PIEDMONT DRIVE

There's something familiar about the places where the LaMonte-Mason-Kern families settled. You'll see it in the background of photos from Bound Brook in New Jersey, Romney in West Virginia, and Wheatlands near Berryville, Virginia.

First Watchung Mountain behind Codrington Park in Bound Brook, New Jersey

It's fortuitous for Bound Brook that these wealthy families who could have moved anywhere chose to live in the foothills of the Appalachian piedmont. For, without their settlement in the Raritan Valley below First Watchung Mountain, our town would be without the Memorial Library, Codrington Park, LaMonte Field, the Greenbrook Academy, LaMonte School, Washington Campground, and Washington School (now BBHS). Neighborhoods west of Vossellar Avenue and north of Maple Avenue, LaMonte subdivisions one-and-all, would have developed differently or not at all.

Estimated former LaMonte family land in Bound Brook, New Jersey

In the early twentieth century, as the pre-electric Evergreen mansion above West High Street aged, George Mason LaMonte built a new estate on the family's pasturage in the northeast part of town. There Piedmont Farm still stands, hidden behind a forest of massive oaks and firs appropriately filled with a committee of black vultures, supervisors of the completion of events set in motion three hundred years ago by the buying and selling of black Africans.

Main entrance to Piedmont Farm, Bound Brook, New Jersey