On a Saturday morning in late summer, the six pickleball courts at 395 Southern Boulevard fill up before the swim lessons even start. Paddles pop against the hard surface, a lifeguard whistle cuts through somewhere near the beach, and a line of kids in goggles waits for their turn in the 3.5-acre pond that gives the club its name. Nothing about the scene suggests that five years ago, this property had a signed purchase agreement with a developer and a closing date on the calendar.
Most people who drive past the gate know the club has history. Fewer know how close that history came to ending, or that the thing everyone remembers as the moment Noe Pond got saved, a march by more than 100 members, wasn't actually what saved it.
The Sale Nobody Saw Coming Until It Was Already Signed
Noe Pond had survived plenty by 2020. The pond itself dates to before the Revolutionary War, when it sat on the Noe family's roughly 800-acre dairy and rose farm and supplied irrigation water and winter ice. In 1955, Bailey Brower Jr. and his wife Nancy "Taz" Brower, working with Jack and Ruth Noe, converted it into a private swim club. Kim Barton, a Brower descendant, and her husband Chuck bought the club from her parents in 2004 and ran it for another decade and a half.
The 2020 season kept the club running through the pandemic under the Bartons and general manager Kirk Warshaw, who managed to open the waterfront, tennis courts, and concession area while most of the country's summer plans fell apart. Then, in September of that year, the Bartons told members they'd received an unsolicited offer from what they described as a very reputable developer. They accepted it. A closing was targeted for December 2020 or January 2021.
By December 21, members got the message that made it official: the sale had closed, and all club operations and activities had ceased. The buyer was later identified as The Silverman Group of Basking Ridge.
The March Raised Awareness. It Didn't Change The Deed.
Word of the pending sale spread through the fall, and a group of residents organized as Save Noe Pond, worried that the 35-acre property would turn into high-density housing. They held a march that Saturday, partnered with the Great Swamp Watershed Association, and got the organization's executive director, Sally Rubin, on record saying Noe Pond had been part of Chatham's culture since the American Revolution.
That advocacy did real work. It kept the property's fate in the local conversation for a full year while the Silverman Group held the land, and it likely shaped whatever informal expectations the eventual buyers walked into. But advocacy alone didn't return the deed to club members. Through the entire 2021 season, the property operated under interim arrangements while its actual ownership remained with the developer. A march can generate pressure. It cannot generate a purchase agreement.
What Actually Changed Hands In January 2022
The turn came from a different direction entirely. On January 17, 2022, a newly formed entity called Noe Pond LLC announced it had signed a purchase contract with the Silverman Group. The people behind it were Madison residents Scott Readlinger and Lawrence Palumbo, partnered with a Chatham-based company called Boxcar, Inc.
Boxcar wasn't a random investor. The company had spent four years running commuter shuttle services for Chatham and Madison residents, which meant its leadership already knew the membership base it was about to inherit. Boxcar CEO Joe Colangelo said as much when the deal was announced, framing the purchase as a continuation of a relationship the company had already built with local families.
Readlinger and Palumbo put it plainly in the same announcement: "We are delighted at the opportunity to preserve Noe Pond as open space and a club for area residents. As members of Noe, our one and only objective is to ensure that this Chatham institution remains a family gathering place for years and years to come."
That sentence contains the actual mechanism. The buyers weren't a nonprofit or a government entity stepping in to preserve parkland. They were former members who had the capital and the motivation to outbid or out-negotiate the developer directly, then formed a company to hold the asset going forward. Noe Pond wasn't rescued. It was repurchased, by people who already had a stake in it working.
What Membership Looks Like Now, And What's New
The club that reopened in 2022 carries the tagline "Established 1955. Reborn 2022," and the amenity list has grown past what the Browers built. Today's 35 acres include the same 3.5-acre pond with its white sand beach, but also eight Har-Tru tennis courts, four paddle courts, and six pickleball courts that didn't exist in the club's original build. Dues now run through a Boxcar-managed app rather than a paper ledger, and the kids' program still runs ages 3 to 11 with certified lifeguards teaching swim lessons, much as it did under the Browers' original swimming-emblem program.
The pickleball courts are worth pausing on, because they're a small but telling signal of how the new ownership approached the reopening. Rather than simply restoring what existed before the sale, Boxcar and its partners built toward a sport that barely registered in suburban New Jersey when the Bartons still ran things. It's the kind of decision that only makes sense if you're planning for the club's next several decades of membership, not just patching together what was lost.
The Founders Didn't Get Much Time With The Reopened Club
Bailey Brower Jr. died on October 8, 2022, less than a year after the sale to Noe Pond LLC closed. He was 94. Nancy "Taz" Brower died on March 25, 2024, at 95. They had been married 71 years, and beyond Noe, they had helped establish two other regional swim clubs, Copper Springs in Meyersville and Clover Hill in Millington.
Bailey got to see the club reopen under new ownership before he passed. Taz saw two more seasons of it. Their names are still on a historical marker the Chatham Township Historical Society installed at the pond in 2010, but the people who actually remember the club's founding are now gone from it entirely.
That matters more than a footnote. For 65 years, Noe Pond's continuity ran through one family, first the Noes, then the Browers, then the Bartons by marriage and inheritance. The 2022 sale broke that chain. What replaced it wasn't a public trust or a township acquisition. It was a private membership corporation run by people with no blood relation to the original founders, held together by former members who happened to have the means to buy in when it mattered.
If you live in Chatham Township, that's the part worth knowing next time you drive past the gate on Southern Boulevard. The pond you see today isn't a family legacy quietly continuing. It's a community asset that almost became a subdivision, and that only stayed a swim club because a handful of its own members were willing to act like buyers instead of just marchers when the moment actually came down to a signature on a contract.
More on the club's current programs and membership is available directly through the Noe Pond Club, and the fuller account of the Brower family's role in shaping the club, along with the two sister clubs they helped found, is documented by Mr. Local History Project.
Whether you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, or you're further along and thinking about what it would take to put down roots near a place like Noe Pond, Karen Torrente knows Chatham Township from the inside. Let's Connect.
