Branch Brook Park is the oldest park in the first county park system established in the United States and an outstanding example of naturalistic landscape design. The Essex County Park Commission, formed in 1895, acquired the first 60 acres from the City of Newark that year, and later donations and purchases expanded the park by the mid-1930s to its present 2-mile length in Newark and Belleville. Named for a brook that flows into the Passaic River, its 360 acres once contained swamps, cornfields, and a training camp for Civil War troops. Most of the design was by John Charles Olmstead, stepson of Frederick Law Olmstead, planner of New York's Central Park and the U.S. Capitol grounds. A large lake, ponds, winding paths, meadows, and woods surround numerous recreation facilities, and a skating rink now occupies a former reservoir carved out of a brownstone quarry near Clifton Avenue. Its 3,000 cherry trees, begun in the 1920s by Caroline Bamberger Fuld, sister of a department store magnet, are the largest collection in the nation. An elaborate gateway modeled on one in Scotland was donated in 1899 by Robert Ballantine, whose brewing family once owned some of this land, and the park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.