Ringwood is a borough in northeastern Passaic County, New Jersey, set among the wooded ridges of the Ramapo Mountains roughly 40 miles northwest of Manhattan. Its identity is shaped by two things: a deep industrial past and an unusually strong connection to preserved open space. Before it became a commuter-oriented residential borough, Ringwood was a center of iron mining and smelting that supplied iron through the Revolutionary era and the nineteenth century. The 51-room Ringwood Manor preserves the estate of the ironmasters who ran those operations, most notably the Ryerson and Cooper-Hewitt families, and anchors the borough's sense of place. That heritage lives on in Ringwood State Park, a 582-acre historic site the Hewitt family donated to the State of New Jersey in 1938. The park is the civic centerpiece of the borough, drawing visitors for its historic house museum, gardens, and trail network. Around it, Ringwood developed as a low-density residential community, much of it clustered around four private lakes — Cupsaw, Erskine, Skyline, and Riconda — created in the 1920s and 1930s to promote the area as a hunting, fishing, and summer-resort destination. Those lake communities later filled in with permanent homes as commuters discovered the borough. Today Ringwood reads as a quiet, semi-rural borough rather than a conventional suburb. Its roughly 11,700 residents live on wooded, often lake-adjacent lots, and the community retains a distinctly outdoors-oriented character. It tends to suit households that want space, water access, and proximity to hiking while remaining within commuting distance of the New York metropolitan area. The borough educates students through the Ringwood Public School District for grades K–8, with high school students attending Lakeland Regional High School in neighboring Wanaque.