What's in a name? Council to decide on park name on Nov. 14

VERNON-And the nominees are: Maple Grange Community Recreation Complex; Arrowhead View Park; Mountain View Park; Vernon’s Field of Dreams Park; and Maple Grange Community Park. Those are the names that were mentioned most frequently in the approximately 200 entries submitted by Venron Township residents in an informal “name the park” contest. Commonly referred to as Maple Grange, the park was dedicated last Sunday, about a month after local teams began playing on the two synthetic turf fields already installed. A grass field has also been completed, but will not open until next year after the turf has built up a good root system. Courts for tennis and bocce as well as horseshoe pits are also planned. The council asked for suggested names last month and Councilman Neil Desmond, who has been the council’s front man on the park acquisition and development, told the council at last Monday’s meeting what the most common suggestions sent in to the recreation department were. Many of the suggestions, Desmond said, came from children. The council put off deciding on a name until its Nov. 14 meeting. The delay, said Deputy Mayor Janet Morrison, would give Vernon residents a chance to see and think about the names provide feedback to officials. Mayor Ira Weiner remarked that he had always thought that the citizens should have something to say about the name the park would bear. “The Fagan property was not traditionally named Maple Grange and I thought the community should weigh in on this issue,” he said. The property has been called Maple Grange because it is on Maple Grange Road and is part of the Maple Grange section of the township. In an earlier meeting, Weiner had said, “I’m sorry that the issue of the park’s name has been politicized by a few Vernon residents. The allegation that the council is trying to change the name for political reasons is completely unfounded.” The controversy surrounding the purchase of lands for the park arose because Vernon had wanted to use the entire Maple Grange area to create the new park. The N.J. Department of Transportation uncovered an American Indian site in the early 1990s, when they were replacing the bridge on Maple Grange Road. The possible existence of the site had been noted in the first half of the twentieth century. A local avocational archeologist, Rick Patterson, later found thousands of Lenni-Lenape artifacts dating from approximately 8500 B.C. to 1700 A.D. were at the site, which remains undeveloped on the other side of the entry road to the recreational fields on the township’s portion of the site. After a lengthy and bitter legal battle, the Superior Court of New Jersey’s Appellate Division in April 2004 ruled in favor the Department of Environmental Protection’s position that Black Creek Native American area of Maple Grange Park must be preserved and protected. Subsequently, the DEP Green Acres Program bought the Black Creek area of Maple Grange from Vernon Township and added it to Wawayanda State Park, while the township began construction of new playing fields on the remainder of the land.