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The Pinelands National Reserve is a region of more than a million acres. It is the largest land area of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond and Boston. The United States Congress recognized this special place for its rich diversity of rare plants and animals, as well as the vast aquifers that lie beneath it containing 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest water in the land.
Today, the Pinelands is also appreciated for the serene beauty of the forests and lakes. People enjoy spending time there to reconnect with nature. Many visitors are surprised to learn of the area’s industrial past and of the small towns and villages that developed in the woods.
In the 1700s, the iron industry ruled the Pines. Forges and Furnaces with names like Tauton, Atsion and Batsto fortified Washington’s troops. Bog iron munitions later armed the ships in the War of 1812. Small industrial towns grew up throughout the Pine Barrens to meet the Colonies’ needs for a variety of iron goods, including stoves and cooking pots. Feeding the furnace was a 24 hour job. Laborers worked seven days a week mining bog iron from the streams and swamps. Thousands of trees fell to the axe and baked in charcoal pits to become fuel.
By the mid 1800s, the iron industry died in the Pinelands. Paper mills, glass factories and cranberry farms often rose from the furnace ashes, as an attempt to keep the towns going. The first Mason jar was actually produced in the Pines, but once the forests became depleted the paper and glass industries also failed. Little remains of these Pine Barrens villages and towns. Sometimes only a cellar hole exists where a two-story house once stood.
Historian and botanist Ted Gordon has been exploring the Pine Barrens since he was a child. He was inspired by historian Dr. Henry Bisby and by the books of Arthur Pierce and Henry Charlton Beck. In the 1950s, he began to travel through this vast forest in search of the lost and forgotten towns. Gordon has taken thousands of photographs documenting these historic places. Within the past thirty years, eighty percent of the buildings that he photographed in the Pines have disappeared. And as Gordon says, “That’s an alarming rate.”
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| Ted Gordon inside the Atsion Mansion |
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Historic buildings in the Pinelands suffer from vandalism, lack of care, wildfires, creeping vines and the unstoppable sands of time. The dramatic loss that Gordon has documented makes it more important to preserve what remains. After many years of limited funds for preservation, the Batsto and Atsion Mansions are now receiving the care that they need. Atsion suffered greatly from vandalism. Its interior walls were scarred by graffiti. Batsto fared much better but it also needed major work to ensure its continued survival.
They are among the few industrial towns in the Pines that still remain and are a surprise to find in the woods. Their sheer presence makes people wonder, “What is this place?”
Whitesbog, in Pemberton Township, is a little Pine Barrens village with a big history. It started with a small set of cranberry bogs farmed at the site of the abandoned Hanover Iron Furnace. By the turn of the 20th century, Whitesbog grew into the largest cranberry farm in New Jersey. Joseph Josiah White owned this company town, which employed more than 600 workers during the picking season. Many were Italian immigrants who lived in two satellite villages called Florence and Rome.
In the early 1900s, White’s daughter Elizabeth worked with Dr. Frederick Coville on cultivating wild blueberries growing in the Pine Barrens. They paid local woodsmen to find the sweetest and largest berries for their experiments, which led to great success and started a multi-million dollar industry.
In later years, Whitesbog was sold to the State of New Jersey and became a part of Brendan Byrne State Forest. Over time the villages of Florence and Rome were vandalized and torn down. Nothing remains of these sites except empty land. The Whitesbog Preservation Trust worked to save the main village. Every year the Trust celebrates the birthplace of the cultivated blueberry with a festival designed to raise awareness of the significance of this historic site. The Trust also leases out some workers homes as private residences to raise money for restoration.
The Cranberry Packing and Storage House was once the largest building in the village. Now very little remains of this historic structure. In the 1980s, many hoped the Packing House would become a Pine Barrens welcome center and museum. With no funding available, the Packing House and the dream are slowly dying.
Publicly owned sites compete for limited resources. Money is needed for restoration as well as for rescuing noteworthy buildings from demolition, like the office of Dr. James Still. Known as the “black doctor of the Pines,” this self-taught physician wrote a book about his life practicing medicine. He used natural plant based remedies to cure patients other doctors had given up on. In the 1800s, Dr. Still’s fame grew into a successful biracial practice. The small office where he treated patients was up for sale and the property slated to be developed when the state stepped in to save it. Money is still needed for restoration and interpretation of this historic place, which is the first state owned site dedicated to the life and legacy of an African American individual.
The ghost towns of the Pine Barrens are a fascinating piece of American history. The books listed on our Resources page contain additional information.
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