Snake Hill

Snake Hill, officially Laurel Hill, is a prominent diabase outcrop in the Secaucus Meadowlands, formed about 200 million years ago as an offshoot of the same magma intrusion that created the Palisades. Known to Dutch settlers as Slangenbergh for its many snakes, it later became the site of Hudson County’s penal, medical, and charitable institutions from 1855 to 1962, including an asylum, hospitals, quarry, and potter’s field. Heavy quarrying and mid-20th-century leveling drastically reduced the hill. Today its remnants are preserved in Laurel Hill County Park, while the relocation of more than 4,500 burial grounds bodies in 2003 underscores the site’s unusually layered and troubling past.

Secaucus, New Jersey · United States