The house built on a volcano

This is part of an article about a woman whose home is built on a 440 million year old dormant volcano in Sussex County.

Stories about suburban sprawl in New Jersey usually contain a lament for lost farmland, but this story is about new homes on something much more scarce — the state’s last available volcano. The old “Beemerville Volcano” in the rural Sussex County township of Wantage now has a house on top. “I’m on the cone” of the volcano, said Kathryn Kelly Herkert of Hasbrouck Heights, Bergen County. “It’s been extinct for 440 million years. I’m comfortable with that.”

The placid, picturesque knob last spewed lava in the Precambrian era and is officially classified as an extinct volcano. Now, it’s just another plot of ground on which to build a home, although one with spectacular views of the neighboring countryside and a history dating to Mother Earth’s childhood. Geologists lament losing the old volcano to a house because the formation is the oldest of the very few volcanic necks, or magma pipes, found in New Jersey. (The most well-known volcanic neck is the jutting “Fraternity Rock” alongside the New Jersey Turnpike in Secaucus.)

Michael Carr, a geology professor at Rutgers University, once brought students to visit the Beemerville Volcano, but stopped about 20 years ago when homes began to crop up on the apex. “It is too bad that a geological rarity is turned into a suburban lot,” Carr said after learning of the latest home built there. After blasting began for construction of the home, some residents mounted a petition to try to preserve the volcano, but nothing ever came of it, Kelly Herkert said. At least one resident does not begrudge Kelly Herkert her home on the volcano. Henry Byma had a dairy farm at the bottom of the hill for some four decades until moving three miles up the road in October. His son runs the farm now.