In 1910, twin brothers John and Anthony Kuser purchased the High Point Inn and the surrounding 1,700-acre property. After operating the inn for one summer, John sold his interest to Anthony and Anthony's wife, Susie Dryden Kuser, who remodeled the inn by tearing down a third of the structure and transforming it from an Adirondack-style inn into a Colonial Revival-style mansion. They also inherited an additional 8,000 acres of the ridgetop from Susie's father, John Dryden, a U.S. Senator and founder of the Prudential Insurance Company. For more than a decade, the nearly 10,000-acre estate served as the Kusers' vacation home and became a regional landmark, while they increasingly welcomed the public to enjoy its natural beauty. They eventually decided the mountaintop tract should remain open to everyone and donated the estate to the State of New Jersey, which opened High Point Park in 1923 as one of the state's first state parks. Five years later, at the conclusion of World War I, the Kusers proposed and financed construction of the Monument at the highest elevation in New Jersey to honor all New Jersey veterans past, present, and future. The remodeling of the inn was so extensive that rumors long persisted that the original building had burned down; thirty-six carpenters, along with electricians, gas-fitters, plumbers, masons, and decorators, demolished the southern third and refashioned the rest into a mansion with utility and service rooms in the basement, living and public rooms on the main floor, eleven bedrooms and six baths on the second floor, and servants' rooms and baths on the third floor.
