. was only a paper street until an angry resident, tired of paying taxes with no services, pestered the town into improving it. Harry Morris, a plumber, lived there in 1940. He stored his supplies in the old barn which probably antedates the house.
Bartholf’s Lane never did lead to his farm as so many lanes of those days did. It was cut through by Gilbert Bartholf as a road through his property connecting Youngs Road and Fardale Ave. A daughter had a house on the lane.
Down along Youngs Road west of the Young Homestead and across the pond is a house once owned by H. T. Grundland, a radio announcer and showman. He kept a stable and often had show girls out who rode horses along the local roads, no doubt causing considerable neck-stretching by the men in the fields.
Along in the 40’s Fardale firemen used a building still standing at the S bend on Forest Ave., a two-car garage which they rented. In it was kept a pumper donated by the Civil Defense. Three local men with pickups capable of pulling it had the key job of getting it to the fires, C. Bartholf, H. Carlough and E. Kjellander. Later, a Reo fire truck was added, but It was the pumper that responded first when a new brooder coop on the Fardale Poultry Farm burned down fortunately with no loss of life, poultry or otherwise. When heat was to be put in the chapel, the firemen, using Harry Carlough’s equipment and horse power, dragged soil from beneath the foundation to put in a basement. It was a return favor because the firemen were always allowed to hold their suppers in the building.
Actually, Fardale Avenue was quite an economic asset to the town with a thriving egg business, Bartholf’s farm and orchards and Hieland’s seasonal harvesting of two to three thousand pints of blueberries from the swampy land on the north side of the road.