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Yes, and that was once a no man's land. When I was a kid I drove up there several times out of curiosity. The area straddles the Rockland County-Bergen County border and includes the Village of Hillburn in New York and the Stag Hill section of Mahwah in Bergen County. The "residents" were very menacing to outsiders and I once fled in fear when a group of thuggish teenagers approached my car. And they were not going to say hello how are you. A friend of mine who drove up there was almost trapped when he drove in and they put a tree trunk in the street to try to block his escape. While it many not be true today, it was well known as a place to stay away from. There was junk everywhere, and the area had a reputation as a receiving area for stolen cars. The residents are not Native Americans and I believe the effort to achieve a tribal designation is really for economic reasons. They are a mixture of Dutch, Black, and Native American and a large proportion of the residents intermarry and have one of very few names, especially Van Dunk, but also De Groat, DeFreese or Mann.
It is a very odd area. I haven't visited since my teens but when we did go up there, it was to defy death and experience the adrenaline rush of escaping capture.
For more understanding of the community, HBO has done a wonderful documentary on how Ford Motor Company (remember the Ford plant on Route 17?) dumped all it's toxic waste on the Ramapough Mountain Indian property in Ringwood/Mahwah. Many in that community are now dead from the process. They are now a bigger political force. Once a neglected and isolated population, that is now over. MANN V. FORD by Maro Chermayeff & Micah Fink - Documentary Feature Film @ Brooklyn Film Festival
This is fascinating! I grew up in Clifton, and we used to go to Ringwood manor (park, historical home) and also Campgaw Mt in Mahwah for skiing. I though this was an urban legend much like the Jackson Whites.
Oh, now that I read the wiki, these are the so-called Jackson Whites. As a kid I heard many horror stories about them coming down from the mountains and raiding neighborhoods.
I believe they are mentioned in the book Weird NJ.
Yes, and that was once a no man's land. When I was a kid I drove up there several times out of curiosity. The area straddles the Rockland County-Bergen County border and includes the Village of Hillburn in New York and the Stag Hill section of Mahwah in Bergen County. The "residents" were very menacing to outsiders and I once fled in fear when a group of thuggish teenagers approached my car. And they were not going to say hello how are you. A friend of mine who drove up there was almost trapped when he drove in and they put a tree trunk in the street to try to block his escape. While it many not be true today, it was well known as a place to stay away from. There was junk everywhere, and the area had a reputation as a receiving area for stolen cars. The residents are not Native Americans and I believe the effort to achieve a tribal designation is really for economic reasons. They are a mixture of Dutch, Black, and Native American and a large proportion of the residents intermarry and have one of very few names, especially Van Dunk, but also De Groat, DeFreese or Mann.
It is a very odd area. I haven't visited since my teens but when we did go up there, it was to defy death and experience the adrenaline rush of escaping capture.
Yes, we did the same. I remember driving up Stag Hill Road with friends, and we came upon a sign that said, "No Dumping". It was surrounded by trash and the the sign was full of bulletholes.
I also went part-time in my junior and senior years of high school to "Satellite School" in Mahwah, where you could learn a vocational trade (I sucked at cutting hair, which is why I'm not a hairdresser today.) A few of the Jackson Whites, as they were called at that time by others, and before they started calling themselves the "Ramapough", went to school there, too. One girl smelled so bad that no one wanted to work on her. Her cousin, who lived off the hill and in the actual town of Mahwah, told us that the people on the mountain got their water from a community well, so no one up there bathed often and that's why the girl stunk. Eventually, the smelly girl left because she was pregnant at 16--her cousin then informed us that she'd already had three miscarriages and was happy because she was hanging on to this one.
From what I understand from my sister, who is a genealogy freak, they have very little, if any, actual Indian in their DNA, though I don't know how good that information is. They mostly look like a mixture of black and white, with extremes sometimes in the same family. And I think you covered all the last names up there.
NJ recognizes them as a tribe, but the federal government doesn't.
For more understanding of the community, HBO has done a wonderful documentary on how Ford Motor Company (remember the Ford plant on Route 17?) dumped all its toxic waste on the Ramapough Mountain Indian property in Ringwood/Mahwah. Many in that community are now dead from the process. They are now a bigger political force. Once a neglected and isolated population, that is now over. MANN V. FORD by Maro Chermayeff & Micah Fink - Documentary Feature Film @ Brooklyn Film Festival
They also own some of the last undeveloped land in Bergen County, which should help their economic situation. Ford dumped in places other than the community's land, but they were definitely affected.
This is fascinating! I grew up in Clifton, and we used to go to Ringwood manor (park, historical home) and also Campgaw Mt in Mahwah for skiing. I though this was an urban legend much like the Jackson Whites.
Oh, now that I read the wiki, these are the so-called Jackson Whites. As a kid I heard many horror stories about them coming down from the mountains and raiding neighborhoods.
I believe they are mentioned in the book Weird NJ.
Thanks for posting this.
I don't know if they actually "raided" neighborhoods, but yes, there was a lot of criminal activity on the level of breaking into homes by the community. I have cousins who grew up in Mahwah, and they had a lot of stories from school about fights started by the Jackson White kids and theft, etc. This was in the 1970s when Mahwah had a population of about 2000 and was still partly farmland (my cousins had an RFD mail address.) My cousins would just avoid them.
They were outcasts because of their racial mix, and it just continued for generation after generation.
i grew up in mahwah and had a few friends who lived in that area who not so coincidentally had the last names of Mann and defreeze. i didn't think much of it but as i got older and the ability to drive it became very obvious that not all of mahwah was on equal footing and distanced myself from the weird, violent, and drug filled nature that encompassed that area. the incest that was mentioned in one of the posts above is spot on as well. we called them jackson-whites and the 1 or 2 times i was up in the mountains for backwoods party some terrifying things happened. I haven't been back in almost 15 years
There is a new movie with Christian Bale out. Woody Harrelson plays an alpha male (De Groat). The tribe was not happy about the movie and sued. Go figure.
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