Hands up, anyone who’s heard of David Felt. Until just recently my hand would’ve remained down too. In his day, however, Felt was famous enough to have a town named after him (Feltville, New Jersey) and wealthy enough to leave it when it failed. Today the Deserted Village is a small tourist attraction, a wooded site on the National Register of Historic Places, and the residence of a few locals who prefer the quiet life. David Felt settled in Union County back in the days when it was rural, and established an industry around a mill. The available literature is frustratingly silent on what kind of a mill it was, but it was important enough for him to build housing to accommodate his workers out in the middle of nowhere. While many of the houses no longer stand, including that of Felt himself, the property has a few remaining buildings and a sense of history.
The man that employees knew as “King David” went on to other ventures and has largely faded from history. Incredibly in this age of internet fame he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page. Symbolically, the only building that remains accessible to the public in the church—now a museum with a few artifacts from a century-and-a-half ago. Having lived not far from Feltville for nearly a decade now, I had no idea of its presence until a chance meeting held there brought it to my wife’s attention. We can build our own little kingdoms, it seems, and call them after our own names. They are no guarantee, however, that what we leave behind will not become a ghost-town as the interests of civilization move in directions we had never anticipated.