The Preserve Franklin Lakes Renamed Last Fall, and the One Everyone Still Confuses It With

The borough's own website still tells visitors what to do if their GPS doesn't recognize the new name. "For older GPS units use address: 1196 High Mountain Rd North Haledon, NJ," the page reads, right below the current address of 1 Russ Schroeder Way. That's not a typo left over from a redesign. It's an admission that a year after the change, enough devices and enough habits still point to the old identity that the town felt it needed a workaround.

The place in question is the 120-acre preserve off High Mountain Road that most residents have driven past a thousand times without giving its name a second thought. For nearly two decades it was the Franklin Lakes Nature Preserve. On October 11, 2025, the borough renamed it the G. Thomas Donch Nature Preserve, honoring the mayor who was in office when the town acquired the property in 2006. Before that, the 75-acre lake at its center was known as the Haledon Reservoir, the water supply for Haledon, North Haledon, and Prospect Park.

Here's the part that actually matters if you live here and plan to use it this fall: the rename landed at the same time the preserve's boating season is heading toward its annual cutoff, and Franklin Lakes has a second, entirely separate natural landmark that gets mixed up with it constantly. Sorting out which is which, and knowing what closes when, is more useful this month than any generic list of fall activities.

A Rename With a Real Reason, Not a Rebrand

Town nature preserves don't usually get ceremonies. This one did. The renaming honored G. Thomas Donch specifically for his role in securing the land, a partnership between the Borough of Franklin Lakes and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, funded mostly through county and state grants. The borough's page on the preserve still carries the parenthetical "formerly called Franklin Lakes Nature Preserve" in its own headline, which tells you the town expects the old name to stick around in conversation for a while yet.

It's worth knowing the shape of the place if you haven't hiked it recently. The 2.3-mile trail system inside the preserve connects to 11.2 miles of trails at High Mountain Park Preserve across the Wayne line, and a separate ADA-accessible loop follows the lake's edge with viewing platforms built for wheelchairs and strollers alike. A local hike writeup that predates the renaming still walks through the same loop trail, the same pontoon bridges over the lake's northern dike, the same views of High Mountain, because none of that changed. Only the sign at the entrance did.

The Other Preserve in Town Is a Different Place Entirely

If you've ever told a friend to meet you "at the nature preserve" and they showed up somewhere else, this is probably why. Franklin Lakes has two distinct natural sites that share a category but nothing else.

The G. Thomas Donch Nature Preserve is a public, borough-owned facility built around a lake, open for fishing, boating, and hiking, with boat rentals handled through Ramsey Outdoor as part of the town's Mayor's Wellness Campaign. It runs on borough rules, not a program calendar.

Lorrimer Sanctuary, at 790 Ewing Avenue, is something else. It's a private nature center run by New Jersey Audubon, bequeathed to the organization by Lucine L. Lorrimer in 1956, and it runs its own full calendar of paid programs: birthday parties, scout badge projects, summer camps, and seasonal festivals. Different address, different owner, different rules, and neither one is a satellite of the other.

That distinction isn't trivia. It changes what you should expect to find at each place and who you should call if you're trying to book something.

Two Closing Windows Before Winter

The rename coincides with a real deadline at the preserve, and Lorrimer Sanctuary is running its own separate clock on the fall side of its calendar.

Boating at the preserve runs April 1 through November 15 each year, and the rules are specific: kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards have to be small enough to carry on top of or inside a vehicle, trailered boats aren't allowed, and launches happen only from the designated area off High Mountain Road. If you've been meaning to get the kayak on the lake before the weather turns, the window is measured in weeks now, not months.

The Market's Last Saturdays

The Franklin Lakes Farmers & Artisan Market runs Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Veterans Plaza, and this year's season stretches from May 16 through November 21. That's a longer run than a typical spring-to-summer farmers market, which means the vendors who show up in late October and November are usually leaning into the harvest end of things rather than the peak-summer produce crowd. If you've only ever caught this market in June, the November Saturdays have a different feel entirely, closer to the fall festival programming happening across town than to a produce stand.

Lorrimer's Fall Calendar Runs on Its Own Clock

Separate from anything happening at the preserve, Lorrimer Sanctuary keeps its own seasonal rhythm going. The sanctuary's After School Nature Club fall session starts September 30, and its Wilderness Skills Series runs Saturday mornings through the fall. Registration for these programs runs through Eventbrite, largely because on-site parking is limited and NJ Audubon caps attendance for each session.

Lorrimer also has a longstanding Apple Cider Fall Festival that the sanctuary tends to bring back most years, built around cider press demonstrations, kids' crafts, and guided nature walks. It's the kind of event that shows up on the calendar with enough regularity that longtime residents plan around it without needing a reminder, though the exact date shifts year to year, so it's worth checking the sanctuary's own listings before you build a Saturday around it.

Before You Head Out

None of this requires much extra effort to sort out once you know the two places are different. If you're loading a kayak into the car, you're headed to the preserve off High Mountain Road, and you have until mid-November. If you're registering a kid for an afternoon program or planning around a festival, you're headed to Ewing Avenue and Lorrimer Sanctuary, which runs on its own separate booking system. And if you're just trying to catch the market before it wraps for the year, Veterans Plaza on a Saturday morning is still the move through November 21.

For anyone stopping for coffee before or after any of it, Farm & Flour Cafe opened at 436 Pulis Avenue in the former Country Cafe spot and runs breakfast and brunch daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Uncle Louie's Pizza on Franklin Avenue is open seven days a week if the day turns into a dinner instead.

Franklin Lakes doesn't change much year to year, which is part of why a name on a sign is worth pausing over when it does. Whether you're chasing the last weeks on the water or just trying to get your friend to the right parking lot, knowing which preserve is which will save you more time than any list of things to do this fall.

If a change in your own address is what brought you to this page, The Ivanov Group works Franklin Lakes and the rest of Bergen County every day and is glad to talk through what's next.