When traveling on Ridge Road (CR 620) between Oak Ridge and Sparta NJ, you may notice a little known by-way, called Edison Road, heading to the top of Sparta Mountain. When you check your map you see that this road does indeed go through Edison before plunging down the mountain to Ogdensburg.
This, however, is not the Edison NJ, which lies far to the south and is the one that most people are familiar with. This is the location of Thomas Edison’s greatest experiment, his “Ogden Baby” as he called it, in which he invested ten years of his life and over two million dollars of his own money.
If you turn onto Edison Road and travel to the top you will have the strange experience of passing a development of newly constructed starter castles and then, in the blink of an eye, traveling a hundred years back in time as huge stone ruins line both sides of the road. In the summer time even these massive edifices are easy to miss as almost everything is covered with a blanket of lush green vegetation.
Travel a little farther, just past the abandoned Coplay Mine Pit, and you will come to a small parking lot on your right marked by a Sparta Mountain Wilderness Sign. When parked, take the time to enjoy the monument to Thomas Edison erected in 1999 by the Sparta Township Council, with assistance from NJ State Senator Robert E. Littell and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
This book is intended to help identify these ruins and show what once was here on top of Sparta Mountain. There are fascinating ruins, great trails, abandoned railroads and ancient mines to explore.
