House Washing in Kinnelon, NJ

Once known as Charlotteburg (named after Charlotte, wife of King George III of Great Britain), Kinnelon was formed as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on February 20, 1922, from portions of Pequannock Township, based on the results of a referendum passed on March 21, 1922.

By the 1880s Francis Kinney, a 19th-century industrialist who founded Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company built an estate that dates back to 1884. Kinney purchased upwards of 5,000 acres (20 km²) of land and built a colossal “summer cottage” known as Smoke Rise, which is a translation of the Pequannock Native American name for the mountainous area, where a heavy mist often rises at sunset. His son, Morris Kinney, for whom the borough of Kinnelon was named 41 years later, lived most of his life on the estate.

Upon Morris Kinney’s death in 1945, he left the estate to longtime friend John Talbot Sr., former mayor of the borough, and a founder of the Chilton Memorial Hospital, Pompton Plains (John Talbot Sr. was a real estate developer in New York City and a patron of the arts and was credited with the revival of ballet as a major art form in the United States in the 1930s), as a tribute to their lifetime friendship and mutually shared love of Smoke Rise.