SOUTH JERSEY HERITAGE:

A Social, Economic and Cultural History 

R. Craig Koedel

Associate Professor of History and Religion Atlantic Community College Mays Landing, New Jersey

original hardbound edition: Copyright © 1979 by University Press of America, Inc.TM P.O. Box 19101, Washington, D.C. 20036 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

LC Call Number: F134 .K57 LC Control Number: 80122320 Dewey Class No.: 974.9/8 19  ISBN: 0-8191-0246-6

DEDICATION

To those especial persons who, by extending the hand of friendship, have made for us a home in South Jersey, this book is gratefully dedicated. 

FOREWORD

      Because South Jersey appears on no map, a line from William Penn, slightly modified, is appropriated by the author to introduce this narrative: "That there is such a place as South Jersey, is certain." Just as surely, it has a history well worth the telling.

      Unlike West Jersey, which existed as a separate province for nearly forty years, South Jersey has never been a political entity with precise boundaries. However, the term has been used informally for more than a century to designate the southern portion of New Jersey. It is incumbent upon the user to provide there own definition.

      From a low midland of scrub pine and oak, the region slopes toward the marshy inner and outer coastal plains. It is an area bounded on the north by the Pine Barrens, lying between the waters of the Delaware on the west and the Atlantic on the east, and reaching southward in the shape of an inverted pyramid to a point where the bay and the ocean meet. The present-day counties that South Jersey comprises are Cape May, Cumberland, Salem, Gloucester, Camden, and Atlantic, along with the areas of Burlington and Ocean Counties that border on Pennsauken Creek and the Mullica River.

      South Jersey is the "Garden" of the Garden State. Although the types of farming have changed, agriculture continues to be the economic mainstay of most of the region, as it has been since colonial times, Shore tourism and industrialization along the Delaware River are the chief exceptions. This rural society is distinctive within a state that is otherwise heavily industrialized and densely populated.

      In a sense, South Jersey is a historical entity, separate from the rest of the state. Its patterns of social, economic, and cultural development were different from those of the northern counties. The ethnic and religious backgrounds of its colonial settlers were more various. On the other hand, the new Immigration of the late-19th century introduced less national and cultural diversity into South

Jersey than it did to northern New Jersey. Historically, Philadelphia has been the metropolitan center toward which the interests of South Jersey people have gravitated, whereas New York has been the focus of the north.

      Writers of New Jersey history have tended to emphasize the past of the more populous corridor counties that lie between New York and Philadelphia -- the New Jersey that comes to the mind of most Americans whenever they hear the state mentioned. This is reasonable, since presumably there is a connection between a quantity of people and the amount of history they create. However, these narratives are of limited interest to residents of the southern counties, whose history is manifestly different from that of their northern neighbors.

      The purpose of this volume is to provide a brief, but comprehensive, account of South Jersey from the early explorations to the present. It is intended, by doing so, to make the reader aware, as well as both proud and critical, of his heritage for whatever personal enjoyment he may derive from it, and that he might be enabled thereby to place South Jersey’s present, with its problems and prospects, in an historical perspective.

      The author wishes to express his appreciation to the area’s county, college, and university historical libraries for the use of their facilities, with special thanks to Rutgers University, Princeton University, Glassboro State College, and the Presbyterian Historical Society for making their manuscript collections available to him, Special acknowledgement is given to Mr. Elmer Woods, Research Librarian at the Daniel Leeds Library, Atlantic Community College, who was diligent in securing rare and out-of-print books needed for this research. Thanks is given also to friends and students for making their private collections available, offering helpful criticism of the text, proofreading the manuscript, and checking the index. For her research, transcription of handwritten manuscripts, preparing the index, proofreading copy, and for her patience and understanding through his months of work on this project, the author is indeed grateful to his wife.

R. C. K. 

Absecon, New Jersey 

May 1977 

CHAPTER ONE

The First Settlers and the People They Found

      Sailing for the French king, who wished to add to the glory of his reign the discovery of a water route to the Far East across the American continent, a Florentine navigator by the name of Giovanni da Verrazano sighted the future South Jersey in 1524. That spring, while exploring the coastline on a voyage northward from the West Indies, the Italian mariner passed the chain of narrow, sandy islands on which today stand the seashore resorts of the Garden State. He and the crew of his ship, La Dauphine, were the first Europeans known to have traveled alongside these shores. Unhappily for the historian, Verrazano left no description of what he saw, nor is it likely that he landed on them.

      The Delaware Bay was first sighted by an Englishman, Henry Hudson. Employed by a Dutch Trading Company, Hudson too was searching for a passage to the Orient when, aboard the Half Moon, he attempted to enter Delaware Bay on August 28, 1609. A ship’s officer, Robert Juet, recorded the event in his journal. Encountering shallow water and sand banks, upon which, as Juet noted, "once we strooke," the captain brought his tiny ship about, headed for open water, and set a northerly course along the coast. Juet wrote on August 29, "We weighed at the breake of day, and stood toward the Norther Land, which wee found to bee all Ilands to our sight," the off-shore islands of the South Jersey shore.

      A year later, almost to the day, an English mariner, Samuel Argall, successfully entered the bay, where he and the crew of the Discovery "found great store of people, which were very kind, and promised that the next day in the morning they would bring him great store of corn." Before the Indians could return, Argall and his vessel were forced out of the bay by the winds, but not before the captain christened it in honor of his friend, the governor of Virginia colony, Sir Thomas West, Lord de la Warr.

      Argall’s "great store" of kind people, whose generosity was denied him by a contrary wind, were the Lenni-Lenape, "men of men," or Original People, frequently called the Delaware Indians. The fewer than 2000 who inhabited the southern portion of New Jersey, a region they knew as Schejachbi, "the land of the shell wampum," dwelt in villages on the riverine flats along the Delaware. Few permanent sites were located on the rivers, bays, and lagoons of the outer

coastal plain, although vast mounds of shells give evidence that the Indians set up temporary summer encampments by the seashore.

      Modern archaeology casts suspicion upon the long-held notion that the Lenapes of southern New Jersey constituted the Unalachtigo sub-tribe, of which the turkey was the supposed totem. (Those who subscribe to the sub-tribe theory claim that central New Jersey was inhabited by the Unami and the north by the Munsee sub-tribes, with the turtle and the wolf, respectively, as totems.) It is proposed that such animal names were used to designate clans or familial groups, and were not the totems of sub-tribes. Some archaeologists contend, furthermore, that such a term as "Unalachtigo" is properly used only to refer to an enforced Lenape grouping after they had been displaced from their ancestral lands by white colonists. In short, the Unalachtigo were not members of an ancient and natural sub-tribe of the Lenapes, but of an artificial social structure of 18th-century origin.

      European observers who first arrived on these shores described the Lenapes as a handsome people, slender but strong and well-proportioned, and of varying heights, some of them quite tall. Their skin was of a yellowish complexion, ranging from almost white to the color of brass. Their heads were covered with coarse, black hair, which the men cut into shocks or a scalp lock and ornamented with shell beads. The women braided their long hair and dressed it with bear grease.

      The summer attire of men and women was simply a loincloth of deerskin that barely covered their genitals. Even that, some reporters believed, was a later concession to Christian modesty. In winter, they wore a cloak-like garment of animal fur. Moccasins, usually of deerskin but made sometimes from corn husks, protected their feet. On festive occasions, the beardless faces and smooth bodies of the braves were painted with lines and circles of black, red, and green. The paints were made from ocherous clays ground in small mortars with a pestle no larger than a finger.

      Always there was the wampum, the sign of wealth, worked into strings that hung from the braves’ necks, dangled from their wrists and shoulders, and encircled their foreheads and waists. Hanging also from their necks were their paahras, or sacred charms, and down their backs bags containing such necessities as food, money, tobacco, pipes, and, when hunting, their bows and arrows, The women were equally fond of beaded necklaces and bracelets, but to the male went the prize for vanity.

      Most of these objects of Lenape dress and ornamentation underwent modification when the Europeans began bartering with them for pelts and furs. Shirts that reached to their knees and wraps of red and blue Dutch duffel were eagerly accepted in trade from the white men. Firearms were gradually substituted for bows and arrows. Pipes of Dutch manufacture came to be preferred to their own of carved stone or crudely baked clay, while the cheaper and more easily made Dutch beads became popular as an alternative to the shell beads, which had to be laboriously cut from the straight inner core of the whelk and polished.

      The Lenapes lived in small villages, located along the banks of streams, in which the family was the center of a loosely-structured sociopolitical order. Their wigwams were made of two rows of saplings, each twenty feet long and set about ten feet apart, tied at the tops to form a dome-shaped roof, and covered with bark. Flaps of skin closed the open ends. Inside, along the walls, low platforms functioned as chairs and beds. These and the floors were covered with mats of white oak and poplar. Smoke from a fire, which burned in a pit in the center of the floor, ascended through a hole in the roof. In the larger longhouses of sixty feet length, partitions were erected to divide the building into multi-family units.

      For meat, the Lenapes depended upon the catch of the hunter, the fisherman, and the trapper. Seafood, like the shells for wampum, was gathered on annual summer treks to the shore. Berries and nuts were collected from the woods. Corn, vegetables such as beans, squash, and pumpkin, herbs of various sorts, and tobacco grew in gardens, tended by the women, near the houses. Both meat and vegetables were sometimes eaten raw, but usually the meat was broiled over the open fire, and the vegetables were boiled in clay pots. Cakes, of corn meal, mixed at times with berries and nuts, were baked on beds of hot stones. The winter fare was dried or smoked meat, fish, and seafood, with dried squash, roots, and tubers.

      After generations of travel by Indian feet in single file over paths along the edges of the forests and across the marshes, well-defined trails were set. The most traveled trails in the south ran from Camden to Cape May, across the Cohansey and Maurice Rivers, following the upper limits of tidewater. Another followed the shore to Cape May from Beesley’s Point. Other trails from Somers Point and Leeds Point went westward to the headwaters of the Cohansey. The Shamong Trail crossed the middle of South Jersey, extending from Burlington, along the western edges of the Pine Barrens, across the headwaters of the Great Egg Harbor River, to Cape May. Numerous connecting

trails criss-crossed the region. The streams and rivers also were highways of Lenape travel. Vessels were dugout canoes made by felling large trees, lopping off the branches with a stone ax, and hollowing out the trunks by a process of repeated burning and removing the charred wood with stone chisels. In three to five days, an expert could produce a complete canoe.

      Advanced little beyond a Late Stone Age culture, the Lenni-Lenape were a simple people, yet evidently a happy one. To whatever extent there was a chief, his powers were restricted to times of war. Divorce was uncommon, although it was easy to obtain. Their well-behaved children were disciplined by example instead of physical punishment. Verrazano found them to be "sweet and gentle" of manner; in the opinion of Juet they were "very civil." Their generosity in aiding the newcomers was frequently praised.

      On the other hand, the Lenape religion, or lack of it, shocked some observers, while their alleged immorality was offensive. Verrazano’s handsome, well-mannered and pleasant "goodliest people" had come to be called "savages" by the time of Juet. When the Swedish engineer, Peter Martens-son Lindestrom, wrote his classical description of the Lenape, in 1653, showing them among other things to be "very mischievous, haughty, are eager far praise, wanton, bestial, mistrustful, untruthful and thievish, dishonorable, coarse in their affections, shameless and unchaste," they had long been subject to corrupting influences from abroad.

      Among the remnants of the Lenape culture in modern South Jersey are the roads, which vaguely follow the ancient trails carved by the Indians through meadow and woodland. Some Indian names have survived in modern form - - Absecon and Alloway, Nacote Creek and the Nescochague, Tuckahoe and Patcong, Cohansey and Pennsauken, and more than a score of others. Our vocabulary has been enriched with such Indian words as hickory, chipmunk, pone, papoose, sassafras, tobacco, canoe, and wigwam. To our diet has been added the August delight of corn-on-the-cob, to our habits the dubious pleasure of smoking. Charm bracelets, men’s necklaces, and moccasins for leisure are, in part at least, our Indian heritage, altered perhaps by modernism but yet a reflection of our past. Furthermore, there is tourism -- the annual escape to cool sea breezes, tasty seafood, and a dip in the brine. The Lenni-Lenape pointed the way to a summer at the seashore.

      Sailing under the banner of the United Netherlands Company, Captain Cornelius Jacobsen Mey, in 1620, set southerly course along the coastline from Cape Cod to New York Bay, which he called Port Mey, and on to the mouth of the Delaware. Facing upriver, the captain named the cape to his left Cape

Cornelius (now Cape Henlopen); the cape to starboard he called Cape Mey. Only the last of these names has remained, anglicized to Cape May, Several years afterward (variously dated between 1623 and 1626), the proud Dutchman ascended the Delaware to the mouth of Timber Creek, where he set twenty-four persons ashore to establish a trading post. They constructed a stockade, Fort Nassau, which housed the first known white settlement in the future South Jersey. 1

      The favorable and vivid accounts of the newly discovered land given by the explorers, especially that of Robert Juet, diverted the Dutch from a concern to find an easier access to the far-off wealth of China to an interest in the more proximate benefits obtainable in the region between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. The lust for silks and spices was supplanted by the desire for the "good furres" and animal "skins of divers sorts" that could be turned into a handsome profit. The stated purpose of the Dutch West India Company, incorporated in 1621, was to carry on a peltry trade with the Indians. With this intent, Fort Nassau and neighboring New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, were begun.

      For eight years after Fort Nassau was built, no ship of record called at the lonesome outpost. In 1632, when David Peterson DeVries sailed upriver to the fort, he found it occupied only by Indians. Evidently, the white traders had been ordered to New Amsterdam in or about 1626, when Peter Minuit was concentrating the Dutch population in America on Manhattan Is land. The theory that the Dutch at Fort Nassau were slain by Indians is given little credence by reliable historians. They point to a presumed lack of evidence, an inference drawn from DeVries’ silence regarding the matter, and to the uninterrupted tradition in South Jersey of good relations between the native peoples and white colonists. No organized attack was ever perpetrated by the Lenni-Lenape upon European settlers in the southern peninsula, while the Europeans themselves left numerous testimonies to their kindness, even open friendliness.

      The Scandinavian kingdom of Sweden stepped to the forefront of European affairs in the early decades of the 17th century. As the tiny country was emerging as a major power, her merchants began to cast envious glances at the colonial enterprises of their English, French, and Dutch neighbors. The profitable trade in American pelts and furs was a mercantilist pie of which they wanted a taste. Their illustrious monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, was anxious, too, to fill the coffers of his kingdom with the revenues obtainable through foreign trade, while hoping as well to enhance thereby Sweden’s international prestige.

      The king and his able chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, gave a willing ear, therefore, to the founder of the Dutch West India Company when he, bitter over an alleged slight by the Dutch government, proposed that Sweden organize a foreign trade company. Promptly, a charter was issued. The plans for such a company, however, failed to materialize, as Sweden became further enmeshed in the Thirty Years War and as sufficient corporate funds could not be raised. The king himself was slain in battle in 1632. Because the crown passed to the head of a six-year-old girl, to Chancellor Oxenstierna fell the task of bringing the late king’s dream of Swedish commercial expansion to fulfillment.

      Peter Minuit, the famed purchaser of Manhattan Island and Director General of New Netherland, was removed from his post in 1632 because of a dispute with the Dutch West India Company. He offered his services, along with his extensive knowledge of the New World, to Sweden in a letter to the chancellor, in which he proposed that, not just trading posts, but a permanent colony be founded. Thereupon, a corporation by the name of the New Sweden Company was chartered, in 1637.

      Only twenty-six people, a number of them Dutch, sailed for the intended New Sweden in early November, 1637. Among them were no women or children. Delayed for weeks by weather and repairs at a port in Holland, their two small ships headed for the open Atlantic on the last day of December.

      Had Swedish colonization begun when the first trading company was chartered in 1624, perhaps the settlement of New Sweden would have been accomplished with less interference from rivals. As it was, these tiny Swedish ships, beating against the westerlies, were about fourteen years too late. Both the Dutch and the English had laid claim to the lands toward which they were heading. Fort Nassau, reestablished as a permanent garrison in 1636, was the visible evidence of Dutch occupation. England’s claim was more tenuous. Charles I granted a tract of land extending from Long Island to Cape May, a region to be called New Albion, to Sir Edmund Plowden in 1634. England claimed the right to this land by virtue of John Cabot’s discoveries in 1497. Within Plowden’s tract, at the mouth of Pennsauken Creek, fifteen English traders had settled and erected a fort, called Eriwoneck, before the Swedish arrival. (Some historians believe that Eriwoneck was, in fact, Fort Nassau, near Timber Creek, which stood temporarily unoccupied.)

      Minuit and his company reached the Delaware in March, 1638. After purchasing two strips of land on the west bank from the Indians, the Swedish settlers chose the site for a fort and began to construct it, while the director set off on further exploration. When the fort, located near modern Wilmington,

was completed in May, it was named Christina, in honor of Sweden’s queen. His mission accomplished, Minuit attempted to return to Sweden to deliver a progress report in person. Although he was lost at sea during a violent hurricane, his report reached Sweden safely.

      However, for nearly two years after Minuit sailed from the wharf at Fort Christina, the settlement had no word from Sweden, nor did they hear of the director’s death. His replacement, Peter Hollander Ridder, arrived in April, 1640, bringing with him some of the necessaries for colonization -- supplies, domestic animals, items for trade with the Indians, soldiers, a new trading commissioner, and a Lutheran pastor. Also with the coming of Ridder, the chapter of Swedish settlement in the future South Jersey was officially opened when, in the spring of 1641, the governor purchased from the Indians a strip of land extending along the east bank of the Delaware River from Raccoon Creek to Cape May.

      Sweden’s entry into the region did not go unobstructed. The English acquired tracts from the Indians nearly identical with Ridder’s, including the banks of Varkens Kill (Salem Creek), where a band of New Haven Puritans settled sometime before 1642. Disturbed at this English intrusion, the Swedes and the Dutch put aside their rivalry long enough to lay plans for a joint attack upon their common enemy.

      Action was not needed, however, for the colonists at Varkens Kill were denounced as lawbreakers by their own mother country because they had settled without leave on Plowden’s lands. The former New Haven people appealed to New Sweden and the Dutch for protection, acceding gladly to the authority of either.

      Apparently with no intent to deprecate the manifest accomplishments of Ridder, the crown decided in 1642 to replace the Hollander with a man of Swedish citizenship. His successor was Johan Printz, New Sweden’s third and ablest governor.

      A man of huge dimensions, said to have weighed nearly 400 pounds, the humorless Printz was of a heavy hand as well, ruling with arrogance and despotic power. For ten years, he ran New Sweden as a dictator. Even before the retiring Ridder departed, the new executive of the Swedish colony defied the Dutch by sailing boldly past Fort Nassau, a feat the former governor had been unable or unwilling to perform three years before.

      Important to South Jersey’s history was Printz’ decision to erect a fort on the east bank of the Delaware, on a promontory a few miles below the mouth of Varkens Kill. Built during the summer and fall of 1643, it was named Fort Elfsborg. Within a short time, Elfsborg became the chief Swedish stronghold on the river. Dutch ships proceeding upstream to Fort Nassau were forced, when passing the Swedish bastion, to strike their colors, sometimes even to anchor beneath it.

      Within a year of his arrival, Printz had made the Swedes the undisputed master of the Delaware, although the population of New Sweden, in 1644, was as yet only 121, a figure that included the subservient English at Varkens Kill. Of these citizens, a third were soldiers; the others were farmers, and artisans such as carpenters and blacksmiths.

      Throughout these years, Printz repeatedly begged Sweden and the New Sweden Company for additional people, especially soldiers, and for the material reinforcements needed for protection and trade, but they were unable to comply. Sweden was heavily engaged in the last gasps of the Thirty Years War.

      The homeland’s neglect of New Sweden was to take its toll. In her weakening condition she fell prey to new Dutch thrusts into the Delaware region, after the bold Peter Stuyvesant appeared as the director of New Netherland. The first serious threat came in May, 1653, when an armed ship from the colony on Manhattan Island sailed upstream, past Fort Elfsborg, to an anchorage below Fort Christina and closed the river. The Dutch ship withdrew when it was hastily confronted by a sloop, armed and manned, sent out by Printz.

      The victory of the Swedes was only apparent, for that summer the governor at New Netherland both reinforced Fort Nassau with an additional contingent of soldiers, who marched overland from New Amsterdam, and constructed a new fort on the west bank of the Delaware below Fort Christina. Printz did not have the forces to resist. To consolidate his strength on the west bank, he withdrew the garrison from Elfsborg, thus bringing an end to the Swedish military occupation of the east bank. Still no assistance was forthcoming from Sweden. Discouraged, sick of body, his people restless and resentful, his soldiers disloyal, the once proud governor of New Sweden relinquished his command to his son-in-law, and departed the colony for Europe in October, 1653.

      After an abortive attempt by Printz’ successor, Johann Rising, to reinstate Swedish power on the river, Peter Stuyvesant dealt the final blow to New Sweden in late summer, 1655. With a fleet of seven vessels, two of them battleships, and an army of more than 300 troops, the Dutch reached Fort Christina and surrounded it. The conquerors ravaged the homes of the Swedish colonists. Rising surrendered the fort, with all of New Sweden, to Stuyvesant. The defeated governor, with a number of soldiers and colonists, returned to Europe, while those who remained at Fort Christina swore their allegiance to the Dutch and turned to rebuilding their despoiled property. Others crossed the Delaware to begin anew with the building of houses and the planting of farms.

      No records give positive proof of the year in which the colonizers of New Sweden first embarked into the wilderness between the river and the ocean. Surely the opposite shore beckoned the more hardy Swedes shortly after their arrival in the new land. Adventurers doubtless scouted the peninsula in search of furs and pelts during the time of Printz, perhaps before, for under his and the previous governorships individual trade with the Indians was forbidden. The only legal commerce was that carried on by the New Sweden Company. The hidden coves and secreting forests along the streams of the east bank offered easy escape from detection to those who preferred to deal with the Indians directly, unencumbered by the company’s restrictions. Then too, others who wished to avoid the harshness of Printz’ regime could remove themselves physically from his brooding presence by carving homesteads in the untouched wilderness, far away from the established settlements along the west bank.

      A reasonable assumption is that more settlers were encouraged to migrate eastward when, with the building of Fort Elfsborg, they could be more confident of speedy protection against any would-be attackers. The fertile soil, grassy marshes, and low, rolling meadows of the eastern shore were a further inducement to farmers and cattlemen whose cultivation had quickly exhausted the rough, stony patches and thin grasses of the west bank. Fish and game, too, were more abundant in the Jersey streams, salt marshes, and woods.

      At the coming of Dutch rule, the center of Swedish colonization along the Delaware moved to the east side. With this shift, the documented history of the Swedes and Finns (who, from the beginning, were a part of the Swedish migration to America) in South Jersey began, although no land titles were recorded until later. The first legal residence of a Swede in New Jersey was established in 1673; yet during the ten preceding years numerous Swedish families had settled at the mouths of Raccoon and Pennsauken Creeks, and

others had moved to the interior along their banks. Finnish settlers, and shortly thereafter Swedes, had located upward from the mouth along Varkens Kill.

      During the decade of the 1680’s, Swedish settlements grew apace up and down the streams of old Gloucester County. Twenty-nine Swedish landowners worked 5000 acres of farm and grazing land between Oldman’s and Timber Creeks in 1687. By 1697, the Swedish population of New Jersey was nearly 1000. New emigrations from Europe and a continuing high birth rate swelled their numbers. Long since, the uncertain economy based on a trade in furs and pelts had given way to a more permanent and secure order founded on agriculture and cattle raising. Among the Swedes of Gloucester County, the latter was the major source of income.

      Late 17th-century migration brought Swedes to the stream banks of Cumberland County and to the shore, where the first known settlement of a Swedish family, that of James Steelman, occurred along the Great Egg Harbor River in 1693. Three years later, Steelman was chosen to supervise the laying of a road between Gloucester and the Great Egg Harbor. On the Burlington County side of the Little Egg Harbor River, Eric Mullica fixed a plantation in 1697. This Swede was the first European to explore the river that today bears his name. 

1 For another opinion on Fort Nassau, see C. A. Weslager, Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley, Chapter V.

CHAPTER TWO

From Quaker Commonwealth to Crown Colony

      After a fanciful plan for New Albion vanished, the English, involved with other colonies in the New World and wracked by civil war, bided their time as the Dutch and Swedes contended for possession of the Delaware. Never having relinquished her claim to the coast of North America, the island kingdom struck in 1664, four years after the Stuart Restoration. In that year, Charles II awarded to his brother James, the Duke of York, all the lands lying between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, to be apportioned and governed as he chose.

      The Duke, in turn, on June 23 gave to two court favorites, Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, the territory lying between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, decreeing that the "said Tract of Land hereafter is to be called by the name or names of New Caesarea or New Jersey." The naming was an expression of gratitude to Carteret, the man who governed the Isle of Jersey and defended it for the crown during the English Civil War. Meanwhile, James dispatched Colonel Richard Nicholls, equipped with a fleet and an army, to seize New Netherland. Upon the Dutch surrender, the name of the village on Manhattan Island was changed to New York. The victorious Nicholls then sent Sir Robert Carr to the Delaware to take possession of the settlements there. Although no armed opposition greeted Carr, in a needless show of strength he blasted off two kegs of powder and twenty shots, by which several settlers were killed.

      When Lord Berkeley’s financial entanglements rendered him insolvent, he was eager to forego the long-term profits his American holdings could give him in exchange for ready cash. Thereupon, he sold his half of New Jersey, an area as yet undefined, in a transaction of March 18, 1673 with John Fenwick, a member of the Society of Friends (commonly called Quakers), for the price of 1000 pounds. Fenwick made the purchase as the agent of another Quaker, Edward Byllynge. Because Byllynge was in financial trouble at the time, he could not consummate the deal on his own behalf without risking devastation by his creditors. Eventually, his affairs became so involved that three Quakers

of substance and ability, among them William Penn, were appointed trustees of his estate until he could be extricated from his financial woes.

      The leadership of the Society of Friends was eager to found a colony in the New World where they would be safe from persecution, and in which they could establish a commonwealth resting on the political, moral, and social tenets of their faith. Each person would be free to worship according to his own conscience, all would be equal before the law, and opportunity for advancement would be available to everyone without restraint. In turn, hard work, plain living, and the development of spiritual values would be expected of all.

      Byllynge and the trustees spent three years developing a plan for creating in New Jersey a haven for their fellow Quakers. A division line between their holdings and those of Carteret had to be established, a plan for a government was needed, and if Quaker colonizers were to be attracted to New Jersey, advertisements were necessary. The first of these matters was disposed of by the Quintipartite Deed of July 1, 1676, by which Carteret, Byllynge, and the three trustees agreed that the boundary line should run north by west from the mouth of the Little Egg Harbor River (the Mullica) to the uppermost tip of the province. Berkeley’s former holdings were called West New Jersey.

      The region to be settled was divided into 100 shares, or proprieties, to be sold at the usual price of 350 pounds each. Any purchase of a share, or a part thereof, carried with it the right to participation in the government of the province. Ten of the shares were allotted to Fenwick in recognition of his part as Byllynge’s agent in carrying off the transaction with Lord Berkeley. To announce their plans, descriptions of the lands to be taken up were printed and distributed.

      A constitution, entitled the Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Province of West New-Jersey in America, was devised. A model of liberality and humanity, the Concessions and Agreements provided for the annual election of a representative assembly, guaranteed the right to freedom of worship on the principle that "no man, nor number of men on earth, hath power or authority to rule over men’s consciences in religious matters," and assured to anyone accused of a crime a public trial by jury, to take place only after a formal indictment. Proof of guilt could be established only by the testimony of at least two reliable witnesses. Illegal arrest and imprisonment for debt were barred.

      Fenwick was understandably furious at what, to him, amounted to a swindle by Byllynge, Penn, and the others since, according to his claim, he had paid Lord Berkeley with his own money. Although he later deeded nine-tenths of his purchase to the trustees and received, in exchange, 900 pounds, a proportionate amount of his original payment, he was only partly mollified by Penn, who entreated him to "fall closely to thy business . . . make the best of what thou hast; thy grandchildren be in the other world before the land thou hast allotted will be employed." Fenwick decided to act alone in colonizing his shares. Forthwith, he advertised for buyers and for skilled artisans especially to go with him to the New World. Most of the inhabitants there, he pointed out, were farmers. Tradesmen, being few, "live happily there, as Carpenters, Blacksmiths, Masons, Taylors, Weavers, Shoemakers, Tanners, Brickmakers, and so many other Trades."

      Having organized an expedition, Fenwick and his passengers sailed for America aboard the Griffin in early autumn, 1675. They arrived on the Delaware, at the mouth of Varkens Kill, in November. The place of their landing Fenwick called New Salem, because of the "delightsomeness of the land."

      Although his by right of purchase from Lord Berkeley and allocation from Byllynge’s trustees, Fenwick nevertheless consolidated his claim by buying from the Indians an area comprising all of today’s Salem and Cumberland Counties. In addition to guns and powder, the Indians received in payment from the Quaker 300 gallons of rum. The region came to be called Fenwick’s Colony, or Fenwick’s Tenth, being one-tenth of the 100 shares into which West Jersey was divided. Eventually, when his business affairs in London had to be untangled by the trustees, Fenwick’s holdings were reduced to the territory around the little settlement at Salem town. William Penn received the bulk of Fenwick’s shares.

      The arrangements complete, the first group of Byllynge’s colonizers were ready to depart for the New World by the fall of 1677. Most of them were Quakers of Yorkshire and London. As their ship, the Kent, left the dock at London and headed down the Thames, they were hailed by the king, relaxing aboard the royal yacht. Upon learning that the passengers aboard the Kent were Quakers, the monarch gave them godspeed as they journeyed to their new homes. Despite the king’s blessing, it was a tiresome voyage for the 230 Englishmen aboard a ship crowded with livestock and all the necessaries for setting up households in a wilderness. In October, they made landfall at Raccoon Creek.

      At Raccoon, the Yorkshire and London Quakers enjoyed the hospitality of the Swedish settlers until they could negotiate a land settlement with the Indians and select a site for a village. They agreed upon a Delaware River location several miles upstream from Raccoon, where they established a town called Burlington, the nucleus of what would become the second most prominent Quaker community in America, after Philadelphia.

      Quickly, other ships sailing from English ports bound for West Jersey brought Quakers to the shores of the Delaware. By the middle of 1679, their numbers had increased to 800. A group of Irish Quakers left from Dublin in 1681 to settle the Irish Tenth, the area comprising part of what became Gloucester County. Although the influx of Quakers to New Jersey lessened considerably after 1682, when William Penn transferred the center of Quaker settlement in America to his new colony of Pennsylvania, by the end of the 17th century, of a total West Jersey population in excess of 3300 persons, more than two-thirds were Quakers.

      Not all the members of the Society of Friends departing England and Ireland in the 17th century pointed their ships toward the Delaware. Some planted settlements on Long Island, and in New England, where for the most part they were not kindly received. Unlike their co-religionists on the Delaware, who turned to farming as a chief occupation, these families looked to the sea, and the pursuit of the whale, for their livelihood. In the 1690’s, in the search for more freedom and a larger catch, a small group of northern Quakers moved southward along the shore to the ocean side of West Jersey province, to settle at such places as Leeds Point, the mouth of the Great Egg Harbor River, and the coastal strip of Cape May County. An English Quaker, John Somers, who settled first in Pennsylvania, purchased land for a plantation along Great Egg Harbor Bay shortly after 1690.

      Although by 1700 nearly 70% of the population of West Jersey were Quakers of English or Irish origin, and another 1000 were Swedes and Finns, English-speaking people of other religious persuasions had begun to settle the province.

      Baptists from England, Ireland, the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and New England settled at Cape May and in Fenwick’s Colony during the last quarter of the century. Puritans from New Haven colony entered into the Fairfield Agreement, an instrument by which a New England-type township was created along the Cohansey River, in 1697. They had migrated to the future Cumberland County some years, perhaps as many as thirty-five or forty,

before the formal agreement was drawn up. Of the total population, the Baptists and Puritans, with a few scattered Anglicans, constituted no more than 5%.

      During the earlier years in which English-speaking peoples, by setting up a permanent, thriving colony, captured undisputed claim to the territory, West Jersey was governed by Edward Byllynge, a non-resident executive who acted through a deputy-governor. For the most part, the governor, albeit he had the sole political power by conferment from the Duke of York, administered the province in the spirit of the Concessions and Agreements, recognizing the civil and religious liberties granted by the constitution, and allowing the citizens representation in an elected assembly. No great change was made in 1687 by his successor to the governorship, and the one who also purchased most of his lands, Dr. Daniel Coxe. In 1691, the physician, who never came to America, sold most of his shares, and with them the power of government, to the West Jersey Society, a London-based company of real estate investors with holdings in both the Jerseys and Pennsylvania.

      Under the Society’s governance, West Jersey affairs ceased to be dominated by Quakers. Also during the years of their control, the province was first divided into counties. The first county to be created was Cape May, on November 12, 1692. Previous to this date, residents of the Third (Irish) and Fourth Tenths had declared themselves a county, but not until May 17, 1694 was the County of Gloucester officially created by the provincial legislature. At the same time, the Egg Harbor region was placed under its jurisdiction. In 1710, Egg Harbor was formally incorporated with Gloucester County. Salem was selected in 1682 as one of two West Jersey towns (the other being Burlington) in which annual Courts of Sessions would be held, thus making Salem, in effect, a county comprising all of the six southernmost counties of present-day New Jersey. However, an act formalizing Salem as a county and defining its boundaries with Cape May and Gloucester was not passed until May 17, 1694. Cumberland was a part of Salem County until 1748.

      By the last decade of the 17th century, it had become evident that proprietary government, as it operated in New Jersey, was of neither the stability nor the efficiency needed to maintain the civil and economic well-being of the people, in particular the land owners. Consequently, the proprietors of both the New Jersey provinces were content, even eager, to relinquish control of the government to the crown in exchange for greater economic security. Accordingly, they surrendered power to Queen Anne in April, 1702. The Jerseys were then united as a single crown colony.

      Few privileges were actually given up. The proprietors retained both their property rights and a measure of political control. The crown appointed a royal governor, whose instructions were the essence of a constitution. The governor ruled with a council appointed by the crown from among the leading proprietors. The council acted as the governor’s advisor, was the upper house of the provincial legislature, and sat as the highest court of appeal. A representative assembly, the lower house, was chosen by the citizenry in elections called at the discretion of the governor. The right to levy taxes, and to grant funds or withhold them, even for the governor’s salary, was vested in the representatives of the people. Although the assembly could initiate legislation, all its acts were subject to the approval of the crown. The civil and religious liberties of the proprietary era were continued, but their application was limited to Protestants.

      From a wilderness, the western edges of South Jersey were transformed, in the 1698 description by Gabriel Thomas, into an idyllic, peaceful English countryside, with an air that was "very clear, sweet and wholesome." Fenwick’s "pretty town" of Salem sat amid orchards of apple, cherry, pear, plum, and peach trees. They were "the natural product of this country, which lies warmer, being more befriended by the sun’s hot and glorious beams, which without doubt is the chief cause and true reason why the fruit there so far excells the English." Sheep, covered with wool "very fine, white and thick," dropped two lambs at once in the spring. Great stocks of cattle and oxen grazed in the pasture, hogs of prodigious size fed in the woods beside horses, "very hardy, strong and of good spirit for labor or travelling." There were bees aplenty, fish in great variety, and wild and tame fowl "incredible in numbers," among them the mocking bird, "uncommon and valuable . . . , known but not well in England." Gardens of vegetables, flowers, and herbs cradled the "great brick houses" of the country estates.

      Salem, the "ancientist" but not the "chiefest town in that countrey," was a market town, with several yearly fairs and a "commodious dock" along the river, where vessels to and from Barbadoes and other islands could tie up. Salem’s "stately brick houses" were many and fine, their storehouses well-furnished with "bread, beer, beef and pork, as also butter and cheese."

      Gloucester town, "a very fine and pleasant place," notable for its summer fruits, was resorted to by Philadelphia young people, who would cross over "in the wherries" to sit within sight of the city while they ate strawberries and cream.

      Thomas wrote this description, as he said, "to inform all (but especially the poor) what ample and happy livelihoods people may gain in those parts, whereby they may subsist very well without either begging or stealing. . . ."

      In the 18th century, the Europeans came, as they had in the decades before, and in great numbers. A natural increase among those who arrived earlier also swelled the population.

      By 1726, the figure for the three counties of Gloucester, Salem, and Cape May stood at 6874, a 225% increase over the estimated population of 1699. During this period, Gloucester County was growing more rapidly than either of the other two counties. The eleven years following 1726 saw a continuing moderate growth, with a total of 10,155 residents in the three southern counties by 1737. This represented a 48% increase in eleven years. The rate of growth declined over the next nine years. Nearing the mid-century mark, in 1745, the population stood at 11,541, only a 14% increase over the 1737 figures, or an average annual growth just in excess of one and one-half percent. This trend was reversed in the decades leading up to the Revolution. Between 1745 and 1784, the average annual rate of growth was slightly under 4%, for a total population of 27,693 in the southern counties in 1784. Of these, Gloucester County continued to undergo the fastest rate of growth.

CHAPTER THREE

The Husbandry of Land and Sea

      Gabriel Thomas’ description makes it evident that, at the turn of the 18th century, the economy of South Jersey was predominately agricultural. Throughout the 1700’s, in spite of the appearance of a nascent industry, the economic base of the southern counties was rooted in farming and cattle raising. Grains such as wheat, corn, rye, barley, rice, and oats were grown in vast amounts, with winter wheat being the chief cash crop. Thomas emphasized the commercial production of rice in Salem County. South Jersey flax also was an item of export. Common garden vegetables in great quantity and variety were raised for home consumption and to be sold at market on the numerous fair days prescribed by the provincial legislature. Melons and berries were cultivated, cranberries especially being a marketable product of Salem County growers. The best methods known at the time were applied to the care of the orchards, which produced an abundance of apples, pears, plums, and cherries. From excellent peaches a notable brandy was distilled.

      The raising of animals for breeding and butchering was significant in the commerce of colonial South Jersey. Substantial profits were realized from the stud fees collected for the services of fine, blooded horses. Herds of cattle, fed in cultivated pastures and the thick, salt hay of the southern marshes, were driven by cowboys to markets in Philadelphia and New York. Hogs were slaughtered on the farms, where the meat was salted, packed in barrels, and sent to the cities of the coast and the Caribbean Islands. Dairy products and beeswax also were exported.

      The primitive and wasteful agricultural practices of the Jersey farmers have been decried. The apparently inexhaustible expanse of untouched land invited exploitation. There appeared to be little need for conservation and careful cultivation. Fertilizers were not used, fields instead of crops were rotated after the medieval fashion, nor was winter fodder provided for the cattle, which grazed in unfenced fields. By mid-18th century, with much of the better soil depleted, cheaper and less desirable land in the Pine Barrens was cleared for agriculture. Meanwhile, the sons of the farmers began to seek business careers in Philadelphia.

      In defense of the South Jersey cattle raisers and tillers of the soil, it can be pointed out that nowhere in the colonies or in Europe were scientific methods of agriculture widely known before the middle of the 18th century. Wasteful open-field grazing predominated in England until after 1740. Modern plows were not introduced there until the 1780’s. Crop rotation, the development of artificial feeds, and the knowledge of fertilizers were almost equally late in coming to Britain. Destructive as they were, the methods of agriculture employed in colonial South Jersey were not behind the times, but were instead representative of the times.

      Equally exploitative but fundamental to the colonial economy was the lumbering industry. Boards, shingles, and laths of cedar, oak, and pine, made from trees harvested in the southern forests, were turned out in great quantity from the sawmills to be shipped to ports of call in America and abroad. The sawmills hummed at Batsto, Pleasant Mills, Clark’s Landing, and Clark’s Mills along the Little Egg Harbor River. Forest tracts and landings on the Great Egg Harbor River were the sites of numerous mills and docks from which the lumber-bearing ships departed. Hundreds of thousands of shingles, for example, were sent out from Somers Point by Richard Somers on a single voyage of one of his vessels. Related to the lumbering industry was a market for pitch, tar and resin, and a trade in pine knots, which were used for fuel and illumination before inexpensive candles were available.

      The extensive forests were a factor in creating in the Pine Barrens of Burlington County a colonial industry that peaked during the early decades of the 19th century. This was the making of iron, which depended upon the accessibility of timber for the charcoal needed to heat the furnaces. The major streams of Burlington and Gloucester Counties were harnessed to generate the waterpower necessary to operate the bellows, and to turn the wheels of the various mills in the iron villages. The streams provided also the basic ingredient of the industry, the bog ore deposits, which had accumulated over

the years in the beds of swamps and along the banks of the streams, heavy with a soluble iron content gathered from the strata of marls through which they flowed. The limestone flux required in the smelting process was available in the form of the clam and oyster shells that lay in seemingly unlimited abundance across the coastal plains. Here in the forests of oak and scrub pine, a barrens unsuitable for agriculture, were all the components for a new industry to add to the growing South Jersey economy.

      Charles Read, an ambitious and enterprising man from Burlington, realized the potential for an iron industry in southern New Jersey. Within the span of three years, from 1765 to 1767, he built four furnaces in Burlington County: Atsion, Batsto, Etna at Medford Lakes, and Taunton. Unfortunately for Read, the outlay of capital involved in this enterprise was enormous, greater evidently than he realized it would be, and he was forced to sell the offspring of his vision and imagination. By 1773, Read owned none of the furnaces.

      The projects, however, were reasonably successful and, except for Etna, molten iron poured from Read’s furnaces well into the 19th century. Much of the iron was exported as pigs, bars of porous metal which had been shaped in sand molds during its molten stage. Some of it was made into iron articles such as pots and kettles, stoves, sash weights, and hammers at the site of the furnaces, in spite of British proscriptions against colonial manufacturing.

      Self-contained communities of workers, living in isolated villages deep in the Pines, grew up around the iron works. At the heart of each settlement was the furnace or forge itself. Nearby was the ironmaster’s mansion, surrounded by the numerous plantation outbuildings, the mills for grinding grain and sawing lumber, shops for the blacksmith and harness maker, and the company store, where items of necessity and a few of luxury, that could not be grown or made within the community, could be obtained.

      Workers’ cottages of crude, frame construction lined the streets that radiated from the center. On the periphery of the village grew the gardens and orchards, and beyond them lay the fields, which furnished grain for the families and animals of the village.

      As in the case of iron, all the essentials for making glass were abundant in the South Jersey streams and forests. With its resources of white sand, stands of timber for potash and fuel, clay for making furnace pots, and stone for the furnace walls, to which were added the business acumen of Caspar Wistar and his foresight in hiring experienced glass-workers, Salem County became the scene of the first successful glassworks in colonial America.

      Four Palatine Germans sailed from Rotterdam on December 7, 1738 in response to Wistar’s invitation to come to Alloway’s Creek in the Jerseys, there to train him and his son in the art of making glass, and to take charge of the glassmaking operation. The furnace went into blast in the autumn of 1739. Labor was provided, for the most part, by German immigrants, many of them indentured servants bound out to the Wistars in exchange for their passage and a home in the New World. The village which housed the workers, similar in plan to that of the iron communities, was called Wistarberg. At nearby Friesburg, a Lutheran church tended to their spiritual needs. The Wistar factory was the only glassworks in New Jersey during the colonial era.

      Window glass and bottles, blown from metals of aquamarine for most window lights and hollow ware, a deep olive-amber for bottles, to protect their contents from light, and white (clear colorless) were the staple of Wistarberg production. Luxury, or "fine" glass, was probably made also but its sale was not promoted because of the British restrictions and taxation on articles of colonial manufacture. Most of these luxury pieces were bowls and pitchers of a pale green or bluish cast. Fine goblets of Wistarberg make were known, but rare.

      The waters of the sea and Delaware Bay provided a livelihood for many of the colonial South Jerseymen who did not rely solely upon the land for their sustenance. Whaling was a way of life for some; others made small fortunes in shipbuilding and the coastal, or "coasting," trade.

      Attempts at making whaling a profitable enterprise date back to the time of the Dutch fur traders when, for example, David DeVries complained mildly in his journal on a day in March, 1633, ". . . . our people has caught seven whales, We could have done more if we had good harpoons, for they had struck seventeen fish and only saved seven." William Penn recognized the potential value of the industry. Writing in 1683 to the Commissioners of the Free Society of Traders, he said, ". . . . mighty whales roll upon the coast, near the mouth of the Bay of Delaware; eleven caught and worked into oyl one season. We justly hope a considerable profit by a whalery, they being so numerous and the shore so suitable." Town Bank (known also at different times as Portsmouth and New England Village) in Cape May County, the site of the first successful whaling venture, was settled when Dr. Daniel Coxe was the owner and absentee governor of much of West Jersey.

      By the end of the 17th century, whaling was the distinctive industry of the county, as was noted by Gabriel Thomas: "The commodities of Cape May County are oyl and whale bone, of which they make prodigious, nay, vast quantities, every year, having mightily advanc’d that great fishery, taking great

numbers of whales yearly." Town Bank was a thriving village of fifteen or twenty houses. At one time, the income from a single whale, when caught and reduced to oil and baleen, could approach $4000, and a Cape May whaler recorded that he and his party captured eight in one season. So profitable had whaling become by 1693 that the West Jersey legislature enacted a law requiring all non-residents of that province, or of Pennsylvania, to submit to the provincial governor 10% of all oil and bone extracted from whales caught by them in Delaware Bay.

      Whaling operations continued throughout much of the 18th century from the island beaches that stretch from Brigantine to Cape May. Companies of whalemen rowed up and down the offshore waters from mid-winter to early spring, setting up camp from time to time on one island or another from which they would launch their boats upon sighting a whale. But by the end of the century, offshore whaling had all but ceased, as few of the animals still came close enough to shore to be captured by men equipped only with tiny boats and primitive harpoons. The whaling industry, with the whales, moved out to sea.

      Although shipbuilding did not become a major South Jersey industry until the fourth decade of the 19th century, it was not unknown in the preceding century. Most of the vessels made in the southern counties during the colonial era were used by local merchants in carrying on a coasting trade. Among the prominent centers of this industry was Greenwich, on the Cohansey, where a sloop was built before 1735. Two more ships of Greenwich construction were launched in 1737.

      Others slid down the Greenwich ways regularly until the Revolution. They were small craft of no more than forty-five feet length on the keel, carrying a single mast with a fore and aft sail and sometimes small topsails. At Mays Landing, near the head of the Great Egg Harbor River, a number of sloops were built during this period. Colonial shipwrights worked, as well, along the Little Egg Harbor River and the streams of Salem County.

      Every commercial enterprise in colonial South Jersey contributed in some measure to a vigorous shipping industry that transported cargo to the coastal cities of America, and beyond them to the West Indies, on occasion even to Europe. Food products, whale oil, charcoal, lumber and shingles, tar and resins, iron, and glass left from the forests, the furnaces, and the farms of the southern counties in vessels that returned laden with sugar, molasses and rum, tea and coffee, hardware and canvas for shipbuilding, linen, and manufactured articles for sale in the general stores.

      On land, goods were carried over the colonial road system of South Jersey, which paralleled the waters of the streams and the bays. Basically, roads followed the old Indian trails, except, to some extent, the twists and curves of the native paths, the result of the Indians’ preference for ease of travel to shortness of distance and conforming therefore to the topography of the area, were altered by early road builders.

      When the roads were first laid, some were little more than bridle paths over which travelers moved on foot or horseback, followed by packhorses, or black or Indian slaves, bearing their baggage on their backs. In the same way, cargo was transported along the narrow routes.

      A major road, frequently called the King’s Highway, was laid between Burlington and Salem in the 1680’s. It passed near Cooper’s Ferry (Camden), touched Gloucester, Woodbury, and Raccoon, and met the Delaware at Penn’s Neck. From there it continued on to Salem. Later, the Salem road was extended to Cape May, by way of Greenwich and Cohansey Bridge (Bridgeton). A road was provided for travelers along the shore from Cape May to Tuckerton, where it took off across the Pine Barrens in Burlington. In 1696, a highway was laid between Great Egg Harbor and Gloucester. Local roads radiated from the larger settlements.

      Prominent citizens were authorized to operate ferries across the major streams, whereas crude bridges spanned the smaller creeks. On secondary roads, however, rivulets had to be forded, a road condition criticized by a Swedish visitor, Peter Kalm, who observed that, "many people are in danger of being drowned in such places, where the water is risen by a heavy rain." Travelers through the wilderness of pine and salt marshes sometimes came upon large streams where neither bridge nor ferry service was provided. Itinerant preachers, some of the most widely traveled of colonial men, wrote of having to cross Maurice River and the Great and Little Egg Harbor Rivers in canoes, while their horses swam alongside them.

      With few exceptions, the approved medium of exchange in South Jersey colonial commerce and trade was the coin of the realm. Theoretically, but not always actually, foreign currency was exchangeable at rates set by royal proclamation. The scarcity of specie, the cornering of bullion by colonial merchants, and the burgeoning trade eventuated in New Jersey’s first issue of paper money in 1709. Continuing demands throughout the century by the provincial legislature for the issuance of paper money seriously depreciated monetary values, thus creating the appearance of economic prosperity while, in fact, reducing the buying power of such money as did exist.

      Even the illusion of prosperity in colonial South Jersey was denied the many who lived in abject poverty. Their destitution was often underscored by their religious pastors, who lamented the inability of parishioners to pay them the barest minimum needed for survival. A large concentration of indigent dwelt along the untillable, marshy banks of the Delaware in Gloucester County. Elsewhere, among the poorest residents were the swamp-men, who lived at mining cedar logs buried in primeval ooze, the woodsmen who felled the trees for the lumber mills, and the bog ore diggers at iron-making centers such as Batsto and Atsion.

      Committed to the mercantilist theory that colonies are massive farms to be exploited for the economic benefit of the mother country, England in the 18th century pursued a policy that would have stultified American industry and shipping had not those measures been circumvented and resisted. Trade in and out of the colonies had to be conducted on ships of English or British colonial make and ownership. With few exceptions, products made or grown in the colonies could be sent only to the British Isles. Inter-colonial trade was restricted to the extent that any item of colonial export that could have been provided by England had to clear a port in England before shipment to another colony. Alternatively, the shipper could pay an export duty, in the amount equal to the import duty that would have been collected if it had been sent to England, and send the merchandise directly to the colonial port. Any goods shipped from a non-British port to America had to go by way of England.

      Similar policies were formulated by British political and commercial interests in regulating colonial manufacturing. Food and raw materials were desirable as articles of colonial export to the mother country, but goods manufactured in the colonies and placed on the market posed a threat to the English work force and the nation’s position in domestic and international trade. Such operations as those at Batsto and Wistarberg, therefore, incurred the official displeasure of the British government and felt the restrictive hand upon them.

      In spite of these strictures, colonial manufacturing expanded, in South Jersey as elsewhere. Smuggling, the shipping and receiving of goods in violation of these regulations, became a way of life even for the most moral, upstanding, and honest of men engaged in colonial commerce and trade. The winding rivers of South Jersey, near the shipping lanes but with many hidden coves and estuaries protected by beach islands and narrow inlets, became havens for illicit traders. Sandy roads, traversed by heavy wagons carrying loads of smuggled goods to outlets near Burlington and across from

Philadelphia, were cut through the pine barrens. Moving usually at night, the drivers concealed their illegal merchandise beneath loads of salt hay or clams.

      Fortunes were made by the most prestigious families along the Great and Little Egg Harbor Rivers and in Cape May County through the purchase, sale, and distribution of contraband. It is likely that most goods received and shipped at those places were illegal because, at the time, the only legal ports of entry in New Jersey were at Perth Amboy, Greenwich, and Burlington.

      British agents in the colonies habitually displayed a very casual attitude toward the snuggling business. When their indifference was prodded into an attention to duty by the British authorities, colonial traders responded to the increased surveillance and enforcement with acts of open defiance, culminating in warfare. As John Adams put it, "molasses was an essential ingredient of our independence."

CHAPTER FOUR

Meeting House and Schoolhouse

      Religious worship and the social control maintained by the churches were introduced to South Jersey with the coming of the earliest settlers. Albeit the membership of religious societies seldom, if ever, constituted more than half of the total population during the colonial era, the churches of the time were the most formative and important bodies in politics, education, and the care of the poor. The region’s literary output of the century came almost exclusively from the pens of clergymen and Quaker preachers.

      The first religious minister known to have labored in South Jersey was a Swedish Lutheran, Israel Fluviander, who was appointed by Governor Printz to serve as a chaplain to the military and civilian personnel engaged in the construction of Fort Elfsborg. However, his ministry there was brief, no parish or congregation was founded, and Swedish Lutherans looked to the west bank of the Delaware for spiritual care until after 1700. Lutheran parishes were established early in the 18th century at Raccoon (Swedesboro) and Penn’s Neck (Churchtown). Permanent religious societies were organized and meeting houses were built in South Jersey by Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterian Puritans before 1695.

      The company of John Fenwick is said to have turned the sails of the Griffin into a Quaker meeting house immediately upon their landing at Salem. As the ship is thought to have returned to England by way of the West Indies, the legend is improbable. But, if true, the meeting tent soon gave way to the log residence of Samuel Nicholson, where the people of Fenwick’s Colony began gathering for services of worship twice each week in 1676. In that year, the Salem Monthly Meeting of Friends, a monthly session in which business

and disciplinary matters were handled, was settled. The same residence was later donated by the owner to the Salem meeting for their exclusive use as a meeting house. Enlarged and improved, it provided the Salem Quakers with a place for worship and business until they erected a brick meeting house on the same lot in 1700.

      With each successive wave of Quaker immigration, new meetings were settled in South Jersey. Gathering at first in private homes, each group eventually built its own meeting house. As their numbers grew, monthly meetings for business and discipline were established. By the end of the 17th century, Quaker meeting houses were standing at Salem, along Alloway’s Creek, on Newton Creek in Gloucester County, and at Greenwich on the Cohansey. Between 1700 and the middle of the 18th century, Quaker houses of worship appeared at Hancock’s Bridge and Pilesgrove in Salem County, in Cape May County at Beesley’s Point and Seaville, in the western end of Gloucester County at Haddonfield and Woodbury, and along the shore at Somers Point, Leeds Point, the "upper end" of Great Egg Harbor (Linwood), and at Tuckerton on the Little Egg Harbor River. As the original buildings became too small or fell into disrepair through years of usage, new structures replaced them.

      Quaker meeting houses, often of sturdy, brick construction, inside were plain in the extreme. Meeting goers sat on rows of benches, parted by a middle aisle that separated the women from the men. (In many buildings, the two sexes had entered through separate doors.) Facing them were similar rows of benches, frequently on a stepped platform, from which the elders and overseers looked out upon the congregation. The whole was void of decoration. There was neither altar nor pulpit. Indeed, there was neither sacrament nor priest, nor ordained minister, but only the people, one or more of whom spoke according to the moving of the spirit. Otherwise, they all worshiped in silence, contemplating the inner light.

      Plainness of dress and speech, modesty and sobriety, the eschewing of any ostentation in their homes or manner of living were enjoined upon all Quakers. No idleness, frivolity, or worldly entertainment were countenanced. Quakers were permitted to marry only Quakers. Control over the membership was exercised by the monthly meeting of elders and overseers, who dealt with individuals accused of violating Quaker principles, imploring them to confess their fault and repent. The errant member who ignored this admonition was subject to the ultimate punishment of disownment by the society, or as is commonly said, of being "read out of meeting." Whenever possible, civil

disputes too were adjudicated by the monthly meeting, Quakers preferring that such matters be settled peaceably among themselves rather than by the civil courts.

      Quakers who married outside their faith faced a humiliating confession or disownment. Before the middle of the 18th century there was little infraction of this precept. As the Society’s influence in South Jersey waned, however, the incidence of irregular marriages among their membership increased significantly, alarming those who longed to preserve their homogeneity as a religious and social group.

      Settlers of Baptist persuasion migrated in or about 1683 from Ireland to the Cohansey precinct of Salem County, where shortly they were joined by another group of Baptists from Rhode Island. They were constituted a church in 1690, met for a time in private homes, and built their first meeting house at Back Neck in 1692. Later the congregation moved to a building at Sheppard’s Mill, then to Roadstown. A second group of New England Baptists settled at Bowentown in 1690. At Cape May, Baptist services are thought to have been held as early as 1675, but a congregation was first organized in that county in 1712. Their first permanent house of worship was near modern Rio Grande, where they met until 1742, when a new building was erected at Cape May Court House. During the three and one-half decades prior to the Revolution, Baptist churches were organized at Salem, Pittsgrove, Dividing Creek, and Tuckahoe.

      Puritan emigrants from New Haven Colony first settled along the banks of the Cohansey River as early as 1660. Exactly when these Puritans organized a church is not known, but a pastor was among them by 1695. Rev. Thomas Bridge, an Englishman and Oxford graduate described as having been "a man of wealth, piety, learning, ability and manifold experience," was requested in 1692 to consider removing from Bermuda to the Cohansey region, because "Many Persons in diverse Parts of ye Country have frequently exprest their desires of a Minister & assure us they will Contribute towards his Comfortable subsistence & pay him all that duty respect & deference his worke deserves . . . . " It is known that Bridge accepted the call and was in Fairfield in 1695. Under his direction, a log meeting house was built, to be replaced later by the frame predecessor of the Old Stone Church, which stands today near Fairton. In 1706, the congregation affiliated with the first American presbytery then being formed at Philadelphia, thus becoming, in fact, a Presbyterian church.

      Across the Cohansey from Fairfield, at Greenwich, a second Presbyterian congregation was begun around 1700, although its formal organization was delayed for a quarter of a century. Meanwhile, Calvinist whalemen sailing southward from New England located finally at Cape May, where they founded a church of the Presbyterian order at Cold Spring, around 1714. A small, log meeting house was erected near a spot where fresh water bubbled up in a salt marsh. Unorganized congregations of Presbyterians were meeting for worship in private homes at Pilesgrove and Woodbury in 1716. Presbyterian meeting houses were standing at both places before mid-century.

      Deep in the pine forest, along the Little Egg Harbor River, Presbyterians are said to have been worshiping in crude cabins early in the 1700’s. One group was at Pleasant Mills, where Scottish exiles, fleeing from the persecution of the later Stuart kings, found refuge. Downstream, at Clark’s Landing, Puritan emigrants from Connecticut established a town, and built a primitive meeting house, shortly after the turn of the 18th century.

      Less plain of speech and dress than the Quakers, the Baptists and Presbyterians were no more tolerant than they of slothfulness, frivolity, or sexual misconduct. Such vices as dancing, card playing, gambling, drunkenness, cheating, profanity, fornication, and Sabbath breaking were sternly denounced. Presbyterians suspected of engaging in these evils were forced to stand trial before the elders of the congregation. A public confession and the promise to mend his ways were required of anyone found guilty. A sentence of excommunication was pronounced upon unrepentant persons convicted of serious immorality or blasphemy.

      Other religious denominations which established congregations and erected meeting houses in South Jersey during the colonial period were the German Lutherans at Friesburg and a short-lived German Reformed Church nearby. The Moravian Brethren had churches along Oldman’s Creek and at Port Elizabeth on the Maurice River. The Church of England (Anglican), from which many of the colonists were in dissent, had little strength or influence in the southern region of the province. However, by the time of the Revolution, Anglican churches were standing at Salem, and at Waterford and Berkeley (Mount Royal) in Gloucester County. After the Revolution, the Swedish Lutheran churches joined the Anglican churches in becoming member congregations of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. Methodism, officially introduced to America by Joseph Pilmoor in 1769, and later to become the dominant religious group in South Jersey, was not widely followed in the area before the 1780’s.

      Roman Catholics, without legal protection or civil rights during the years of New Jersey’s status as a crown colony, were forced to meet in secret. At first, Catholics were exceedingly few. However, their numbers increased as European immigrants from predominately Catholic countries came to work in the Wistarberg glasshouse and at the iron furnace at Batsto. Itinerant priests from Philadelphia, one of them at times disguised as a physician, traveled to Salem and Gloucester Counties to celebrate the Mass in the homes of the faithful. The first such trip on record was in 1743.

      Made of logs in the earlier days, the meeting houses of all religious denominations eventually were shuttered structures of brick, frame, or stone. The interiors were sparsely furnished, initially with planks for seats, to be replaced later by plain box pews. In Lutheran and Anglican churches, the Sacrament was consecrated on simple wooden altars, usually bare of sacerdotal coverings or adornments. In Presbyterian meeting houses, the minister addressed his people from a high pulpit, approached by a staircase with balustrade, that loomed at the front or side of the room. Beneath and before it was an enclosed pew on a slightly raised platform, from which the precentor led in the congregational singing. Balconies on three sides were common in the larger of these buildings. None were heated. Late in the 18th century, when a new church building was furnished with a stove, it was a progressive innovation that occasioned commentary by contemporary writers.

      A change in the desultory spiritual climate that characterized much colonial religion was signaled when the great British evangelist, George Whitefield, first swept into South Jersey in 1740, bringing with him the early stirrings of a religious revival, known as the Great Awakening. That year, Whitefield appeared at various places in Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland Counties, aided by the visits of the famous and fiery Gilbert Tennent of New Brunswick. From then on, most of the stellar lights of American Presbyterianism appeared regularly and frequently in South Jersey pulpits. Whitefield, himself returned in 1746, when, according to stories carried in the Philadelphia newspapers, "he preached 4 times at Cape May, once at Cedar Bridge, once at Woodbury, and 3 times at Greenwich, to a very large and affected Auditories . . . ." The membership of the old churches grew. They gathered in newly-erected meeting houses, which were often filled, while new Presbyterian congregations emerged at Deer-field, Timber Creek (Blackwood), Quihawken (Churchtown), Long-a-Coming (Berlin), and elsewhere.

      One of the unsung heroes of South Jersey history in the mid-18th century was John Brainerd. Unfortunately, time has placed him in the shadow of his

more famous brother, David. Missionary to the Indians and overseer of a reservation in Burlington County, to him fell the burden of providing a regular ministry to the white population along the coastline and the Egg Harbor Rivers. Sermons, sometimes three on a Sunday, were delivered by him at widely scattered places throughout his huge parish. His busy Sundays were the beginning of busy weeks, when Brainerd would travel into the Pine Barrens toward the shore preaching, administering the Christian sacraments, solemnizing marriages, attending the sick, conducting funerals, counseling the distressed, organizing congregations, and supervising the construction of meeting houses.

      Brainerd, too, was an apostle of the Great Awakening. He began his South Jersey labors in 1758. Soon there appeared throughout the Egg Harbor country preaching stations commonly called "Brainerd’s churches." One was at Cedar Bridge (Bargaintown) and was known as Blackman’s Meeting House. Today Zion Methodist Church stands in its place. Another was Clark’s Mills Meeting House, near Port Republic, and another at Long-a-Coming. The peripatetic Brainerd stopped most frequently at Pleasant Mills and Batsto, where he was entertained by his intimate friend, Elijah Clark, in the fine colonial mansion still standing along the Nescochague. The log meeting house they erected at the Forks has long since given way to the Pleasant Mills Methodist Church.

      The humanitarian concern of the churches was directed toward the plight of the Lenni-Lenape. With the encroachment of white settlers upon their lands, the Indians began to leave New Jersey. A few of them were enslaved by the colonists. Their numbers were reduced when they fell prey to the white man’s diseases and vices, among which tuberculosis, small pox, and the use of intoxicants, against none of which they had resistance, proved to be the most devastating. By 1700, the Indian population of New Jersey was probably little more than 500.

      A missionary society in Scotland, responding to an appeal by a group of Presbyterian ministers in the colonies, provided funds for the relief of the distress of the New Jersey Indians. David Brainerd, of Connecticut, was appointed in the mid-1740’s to carry out the mission. After his tin-timely death in 1747, Brainerd’s task was taken up by his younger brother, John, in 1748. Ten years later, the provincial legislature purchased 3000 acres in Burlington County upon which was to be founded a reservation for the Lenni-Lenape, in exchange for their surrender of all remaining claims to land south of the Raritan River. The reservation was placed under the supervision of the colonial Presbyterian synod and John Brainerd was appointed overseer.

      Under Brainerd’s direction a settlement of several houses, a church, a school, a grist mill, and a saw mill was created. The Indians called it Edgepillock; Brainerd named it Brotherton. (Today the town on the site is called Indian Mills, but nothing of the old reservation remains.) About 200 Indians gathered there at first, but Brotherton was not a successful venture. Too much of the exhausting work fell upon Brainerd who, tired and worn, retired from his mission on the reservation in 1767. No one took his place. By 1774, no more than sixty Indians were left at Brotherton.

      After the Revolution, a few Quakers from Haddonfield attempted to revive a mission to the Indians. Clothing and blankets were collected, fields were plowed and planted, education and religious worship were provided. But it was to no avail. The last of the Lenape left New Jersey in 1802 when, at their request, their lands were sold by the state legislature and the proceeds used to relocate the remaining few with their fellow Indians in upstate New York.

      The rudiments of education in colonial South Jersey were dispensed by the churches, and by lone pedagogues in their private homes. In a few instances, education was provided as a public service by a community, but there was no comprehensive system of public education on a wide scale.

      A school was begun, it is believed, under Quaker auspices at Salem soon after Fenwick and his company settled there. This was the first of a number of similar Quaker schools which were instituted between 1676 and the middle of the 18th century. Usually, the meeting house and the schoolhouse were one and the same. Intended at first for Quakers only, these schools were opened later to children of any religious denomination. Only the basic skills of reading and writing were taught. Anything beyond these and a few practical skills, such as arithmetic for boys and homemaking for girls was thought to be frivolous and unnecessary. Instruction was "guarded," lest Quaker children be introduced to ideas and practices not in conformity with Quaker tenets. A broadening of viewpoint was evident in 1751, when the Haddonfield meeting proposed that Quaker parochial education give way to good neighborhood schools, for which the Quakers would use their influence in securing competent teachers.

      The Swedish Lutherans in South Jersey had a schoolmaster before they had a pastor. A school was opened at Raccoon in 1701, when Hans Stalt was sent to double as a schoolteacher and lay reader at Swedish worship. The purpose of the Raccoon school was not only to catechize children in Lutheran doctrine, and to teach them to read and write, but to try to preserve the Swedish language and culture in the midst of an English-speaking society. This parochial school met intermittently throughout the 18th century. Immediately prior to the

Revolution, a schoolhouse was erected alongside the church at Swedesboro (Raccoon until 1763.).

      The German Lutherans and the Moravians both had parish schools in South Jersey during the last half of the 18th century.

      The best educated group in colonial South Jersey was the Presbyterians, who brought both teachers and a long tradition of sound education to the region. Their pastors were proficient in the reading and writing of the Biblical and classical languages, they were informed on the most recent advances in scientific and philosophical thought from abroad, and they were fluent in the presentation of all the comp1exities of Reformed theology. This learning was dispensed weekly to their congregations in erudite sermons of extraordinary length.

      The Puritans brought the New England school system to Fairfield in 1697, when the New Haven settlers bound themselves to finance and maintain a township school to instruct their children in reading and writing. Land was reserved for its support. It was supervised by the town meeting and managed by the township officials. Similar schools were established later at Greenwich and Deerfield, and wherever New Englanders or Scotch-Irish Immigrants settled.

      For the most part, education in colonial South Jersey consisted of little more than instruction in reading. Boys were taught writing and arithmetic also as tools useful in running a household. A knowledge of these skills, more often than not, was denied to girls. A farmer from Penn’s Neck, for example, stipulated in his will that his son should learn "to read and write true Inglish," while his daughter was to be taught "to read as far as to know her Christian faith." A Cape May farmer directed that his son "larn Read rite & Sifer" up to the rule of three. Another legator from Waterford provided in his will that his daughter be apprenticed to "some religious and discreet master and mistress to learn to read the Bible and housewifery."

      Private schools were sometimes held in the homes of prominent citizens, often the local clergyman, or in buildings erected by them for that purpose. Frequently, they were academies, or classical schools, which offered advanced studies preparatory to admission to one of the colonial colleges. Such schools were conducted at Pittsgrove and Deerfield, where the usual academic fare included large portions of reading Greek and Latin classics in the original languages, writing dissertations in these languages, and the study of older and contemporary classics of English literature. Most of the graduates of the classical schools in South Jersey matriculated at Princeton.

      In many homes, the Bible was the only printed matter to which the literate could apply their learning. Homes with more extensive libraries included on their shelves, with the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, psalters, sermons, the journals of noted preachers, and other works of a religious nature. Primers and books of history were sold at some general stores.

      Although education was minimal, early South Jersey had its literary figures nonetheless. The first almanac in America was published by Daniel Leeds, property owner and part-time resident of Leeds Point, beginning in 1687. His sons, Titan and Felix, continued the publication after their father’s death. A collection of poems by the priest of the Anglican church at Waterford, Nathaniel Evans, was published posthumously in 1770.

      Most notable among the journals of Quaker preachers was that of John Woolman, of Mount Holly. The first edition was published at Philadelphia in 1774. Praised for the exquisiteness and grace of its style, the journal was called by William Ellery Channing "the purest and sweetest of all autobiographies." Charles Lamb is quoted as having said, "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart and love the early Quakers."

      Peter Kalm, a Swedish scientist, specializing in botany, spent the winter and spring of 1748-1749 and 1749-1750 at Raccoon and Cape May, where he wrote part of his book, Travels into North America. Kalm left not only a description of the flora and fauna of the region, but gave an account of Indian customs and remedies, marriage practices among the white colonists, and road conditions. He discussed such topics as Negro slavery, the rapid growth of population, climate, and the digging of wells. In botanical nomenclature, his name was given to New Jersey’s mountain laurel, kalmia latifolia. Written in Swedish, Kalm’s Travels was translated first into French and German. An English translation was published in 1770. A minister and scientist, Kalm served as pastor of the Swedish Lutheran churches in South Jersey during his stays at Raccoon.

      Probably the best known today of the 18th-century journals by South Jerseymen is that of Philip Vickers Fithian. Hardly a book currently being published on the topic of colonial culture or religion fails to quote from Fithian’s works. Selections from his war diary appear in most collections of Revolutionary documents. The son of a farmer, Fithian was born and raised in Cumberland County. He attended the classical school at Deerfield, was admitted to Princeton, and graduated in 1772. For a year he tutored the children of a wealthy Virginia planter, was licensed as a Presbyterian preacher in 1774, and afterward made several missionary tours. In 1776, he enlisted as a chaplain

and died in camp at Fort Washington during the New York campaign. His journal is a masterpiece of vivid description of people and places, of personal thoughts, and accounts of events which reveals all the passions, hopes, and fears of a sensitive young man caught up in the affairs of 18th-century life in America and of those leading to the colonial struggle for independence. Fithian’s writings, unknown in his time, lay in unpublished manuscripts until the 20th century.

CHAPTER FIVE

Life and Leisure in Colonial South Jersey

      Indoor life for most in the earliest days of South Jersey was a cramped affair. Whole families ate, drank, and slept within the confining four walls of a single, tiny room. During most seasons, the householder, away at work in the fields or the furnaces, could breathe the air of the out-of-doors and stretch his legs in the open spaces. On the other hand, the housewife had only the garden patch alongside the cottage to relieve the tedium of the dark, crowded interior where she sewed, spun, wove, cooked, cleaned, and raised their offspring, some of whom were always underfoot.

      More often than not, the one-room building was made of notched logs, a type of construction attributed to the Swedes. Access to the outside was by way of a low door, through which one could pass only by stooping. Glassless windows, admitting light and fresh air on warmer days, were covered by a wooden board in winter or in rainy weather. The log walls were chinked with clay. Several cubic feet of precious space were sacrificed to make room, in one corner, for the fireplace and chimney, a lumpish fixture of gray stone or thick clay from which came heat and warm meals.

      At mid-18th century, poorer families still lived in such cabins, or worse. Peter Kalm decried the poverty of some Swedish houses at Raccoon - - comfortless places without shutters, walls with open cracks, and rooms without a fireplace or chimney. It was a cold existence for the inhabitants on days when winter chilled even the better homes almost beyond endurance. In January, 1749, to cite an instance, the cold was so bitter inside Kalm’s house at Raccoon that it froze the ink on his pen before he could write two lines. He was forced to

place his inkwell on the hearth, or in his pocket, to keep its contents in a liquid state.

      People a step above the Impoverished on the economic scale lived in clapboard houses. Among the more affluent, dwellings with shingle facing or made of brick (occasionally of fieldstone by mid-18th century), supplanted the first rough cabins.

      The Swedish brick dwellings, initially, were one-storied edifices, with gambrel roofs. Before long, second stories were added, creating the high, narrow, brick houses of a style known as Swedish Colonial. In Quaker Salem County, brick dwellings that resembled the townhouses of 18th-century Philadelphia were erected on the manors of the wealthy. They were of two stories, with interior chimneys at each end. The fronts were wide, some with plain entrances, but others with elegant doorways, carved and transomed, an outward evidence of the graceful style of living enjoyed by the dwellers within. A distinctive feature of the Salem houses was the patterned ends, in which, standing out boldly against the background of red bricks were the figures of diamonds, zigzags, or checkerboards done in glazed bricks of a contrasting color -- blue, purple, or gray.

      Frame dwellings were the rule, even among the wealthy, in Cape May County, in the shore areas of old Gloucester County, and along the Delaware as far north as Salem. (The mansion house of the Somers plantation was a notable exception.) They were lower and more rambling than the brick houses further inland, Constructed over a framework of oak and pine timbers, they were faced, on their exteriors, with white cedar shingles. According to Kalm, white cedar was preferred for the exteriors, including the roofs, because it was both durable and lightweight, obviating the necessity for thick walls and strong beams to support the roofs. Being light, the shingles did little harm when they fell to the ground or upon the pate of an unsuspecting passer-by. Furthermore, white cedar, being somewhat absorbent, could "easily be wetted in case of fire." The large-headed, wrought nails, used in construction, were often forged in the owner’s own blacksmith shop.

      Ventilating grilles, cut in the wood panels over the closets which flanked the fireplaces, were a novel component of South Jersey domestic architecture in the 18th century. Some examples, still observable today, are in the Somers Mansion at Somers Point and in the Vauxhall Room, formerly in the Thomas Maskell house of Greenwich, now one of the restored rooms at the Winterthur Museum near Wilmington.

      Floors in modest South Jersey homes were bare, for the most part. Small, hooked rugs, although known, were uncommon. Such floor coverings as were used, as in places of heavy wear and before the hearth, were braided from a potpourri of left-over cloth. The earliest furniture, made of such natural South Jersey woods as gum, pine, walnut, cherry, and red cedar, less often from chestnut, maple, ash, hickory, or apple, was plain and sturdy. Tables, corner cupboards, dressers, and beds were built by local carpenter-joiners, craftsmen whose pieces were too unprofessionally done to merit them the title of cabinetmaker.

      Diners sat at table on portable stools; although outfitted with upholstered pads in the homes of the wealthy, they were still no more than stools. Eventually, stools were replaced by chairs with curved legs and carved feet, or by plainer, slat-back chairs with rush seats. Best known of the latter were the Ware chairs, made in Cumberland County late in the 18th century by the father and sons of the Maskell Ware family. The wood of the Ware chairs was swamp maple; the seats, rushes gathered from the marshes.

      Popular in Cumberland and Salem Counties were dressing tables (lowboys) which, like the chairs, had cabriole legs and web feet. Usually the 18th-century lowboys from this area are attributed to cabinetmakers in Philadelphia or New York; it is possible, however, that some were done locally, because numerous furniture makers were working in South Jersey before the Revolution. The names of at least seven are known. From 1760, or thereabout, when the Chippendale style came into vogue, to the period immediately after the Revolution (the Hepplewhite-Sheraton era), local furniture makers, as others of good reputation in the colonial cities, copied the patterns given by Chippendale in his guide, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, a work published in London in 1754.

      Cases for clocks were fashioned by cabinetmakers. The working parts, and the faces, embellished frequently with colorful, decorative painting, were done by clockmakers. Colonial South Jersey clockmakers, whose names are known, included men from Burlington, Mount Holly, Bordentown, Pemberton, Greenwich on the Cohansey, Woodbury, and Salem.

      Tea and dinner services of fine porcelain were brought in from England or the Continent, or from the Orient by way of London. The less affluent ate and drank from red-ware, the earliest type of Jersey pottery. Plates, platters, mugs, and jars fired from local clays, were frequently ornamented with floral and other designs called "sup." The earliest South Jersey pottery was opened by Dr.

Daniel Coxe at Burlington around 1684. A small pottery was standing at Salem as early as 1704.

      Alongside the expensive, delicate china, silver graced the tables and sideboards of the wealthy, while pewter sufficed for those who were merely comfortably well-off. Some of the silver was crafted locally. Silversmiths (a number of whom were also clockmakers) of known reputation worked at Burlington, along the Rancocas, in Pittsgrove, and elsewhere in South Jersey during the 18th century. On the other hand, no pewterers are known to have been working anywhere in New Jersey during the colonial period. Possibly, (perhaps not probably), as in other colonies, some South Jersey silversmiths made pewter objects as well. If so, either they did not mark their pewter pieces or none of them have survived. Extant pieces from the colonial era in South Jersey bear touchmarks of Philadelphia, New York, Connecticut, and European pewterers.

      Portraiture, landscape, and seascape painting were not South Jersey arts in colonial times. Doubtless, the well-to-do decorated the walls of their houses with works by European or Philadelphia masters, and possibly an itinerant silhouette artist paused at the better homes to memorialize the profiles of the family members in black and white outline, but no painter of note lived or worked in the southern counties in the 18th century. Most decorative art pieces, delft tiles, for example, or expensive glass bowls and pitchers, were imported. Among the ladies, the artistic impulse found expression in fancy needlework, especially in embroidering samplers, a devise by which small girls learned both stitchery and the alphabet. Late in the 18th century, embroidered pictures became the fashion.

      Professional weavers plied their trade in shops, as at Salem in 1676, or traveled from house to house and from settlement to settlement. Nevertheless, most of the weaving, and the spinning that preceded it, was done at home by the housewives and their older daughters on wheels and looms turned out by local woodworkers. More of a necessity than an art, homespun was a staple in the colonial wardrobe among the common people, but spinning and weaving were raised to a fine art by skillful mothers who executed patterns of great beauty and intricacy in the quilts and coverlets they produced for the hope chests of their marriageable sons and daughters.

      Although homespun was the customary material for clothing, there were exceptions. The first Swedish settlers wore jackets, waistcoats, breeches, and petticoats of animal skins. Shortly, however, they planted flax from which they wove linen cloth. Throughout the 18th century, elegant clothing, styled from

imported fabrics of high quality, bedecked many a citizen of South Jersey. One ship, for instance, on a single crossing from London bore among her cargo quantities of broadcloth, fine linens, calicoes, chintzes, lawns and cambrics (both of them thinspun fabrics of cotton or linen), silks, and satins. On the same ship were silk stockings, and men’s and women’s shoes.

      An eye-witness account given by an 18th-century Greenwich lady tells that, on summer Sundays, the men often attended worship without their coats, for then they could display their beautifully tailored shirts, with full sleeves, "carefully pleated from the shoulder to the wrist, [and] a pair of silver or gold sleeve buttons, and a cambric stock with a buckle of the same metal." A letter written by Benjamin Franklin in 1748 shows that the young ladies of Cape May were sumptuously outfitted, too. A new hat became the rage when Mrs. Franklin presented the gift "of a new-fashioned cap" to a Cape May skipper’s daughter. When she, wearing her new bonnet, appeared in church, "all the girls resolved to get such caps from Philadelphia." They raised the money for their coveted finery by knitting worsted mittens for sale in the Quaker City.

      Among the colonial craftsmen who contributed their compositions to the South Jersey scene were the carvers in wood and stone. Along the shore, carving and decorating decoys was a thriving art. Other woodcarvers created articles for domestic use, while itinerant artists were commissioned to execute carved embellishments on the mantles, balustrades, wall panels, doorways, and porticos of houses. Unknown stonecarvers left monuments to their talents in the names and epitaphs on the gravestones that stand in dozens of churchyards across the countryside.

      For one South Jerseyman of the 18th century, music was the art that most "touches and soothes [the] Mind." Philip Fithian, the man so moved, was writing primarily about Scottish hymns, which, with other hymns, folk music, and popular songs of the 18th century were sung in homes at gatherings of families and friends. Musical instruments, among which the violin and the flute seem to have been the most common, were played in accompaniment to the singing or in performances of their own. Fithian, trained in both vocal and instrumental music, enjoyed entertaining friends -- and whatever "handsome" ladies whose acquaintance he happened to make -- by piping on his German flute. The well-to-do of South Jersey may have emulated their Philadelphia counterparts by holding private concerts of chamber music in the parlors or drawing rooms of their mansions. With the coming of the Revolution, the fife and drum added martial music to the repertory.

      Rarely were musical instruments heard in the meeting houses, albeit in most of them the singing of hymns was an integral part of the worship experience. Quakers shunned the use of any music, vocal or instrumental, in connection with religious services. In Presbyterian meeting houses, psalms from the Geneva or Scottish Psalters, or the hymns of Isaac Watts, were sung without accompaniment. A precentor, having taken his pitch from a tuning fork, "lined out" the words and melody of the song phrase by phrase. As he paused at the end of each line or phrase, the congregation repeated what he had just sung, and so on until the entire hymn was finished. In South Jersey churches, only the Anglicans had organs, and they only after 1760, when the congregations were first able to afford them.

      Singing schools, in some cases, were the outgrowth of the need for competent singers in the organless churches. At Swedesboro, the Lutheran pastor, despairing of finding a vocalist who could sing in English, urged "with success the establishment of singing schools, and since then I have rarely been in want of singers." In other instances, it appears, these schools were more in the nature of entertainment than of the serious study of music. At Pleasant Mills, early in 1775, they met on Monday evenings, when the young men of the village and nearby Batsto would call upon their lady friends to escort them to what must have been the social event of the week.

      Much to the distress of their pastors, who railed against the evil with fearful admonitions, the young of colonial South Jersey loved to dance. These were frolicsome times when the feet would stamp and the fiddles hum. Often, to the further discomfiture of serious people, dancing and fiddling were not all that happened. With them were mixed vast quantities of rum or brandy, a combination that prompted the loosening of morals as well as the feet. Apropos of this, South Jersey in colonial times had something of a reputation for inebriation that could astound even the most liberated city dweller who happened to travel through the region. Pastor von Wrangel wailed that the ancient Swedish custom of celebrating weddings with three or four days of eating, drinking, dancing, and merrymaking, abandoned elsewhere, had been perpetuated in the Egg Harbor country.

      Other diversions that appealed to South Jerseymen in their hours of leisure, but which brought anguish to the sober-minded, were games of chance, card playing, and horse racing. Quoit pitching, too, offered colonials the opportunity for a friendly wager. One Quaker preacher espied the eroding of Quaker standards among their youth when, among other frivolities, they were consumed by a penchant for pleasurable sleigh riding.

      More innocent entertainments were the "frolics" and "bees" that accompanied barn-raisings, butcherings, harvests, and the like. Wrestling tested the skills of man against man. Young people along the shore were early enticed by the fun of parties on the beach. Adult men, relieved by their farms and herds from the necessity of fishing and hunting for food, turned to angling and gunning for sport. A fox hunting club was organized in Gloucester County early in the 18th century.

      Countless mugs were raised and tankards were drained at the taverns which beckoned from every crossroads. These accommodations offered, with beds and food for strangers, gathering places for local men seeking respite from the week’s labor and monotony. They assembled there for an exchange of views about the weather, the crops, and politics. They collected their mail, just arrived with the latest carrier, while travelers told them of happenings in distant places. On auction days, blocks were set up at the taverns; on election day, polls. Sometimes they housed courts and legislative bodies. As 1776 approached, some became scenes of revolutionary meetings.

      Established by law - - at one time every New Jersey town was required to provide facilities for the care and comfort of travelers - - inns and taverns were licensed and regulated by the authorities. In South Jersey, the county courts controlled the rates charged for food, drink, and lodging. The legislature prescribed suitable punishment for guests and regulars found guilty of drunkenness or tippling on the Sabbath.

      A number of South Jersey taverns attained a modicum of fame in colonial times. Hugg’s, at Gloucester Point, was known for its commodious third-floor banquet hall, which was the scene of courts and town meetings. There the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club met, rebellion was discussed and planned in the 1770’s, and Betsy Griscom was married to John Ross before she took up the business of making flags in Philadelphia. Taverns in Greenwich and Bridgeton, too, were associated with revolutionary activities. A handwritten newspaper, the Plain Dealer, a Revolutionary broadside, was posted for public reading at Potter’s Tavern in the Cumberland County seat. At the Indian King, in Haddonfield, the New Jersey legislature held sessions for a time in 1777, when Trenton and Princeton were under attack. A chain of taverns, that offered cover to smugglers and relief to travelers riding by stage or horseback through the Pines, stretched from the shore to Cooper’s Ferry.

      The proprietors were men of many parts: gracious host, efficient manager, master chef, fount and dispenser of information, referee in disputes, judge of human character, "bouncer," and often the most prominent local politico and

overseer of justice. These versatile innkeepers sometimes were women. Among them was Ann Risley, who kept, at Absecon Bridge, a tavern that was known far and wide for its menu of succulent seafood, which patrons washed down with hearty drafts of Madeira or West India rum. Desire Sparks was proprietor of the Two Tuns, near Gloucester, a favorite watering place for British Regulars and Hessian mercenaries during the months of enemy occupation.

CHAPTER SIX

South Jersey in the Revolution

      Resistance against British mercantile restrictions and protests against the abrogation of liberties long held dear by Englishmen everywhere had warmed to the point of violence and open rebellion in South Jersey by 1774. The most spectacular demonstration of this mounting spirit of opposition occurred at Greenwich on the Cohansey near the end of that year.

      The brig Greyhound, loaded with tea intended for Philadelphia, tied up at the Greenwich wharf in mid-December. Evidently the captain had been warned that any attempt to land his cargo at the Quaker City would encounter stiff rebuff. A Greenwich Tory offered the use of his cellar as a storage place for the unwanted tea until it could be marketed. Surreptitiously, on December 12 the chests of tea were removed from the ship under cover of night and secreted in the Greenwich house.

      It was an ill-kept secret, for the whereabouts of the hated tea was widely known throughout the countryside. On December 22, while the citizenry was gathered at Bridgeton for the purpose of choosing a committee to confiscate the tea and arrange for its proper disposal, a gang of impetuous enthusiasts broke into the Tory’s home, stole the tea, piled it in the town square, and set it afire. While their contraband blazed up in a bonfire, the vandals, disguised as Indians, danced around it. Several of them were later indicted, but there was no jury to be found in Cumberland County who would convict them. According to Philip Fithian, the victim of an unlikely tradition that he was the ringleader of

the episode, the community consensus was one of gladness that the tea was gone, but of disapproval as to the method of its disposition.

      The counsel of moderation laid by their leaders upon the people of South Jersey during the months of 1774 and early 1775 yielded to rebellious fervor after the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, in Massachusetts. All expedients short of open fighting having failed to resolve their differences with the mother country, South Jerseymen began to prepare for war. In May, companies of militiamen were formed in the southern counties, as elsewhere in the colony. Among the more enthusiastic of this new soldiery were the Greenwich tea burners. Committees of Observation were chosen throughout the region to plan for the common defense.

      Except for training and planning, there was little action for nearly a year. In March, 1776, Joseph Bloomfield’s company of the Third New Jersey Battalion was summoned to duty in the Canadian campaign. In July, others were called to camp at New York, where they distinguished themselves in the ill-fated battle for that city in the fall of 1776. The end-of-the-year retreat of Washington’s army across the Jerseys brought the war close to home.

      In the early years of the Revolution, three forts were erected on the lower Delaware to stave off a possible British naval assault upon Philadelphia by way of the river. Two of the forts, Billings and Mercer, were on the Jersey side in Gloucester County; the third, Fort Mifflin, was a short distance below the mouth of the Schuylkill on the Pennsylvania side. The chief strategic function of the South Jersey strongholds was to guard the chevaux-de-frise that had been laid across the navigable channel of the Delaware River.

      This deterrent to the upriver movement of enemy vessels, of a design attributed to Benjamin Franklin, was constructed in the summer of 1775. It consisted of rows of mammoth logs, secured in stone cases at the bottom of the river, and extending upward toward the surface at a forty-five degree angle. Their ends, concealed just beneath the surface, were capped with iron points that could tear apart the wooden hull of any unwary ship that passed over them.

      Purchase of planks for the erection of a redoubt at Billingsport was authorized by the Continental Congress in June, 1776, two weeks before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In July, ground was purchased and the fort begun. About four miles upstream, at Red Bank, Fort Mercer was constructed the following spring on land confiscated from an elderly Quaker couple, James and Ann Cooper Whitall. It was situated on a high bluff overlooking the river.

      With the fall of Philadelphia to the British commander-in-chief in September, 1777, the defense of the lower Delaware assumed a critical importance. Albeit the attacking forces approached the city by way of the Chesapeake and overland from the southwest, the occupying army could not rely upon the same route to bring in its needed military supplies, nor food and other necessities for the soldiers. General Howe had to have access to the open sea by way of the Delaware, if the captured capital was to be retained.

      Washington, cognizant of Howe’s predicament, ordered a shoring up of the defenses along the lower river. He was prompted into quick action when Fort Billings was taken without a struggle by one of Howe’s officers in a surprise attack on September 30. The British demolished the fort and opened a seventeen-foot passage between the shore and the chevaux-de-frise. Through this, and a wider passage cleared later, British ships penetrated to within firing range of Fort Mercer, but were repelled by cannon fire from gun emplacements along the shore and American floating batteries stationed in the river.

      The American commander dispatched a letter to Colonel Christopher Greene of the First Rhode Island Regiment on October 9, informing him that he had been placed in command at Red Bank. A French engineer and captain, Manduit du Plessis, and Colonel Israel Angell, with their forces, were also being sent to the Gloucester County stronghold, Greene was told. Washington reminded him that, "the post with which you are now intrusted is of the utmost importance to America, and demands every exertion you are capable of, for its security and defence. The whole defence of the Delaware absolutely depends upon it, and consequently all of the Enemy’s hopes of keeping Philadelphia and finally succeeding in the object of the campaign."

      The sprawling fortification at Red Bank was much too extensive to be defended, even with this increased manpower. At du Plessis’ suggestion, the fortified area within the outer stockade was reduced by two-thirds. A pentagon-shaped redoubt was erected at the lower end, protected by wooden pickets and an abatis, a barricade of brush and fallen trees with spiked branches. Heavily loaded cannon were trained on the upper end of the enclosure.

      The anticipated attack on Fort Mercer was launched when a Hessian colonel, Count Carl von Donop, was selected by the British commander-in-chief to lead his 1200 picked Hessian mercenaries against the fort. Early in the morning, on October 21, 1777, von Donop and his army crossed to Cooper’s Ferry and took the road to Haddonfield, where they encamped. The next morning (October 22), at dawn, they began the march toward Red Bank, by

way of Woodbury. Meanwhile, the British ships Augusta and Merlin had moved into position within range of Fort Mercer.

      By afternoon, the Hessians, hidden among the trees, were within 400 yards of the fort. An American sentry alerted the 400 defenders within the enclosure to the impending attack. Commander Greene ordered his men to hold their fire until they sighted the Hessian soldiers’ belts, and then to shoot below them. The strategy was effective, for in the ensuing battle, although von Donop and his men breached the abatis, crossed the ditch beyond it, and some even mounted the parapet, 400 or more of the Hessian mercenaries were killed or severely wounded. The American losses were twenty-eight wounded and eleven dead. Within forty minutes of the time the Hessians had commenced the assault, those who remained of von Donop’s disordered ranks were fleeing toward Woodbury.

      There the badly injured were hospitalized in the Friends’ Meeting House, while the others continued the retreat to Haddonfield and back to the safety of Philadelphia. Their commander lay mortally wounded within the fort. He, with the other injured and dying soldiers, was removed later to the Whitall house at the south end of the stockade.

      The British ships anchored in the river were ineffectual during the battles for their cannon balls were hurtled harmlessly into the muddy bluff beneath the fort. During an attempt to withdraw downriver to escape the bombardment from the American galleys and shore batteries, the Augusta and Merlin ran aground. A naval battle of sorts was then waged until nightfall. Resumed the next morning, it resulted in the destruction of both ships.

      The struggle for the Delaware was not yet ended. Fort Mifflin succumbed to British seizure and bombardment in mid-November, while General Cornwallis, with 2000 troops, was crossing from Chester to Billingsport and marching toward Red Bank. His forces were supplemented by a detachment from New York. General Nathaniel Greene was ordered by Washington to proceed with his division to give battle with Cornwallis in defense of the Red Bank garrison.

      Accompanied by General Lafayette, Greene and his men crossed to Burlington and headed south. However, expected reinforcements did not appear, in consequence of which Greene deemed it unwise to engage Cornwallis and filed off toward Haddonfield. Colonel Christopher Greene, the general’s cousin and still commander at Fort Mercer, upon orders evacuated the fort on November 20. Under cover of darkness, on the night of November 21,

part of the American fleet escaped upstream to Burlington, but seventeen vessels still remained at Gloucester when the maneuver was detected by the British. The stranded American ships were abandoned by their crews and set afire.

      Cornwallis seized and dismantled the forsaken redoubt at Red Bank. Then with a contingent of about 5000 men he marched northward a short distance along the river bank to Gloucester Point, where he established a fortification. There followed in that region of Gloucester County a number of minor skirmishes, involving Nathaniel Greene, Lafayette, and other less prominent American and French officers, but a hoped-for attack on the Cornwallis garrison never became feasible. American power on the Delaware River broken, the British removed the chevaux-de-friseand began to pass safely to and from occupied Philadelphia.

      Both the British, happily ensconced in the comfort of Philadelphia, and the American patriot army, freezing at Valley Forge, depended upon the farmland of South Jersey for food during the terrible winter of 1777-1778. Foraging parties scoured the countryside from Gloucester to Cape May, rounding up cattle, stealing horses, robbing barns of their grain, and confiscating wagons. Too often in ravaging the fields and farms, they plundered the homes and defiled the meeting houses in sprees of wanton destruction that brought needless suffering upon civilians, sometimes the very elements of the population that had most befriended them. Forage that could not be gathered was sometimes burned to keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy.

      The encounters of foraging parties with detachments of the opposing army resulted in a number of skirmishes. Among them were the affair at Quinton’s Bridge and the notorious massacre at the Hancock House. With a force upwards of 3000 men, the British occupied the city of Salem in March, 1778. Their foragers attempted to advance deeper into the county, but the patriot militia determined to stop them at Alloway’s Creek. The Americans, some of whom were ambushed, made an apparently successful stand at Quinton’s Bridge. The British returned to Salem, only to attack later at Hancock’s Bridge. There they surrounded the William Hancock dwelling, where they supposed the militia officers guarding the bridge were billeted, stormed it from front and rear, and put all those within to the bayonet. Unknown to the British raiders, most of the defenders had departed from the house the night before.

      The affair at Hancock’s Bridge was the last episode of the Revolution along the Delaware. In June, 1778, a change in British strategy dictated the

evacuation of Philadelphia, as the seat of battle moved to other parts of the seaboard north and south of the Delaware valley.

      When South Jerseymen were answering the call to arms, the fires at Batsto furnace began to glow with patriotic warmth. John Cox was the owner of the ironmaking establishment in 1776, when munitions for the Continental Army began to pour from the village in the Pines. Cannon and cannon balls, hardware for ships and wagons, kettles, and other articles were hauled overland to Washington’s soldiers. Guns and ammunition were manufactured, too, for the arming of privateers. A militia company was organized to defend the works in case of invasion, but otherwise the ironmakers were exempt from military duty.

      Munitions not manufactured in the colonies were imported for sale to the Continental Army by South Jersey shipowners. Quantities of gun powder, flints, and lead from the West Indies were unloaded regularly during 1776 at Somers Point from the ships of Colonel Richard Somers. Although much of it was retained for the use of the militia companies of Gloucester County, some of it was forwarded to the Continental Congress for their disposition.

      Richard Somers, John Cox, Richard Wescoat, and other notables of old Gloucester County were heavily engaged in privateering during the war. Whereas the importing of military supplies from the islands proved to be of little profit, the gains to be realized from privateering were immense. The advantages that made the South Jersey coastline attractive for smuggling were equally beneficial for privateering. In fact, from the British point of view, there was little difference between the two.

      A privateer was a privately owned vessel, outfitted with arms, and licensed by a government to prey on enemy craft. During the Revolution, American privateers were granted their licenses, called letters of marque, by Congress or the state. These entitled them to fire on British ships, capture and board them, and take them to an American port, where they and their cargo (except that part designated for the army) were sold at public auction. The crews of the enemy vessels were imprisoned. In some instances, a percentage of the income from the sale of the prizes went to the Continental Congress. The remainder was divided among the owners, the officers, and the crew of the privateer. It was a dangerous but highly profitable undertaking that resulted in enormous gains for the Americans, but devastated British coastal and transoceanic shipping.

      A naval clash, called the Battle of Turtle Gut Inlet, the first in South Jersey waters to be waged by a privateer, occurred off the Cape May County beaches during the last week of June, 1776. The armed American merchant

brigantine, Nancy, returning from the Caribbean with a supply of arms and ammunition, fired a broadside at the armed boats sent out by a British warship to intercept her. Barges of three American privateers other than the Nancy reached her in time to give assistance. While some seamen manned the guns, others worked to get as much of her precious cargo as possible to the beach. As British warships moved in, with their nine-pounders, the Nancy’s commander prepared for the destruction of all that remained by a delayed explosion, after he and the crew had abandoned ship. Just as the British seamen boarded her, a carefully laid trail of powder caught fire from a sail ignited by the Americans before they had departed, and the ship blew up with a deafening roar.

      At the estuary of the Little Egg Harbor River lay the "nest of rebel pirates" that was of most annoyance to the British. In September, 1778, their commander-in-chief drew up plans to dispose of this annoyance by sending a naval striking force against it. A fleet of a dozen armed sloops and galleys, tenders, and transports, with their crews and an army of 300 soldiers, were assembled for the expedition at Staten Island on September 30. Heavy seas, stirred up by storms, slowed their progress southward, a delay used by the defenders of the Little Egg Harbor to get some of their larger ships to sea and the smaller craft upstream to prevent their falling into British hands. Goods were removed from the houses, warehouses, and public buildings at Chestnut Neck, the village on the south side of the river, near its mouth, where Gloucester County privateering was centered.

      It was surmised at Chestnut Neck that they were the object of the British maneuver. A small redoubt, called Fort Fox Burrows, had been erected there about two years before to protect the privateering interest along the bay and to prevent enemy penetration upstream to Batsto. But, for reasons that have never come to light, neither in the fort, which stood at the water’s edge, nor on the platform constructed on the hill behind it were cannon ever installed.

      On the afternoon of October 6, the British fleet reached Chestnut Neck. A direct bombardment of the fort quickly routed its cannonless defenders, whose muskets, soon emptied, were no competition for British artillery. The patriots scattered to the woods. The British troops and seamen went ashore, destroyed the fort, and set fire to the entire village. Ten vessels, prizes of the privateers at Chestnut Neck, which could not be removed before the British arrived, were dismantled and scuttled.

      Advised that American reinforcements were on the way, the fleed commandee decided against carrying out his intent to push upstream to Batsto and Pleasant Mills. The British desire to return to New York immediately was

thwarted, however, by inclement weather, which made a crossing of the bar to open sea risky. While their ships lay at anchor, British raiding parties plundered the north shore of the river. A picket post of Count Pulaski’s Legion was taken by surprise in a farmhouse on Osborn Island and massacred.

      At last, on October 20, the commander ordered his vessels out of the bay. With the other craft safely over the bar, the flagship Zebra tried to cross it, but struck, and attempts throughout the day and into the next morning to free her having failed, she was abandoned and set afire; thus, the British lost a major ship in an expedition that accomplished only half its purpose. The affair at Chestnut Neck was the last incident of the Revolution to take place in South Jersey.

      Full-scale privateering was resumed at Chestnut Neck, but the village was never rebuilt. The residents, having fled at the approach of the enemy, remained at the inland villages to which they had escaped, especially at the town on Nacote Creek which later came to be called Port Republic.

      Religion dictated, along with economics and political loyalties, the attitudes of many South Jersey people toward the Revolution. Not all viewed it with favor. The Quakers, as a whole, were opposed to the Revolution, as they were to all wars, on the basis of their pacifist principle that the bearing of arms for any reason whatever is evil, even when so precious a right as liberty is at stake.

      When the county militias were being formed at the commencement of hostilities, young Quakers were forbidden by their monthly meetings to join, on pain of disownment; nor were they permitted to pay the fines assessed upon those who refused to serve. Payment of taxes imposed by the revolutionary government to defray the expenses of the war was deplored among their membership as a deviation from their "peaceable principles." Any noncombatant association with the Revolution, whether by joining committees of correspondence or administering or taking an oath of allegiance to the new government, was disapproved by the Society. Quakers who observed these strictures laid down by their monthly meetings not only incurred the suspicion and ill-will of their non-Quaker neighbors, but frequently landed in the county jail while their property was seized. Those who violated them were cut off from the unity of Friends.

      A number of South Jersey Quakers, some of prominent name, chose to risk almost certain disownment by their religious society rather than turn their backs upon the cause of political and economic freedom for which the American patriots were fighting. The minutes of the South Jersey monthly meetings

reveal the names of scores who were separated from the Society of Friends for overt participation in military activities, the payment of military fines, and joining the privateers.

      The most evident consequence of the Revolution to the Society of Friends in South Jersey was a marked attrition in membership - - the loss of young men to the military and the young women who married them. Accompanying this loss was a spiritual decline on the part of many who remained, a condition lamented constantly by local Quaker preachers. Most regrettably, the loss of Quaker power and influence, so prominent in colonial affairs in South Jersey, deprived the new state of the same moral fiber and public conscience that the Society of Friends had woven into the fabric of the former province.

      For South Jersey Presbyterians, the Revolution was a "righteous cause," to which the stalwarts of God and the American liberties sallied forth in full armor. At first, the Presbyterian clergy preached caution, even restraint, as affairs were warming toward warfare. But when war came, and the British position proved to be intractable, Presbyterian preachers in South Jersey joined loudly in the call for independence from Great Britain. The time for restraint had passed!

      Five Presbyterian ministers from the southern counties enlisted as military chaplains. John Brainerd implored Presbyterians to enlist and fight for their country. He moved an audience to tears at Timber Creek (Blackwood) in 1776 with a patriotic sermon, after which those with "stout hearts and strong wills" joined the Continental Army. Enoch Green, the Deerfield pastor, addressed the troops about to embark on the Canadian campaign with the words, "This Contest is glorious, this cause is just, and your Resolution to support and defend it does you Honour -- the Resistence of this Land will be celebrated by future Ages, and Generations unborn will arise and call you blessed. You fight to defend us from ye Jaws of Tyranny, to save a mighty Empire from ye Yoke of Oppression. The Prosperity of Millions unborn will be ye Fruits of your Bravery. If you Conquer you will be crowned with unfading Laurels, but if it be your Lot to fall, you will fall with Glory." Some Presbyterian pastors who did not join the chaplaincy were forced from their pulpits because of the fervor of their patriotic preaching.

      With deaths like that of Philip Fithian, South Jersey Presbyterians paid a terrible price for their involvement in the Revolution. The stronger churches survived the crisis, shaken but still alive. Few of them had pastors. The weaker congregations collapsed. The meeting houses along the Egg Harbor Rivers fell into disuse and disappeared, or were taken up by Methodist circuit riders.

Presbyterian itinerant preachers were no longer assigned to travel to the Pine Barrens and along the shore.

      At the beginning of the Revolution, Methodism in America was little more than an infant. The first known Methodist in New Jersey was John Early, who emigrated from Ireland to Gloucester County in 1764. The first preachers sent by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, arrived in 1769. Francis Asbury came in the fall of 1771.

      American Methodism was dealt a stunning blow early in the war when Wesley openly declared himself in sympathy with the British side in the conflict, and most of his preachers in America returned to England. Asbury, who remained, was forced into temporary retirement in Delaware when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the revolutionary government. Methodist fires were kept alight during the war by dedicated American laymen. In many quarters, all Methodists were branded as Tories, despite the patently patriotic services of a number of them. Benjamin Abbott, the most prominent Methodist lay preacher in South Jersey during the period, tried to remain neutral. When confronted with a draft for military service, he paid for a substitute, explaining, "as I had a call to preach, I could not think of going out to fight."

      Under such a cloud, Methodism spread little throughout South Jersey until 1780, when the theater of war had shifted from New Jersey to other parts of the country. Then the Methodists began extensive preaching and the organizing of classes and societies in the southern counties. By the end of the 18th century, it was well on its way to becoming the predominant religion of the people of South Jersey.

 The two Swedish Lutheran congregations, at Swedesboro and Penn’s Neck, were almost evenly divided as to pro-American and pro-British sentiment. Pastor Nicholas Collin, a Swedish citizen, tried to remain aloof from the fray, regarding it as their fight, not his. He was seized twice by American militiamen on suspicion of holding pro-British sympathies, an accusation shown in numerous ways to have been unwarranted.

      The congregations suffered terribly from the marauding and confiscation by both armies. Collin described the attitude of his people, and their anxiety, when the fall of New York brought the British forces into New Jersey: "Formerly all had been eager to take part, but now as the fire drew closer, many drew away, and there was much dissension among the people. Many concealed themselves in the woods, or without their houses. . . . The people were afraid to visit the

church, because the authorities took the opportunity to get both horses and men." Services were interrupted frequently during the autumn of 1777, when with the British in possession of the river, straying parties and the militia were marching up and down the highway. That winter, Swedesboro was occupied for several months by the militia. Some of them were quartered in Collin’s house, so crowded at one time that only one room was free of soldiers.

      Decline of the Swedish character of the congregations and the disruption of communication with Sweden during the war prompted the Swedish government to withdraw from their mission to the Delaware, which they had been supporting for a century and a half. In 1789, when the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States was formed, the Swedish congregations joined, thus ceasing to be Lutheran.

      South Jersey Anglicans, generally supportive of the American cause, were numerically weak throughout the Revolutionary era. The church at Salem, without a pastor during the last half of the 18th century, was occupied and wrecked by the British in retaliation against the congregation, many of whom were patriots. Three-fourths of the active American sympathizers in Salem County were Anglicans. Robert Blackwell, the rector of the Gloucester County parishes, became a chaplain and surgeon with the Continental Army after the mission headquarters in London declined to pay him his salary. The Anglicans, too, became members of the Protestant Episcopal Church when it was created in 1789.

      There are no records to reveal the attitudes of South Jersey Roman Catholics toward the Revolution, but it is a reasonable assumption that they followed their fellow religionists in the other colonies in standing up for independence. The heroic efforts of the unsung ironworkers at Batsto, forging cannon for the Continental Army, were as decisive in forwarding the American cause as the more noted achievements of the privateers and the militiamen, and the moving oratory of the Presbyterian parsons. The outlawed Catholics of South Jersey had even more oppression to resist, as South Jerseymen of most religious persuasions answered the call to arms in defense of their God-given liberties.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Furnaces, Farms, and a Railroad

      Although liberated from the shackles of British mercantilism, the South Jersey economy suffered a depression in the years immediately following the end of the war. The Continental currency, money printed and circulated without bullion or specie to validate it, rendered the new nation’s financial structure chaotic. The enormous profits that had been realized from privateering, the making of armaments, and the importing of gun powder were terminated along with the cessation of hostilities. A series of bad harvests aggravated the already serious financial predicament of the farmers, burying them in debt.

      Batsto was put up for sale in 1784. At the time, the furnace was shut down, and the advertisement announcing the sale offered the formerly thriving iron center as an attractive location for grist mills. The glassmaking enterprise at Wistarberg was defunct also. Having closed down early in the Revolution, the factory was up for sale in 1780. It was never reopened. The Stanger brothers, who had established a glass furnace at Glass House (Glassboro) during the war, were in dire straits, their fortune having dissolved into worthless paper money. Gradually, between 1783 and 1786, they sold the glasshouse, the glassmaking equipment, and the land itself.

      However, recovery had begun by the end of the decade. The state legislature replaced the Continental currency with a more stable money of its own, at the same time relieving debtors by paying the interest on their Continental obligations. Owners of swamps and marshland were enabled, by legislative act, to improve their property. Cranberry growers were protected by law, in 1789, from the theft of their crops. The bog iron and glass industries prospered under new management.

      William Richards purchased a share of the Batsto complex when it was offered for sale in 1784. He rebuilt the furnace, paid off the indebtedness, and expanded his ironmaking operations. In 1809, he retired to Mount Holly, turning the management, and the mansion house, of Batsto over to his son, Jesse. The younger Richards presided over the prosperous community until the middle of the 19th century, when the substitution of coke for charcoal in the smelting process, and the consequent rise of the iron and steel industry in Pennsylvania, sounded the death knell of ironmaking from bog ore in the Jersey Pines. Doubtless, the Pennsylvania competition did no more than hasten the demise of an already dying industry. For the twenty years before the furnace at Batsto went out of blast for the last time, in 1848, pig iron was being imported to supplement the diminishing deposits of bog ore in the streams of Burlington and Gloucester Counties.

      In 1801, however, the end of the bog ore industry in South Jersey was a long way off. The Weymouth Iron Works, at the head of the Great Egg Harbor River, was being built on a vast tract of land acquired the year before. By 1802, both a furnace and a forge were in operation. After a shaky beginning, the Weymouth enterprise began to prosper when it was purchased by Samuel Richards, the eldest son of the Batsto family, and his cousin, Joseph Ball, in 1808. Despite a continual shortage of ore, and the need in later years to import it from New York, Delaware, and Timber Creek (in Gloucester County), cast-iron pipe flowed in large quantity from the works on the Great Egg Harbor until after the Civil War had begun. Much of this pipe, the chief product of Weymouth, was contracted for by the Philadelphia Waterworks.

      During the recovery following the post-Revolution economic slump, a Richards iron furnace was put into blast along Landing Creek, in Galloway Township, Gloucester County. Called Gloucester Furnace, little is known about the operation until the second decade of the 19th century, so little, in fact, that some claim it was not erected until 1813. Its brief era of prosperity, and that of the town surrounding the furnace, began after 1830, when Thomas Richards, a son of the Weymouth owner, and his cousin purchased the furnace, a saw mill, and the 17,000-acre tract on which they were located. Products of the Gloucester works included stoves, lamp posts, and special castings. In 1855, Gloucester Furnace fell victim, like Batsto, to the competition from the coke furnaces of Pennsylvania.

      A short-lived ironmaking enterprise, called Etna Furnace, was begun about 1816 on the Tuckahoe River. It ceased manufacturing its bar iron, spikes, and bolts in 1832.

      America’s second war with Great Britain, the War of 1812, provided a stimulus to the South Jersey bog iron industry early in the 19th century. Batsto turned out shot, shells, and grenades for the American army. Weymouth, too, became involved in the munitions business. As early as 1809, shot was being manufactured, followed by shells and bombs in 1810. The production of ammunition, and later of cannons, increased as war drew nearer, and continued throughout the duration.

      Not all in South Jersey agreed that the War of 1812 was either expedient or necessary. Legislators from Gloucester and Cape May Counties favored an anti-war resolution that came before the New Jersey Assembly. On the other hand, representatives from Cumberland and Salem Counties recorded their support of the war movement by voting against the resolution.

      Nevertheless, South Jerseymen cooperated for the common defense when their shores were threatened. They utilized the artillery placed at their disposal by the governor. An encampment of troops was stationed at Billingsport to protect the towns and farms of South Jersey, and to ward off any water-borne attack on Philadelphia. The enemy was uncomfortably nearby for awhile. In 1813, a British fleet stood at the mouth of Delaware Bay to enforce a blockade of shipping in and out of Philadelphia. Enemy foraging parties came ashore near Maurice River, looking for cattle, as other Britishers searched for water at Cape May Point. During 1813, privateering and blockade running were attempted with some frequency by South Jersey traders, but their exploits were rarely successful. On the whole, the War of 1812 had, at most, a minor effect on South Jersey.

      A marked slackening in the growth of population in South Jersey began during the years of the war. It lasted until 1840, when a noticeable increase in the rate of growth commenced. Whereas the population of the southern counties grew by 16%, between 1790 and 1800, and by 22% during the first decade of the 19th century, the rate of increase slowed to 11%, between 1810 and 1820, when Cumberland County actually lost in population. The pattern continued with 14% and 13%, increases during the two decades following 1820. A similar situation obtained statewide. Meanwhile, other Eastern states were showing substantive increases in population, and such Western states as Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee were growing at enormous rates.

      The slowing down of South Jersey is explicable. Despite all its activity in ironmaking, and other kinds of manufacturing, the region was still primarily agricultural, and the soil was becoming seriously depleted by 1810. Hundreds of families, predominantly of farmers, emigrated to the West, to Ohio for the

most part, in search of new lands to cultivate. Other citizens, attracted to the opportunities of city life, moved to Philadelphia. Thomas Gordon, a gazetteer writing about New Jersey in 1834, observed that, because the state’s "labours have contributed largely to build up the two great marts of the Union, and to subdue and fertilize the western wilds," New Jersey "is remarkable for the paucity" of its population increase.

      A halt to the fearful depletion of nutrients in the soil of Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland County farms was begun when marl was introduced as a fertilizer. First dug and sold at Woodstown, in 1826, this earthy deposit of lime, clay, and sand was being spread, with benefit, on the fields throughout the southern counties by 1834, producing abundant crops, grain, and grass. Farmers were attendant, too, upon the cultivation of garden vegetables, potatoes (which grew especially well in marled fields), melons, and fruits for shipment to the big city markets. The trend toward the use of marl was accelerated by the demands for increased food production brought on by the Civil War. Marl pits were opened at Woodbury in 1863. Within less than ten years, eleven companies in Gloucester County were selling marl.

      Improved transportation was a factor in reversing the population trend in South Jersey. Whereas road improvement and the construction of new highways excited the interest of forward-looking persons in central and northern New Jersey during the early decades of the 19th century, the focus for improved transportation in South Jersey was on the development of the steamboat. A brisk, new trade on the Delaware River in the 1830’s has been attributed to the use of steam-powered boats, which stimulated intercourse along the river and between its tributaries. By 1848, however, farmers and entrepreneurs in the south, too, were giving their attention to road construction. In fact, Gloucester County enthusiasm for the projects prompted the freeholders to turn over, without charge, county-owned bridges to private companies, which were formed to erect, maintain, and reap profits from the new road system.

      Most of the arteries laid between 1848 and 1860 were turnpikes, or toll roads, constructed of planks. They were called turnpikes because of the bars, or pikes, which blocked the roadway, and which were raised when the toll was paid. Toll gates were spaced at intervals of five to ten miles. On the average, fees were collected for carriages at the rate of one cent a mile for each horse, a half-cent per mile for a horse and rider, a half-cent for a dozen calves, sheep, or hogs, and a cent for a dozen cattle, mules, or horses. These toll roads were surfaced with sawed lumber, a relatively inexpensive material in comparison

with the cost of the more durable stone or gravel surfaces. Yet, the low initial expenditure for construction notwithstanding, they were costly, because repairs and replacements were substantial and recurrent. Decay was the nemesis of the plank roads, on which the flooring, being continually damp, especially in places where drainage was poor, deteriorated quickly. Use of this type of construction was discontinued before the Civil War.

      The ardor for road development, on the other hand, did not diminish at the same time, South Jersey had seen its benefits: as one writer explained, "the effect of the construction of these roads was to enable farmers to carry seventy to one hundred baskets of produce at a load, where before they were limited to about thirty." Consequently, a number of companies converted their plank roads to gravel roads. Before 1870, turnpikes radiated from Camden to nearby towns such as Mullica Hill, Blackwood, and Haddonfield. Woodbury was connected by road to Mullica Hill, to Red Bank, and to Woodstown by way of Berkeley and Swedesboro. A plank road at first, the Woodbury to Woodstown turnpike was later surfaced with gravel. Longer pikes stretched from Camden and Woodbury to connect with Salem, Bridgeton, and Millville. The longest east-west highway to the shore lay in Burlington County, between Medford and Tuckerton.

      Unfortunately, receipts from stagelines, from the transporting of agricultural products, and from other kinds of local traffic were not sufficient to sustain the turnpikes as profitable ventures. The steamboat, as it was less expensive, continued to be the preferred mode of travel and transportation between the towns along the Delaware. After 1870, the toll roads were supplanted by railroads and public highways, until their revival in the post-Second World War era of the 20th century.

      The first successful railroad in South Jersey was the Camden and Atlantic, organized in 1852. To whom is due the credit for its origination has long been a topic of dispute among local historians. That Atlantic City was both its creation and the fountainhead of its eventual good fortune is a received doctrine among them all.

      At the southeastern end of Camden County, 2 a cluster of glass furnaces was erected between 1822, when Jonathan Haines set up his Waterford Glass Works, and 1827, when a son of William Richards opened the Jackson Glass Works. A third glass factory, at nearby Winslow, was started by William Coffin, Sr., in 1829. At Batsto, several miles away in Burlington County, Jesse Richards turned to glassmaking in 1846. By 1850, the owners of these companies were becoming enamoured with the vision of financial gains that

could be realized by a direct rail connection with Camden, and its outlets to Philadelphia, New York, and beyond. Samuel Richards, a son of the Jackson founder, and a dynamic young man in his early thirties, undertook to bring the dream of such a railroad to reality.

      An Absecon physician, Jonathan Pitney, also was contemplating the benefits of a railroad about that time, but for a different reason. Looking across the bay to Absecon Beach, he envisioned a resort where crowds of people would come for ocean bathing, a pastime which he believed to be unsurpassed as an aid to good health. A railroad to the shore would make his fantastic El Dorado accessible to the hot, teeming populace of Philadelphia. The doctor and his friend, Enoch Doughty, met in a small store in Absecon on February 11, 1851 to begin writing the first draft of a railroad charter.

      To the unimaginative, practical business minds of the state’s railroad interests, Pitney’s vision must have seemed even more absurd than that of the glass industrialists, which they dismissed with some humor and contempt. Indeed the doctor’s fantasy seemed ridiculous to the glass-makers, too; at first, even to Samuel Richards. The glass mogul was persuaded, nonetheless, to join the doctor and others on a visit to Absecon Beach in June, 1852, three months after the legislature had granted a charter for a railroad bound southeast out of Camden, but obviously before a terminal site had been selected. According to his own testimony, given years later, Richards, upon first seeing the island of sand hills, viewed it as "the most horrible place to make the termination of a railroad I had ever seen, but after the sun came out, it gave a different appearance." The civil engineer who had been selected to build the railroad, Richard Osborne, was among the group. He said in a speech at the silver anniversary celebration of the Camden and Atlantic that, except for Dr. Pitney, Enoch Doughty, and himself, none of them deemed it "a suitable site for a proposed bathing village, that to build a railroad to such a wild spot would be a reckless piece of adventure."

      Richards, on the other hand, saw the island’s potential as a harbor that could provide an alternative winter port to Philadelphia, when the Delaware would be choked with ice. With Richards adding his and his family’s financial backing to Dr Pitney’s vision, and to the doctor’s and Doughty’s influence in Trenton (where the state railroad monopoly, certain that such a far-fetched scheme would never materialize, did not block the enabling legislation), the Camden and Atlantic Railroad Company was organized. The 10,000 shares of stock, valued at a half-million dollars, were sold in one day, June 24, 1852.

      Nine months elapsed before land was purchased on Absecon Beach for the terminal and related facilities. The first tract was secured at $17.50 an acre. Later, 1000 acres of beach property were bought up by the Camden and Atlantic Land Company for an average price of $10 an acre. By August, 1853, the tracks reached Absecon. Storms and winter then delayed the project, as construction workers were frustrated in their attempts to lay the railroad across the meadows to Absecon Beach.

      The ceremonial opening of the Camden and Atlantic was celebrated on July 1, 1854, when 600 invited guests climbed aboard nine railroad cars at Camden and set out across the Pines to the seashore. Pulled by the engine Atsion, they traversed a distance in two and a half hours that, up to then, had taken two full days to cover by stagecoach. At the mainland side of the Beach Thoroughfare, the celebrities exchanged their railroad cars for boats, because a bridge across the narrow channel had not yet been built. A year passed before tracks reached all the way to the island. Regular passenger service between Camden and the shore commenced on the Fourth of July, 1854, three days after the formal opening of the railroad.

      The opening of the Camden and Atlantic was the signal for laying other tracks across South Jersey. A year before the route to the shore was operational, in 1853, the West Jersey Railroad was incorporated, with authorization to run a line from Camden to Cape May. Four years later, a section from Camden to Woodbury was opened, to be followed shortly by an extension from Glassboro to Bridgeton. Millville and Glassboro were connected by rails late in the 1850’s. Tracks were laid from Millville to Cape May in 1863, thereby extending the railroad to the southernmost tip of the state. Shorter connecting lines were laid between South Jersey towns after the Civil War.

      The benefits that would accrue to civilians from this new mode of transportation were postponed, while America fought another war, a conflict in which her very survival as a federal Union was at stake. A land joined together by rails was sundered by politics, and a bloody argument over human liberty.

2 Camden County was set off from Gloucester County in 1844. Old Gloucester had been dismembered earlier, in 1837, when Atlantic County was created out of its shoreward regions.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Fight Against Slavery

      Black slavery, although less extensive in South Jersey than elsewhere in the state, arrived with the earliest of the English settlers. In the 1676 Concessions and Agreements the term "slave" was omitted, but the institution was recognized in that every freeman taking up lands in West Jersey was to be allotted additional acreage for every "servant that he or she should carry or send." The holding of Negro slaves had long been customary among English landowners and it was the expectation, indeed the wish, of the framers of West Jersey that the practice be continued in the New World.

      Queen Anne instructed Lord Cornbury, the first royal governor, to report on "the present number of . . . . Masters as Servants, free and unfree, and of the slaves in our said Province." The governor was told, moreover, to be prompt in paying the Royal African Company for their human merchandise in order that the province "may have a constant and sufficient supply of Merchantable Negroes, at moderate rates. . ." He was advised, however, to seek legislation by the provincial government restraining inhuman severity towards slaves and imposing capital punishment upon any master or overseer guilty of "the wilful killing of Indians and Negroes," Their conversion to the Christian religion was to be encouraged.

      An act passed by the provincial assembly in 1713 authorized the return of runaway slaves, stipulating that the expenses for such be borne by the owners, and detailed the punishments to be meted out to slaves convicted of crimes.

      Slaves were deprived, by the same act, of the right to own property. Lest they become a burden to society, freed slaves were to be given twenty pounds; otherwise the manumission would be nullified. By a later act, of 1752, tavern

keepers were forbidden to sell "strong liquors" to slaves. Persons in bondage were denied the right to assemble in groups of more than five, or to be away from the master’s house after nine at night, except when meeting or traveling on the master’s business.

      The slave population of the counties of Gloucester, Salem, and Cape May stood at 348 in 1737. Eight years later, 441 blacks were being held in bondage in the same counties, their numbers having increased by 27%. During the same period, the total population of the area grew by less than 14%. At mid-18th century, slavery was a thriving institution in South Jersey, as it was elsewhere in the colony.

      Pennsylvania slave traders transferred their operation to New Jersey in 1761, when the Quaker colony voted to impose a fifteen-pound duty on the business. African Negroes were auctioned off on blocks at Cooper’s Ferry from that year until 1765. Four years later, in 1769, New Jersey followed Pennsylvania in assessing a fifteen-pound duty on the purchase of black slaves. Simultaneously, the price of African Negroes rose to a level beyond the financial resources of New Jersey buyers, and the overseas slave trade in the state came to an end.

      With the importing of slaves from Africa a thing of the past, cries against the inhumanity of the very institution of slavery began to be raised, as conscientious whites called for abolition during the years of the Revolution, and following. Nothing contrary to the practice of keeping slaves was written into the first state constitution, adopted on July 2, 1776. However, ten years afterward the state passed an act, the preamble of which betrayed a growing uneasiness regarding its morality: ". . . the principles of justice and humanity require that the barbarous custom of bringing the unoffending Africans from their native country and connections into a state of slavery ought to be discontinued, and as soon as possible prevented . . ."

      The reluctance of the state to proceed with abolition notwithstanding, the 1786 law tried to ameliorate the predicament of the enslaved. It delineated the circumstances under which a slave could be brought into New Jersey, defined requirements concerning manumission, and authorized the indictment of persons suspected of the abuse and inhumane treatment of their slaves. By a 1788 law, masters were required to instruct their young slaves in reading and writing. The same law provided for the confiscation of any vessel within New Jersey fitted out as a slaver. An act summarizing and codifying the state’s slavery laws followed in 1798, though outright abolition of the institution was still rejected.

      Human bondage existed in South Jersey at the turn of the 19th century, but its incidence was declining markedly. Whereas the slave population in the southern counties increased only 42% between 1745 and 1790, to a total of 624 in the last year, the population grew by 200%. Ten years later, the population having continued to climb, the number of slaves had decreased to 319. Contrasted with this noticeable reduction in the southern counties was the statewide increase of the slave population, during the same decade, in an amount just one short of 1000.

      It is significant that the formerly Quaker counties were taking the lead in the gradual destruction of slavery as an institution in New Jersey at the approach of the 19th century. That the Quakers were among those who brought the institution to the New World is shown in directives of the Society of Friends in 1696, in which members were cautioned against the further purchase of slaves. The "Negroes" they already had were to be restrained from "loose and lewd living" and provided with opportunities for religious worship. Nevertheless, as early as 1688 a minority of American Quakers was agitating against slavery. At mid-18th century, the issue came to the serious attention of the Society of Friends, among whom John Woolman, in particular, in his superb essays and oral declamations eloquently denounced the enslavement of the black race. He, with three others, was appointed in 1758 to counsel with slaveowning Quakers about their Christian obligation to free those whom they held in bondage.

      Although some progress was made, their efforts were not at once totally successful. As late as 1777, the Haddonfield meeting reported that twenty-eight slaves had been manumitted within their bounds, while a sizeable list of persons not complying was attached to the report. A similar account was submitted regarding Woodbury. Salem Quakers, too, were still in the process of freeing their slaves in 1777. After Woolman’s death, his cousin, John Hunt, pursued the good work of the Quaker saint. By September, 1788, partly because of his labors, the Haddonfield meeting was able to announce that "No negroes [are] held in bondage among us."

      Sometimes the influence of New Jersey Quakers in discouraging slavery, other than among their own membership, is minimized. Nonetheless, it was a group of Quakers who petitioned the provincial legislature in 1775 to enact laws abolishing the institution. Even though unable to move the representatives toward this action, the Quakers set the example. By 1800, the residents of Burlington, Gloucester, and Salem Counties owned only 3% of the blacks still

being held within New Jersey, whereas they comprised 23% of the state’s population.

      Gradual abolition was enacted, at last, on February 15, 1804 in a bill which declared free every child born of a slave within the state after July 4, 1805. However, a boy was to remain the servant of his mother’s owner, or his heirs, until the age of twenty-five. A girl was to retain that status until she reached twenty-one. A master could forfeit his right of ownership if he chose, but he was required to support the child for one year, after which the child would become the ward of the county. A later law forbade the removal of a slave from New Jersey for the purpose of changing his place of residence, without the slave’s consent, or, in the case of a minor, the consent of the parents. A supplement imposed a penalty of a fine and imprisonment upon any violator of this law, and the slave in question was to be set free. Residents of New Jersey were forbidden to sell any of their slaves to non-residents.

      The manumission of black slaves did not mean that Negroes had been accepted as equals by South Jersey whites, for free blacks also were legally and socially restricted. By judicial decision, for example, a Negro was to be deemed a slave unless he could prove that he was free. This ruling was pronounced in 1795 and again in 1821, when the chief justice said in his charge, "in New Jersey,...all black men, in contemplation of the law, are prima facieslaves, and are to be dealt with as such. The colour of the man [i.e. the plaintiff’s slave] was sufficient evidence that he was a slave until the contrary appeared. All our laws upon this subject are founded upon this principle, and all men of this colour are to be dealt with on this principle." Some Quaker masters, upon freeing their slaves, granted them tracts of land, which were then held in trust by the grantors, because titles of free blacks were not always recognized. The 1844 Constitution of the State of New Jersey limited the vote to white males.

      An attempt in 1824 to relocate free blacks on the island of Haiti met with failure. A number of them having left for the Caribbean from Port Elizabeth, in Cumberland County, returned in a short time to their former homes and jobs.

      Whereas the number of slaves in South Jersey declined steadily after 1790, almost reaching the point of nonexistence by 1830, the percentage of free blacks within the population was mounting. In 1820, the slaves in the four southern counties numbered 100, the free blacks 2875. There were only ten slaves in the same area in 1830, while the free black population stood at 3971. Of these, Gloucester County had the largest number. Salem County had the highest percentage of blacks within the total population; ten percent of the county’s residents were Negroes. In that year (1830), Gloucester County had

four slaves and Salem County one. Before the Revolution, the total black population, slave and free, of any southern county never reached six percent.

      Two factors may help to account for this changing pattern: the emigration of white farmers to the western lands after the Revolution and the opening up of New Jersey as a haven for fugitive slaves from Delaware, Maryland, and the South. Before 1826, slaves fleeing from southern masters could hope for little refuge in New Jersey, where bounty hunters hotly pursued the rewards offered for the capture of runaways. At the end of 1826, the incentive for tracking down fugitives was withdrawn when an act terminating the giving of rewards for their capture was passed by the legislature on December 26. Furthermore, the act so circumscribed the procedure for the apprehending and return of runaways that, in the southern counties, where many residents were inclined to give aid to escaping blacks, the Underground Railroad to Canada could operate more openly, and hundreds of blacks chose to end their flight and settle in the relative peace and security of South Jersey.

      Under the 1826 law, to take up an alleged fugitive, the owner or his agent was required to request a judge of the common pleas or a justice of the peace to issue a warrant for the fugitive’s arrest. Moreover, proof of ownership had to be shown before the justice was permitted to release the fugitive for return to his home state or territory. To seize or remove alleged runaways without the necessary warrants was made a misdemeanor. A later supplement provided that any case involving a fugitive slave must be tried before three judges, and guaranteed alleged fugitives the right to trial by jury.

      The Underground Railroad, carefully planned routes for southern slaves fleeing from their masters, operated in New Jersey. Each route had a chain of "stations," hiding places such as a barn, where fugitives paused during daylight hours for food and shelter before being transported, by night, to the next stop. Quakers, ministers, and other whites, and free blacks acted as "station masters." "Conductors" escorted the runaways from station to station.

      Principal way stations of the Underground Railroad across South Jersey were located at Camden, Salem, and Greenwich. The most commonly used route from the South traversed Maryland and Delaware to Philadelphia, where the fugitives were sequestered by a freed slave, William Still, until passage could be arranged across the river to Camden. The station master at the New Jersey city was the Rev. T. C. Oliver, who provided sustenance and cover for the fleeing slaves, while they paused before starting their journey across the New Jersey corridor to New York City, and northward. Fugitives who gathered at Dover, Delaware, were boated across the river to the relative safety of the

Jersey shore at Salem, where Abigail Goodwin was in charge. An unknown number of them relinquished the opportunity to escape to Canada, choosing instead to take their chances at planting new homes in Salem County. Those who elected to go on were routed through Woodbury to Bordentown, then over the Railroad’s main line to New York.

      At Greenwich, escape boats flashing blue and yellow signal lights were met by station master Levin Bond, or one of the Sheppards, or Stanfords, after which conductors guided the fleeing slaves through Swedesboro and Woodbury to Burlington County, where they picked up the route to New York. Homes at Town Bank and Cape May Court House are said to have been havens for slaves escaping to the North.

      Most of South Jersey lies below the Mason and Dixon Line, the traditional line of demarcation between northern and southern United States. Given its location, it would be expected that on any issue separating the two halves of the nation, South Jersey would be inclined toward a Southern viewpoint. Such was not the case, however, in 1860. Whatever pro-Southern sentiment there may have been in the southern counties did not surface, or was not of a vitality to sway majority opinion, in the crises that precipitated the Civil War.

      Lincoln carried all but one (Camden) of the six counties of South Jersey in the 1860 election, whereas all but four of the counties to the north of the Mullica River, where the majority was contemptuous of the "Black Republican," voted for his opponents. Their heavier popular and electoral weight put New Jersey in the Democrat column in that presidential race. The state’s pro-Southern strength did not lie in the southern counties.

      New Jersey was at one, however, in its dedication to the principle that the Union must be preserved at all costs. Although some would have preferred peace on the South’s terms to the suffering and economic dislocations of war, the state clearly supported the North, and the nation’s new leader, when the Union was confronted with the prospect of Southern secession. Triggered by the bombardment and capture of Fort Sumter on April 12-13, 1861, the southern counties were joined by those to the north, Democrats and Republicans, in giving way to a patriotic frenzy of flag waving, drum beating, and speechmaking. Resolutions to stand by the nation and her colors were adopted at every village, town, and crossroads.

      Northern confidence in the ease and quickness of victory was summarized in a facile declaration by a South Jersey congressman at Bridgeton, in which he said, "This rebellion could easily be put down by a few women with

broomsticks." Nonetheless, New Jersey quickly sent a fully organized and equipped brigade of four regiments to Washington, where they marched through the streets on May 6. As yet, there were no battles to be fought, so the Jersey troops were set to erecting a fortification around the city.

      The battles came--Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and on and on. In all, 88,000 New Jerseymen took up arms in the Civil War. More than 6300 of them, enlisted men and officers, perished of wounds or disease.

      Called up for duty, South Jersey recruits bound for the battlefields of Virginia gathered at their county seats, where they were mustered into the service. By wagon, then train, they rode through Woodbury and Camden to the embarkation center at Beverly, a town on the Delaware River in Burlington County. Formed into regiments at Beverly, they departed by steamer for Philadelphia, to proceed therefrom by train to Baltimore and Washington. The Twelfth Regiment New Jersey Volunteers was stationed at Woodbury’s Fort Stockton, the largest Civil War encampment in South Jersey, until their troops joined the Army of the Potomac.

      Early in the war, preparations were undertaken to protect South Jersey’s bay and ocean shorelines against Confederate attack. A telegraph line to Cape May was made operational; a maritime guard was posted along the coast; and Fort Delaware, on Pea Patch Island offshore from Salem County, was garrisoned to prevent any possible Confederate move upriver to Philadelphia. However, no Civil War battle or skirmish was fought on New Jersey soil, nor did a naval engagement of the war take place on the Delaware.

      While the garrison on Pea Patch Island served to discourage any attempt at a seaborne assault on Philadelphia, it was used as well as a Northern prison. On this marshy island of 178 acres, in barracks built to accommodate 2000 men, by the summer of 1863 more than 12,500 Southern prisoners of war were suffering unspeakable horrors of brutality, malnutrition, and disease. An epidemic of cholera took more than 2000 lives; more than 700 others died from neglect and illness. Their bodies were interred at Finn’s Point, in Salem County, near the site where Johan Printz had built Fort Elfsborg.

      President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 angered many in New Jersey who, although willing to defend the Union with their last drop of blood, felt that Negro slavery was an internal matter to be dealt with by each state as its people saw fit. When the war was over, a majority of the representatives at Trenton had not yet changed their minds on the subject, and so did not immediately ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,

the article which freed all slaves within the nation. After the amendment became federal law, in 1865, by ratification of the necessary three-fourths of the states, New Jersey concurred. As it applied to South Jersey, however, the issue was academic, for slavery had disappeared altogether from the southern counties before 1860.

CHAPTER NINE

The Discovery of Surf and Sand

      The fulfillment of the South Jersey shore’s potential as a mecca for tourists had to await the end of the Civil War and the adjustments that followed. However, a modest beginning of the tourist industry was made a hundred years before, as is shown in a 1766 newspaper advertisement extolling the virtues of a parcel of land at Cape May, "where a number resort for Health, and bathing in the Water." The seller suggested that "this Place would be very convenient for taking in such People."

      Another advertisement, thirty-five years and a Revolution later, appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora on July 1, 1801, announcing that Ellis Hughes had "prepared himself for entertaining company who use sea bathing, and. . . is accommodated with extensive house room, with Fish, Oysters, Crabs, and good Liquors -- Care will be taken of gentlemens’ Horses." In that year, stagecoaches ran regularly each week from Cooper’s Ferry to the Cape, departing from the Ferry on Thursdays and arriving the next day at Cape Island (the old name for Cape May City). A packet boat, powered by sail, plied the waters of the Delaware each week on two-day runs between Philadelphia and Cape May in 1802.

      With such attention being given to matters of accommodation and transportation, it can be surmised that by 1801-1802 the trickle of tourists to Cape Island was turning into a stream, albeit not yet a torrent. The Hughes establishment, together with the only other such facility in the town, a place kept by Ephraim Mills and his wife, could entertain thirty boarders, at the most, with convenience, or up to sixty less conveniently.

      A new and larger hostelry was added in 1816, ‘when Thomas H. Hughes built Congress Hall. It was far from elegant; although the building boasted three stories, a length of 108 feet, and a width of thirty-two feet, neither inside nor outside could it claim a square inch of paint or plaster. Nevertheless, it could accommodate a hundred guests. The hotel’s mammoth size was ridiculed by skeptics, who swore that never would so many people wish, at the same time, to stay at Congress Hall. Contrary to this prediction, the facility was crowded year after year. (The building, considerably enlarged, was destroyed by fire in 1878. Its replacement, the present Congress Hall in Cape May, was erected the following year.)

      Eighteen-sixteen was a significant year for the South Jersey resort for a second reason: steamboat service on the Delaware was extended to the Cape, The advertisement in the Philadelphia Daily Advertiser read, "It is announced with great satisfaction that the Steam Boat and Packet Line, is now extended to CAPE MAY. The facility with which Passengers can now be forwarded during the ensuing BATHING SEASON: the great additional accommodation and comfort which will be experienced, and the variety and novelty of the routes will no doubt be suitably appreciated by the citizens of Philadelphia." The announcement omitted, in this instance, the notice that the New Castle –Cape May leg of the voyage was by sail. However, the time in transit was reduced to a single day. Three years later, steamboats were put into service over the entire route between Philadelphia and Cape May. By the 1840’s, they were departing Philadelphia daily, except Sundays, during the bathing season.

      Competition from the steamboats prompted the stage-line companies to inaugurate one-day trips to Cape May in 1827. The coach left Camden at four o’clock in the morning and arrived at Cape Island after dark, a tiring journey which led one rider to complain, "It starts too early, and arrives too late, for satisfaction." The steamboat, he concluded, was "the least exceptionable, and most certain and agreeable mode of conveyance" to and from the Cape.

      Hotel and dining facilities had been expanded to provide for about 4000 visitors by 1849. Despite these services, the resort was so overcrowded during the summer of 1850 that vacationers were forced to sleep on make-shift beds set up in canvas tents, outbuildings, and sheds, in the dining halls, parlors, and kitchens of the hotels, and on their porches and promenades. One tourist advised anyone planning to come to Cape Island to bring his own mattress. Not all of the throngs were from Philadelphia; many came from the near South, others from points farther removed. Since as early as 1828, travelers from as far

west as Cincinnati and St. Louis, and from as far south as Savannah and New Orleans, had been summering at the Cape.

      The crowds of 1850 sparked a frenzy of progress in the Cape May County resort. Shortly, the borough was incorporated as the City of Cape Island, six new public streets were plotted, the Cape Island Turnpike was opened from the boat landing to the hotel district, the gigantic Mount Vernon Hotel was planned, gas lights were installed, Congress Hall was rebuilt, and the Baptist preacher, who was also the mayor, ventured that the time had come when Cape Island should cease to allow the roaming of cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs, at will, within the city limits. Alas, it was a bubble about to burst.

      Talk in the 1850’s of laying rails to Cape Island was quickly discouraged by the steamboat companies, the drivers who shuttled tourists between the steamboat landing and the hotels, and the farmers, who warned that railroad engines, belching fire and smoke, would incinerate the county’s fields and woods, while mangling any unwary cattle which happened to stray across the tracks. The farmers’ dire foreboding did not materialize in 1863, when the first train chugged into Cape Island, but by that time the convenience of the closer Atlantic City had begun to be discovered by Northerners. Moreover, Southerners had ceased to visit any Northern resort, including Cape Island, although it lay well below the Mason and Dixon Line.

      With Samuel Richards casting his eye, perhaps enviously, in the direction of Cape May during the summers of the early 1850’s, there is little wonder that Dr. Pitney so easily prevailed upon him and his associates to finance a railroad to Absecon Beach. To Philadelphians, the appeal of a seaside resort less than two hours away would have been enormous. Even a less astute business man than Richards could not help but have been awake to the financial promise inherent in providing such a service. When the city at the end of "the railroad to nowhere" rose from the sands of Absecon Beach, Cape Island was in trouble.

      Atlantic City was but two years old when Cape Island suffered a blow that seemed more devastating, at the time, than the emergence of a rival resort. Barely had the 1856 season ended when, on September 5, the Mount Vernon Hotel, new that season and the pride of the shore, was reduced to ashes. Her accommodations for 2100 persons represented one-third of the city’s tourist facilities. Adding to the city’s woes, before the 1857 season opened, lodging for 300 more guests went up in flames. Business fell off considerably during the ensuing years.

      The summer of 1860 was only somewhat less dull than its predecessors. With the good-byes of the Southern families at the end of the season, a sizeable part of the Cape’s economic mainstay departed, never to return. In the election that fall, Cape May County went for Lincoln. When spring warmed the beaches again, the nation was at war, and much of the resort’s former clientele had become the enemy.

      Back in 1852, Richard B. Osborne, the civil engineer who built the Camden and Atlantic Railroad, was chosen by Dr. Pitney to plan his city by the sea. Under the engineer’s direction, a map of the proposed street network, on which the avenues running parallel with the ocean were named for the world’s large bodies of water and the intersecting, shorter streets were given the names of the states of the Union, was drawn by John L. Rowland. This "Street Dedication Map" was finished on Christmas Day, 1852. When the map was submitted to Osborne, the proposed city it represented was, as yet, without a name. Upon receiving it, the engineer printed in large letters across the sketch of beaches the title, "Atlantic City." Dr. Pitney’s fantasy now had a label. There remained the task of bringing it into existence.

      The burgeoning Atlantic City, like Cape Island, felt the effects of the Civil War. Pre-war development was not inconsiderable, but the city’s era as the world’s playground did not get under way before 1870. The twenty-five eligible voters in the first election, on May 1, 1854, multiplied to a population of 687 by 1860, and of 746 by the end of the war. Meanwhile, overshadowing the seven houses standing on Absecon Beach in 1852, the sprawling United States Hotel and the block-long Surf House rose alongside the new cottages of permanent and summer dwellers. On the sand dunes, swept by winds and tides, the grid of city streets began to appear.

      However, the dedication of the Boardwalk, in 1870, inaugurated Atlantic City’s epoch of greatness. In that year, the permanent population, those who worked to provide comfort and attractions for the visiting hundreds of thousands thronging to the city’s hotels and beaches every summer season, and who were, thereby, a barometer of the resort’s success, exploded from 1043 in 1870 to 46,150 in 1910. Between these two years, the Gay Nineties were the glamorous time and that of greatest expansion for Atlantic City.

      The 1870 Boardwalk was a crude structure of planks, nailed together in twelve-foot sections, ten feet wide, lying directly on the beach. During the off-season, the boards were taken up and stored. Designed as a convenience for strollers and protection for the plush carpeting in the hotels, within ten years the Boardwalk was seen for its commercial value also. In 1880, a second walk

replaced the first, and, what some Atlantic Avenue business men had feared, the beach promenade became a Street lined with shops.

      The third Boardwalk, of 1884, was a permanent walkway, twenty feet wide and five feet above the sand, its original purpose as an esplanade with an ocean view was subverted when greedy merchants crammed in shops along both sides. Mercifully, a hurricane blew them away in 1889, but the same storm demolished most of the Boardwalk itself. The replacement, opened in 1890, was protected by the Beach Park Act, which granted the city control over all beachfront development. The "golden" spike (actually, an iron spike gilded with paint) that put the finishing touch to the fifth, and present, Boardwalk was driven on July 8, 1896. The new walk was a street, held up by undergirdings of steel, which was forty feet wide and stretched the length of the city. That summer, for the first time officially, it was named "Boardwalk."

      Amusement piers first extended from the wooden way out over the surf in the 1880’s. A second, then a third, rail line brought in carloads of hot, work-weary visitors to the city by the sea. Beer gardens and opera houses enticed the masses bent on pleasure and entertainment. By the 1890’s, nearly 700 hotels and boarding houses welcomed bathers and strollers during the summer seasons.

      Atlantic City was a phenomenon of American imagination, ingenuity, and cold, hard commercial realism. It gave the middle-class East what it wanted, even what it thought it needed -- a common man’s Newport, a temporary escape to a pastel paradise, a world apart where pleasure reigned and cares dissolved in a ball of cotton candy.

      However, there lurked behind Atlantic City’s gilt facade conditions of more somber hue, still there when the last train of summer pulled out from the station. The people of the resort city could not flee to the shore to forget their problems. Seasonal work meant long months of unemployment for a large percentage of the population, a situation only partly relieved when the convention trade began to generate a somewhat year-round economy during the last decade of the 19th century. Most affected, of course, were the service personnel of the hotels, restaurants, and amusement centers. Many of them were blacks who, having abandoned their jobless existences in the cities and in the South, had gone to the growing resort in search of work, only to find that most employment available there was but part-time.

      In 1885, nearly one-seventh of the permanent residents of Atlantic City were black. By 1895, the black population stood at more than one-fifth of the

city’s total, and nearly one-fourth in 1905. (Figures for Camden, the New Jersey city with the next largest black minority, in 1910 show a black population one-fifteenth of the total, and for Newark, in the same year, show that, of the total population, one-thirtieth were black.) Thus, almost from the start, Atlantic City has been forced to cope with the problems of a large minority population on partial employment, facing annually periods of idleness without income.

      Discrimination against blacks was no more pronounced in Atlantic City than elsewhere, albeit business interests felt pressured to cater to the prejudice of white tourists by advertising that the blacks in the city "kept in their places." Local blacks were not forcibly excluded from cafes, trolley cars, the beaches, or the Boardwalk, although black tourists were not permitted in the Boardwalk pavilions. Black visitors frequented the beaches, going at first only after September had begun, but in 1897, and afterward, at the height of the season. Housing for resident blacks, caught up in seasonal unemployment, was bad in the extreme, hidden in alleys and behind hotels safe from the eyes of curious tourists.

      Vice in the streets and corruption in high places were perennial problems. Petty thievery, flimflam games, prostitution, illegal gambling and liquor sales, and other evils gnawed at the city’s reputation, especially when some of the prominent business and political figures became involved in their perpetration. To these worries of a growing urban society, in which amusement was the chief product for sale, was added the concern to project Atlantic City as the wholesome balance of gentility and casualness, committed to a relaxed standard of deportment that smacked neither of prudery nor licentiousness; in short, to show it as both the ideal family resort and pleasure resort. 3

      Encouraged by Atlantic City’s example of stellar success in transforming the surf and sand into profits, the other off-shore island communities of Atlantic and Cape May Counties were putting out their hands for the tourist dollar by the end of the 19th century. The city of Cape May was rebuilt after the devastating fire of 1878, in which thirty acres of hotels, boarding houses, stores, and homes were consumed. Out of the ashes rose, phoenix-like, the Victorian masterpiece that is Cape May today, admired and appreciated by many as a smaller, more quiet, sophisticated alternative to Atlantic City.

      Avalon, Anglesea (North Wildwood), and Sea Isle City took their places among the South Jersey seaside resorts in the 1880’s. Stone Harbor and the Wildwoods became prominent vacation spots early in the 20th century. Brigantine, Atlantic City’s smaller neighbor to the north, proclaimed her

"extraordinary natural advantages . . . as a watering place" in 1880, ten or a dozen years after some tourists had begun regular summer visits to the island. As were the Cape May County resorts, Brigantine was connected with the mainland by a railroad (in 1889), after which the town began to flourish. The expectation of creating a rival resort next door to Atlantic City was smashed, however, by the same ice jam that knocked out the railroad trestle in 1904. The trestle was never rebuilt. Brigantine, joined to Absecon Island by a bridge, has undergone a renaissance in recent years.

      Ocean City was established as a resort with a difference. The product of the camp meeting and revival enthusiasm of the era, it was founded in 1879 by three Methodist ministers who desired to create a retreat where God could be worshiped in an environment of natural beauty. At Ocean City, as the founders envisioned it, worshipers could enjoy, with their devotions, the delights of ocean bathing with neither the unwholesome distractions of intoxicants, near-nudity, and Sabbath desecration, nor the crass commercialism and wanton vulgarity of some nearby beach towns.

      As South Jersey entered the 20th century, the population of the two shore counties was growing more rapidly than that of any other in the region. Between 1900 and 1905 Cape May County increased by 35.5%, Atlantic County by 29%. At mid-century, tourism along the South Jersey beaches had become an industry attracting an annual income in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

3 The author is indebted to Charles E. Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea, for statistics and facts regarding Atlantic City’s economic and social conditions circa 1890-1910.

CHAPTER TEN

From Ships to Soup

      Throughout much of the 19th century, the stream banks of South Jersey echoed with the noise of hammers driving nails into oak beams and boards, as the hundreds of hulls of schooners and sloops took shape on the stocks. The air was acrid with the smell of lampblack and turpentine. Here and there, canvas lay about, waiting to be bent on to the spars of finished ships.

      South Jersey shipyards were plentiful and busy during the era of great sailing vessels. A variety of sloop-rigged craft and schooners with two, three, and four masts were commonly built, alongside the humbler cat boats and barges. The timbers of oak and cedar needed for their wooden parts were cut and hauled to the shipyards from nearby forests. In the clay and loam soils of these forests, as Thomas Gordon wrote in 1834, "oak grows abundantly; frequently of great size, and of quality much valued in the construction of ships." As the supply of tall, straight trees diminished, masts were imported. In the years of South Jersey’s iron industry, nails and fittings for the craft came from the furnaces of Burlington and Atlantic Counties.

      With few exceptions shipbuilding, which was a major industry in South Jersey from 1830 to about 1880, was concentrated on the broad, larger rivers, with deep channels and unobstructed access to open water. In Atlantic County, where more than 200 vessels were built during the century, the Great Egg Harbor River and its tributary streams were the center of the industry. The shipyards at Mays Landing and the surrounding area produced at least half of the county’s output.

      George May built ships at the Landing during colonial times. However, the site rose to prominence in the 1830’s when George Wheaton, a pioneer shipbuilder of the 19th century, turned out the first of his two dozen schooners at the mouth of Babcock’s Creek. Other Mays Landing shipwrights were Samuel Gaskill, credited with eleven schooners, James and John Clark, who built twenty-two schooners, and Nicholas Lane, a builder of schooners and barkentines. The larger vessels, four-masters of 1000 tons burden, were towed to deep water. The Taulane, last of the Mays Landing vessels, slid down the ways in 1885. In later years, only the hulls were made; they were outfitted with masts and rigging at Philadelphia, where they had been towed.

      The Landing was Weymouth’s port; so quantities of the iron furnace’s products made their way downstream and along the coast on vessels of Mays Landing construction. Likewise, schooners laden with charcoal and cordwood left the Landing for calls at New York, Philadelphia, the ports of Virginia, and elsewhere.

      Also along the Great Egg Harbor, sloops and schooners were turned out in quantity at Somers Point until 1890. Construction along tributary Patcong Creek began in 1800, when Christopher Van Sant built a full-rigged ship at Joel’s Landing, and continued until 1868, when the schooner, L. A. Rose was completed. Fifteen schooners and smaller craft were attributed to Israel Smith’s shipyard at English Creek. Both Leedsville (Linwood) and Bakersville (Northfield), where two-masted schooners of thirty tons capacity were built, contributed to Atlantic County’s output of sailing vessels during the 19th century.

      Absecon Creek, a small stream with a deep channel in shipbuilding days, was a major center. Between 1858 and 1879, twenty-three ships of Absecon construction were registered at the Port of Great Egg Harbor. Seven of them were three-masted schooners over 100 feet long. Other vessels were smaller schooners, sloops, and a cat boat. According to a government list, nineteen Absecon ships were afloat in 1893. Although engaged primarily in the coasting trade, these ships frequented the West Indies as well, and called, on occasion, at South American ports.

      Shipyards dotted the banks of the Mullica River, at Green Bank and Crowleytown, for example, and the tributary Bass and Wading Rivers. At Port Republic, the Van Sant yards stood along Nacote Creek. In addition to its other industries, Batsto was something of a shipbuilding center. Not all the vessels engaged in Batsto commerce were constructed at the village; however, that there were stocks at Batsto is shown in the example of the

schoonerFrelinghuysen, which was launched there in July, 1844. Several years before, the schooner Batsto slid down the ways.

      Three Cape May County streams, Goshen and Dennis Creeks and the Tuckahoe River, were the sites of shipyards in the 19th century. The Garrison shipyard at Goshen had stocks for the simultaneous construction of two vessels, which, upon being launched, were slipped into the water sideways. Twenty-five ships of record were built at Goshen between 1859 and 1898. Fifty-six ships, as well as smaller boats, were turned out at Dennis Creek between 1848 and 1901, thirty of them from the yard of Jesse Diverty. As at Goshen, these craft, because of the narrowness of the creek, had to be launched sideways, and then were often kedged down the creek to the bay. Shipyards lined the Tuckahoe River on both sides, with centers at Tuckahoe and Marshallville, where at one time fourteen vessels were under construction simultaneously.

      Because of their distance from the forested regions of South Jersey, Camden, Gloucester, and Salem Counties were less prominent in shipbuilding during the era of wooden vessels than Atlantic County and northern Cape May County. Nevertheless, three- and four-masted schooners were turned out from the Samuel Tilton shipyard at Camden, and a shipyard at Kaign’s Point was kept active with government contracts during the Civil War and afterward. Vessels were built on Mantua Creek, at Carpenter’s Landing.

      At Salem, twenty-four vessels of 650 tons and less, eleven of them steamers and canal boats, left the ways between 1840 and 1846, with eleven vessels still on the stocks during the latter year.

      Cumberland County was the scene of several important shipbuilding enterprises in the 19th century. A shipyard at Bridgeton, where two large schooners and sloops were under construction, is recorded in the 1838 census. Rice and Brothers was a later shipbuilding concern of prominence in Bridgeton. Stocks for building schooners with three and four masts stood on the Maurice River at Leesburg, Maurice-town, Millville, and Dorchester. Greenwich on the Cohansey was a site noted for the construction of oyster boats late in the 19th century.

      The building of sailing ships was a continuing Cumberland County industry well into the 20th century. The last Maurice River vessel to engage in the coasting trade was a four-masted schooner, built at Leesburg in 1904. Smaller schooners used in the oyster industry were launched from shipyards at Greenwich and Dorchester as late as 1929 and 1930.

      To a large extent the oyster fishery in Delaware Bay, which spawned the hundreds of schooners that formerly stood at anchor, deck to deck, under a forest of masts in the Maurice and Cohansey Rivers, was the offspring of the railroads. The oyster business began to grow after the Civil War. Until 1876, when tracks were laid to the Maurice River, oysters from the Delaware Bay grounds were carried to Philadelphia by schooner, or hauled overland in wagons. With the coming of the railroad, the industry and the towns on the river prospered. By 1886, ninety carloads of oysters in the shell were being shipped every week from Bivalve. The demand was so heavy by the later 1800’s that the 300 boats dredging for oysters were inadequate to supply the market. Skip-jacks and bugeyes were brought in from the Chesapeake Bay to augment the Delaware Bay fleet. Until the 1930’s, as a captain from Port Norris remembered it, the bivalves of the bay cast a golden glow upon the Maurice River towns, where the newly-affluent strutted in a manner not unlike that of the lucky forty-niners in California.

      Glassmaking at Wistarberg, site of the only such operation in colonial New Jersey, came to an end about the time His Majesty’s colonies were throwing off the British yoke. Why the prosperous factory closed down at a time when, with imported glass being cut off by the war the demand for the domestic product was gaining, remains a mystery, but the pronouncedly Loyalist inclination of the Wistar family was doubtless a factor. Nevertheless, the art introduced into Salem County by Caspar Wistar was taken up, without interruption, by others whose skills and enterprise in the making of glass forged it into a leading South Jersey industry.

      Before the Wistarberg complex was put up for sale, in 1780, a similar factory was in operation nearby at Glass House (Glassboro). A German family of glassmakers by the name of Stanger had migrated to Wistarberg in 1768. There they worked in the employ of the Wistar family (the eldest son, Solomon, blew glass at the Stiegel factory in Pennsylvania), until they recouped the fortune they had lost in Germany, and purchased 200 acres in Gloucester County in 1779. Soon, they built a furnace at the site, called Glass House, and began manufacturing glass.

      Unfortunately, the Stangers were impoverished a second time by the post-Revolution depression. They were forced to sell their holdings which, by 1786, were in the hands of two Revolutionary colonels, Thomas Heston and Thomas Carpenter. Some of the Stangers stayed on at Glass House as managers and blowers; others left to operate new furnaces in the surrounding area. Out of the Heston-Carpenter business union and the descendents of each emerged 19th-

century Glassboro, with such prominent companies as the Olive Glass Works, the Harmony Glass Works, and one that became a leading bottlemaking plant in America, the Whitney Glass Works, which was in production until the First World War. Throughout the 19th century, at the Whitney works bottles were turned out in such shapes as an Indian Queen, ears of corn, fish, log cabins, and the renowned Booz bottles.

      The Stangers assisted two half-brothers, Thomas and James Lee, in establishing a glassmaking concern, the Eagle Glass Works, at Port Elizabeth around 1799. In 1806, James Lee set up a glass furnace at Millville. The Stangers were involved, too, in founding a Cape May County glassworks at Marshallville, on the Tuckahoe River, around 1814. Other pre-1820 glass furnaces were located at Malaga, Clementon, and Hammonton, a village named after the glassmaker’s son, John Hammond Coffin. By 1820, an estimated eleven South Jersey glass firms were in operation.

      The industry’s advance during the 1820’s has been mentioned in connection with the laying of the Camden and Atlantic Railroad. A listing of other glassmaking centers, in addition to those named elsewhere in this book, will serve to impress upon the reader the extent of glass manufacturing in South Jersey during the 19th century: New Brooklyn, Estellville, Williamstown, Nesco, Camden, Tansboro, Quinton’s, Fislerville, Minotola, Clayton, Woodbury, Salem, Elmer, Janvier, Fairton, Vineland, and Swedesboro. Millville, Camden, Glassboro and Salem each had several factories; Bridgeton, in and about 1889 had twenty. On the Burlington County side of the Mullica River were Crowleytown, Bull Town, Green Bank, and Hermann City, where an ill-fated enterprise of six -months’ duration specialized in Christmas tree ornaments and glass fruit.

      Batsto, if only because of its recent prominence as a restored iron and glass village, deserves special mention. Anticipating that the profits from ironmaking would continue to diminish, Jesse Richards followed the example of his brother, Thomas, at Jackson and introduced the manufacture of glass at Batsto. The first of two furnaces was ready for production on September 6, 1846, a second in 1848. For a time, the demand for Batsto’s output was heavy, especially for glass panes that East coast cities were then installing in their municipal gas lamps.

      Glassmaking, however, was never the success at Batsto that ironmaking had been. The furnaces were subject to recurring fires that put them out of commission for months at a time, even for as long as a year in the fire of 1856. Deficiencies in the quality of glass, too, were harmful to Batsto’s reputation,

and so to its prosperity. Customers complained in 1851 that window panes were cut shorter than the specifications, that their corners were broken because of improper packing, and that they were not of uniform quality. The larger panes were too thin and not well flattened.

      Although the Batsto glass business was declining noticeably by 1861, the Civil War years were generally prosperous. When the workers struck for payment in cash instead of company scrip in 1867, Batsto was dealt a crippling blow from which it did not recover. When their demands were met, the men returned to their jobs, but within less than three months the Batsto works closed down, never to reopen. The furnaces and most of the other buildings of the village, abandoned and dilapidated, were consumed by fire in 1874. There remained the mansion, with its outbuildings, a few workers’ cottages, the store, and the mill that are standing today, but nothing of the glass factory and its related buildings, nor of the iron works, which had preceded the demise of the glass industry at Batsto by twenty years.

      The most, by far, of the marketed products from the 19th-century South Jersey furnaces were window glass, bottles of various sorts, pictorial and historical flasks, and jars. Nevertheless, what has become most famous as South Jersey glass were the whimsies, such as glass canes and rolling pins, among other items of doubtful practicality, and the "fine" glass pieces such as pitchers, vases, and bowls that were turned out by blowers during spare moments at the end of the day, when they had the leisure to express their creative urges. Millville and Vineland paperweights were notable works of early 20th-century art glass from South Jersey.

      The early South Jersey style of glass was made until the mid-19th century in southern New Jersey. Its influence, by that time, extended to glassmaking in New England, New York State, and in places as far removed as western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky. The style mirrored the German origins of South Jersey master glassblowers, but it evolved a number of uniquely American features as well. The characteristics of South Jersey glass are clearly distinguishable. All of it is hand made, free blown from window or bottle glass, and manipulated into various shapes by tools. (Molds were in use at the time, and later pressed glass was manufactured in South Jersey, but experts tend to deny the appellation "South Jersey Glass" to pieces made in this manner.) Swirls, known as "lily pad," were applied for decoration; the feet of vessels and their handles, often double-strapped, were ornamented with dents or flutes, called "crimping." Pitchers and vases sometimes were made by fusing glass loops of two or three contrasting colors into a whorled or waved pattern.

      Another industry that sprang from a South Jersey natural resource and flourished for a time was the making of paper. Paper manufacturing was first introduced to the area at Harrisville, in Burlington County, where William McCarty had a double paper mill in operation by 1835. Utilizing the salt grass from the marshes for his raw material, McCarty could produce up to a ton of paper a day from one of his mills. It was a heavy-grade, yellowish-brown paper, quite strong, that was useful primarily as wrapping, or "butcher’s," paper.

      McCarty’s primitive manufacturing process was updated by Richard Harris and his brothers, who bought the factory in 1851. For a time, the enterprise prospered, but competition from even more refined processes elsewhere and the necessity to export the finished product by mule- or ox-drawn wagons to a railroad station ten miles away reduced the business to bankruptcy before the end of the century. The abandoned village of Harrisville, once a thriving town with steam heat and gas-lit street lamps, fell victim to fire, vandalism, and the encroaching Pine Barrens.

      A papermaking center in Atlantic County, at Weymouth, succumbed to poor management and bankruptcy about the time of Harrisville’s expiration. A paper mill had been built near the charred ruins of the defunct iron furnace in 1866. Manila paper and waterproof roofing paper, placed on display at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition in 1876, were the chief products of Weymouth. Still in full production in 1886, the company declined shortly afterward and was bankrupt by 1887. Attempts to reopen the mill after a sheriff’s sale in 1890 met with failure. Today the ruins, the site of a small park, are being protected by the county from annihilation.

      Of more enduring success was a papermaking enterprise at Pleasant Mills. A cotton mill, about which little is known but which apparently was of considerable size and quantity of output, was erected there soon after the Richards family gained possession of the village in 1798. The victim of a series of fires, the factory went out of existence in 1855. The industry that replaced it, after possession of the tract passed out of the Richards’ hands in 1860, was the making of paper from salt grass. By the 1870’s the factory and the town were prospering.

      Fire was a continual threat to the paper mill, as it had been to the cotton mill before it. Destroyed by an 1878 fire that roared through the village, sparing only the colonial mansion and a few houses, the mill underwent several years of reconstruction. Modern machinery was installed, an improvement that brought a doubling of production, while better firefighting equipment was set

up close at hand. Barely escaping destruction by fire in 1900, the factory was rewired.

      In full production until the First World War, turning out quantities of wrapping paper, documentary paper for the U. S. Government, and a base for sandpaper, the Pleasant Mills plant was shut down in 1915 by the widow of the late company president. The war, with its shortages and restrictions, doomed an attempted reopening by a new owner. The abandoned old mill, in ruins, was converted into a summer playhouse in 1953, but the theater in the Pines was a short-lived and unprofitable venture in art and culture at the doorstep of Elijah Clark who, two centuries before, had been the most cultivated denizen of the Egg Harbor country. Today a tangle of vines creeps up and over the darkened playhouse.

      The manufacturing of textiles was on its way to becoming a leading South Jersey industry by the end of the 19th century. Besides the pre-Civil War cotton mill at Pleasant Mills, a cotton factory was in operation at Lambtown (Almonesson) for a short time after 1830. A mill was built at Millville in 1848 where, until modern times, the entire process of spinning thread from raw cotton, weaving, bleaching, dyeing, and finishing for over-the-counter sale was carried through at one factory. In 1865, in order to utilize the waterpower of the Great Egg Harbor River, three partners built a cotton mill at Mays Landing where, until 1949, it was the chief industry. The Washington Mills at Gloucester City, established in 1844, was carrying 700 workers on its payroll by the mid-1870’s. Silk manufacturing, dreamed of since Revolutionary times as a potential South Jersey industry, was being conducted by 1880 in Camden, where woolen mills also were in operation. In fact, with its 125 factories in 1870, among which were iron, nickel, pen, oil cloth, and chemical plants, and a cannery, Camden had become the industrial center of South Jersey.

      Although industrial growth accelerated during the latter half of the 19th century, in some parts of South Jersey agriculture, employing improved methods, remained the economic base well into the 20th century. Marl, the savior of South Jersey farmlands during the middle decades of the 1800’s, was supplanted by commercial fertilizers before 1890. Meanwhile, the chief cash crops had changed, too, from wheat and other grains to fruits, vegetables, and poultry. New farm machinery and the selective breeding of livestock were introduced. Farms in Atlantic and Camden Counties tended to become smaller and more numerous as the large fields were carved into truck gardens.

      In Salem County, the cattle population expanded along with the dairy industry. Gloucester and Cumberland Counties excelled in the production of

potatoes, with Gloucester County growing more than half of the state’s crop of Jersey "sweets" at the turn of the century. A third of the state’s grape vines were in Atlantic County in 1899, and another third in Cumberland and Salem Counties.

      Tomatoes, said to have been grown in South Jersey for the Philadelphia market as early as the 1840’s, were a major cash crop three decades later. By the wagonload the red fruit, once known as the "love apple" but avoided as food because of its rumored poison, was carried to South Jersey canneries, among them the company begun by Joseph Campbell at Camden in 1869. Others, in huge amounts, were shipped by rail to East Coast cities.

      Industrial expansion, whether in iron or agriculture, brings with it an ambiance of exploitation, greed, dehumanization, and the passion to "get ahead" that often erupts in a conflict between labor and management. South Jersey did not escape this turmoil. As has been shown, Batsto was temporarily shut down in 1867 by a strike of glass-workers, who demanded payment for their labor in cash instead of scrip, usable only at the company store. The Batsto dispute was but a prelude to a later series of strikes over the same issue. Company stores were deemed a necessity in the glassmaking villages, far removed from the nearest town or city. It was reasoned that the workers did not need cash when they had no access to outside shopping areas, whereas all they needed could be purchased at the company store with company money. However, they suspected, and the owners knew, that the local prices were ten to fifteen percent higher than elsewhere. Furthermore, a nefarious credit system that involved wage deductions kept the laborers in perpetual debt. Child labor was rife. As a consequence, seemingly hopeless strikes in 1886 (which lasted for two years), in 1893, and again in 1899 almost closed down the South Jersey glass industry. The ultimate tragedy was averted in 1900, when the glass manufacturers and blowers met in Atlantic City to break the hated nexus of company, company scrip, company housing, company-owned stores, and company-owned laborers in the glass towns.

      Camden County, in particular, was haunted by the specter of labor unrest in the 1890’s, when labor leaders were arousing the rank and file in nearby Philadelphia. However, albeit Camden laborers, hoping for shorter hours and higher pay, gave an ear to speechmakers of the Knights of Labor and called for strikes in the textile, road construction, and transportation industries, they retreated before the onslaught of threatened dismissal from their jobs, strikebreaking, and the united front of the industrialists. It is paradoxical that one of New Jersey’s most able and vocal union leaders of the late 19th century,

Peter J. McGuire, the successful advocate for making Labor Day a legal holiday, was a resident of the city of Camden. Likewise, in Atlantic City, the labor force of the hotel industry was unable to organize in the face of a shortage of jobs and long lines of unemployed who were eager to take their places.

      The stooped backs of migrant laborers have been a familiar sight in South Jersey fields since the 1880’s, when Italians were first hauled in from the tenements of Philadelphia and Camden to harvest the vegetables and fruit, especially berries, growing on the area’s flourishing farms. Unlike the industrial workers, they were a silent labor force recruited by Italian padrones from the city ghettos. During the harvest, parents and children bent side by side for ten or more hours a day, seven days a week, over plants and vines, following the ripening crop from spring strawberries to autumn cranberries. Their labors for a season yielded them several hundred dollars, but they lived meantime in miserable shacks, while their children were deprived of schooling. Not until 1940 was child labor legislation in New Jersey extended to agriculture.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Home for the Homeless

      The masses of the "homeless, tempest-tost" who sailed in steerage beneath Miss Liberty’s welcoming torch in New York harbor shunned the fields and woodlands of South Jersey. The eyes of most were set on the bustling streets and noisy factories of the industrial North where, it was hoped, if not a fortune at least a comfortable living could be made. As late as 1900, of the southern counties only Atlantic and Camden had sizeable foreign-born minorities. Nonetheless, before and after the famous statue took up residence on the New Jersey (not New York) island, in 1886, new immigrants from Europe modified the old ethnic configuration of South Jersey. Thousands helped to swell the urban society of Camden; hundreds of others peopled the planned communities of South Jersey which aimed at attracting Europeans of a specific national or cultural background.

      Irish and German laborers and artisans migrated to South Jersey in the early flush of colonial industry. New generations came to give their brawn and skill to ironmaking and glass blowing, as these industries burgeoned during the first several decades of the 19th century. Other Irishmen bent to the labors of a field hand, or joined the construction gangs that laid the area’s turnpikes and railroads. Like the Germans, immigrants from England, France, and Belgium were brought in under contract to work in the glass factories. At the same time, the English were attracted also to the textile industry. A few Scandinavians found the South Jersey life as sailors, fishermen, and shipbuilders to their liking. Few immigrants from eastern and southern Europe settled in South Jersey before 1870. In fact, as late as 1900 among the foreign-born of Camden, South Jersey’s most polyglot town, the Irish, English, and Germans predominated.

      Although most of the first generation of Irish-Americans did not reach positions of wealth or rank, by 1890 a few of them and their children were emerging as leaders, especially in government, law enforcement, and the legal profession. True nationwide, this was the case also in Camden County. William J. Sewell, of Irish birth, moved to Camden from Chicago in 1860. After the Civil War, in which he distinguished himself at Chancellorsville, Sewell was named to the personal staff of the governor, a position from which he was catapulted into a political career that took him to the United States Senate. For years, he controlled the Republican Party in New Jersey. At one time or another, he held high office in every major New Jersey railroad company, including director of the Pennsylvania Railroad branches in the Garden State. 4

      Sewell’s political champion, the Camden businessman and banker, David Baird, was also an Irish immigrant. His forte, unlike Sewell’s, was ward politics, an activity in which he mixed with the voters, visited them in their habitats and drummed up support for Sewell and the party.

      John J. Burleigh and Edward Ambler Armstrong were second-generation Irish-Americans of South Jersey birth who rose to wealth and top managerial positions in finance, utilities, communications, and transportation in Atlantic, Camden, and Cape May Counties around the turn of the century. Innkeeper, race track operator, and iceman, among other things, William J. Thompson was an Irishman from County Derry who became leader of the Democratic Party in Camden County in the 1890’s.

      Since the days of Caspar Wistar, wherever glass-houses were to be found in South Jersey German glassworkers were to be found inside them, and in the homes, churches, stores, and schools of the glass towns. By 1840, possibly one-tenth of the state’s 10,000 Germans were employed in the glassmaking establishments of the southern counties. Statewide, the number of German-born had tripled by 1860; the 1860 figure had doubled by 1880; and in 1900, New Jersey’s German-born population stood at 119,598.

      Apart from the glassworkers, few of these thousands migrated to the southern counties. However, some resided in Camden, where they perpetuated their German customs with social clubs, folk festivals, singing groups, and gymnastics. Others, leaving their first American homes in New England, settled in Vineland. A number of Germans went to Bridgeton.

      The most thoroughly German of South Jersey communities was Egg Harbor City, a planned settlement in Atlantic County designed to attract Germans from the large American cities, where they were undergoing the persecution and

resentment of the anti-immigrant, nativistic Know-Nothing Party. The new home for Germans, a "refuge" where they could "combine and enjoy American freedom with German Gemutlichkeit," as the advertisements read, was conceived by a group of prominent Philadelphia German-Americans who sat on the Board of Directors of the Camden and Atlantic Railroad. On November 24, 1854, less than five months after the trains began running between Camden and Atlantic City, these men organized the Gloucester Farm and Town Association, and bought up 38,000 acres of pine land midway between Hammonton and Absecon. Much of it was the abandoned Gloucester Furnace Tract.

      Grandiose plans for a great commercial metropolis, serviced by the railroad at one end and a deep-water harbor on the Mullica River at the other, were drawn up. The proposed city was advertised as "a place. . . to develop German folk life, German arts and sciences, especially music. A place around which we can build German industry and commerce." The east-west avenues were named for German philosophers, scientists, artists, and musicians; the north-south arteries were given the names of the great sea-, lake-, and riverport cities of Europe and America. Any purchaser of stock was promised, for each share, a twenty-acre farm and a claim for a building lot in town. Tree-lined streets, a huge municipal park, and public schools were envisioned. By 1860, the Association had agents stationed in twenty-nine American cities, from Boston to Washington to St. Louis, extolling the wonders of Egg Harbor City.

      The great port on the Mullica River never materialized, nor did Egg Harbor City ever attain to the status of a great commercial metropolis, but much of the dream did become reality for a time. German-Americans began to arrive in 1855; in 1858, the city was granted a charter and a municipal election was held; a citizen’s handbook, written in German, was compiled, and a German-language weekly newspaper (multiplied to four by 1900) began rolling from the presses. A public school was established almost immediately, although classes met in the community hall until 1876. By 1863, four German churches had been organized.

      No fewer than six musical organizations, the first pre-dating the churches, and two dramatic societies were soon offering a variety of entertainment from Mozart to melodrama. Two gymnastic societies provided training and cultural expression of an athletic nature. An agricultural society dispensed seeds and plants, and grew a model garden outside town. The latest thinking in philosophy and science was presented in lectures by an adult education group.

      Wine quickly became the staple product of Egg Harbor City industry. Made at first for home consumption, the fermented juice from the grapes of the Egg

Harbor vineyards was a beverage of national reputation well before 1870. Afterward, it was known internationally, taking prizes at Philadelphia in 1876 and at the Paris Wine Exhibition in 1878. The industry caused Egg Harbor City to glow with a special fame (to some of the clergy, it was more like notoriety), especially when its round of summer and autumn wine festivals was noised abroad, drawing tourists and tasters from far and wide.

      For more than half a century, Egg Harbor City was a German town. However, it was recognized as early as 1868 that the settlement could not maintain for long its purely German character. Blacks moved into the area before the end of the century, their children learning to speak fluent German. Italians were attracted by the wine industry, by Egg Harbor City’s second-most prominent enterprise, tailoring, and by the railroad’s need for cheap labor. The railroad imported as many as eighty Italian immigrants to the town in a single month in 1890. The gradual disappearance of the German flavor of the community was evident in the churches, which changed from German to bilingual services, then finally to English. The minutes of the City Council were recorded in German for the last time in 1916. When the First World War ended, Egg Harbor City had become as American as any other town in South Jersey.

      The immigration pattern in South Jersey changed in the closing decades of the 19th century as southern and eastern Europeans streamed to America in greater numbers. After 1900, south Italian and Sicilian immigration was particularly intense. Although most of them sought out the urban centers for settlement, enough of them going to Camden, for example, to justify the creation of an Italian parish in that city in 1903, efforts were made to interest them in locating in South Jersey’s agricultural areas, where farmers were in dire need of laborers. As a result, Hammonton and Vineland developed large Italian enclaves.

      A few Italians settled in Hammonton before the Civil War, but the Italian colony in this Atlantic County community began in earnest when a Sicilian, Matteo Campanello, arrived. Most of his relatives and half of his former townsmen in Sicily followed shortly. They were joined by immigrants from the Province of Salerno. By 1905, the Italian-born residents of Hammonton had passed the 1000 mark.

      Some of the first to arrive rented or purchased their own farms and hired their fellow immigrants to work them. Later, others used the money they had saved from their earnings as farm laborers or on railroad gangs to buy small,

often poor, tracts of their own which they cultivated successfully with close tending and hard work.

      Like Atlantic City and Egg Harbor City, Vineland existed on paper before it was a living fact. It was the brainchild of a 28-year-old Philadelphia lawyer, Charles K. Landis, who proposed, as he said, "to build a city, which would be filled with manufactories, shops and stores for mercantile purposes, schools and halls for public recreation, and private residences, and surround this mile square of city, as far as the boundaries of the land would reach, with farms, gardens, orchards, and vineyards." Fruit instead of grain, he intended, would be the economic staple, because "fruit culture. . .would give more opportunity to people of small means." The city would be called Vineland. In 1861, Landis himself began construction of the town’s grand avenue in a wilderness inhabited by wood choppers and charcoal burners when he cut down the first tree. He named the thoroughfare for himself.

      Five years after Landis laid his ax to the tree, Horace Greeley was the featured speaker at the annual fair held by Vineland’s Agricultural and Horticultural Societies.

      Those who came to scoff at the idea of planting a farming community in a place of such worthless soil remained to hear Greeley say of Vineland’s founders, "It was the greatest concentration of intelligence upon the subject of Horticulture and Agriculture that he had seen anywhere in the country: Truly they could claim the motto hung over the stage ‘The wilderness has blossomed like a rose.’" President Ulysses S. Grant dedicated a new high school in 1874. By 1886, from Landis’ prayers, as he claimed, and from his ingenuity there had arisen a city that boasted eleven churches, three newspapers, a bank, a high school, a fire department, a Roman Catholic seminary, and a population within the borough limits approaching 3000.

      At the invitation of Landis, Italian immigrants headed for Vineland and the adjacent Landis Township in the 1870’s. They cleared the land, planted crops, and many became prosperous fruit growers and truck farmers. Landis was both realtor and friend to the Italians. He secured an educated Italian, Carlo Quairoli, to assist his countrymen with the problems of settling in a new land. From Quairoli’s pen came a written record of Vineland’s Italian colony.

      Immigrants from all parts of Italy, pleased with their new homes, made up 1400 families of Vineland’s population in 1911. Many were farmers, but Quairoli’s record shows that the Vineland Italian-Americans put their hands to a diversity of occupations. More than a score were merchants and carpenters;

others were contractors, shoemakers, tailors, masons, druggists, painters, jewelers, mechanics, foundry workers, barbers, teachers, policemen, and public officials. Their children and grandchildren contributed to all professions and vocations.

      With the immigrants to South Jersey came the ancient customs of old Italy, reproduced in a modern American setting. Barefoot devotees of the Holy Virgin processed with lighted candles through the streets of South Jersey towns.

      Eventually, electric lights illuminated the exuberant throngs who gathered to worship -- and to play on instruments, sing, dance, eat, drink, and shoot off fireworks. Not all residents approved of these celebrations; even some Italian-Americans disdained them, seeing in them a demeaning of Italians as a whole. The festivals died slowly, but never altogether, for each July the statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel is still paraded through the streets of Hammonton in a spirit of piety and carnival.

      A short distance from Vineland, in Salem County, a tract was selected by the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society of New York as a home for persecuted east European Jews. Twenty-five Russian Jewish families were settled in Alliance, a planned agricultural village founded by the Society in 1882. Manufacturing was introduced on a small scale. The success of the Alliance settlement prompted the establishment of the nearby towns of Norma, Brotmanville, Rosenhayn, and Carmel for Russian and Polish Jews.

      The Jewish colonies looked to Vineland for a market for their produce, engendering a trade that increased Vineland’s volume of business. Soon, a number from the Jewish communities moved to Vineland to open stores and a variety of other commercial establishments. As industry advanced, the farms were deserted. Factories in Alliance and Rosenhayn were transferred to Vineland, where there was a larger labor supply. By the end of the 19th century, the Cumberland County city had a sizeable Jewish population which, at mid-20th century, had expanded to 1200 families and included persons engaged in nearly every occupation and profession.

      The most ambitious of the Jewish colonies was founded at Woodbine in 1891. Income from a fund set up by the Baron de Hirsch for the relocation of European Jews upon their arrival in America provided monies for the land and the building of the settlement. Annual allotments from the fund subsidized the colony. Twelve miles of farm roads and twenty miles of streets, lit by electricity, were laid across 2000 improved acres in the midst of the scrub pine

and oak of upper Cape May County. Intended for both agriculture and small industry, at Woodbine the factory eventually outdistanced the farm in the preferences of the Jewish immigrants. However, Woodbine’s most dramatic accomplishment was the Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School, where nearly 100 students every year were instructed in scientific farming. Among the Woodbine school’s most illustrious graduates was Jacob G. Lipman, who became a director of the Rutgers Experiment Station and, in 1915, was named the first dean of the state university’s College of Agriculture.

      Russian and Slavic Christians migrated to South Jersey following the Communist Revolution in 1917. Some of them settled in Camden and Millville, while others established a small village in Hamilton Township (Atlantic County) which they called New Kuban, after the Kuban River in the upper Caucasus. Their numbers were multiplied by the coming of the East European refugees in the 1950’s. The people of New Kuban retain their old style of dress even today, the women affecting the traditional calf-length skirt, with blouse or sweater, and a babushka around their heads. The men commonly wear overalls, or loose-fitting trousers with suspenders, a cotton shirt, and usually a hat. Their diet consists mostly of cabbage, potatoes, beets, bread, and buttermilk, along with vodka and homemade wine, the preferred alcoholic beverages. More Russian than English is spoken. 5

      The ethnic pattern of South Jersey was further altered in the 20th century by a large influx of Southern blacks during the two World Wars. Negroes were not newcomers to the region. As has been shown, a sizeable population of freed and escaped slaves lived in South Jersey before the Civil War. An extensive migration of blacks to Atlantic City occurred about 1870. In that year, blacks in Camden County accounted for ten percent of the county’s population, and by 1880 the county had a larger concentration of blacks than any other place in New Jersey. They attended segregated schools and churches, sat separate from the whites at public events, and on occasion were the object of white resentment and acts of violence. Nonetheless, blacks occupied respected positions in Camden civic, business, and professional circles during the 1880’s and 1890’s.

      These facts notwithstanding, a larger potential black migration to the urban areas of South Jersey at the turn of the century was blocked by a vastly greater influx of southern Europeans, who competed for jobs, worked for lower wages, and moved into established black neighborhoods. When the First World War cut off the supply of immigrant labor from Europe, employment was opened to blacks, who were recruited in the South by manufacturers gearing to wartime

production. This migration continued undiminished until the depression of the 1930’s, to be renewed with vigor at the outbreak of the Second World War. A case in point was Camden County’s increase in black population at a rate greater than that of any other group between 1940 and 1950, when a gain of nearly 5000, a 26%, increase, was recorded. The total county population increased by 17.6%, during the same decade. Black increase during the depression decade was only 1000.

      The Puerto Rican inflow to South Jersey began toward the end of the Second World War. The larger towns of the southern counties, and the two largest cities, Camden and Atlantic City, developed large Spanish-speaking enclaves at mid-20th century, while hundreds from the Caribbean Islands settled in smaller communities in the farming areas. Most of the migrant labor employed in present-day South Jersey agriculture is from this group.

4 For many of the facts and statistics on Camden City and County in this and following chapters, the author is indebted to Jeffery M. Dorwart and Philip English Mackey, Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976: A Narrative History. 

5 The author wishes to thank his student, Mrs. Jane Woodard, for her research on New Kuban, which provided him with this information.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Religion and Education

      The old-time religion in new vesture, the Methodist movement, swept into South Jersey in the years just before the Revolution. Haltingly at first, restrained by opposition and the hazards of war, Methodism grew in the closing years of the 18th century into the predominant faith of South Jerseymen, displacing older denominations that had been rendered effete or ineffective. With an appeal to the heart instead of the mind, offering a free salvation to all who would repent and believe without the stricture of divine election, proclaimed with passion by colorful men in simple words, the Methodist gospel found fertile soil among the unsophisticated farmers, woodsmen, small traders, and iron-workers of South Jersey.

      John Early, who came from Ireland in 1764, was the first known Methodist in New Jersey. He settled in Gloucester County, where for forty years he was a Methodist class leader and steward on the circuit. A Philadelphia merchant by the name of Edward Evans, a convert to the teachings of George Whitefield when he was on his first American tour, began to preach Methodist doctrine at Greenwich in Gloucester late in the 1760’s to "an assorted congregation" composed of Methodists, Episcopalians, "half-Quakers," and a few Swedish Lutherans.

      Answering a call from the Methodist founder, John Wesley, for preachers to go to America, Joseph Pilmoor and Richard Boardman took ship from England in 1769. These first representatives of the new movement in America, carrying full credentials as Methodist preachers under assignment by Wesley himself, stepped ashore at Gloucester Point on October 21, 1769. Methodism

had arrived officially in the New World. As the ministry of Pilmoor took him into South Jersey, to him the Methodist church in New Jersey’s southern counties owes its recognized beginning as an offshoot of the parent society in Great Britain.

      "Live or die, I must ride." Such was the motto of Francis Asbury, who landed at Philadelphia in October, 1771. The name of this man, more than any other, is associated with the origins of the Methodist church, in South Jersey as in the whole of the young American republic. Preacher, able organizer, first bishop, and patron saint of American Methodists, his itinerant ministry of more than forty years took him again and again to old Gloucester County, to Cumberland, Salem, and Cape May Counties, and to the Egg Harbor Country, where he preached, organized Methodist classes, baptized, administered the Lord’s Supper, counseled, supervised the building of meeting houses, dedicated churches, pled with the sinful, rejoiced with the saved, broke bread with the high and the lowly, and was the untiring servant of the Lord in whose vineyard he labored.

      A compilation taken from Asbury’s journal shows that, between 1771 and 1814, the indefatigable preacher made ninety-two stops at forty-two different Methodist preaching stations in the southern counties. These stations included Methodist chapels, free churches, churches of other denominations, and private homes. Not only do these figures show the extent and intensity of Asbury’s ministry throughout the area, but they show as well how widely Methodism spread, its itinerants preaching more often in more places than had those of any other religious group up to that time.

      In New Jersey, Methodism’s most spectacular gains were in the formerly Quaker areas. By 1830, more than 7.5% of the population of the southern counties (including Burlington) was Methodist. In Cumberland County, predominantly Presbyterian going into the 19th century, 11% of the population was Methodist in 1864, whereas five years later the Presbyterian population had dropped to an amount just over 3.5%. At the time, there were three-fourths as many Methodists in Cumberland County alone as there were Presbyterians, the next largest religious group, in all the southern counties put together, including Burlington.

      The spread of Methodism is commonly attributed to a number of factors, among which are its emotional appeal, its reliance upon the unstinting labor of devout laymen, its lack of educational qualifications for ordination, its democratic theology, whereby salvation is offered free to all, not just the few, and the mobility afforded by the circuit system.

      Each circuit was made up of a varying number of preaching stations separated by a distance of several miles. An itinerant preacher, familiarly known as the circuit rider, was assigned to a circuit, and was expected to make a visit to all its stations every two, four, or six weeks, depending upon the distance to be covered and the designation of the circuit. As membership of the classes and societies grew, the circuits were divided. Between the calls of the circuit riders, local class leaders and lay preachers conducted services, held prayer meetings, and in general tended the Methodist flock in their communities. Variety for both clergy and congregation was assured by the frequent change of preachers. Such a system had the benefits of utilizing the talents of capable lay leadership, providing on-the-job training for young preachers, and guaranteeing frequent and regular coverage of the field by licensed clergymen.

      Despite a wide appeal in South Jersey, Methodism encountered resistance, sufficiently implacable at times to call it persecution. The highly emotional style of Methodist worship, punctuated with outbursts of shouting and marked by sometimes violent physical tremors unfamiliar to more staid religionists, evoked ridicule from the impious and opposition from the established churches. Besides its peculiar brand of unction, the Methodist characteristic most often deprecated was its suspect Arminian doctrines -- that God predestined an individual neither to salvation nor damnation; that the believer was perfectable; but, on the other hand, that he could "fall from grace." These were particularly offensive to Calvinist bodies, which saw them as error compounded by Methodism’s serious departure from Christian order. The Methodists, they believed, were neither doctrinally nor ritually rational.

      Meanwhile, other religious denominations in South Jersey were expanding also, in numbers if not percentages, as the population increased. The Episcopalians and German Lutherans made small gains, with the Baptists showing substantial increases. After 1840, a revived Presbyterianism organized a score or more of new congregations, largely through the prodigious efforts of Allen H. Brown, the appointed missionary of West Jersey Presbytery. New religious groups, such as the Mormons, made their appearance about mid-19th century. Only the Quakers continued the decline begun during the closing decades of the 18th century, a falling off intensified by the split over procedural and doctrinal issues led by Elias Hicks in 1827.

      For the most part, the 19th century was an era in South Jersey religion dominated by evangelical Protestantism, emotional in manner and fundamentalist in doctrine, which gave evidence of its enthusiasm in frequent

revivals and numerous camp meetings. It was tinctured, too, with an American nativism that bred hostility and opposition when the new wave of European immigrants began to arrive, particularly if they were Roman Catholics.

      Catholicism was roundly denounced from the pulpit. A line from an 1834 sermon by a Presbyterian pastor in Cumberland County is illustrative: "And it is apparent that Popery with its abominations and superstitious adherents will, in a great part, be swept off with a terrible destruction. For ye Lord will consume this man [the Pope] of sin with ye spirit of his coming, and from some passages of scripture it appears that many of his idolatrous followers will be killed, while some will become his [the Lord’s] willing people." The Pope was damned by Protestants as the Anti-Christ; the Jesuits were publicly accused of conspiring to subject the United States Government to papal control. The opposition, at times, was more than verbal. Buildings in which Catholics met were fouled with manure, and Catholics were denied, in some cases, the privilege of buying ground for their churches. In other cases, when a plot was secured for a church, construction workers laid down their tools when they discovered the kind of church it was to be. Men were fired from jobs if they admitted to being Catholic.

      The drafters of the 1844 Constitution of the State of New Jersey were more liberal than many other citizens in their religious attitudes. Whereas the 1776 Constitution, while granting suffrage to Catholics, restricted the right to hold office to Protestants, the later constitution specified that, "no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust; and no person shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right merely on account of his religious principles."

      Furthermore, in spite of opposition, Roman Catholic churches were erected in South Jersey. The first was at Pleasant Mills in the 1820’s, built by the Catholic workers at Batsto furnace on land donated by Jesse Richards. Catholic churches were standing at Salem, Cape May, Camden, Atlantic City, and Swedesboro before the Civil War, and were joined by those at Millville, Egg Harbor City, and Woodbury during the war. The 1870’s and 1880’s saw the erection of Catholic houses of worship in the other larger South Jersey towns, as well as in a number of smaller communities.

      However, South Jersey remained solidly Protestant to the end of the 19th century. As late as 1905, when baptized Roman Catholics in New Jersey outnumbered the membership of all Protestant bodies combined, there was no southern county with a Catholic majority. Finally, by the 1930’s, Catholicism

in South Jersey was of a size to be created a separate diocese, the Diocese of Camden.

      Religious attitudes during the first half of the 19th century affected the development of education. Fearing that public education would head in a purely secular direction, some church people resisted any move away from the private and church-sponsored schools that had become traditional in colonial times. Statewide, the national, cultural, and religious heterogeneity of New Jersey encouraged the perpetuation of parochial, private, and charity schools.

      The initial actions taken by the state legislature on behalf of free public education, in 1817 and 1820, strengthened the long-held impression that education at public expense was for the poor alone, whereas those who could afford it should send their children to church or private schools. The 1817 act provided for the establishment of a permanent school fund; the act of 1820 authorized townships to appoint supervisory committees and to raise money for schools "for the education of such poor children as are paupers, . . . and the children of such poor parents . . . as are or shall be, in the judgment of said committee, unable to pay for schooling the same."

      Minutes of meetings in which the townships moved in accordance with this act reflect its language: a committee was elected "for the education of poor children in this township," and "RESOLVED that the sum of one hundred dollars be raised for the purpose of instructing indigent children in the usual form of learning." An Egg Harbor Township (Atlantic County) resolution of 1827 specified that only one child in a family could use the school fund in any given year, and he for no longer than three months. In New Jersey, the association of free education with poverty was an idea that died hard. A committee was appointed at a public meeting in Trenton in 1828 to collect and disseminate information about the condition of New Jersey’s schools. The committee’s report shows that, of the southern counties, Cumberland County was the most progressive, with fifty-four schools averaging a winter attendance of over 1400 pupils.6 In some of the schools, classes in languages, geography, and singing were offered. Despite this creditable record, over 400 children in the county were without instruction. Only half of the townships in Salem County reported. In those that did report, there were twenty-nine schools with a winter enrollment just in excess of 1200.7 Four hundred forty-seven children were not being educated. The Salem representatives decried the miserable deficiency of common school education in New Jersey, urging that the legislature "adopt some more efficient mode of instruction."

      Gloucester County, which at the time still included Atlantic and Camden Counties, pointed to the sparseness of its population in explaining the lack of schools in some places. The people in those areas, it was added, were "very solicitous to obtain opportunities of educating their children," but would need state aid to do so. Cape May County did not report, but the American Bible Society, having become familiar with the level of literacy in the state while distributing Bibles and religious tracts, gave a dismal account of conditions in that county.

      It should be pointed out that these were not free public schools being reported to the committee. The annual tuition in Salem County, for example, ranged between $1.50 and $2.00. In 1839, tuition was still being charged by public schools at a statewide average of slightly under $2.00 a quarter. Although Cumberland County had tax-supported schools before 1830, free schools maintained by taxes and monies from the state school fund were not introduced into that county until 1847. Not until 1871 did the state legislature prohibit public schools from charging tuition. Textbooks and supplies have been free to pupils in public schools since 1894.

      The state response to the 1828 report was the common school act of 1829, which provided for the dividing of the school fund among the counties and townships proportionate to the taxes paid by each, empowered the townships to set up committees to organize school districts and to examine and license teachers, and authorized the election of trustees to secure classrooms and to distribute school funds. Public education was enhanced further by the Constitution of 1844, which established the state school fund as a perpetual fund that could not be used by the legislature in any way for any other purpose. In 1846, townships were required to match appropriations from the state school fund. By the same law, elected, paid school superintendents replaced the township committees.

      Although there was strong objection to these measures on the part of many who preferred that education remain under the aegis of the church, the townships of the state had nearly doubled their 1845 appropriations by 1848, while the number of children in school increased by 60%. South Jersey kept pace with the rest of the state.

      Before the Civil War, public education was on the elementary level only; high schools were the product of the 1870’s and afterward. Private and parochial academies, devoted primarily to college preparation, were the norm for secondary education until the proponents of public high schools first made their voices heard in Trenton in 1871. Action by the state, however, was not

taken until the 1890’s, in legislation which required that public high schools be established in all first and second class cities.

      To many, education beyond the common school level was an unnecessary frill that did not justify the expense. They complained that tax assessments for education were already too high. The arguments, pro and con, were taken up by the newspapers, where debate sometimes degenerated into sarcasm. The Salem Sunbeam, for example, lampooned one of the city’s prominent, wealthy citizens who, albeit eager to lend money at 35%, interest, railed at the robbery of having to pay to educate other people’s children. The editor asked, in the last line of a rhymed verse, "Great God -- can such a soul be saved?"

      Camden had the makings of a high school in 1865, when secondary courses were offered as part of a graded school system. Although the Camden County superintendent hoped that the county would soon have a high school where teachers could be trained to instruct the lower grades, his wish was almost thirty years ahead of fulfillment. High school classes first met in Camden in 1891; an edifice constructed for the purpose was opened in 1899, after a number of other South Jersey cities had such facilities.

      Vineland led the way by opening a high school in 1870. In August, 1874, President Grant dedicated the city’s new high school building. The city of Salem graduated its first high school class in 1875. Four other 19th-century high schools in South Jersey date from the 1890’s; they included Camden; Gloucester City High School, which is mentioned in a report of the United States Commissioner of Education for 1892-3; Atlantic City, which was founded in 1893 and moved into a new building three years later, and Egg Harbor City High School, which graduated a class of six in 1895.

      Manual training was included in the curriculum of some city schools, most notably at Camden where instruction was given in drawing, color, and sewing to all grades, and where joining, turning, patternmaking, carving, machine work, and forging were offered at the dual-purpose manual training and high school building erected in 1899. Public vocational education, defined as "any education the controlling purpose of which is to fit for profitable employment," was approved by a state law in 1913, after which Atlantic City High School created industrial and home economics departments. At the same time, Vineland High School was making plans for a vocational department. Atlantic County was the first in the state to provide for a vocational school under the supervision of a county vocational school board.

      Evening schools were a post-Civil War addition to South Jersey learning that proved to be a boon to adult laborers and white collar workers who wished to advance their education. Evening instruction was especially beneficial to immigrants in acquainting them with the language and customs of their new homes. Bridgeton, Millville, Salem, and Camden opened evening schools around 1870. Apprentices in industrial arts and students in household arts were first offered evening classes in Atlantic City around 1913.

      A drawback to the development of public education in South Jersey was the scarcity of qualified teachers. To overcome this obstacle, teachers’ institutes were conducted, as early as 1848 in Gloucester County. Normal schools, which met from nine to twelve on Saturday mornings, conducted studies in school administration, teaching methods, and grammar school subjects after 1866. In some instances, the primary mission of the public high schools was to train teachers for the lower grades. However, post-high school education for teachers was not available within the geographical limits of South Jersey until the state normal school at Glassboro was opened in 1923.

      In the mid-1920’s, a second institution of higher learning was established in South Jersey, the College of South Jersey and the South Jersey Law School at Camden. Incorporated as a part of Rutgers University in 1950, the Camden campus expanded its three-year program to four years in 1951. The state normal school at Glassboro was reorganized as Glassboro State College in 1935, when a four-year, Bachelor of Arts program was introduced. The college began a Master of Arts curriculum in 1949. Stockton State College at Pomona, which admitted its first class in 1971, was the third institution in South Jersey authorized to grant a baccalaureate degree.

      By the end of the 1960’s, five of the southern counties were operating two-year community colleges with authorization to grant an associate degree in a variety of vocational fields and in the liberal arts.

6 Cumberland County population in 1830 was 14,093. 

7 Salem County population in 1830 was 14,155. 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Advances in Health and Public Welfare

      The humane treatment of society’s outcasts progressed slowly in South Jersey throughout the 19th century. However, by the end of the century, significant advances had been scored in the improvement of prisons, the care of the insane, and the education of the mentally retarded.

      The inadequate colonial prisons in the southern counties fell to the ravages of time and a new spirit of justice in the years of the Revolution and immediately thereafter. In Cape May County, an obsolete Baptist church, erected about 1712, had served as a courthouse and jail for thirty years when it was replaced by a new structure in 1774. A two-storied, stone prison, containing cells for inmates and a residence for the jailer, was erected alongside a "spacious jail-yard" at Salem in 1775. The Gloucester County freeholders ordered the building of a courthouse and a new jail, to be patterned after the one at Salem, in 1786. Cumberland County followed with a new prison in 1790. Atlantic and Camden Counties constructed their own prisons when they were separated from Gloucester, in 1837 and 1844 respectively.

      Although prison construction was updated, the outworn philosophy of colonial penology did not change. Punishment, not rehabilitation, was thought to be the proper lot of the convicted. All who entered the state prison, erected at Trenton in 1799, were summoned to "Labor, Silence, Penitence" by an inscription over the main entrance. The same attitude prevailed at the county

jails. The Gloucester County jail was equipped with stocks, a whipping post, and a pillory in 1792. In 1822, new public stocks were ordered for the Woodbury facility. Hangings were public, a spectacle to be relished by thousands of onlookers, as late as 1821. The stone prison at Salem, despite its vaunted yard for outdoor exercise by the inmates, still had no beds for them to sleep on in 1843, because the law did not require them.

      Were it only criminals who were made to suffer the indignities and deprivations of South Jersey’s early prisons, perhaps they would have seemed less offensive to humanitarian sensibilities, but criminals, debtors, the insane, and the merely eccentric were confined together in institutions permeated by filth, cruelty, and crass neglect. The American reformer, Dorothea Dix, inspecting New Jersey prison conditions in the early 1840’s, saw in the Gloucester County jail a young woman who had been in chains for twelve years. At Salem, some insane inmates were locked in their quarters without release for years at a time, while they and other unfortunates were beaten with wooden blocks by the jail keeper. At some of the institutions, the insane were placed under the care of other inmates.

      In accordance with the state’s insolvency laws, debtors were committed to prison side by side with criminals and the insane. The practice was denounced in a Salem newspaper in 1823, when there were incarcerated in the county jail a number of persons of good reputation who owed money. In the same year Salem County petitioned the state legislature to abolish imprisonment for debt. Evidently the petition was not recognized, for not until 1846 did New Jersey discontinue the practice of imprisonment for debtors whose actions did not involve fraud.

      At the end of the Civil War, the county prisons of 18th-century construction having become, as the jail at Woodbury was described by the Gloucester County judges, a "nuisance," the building of new and more adequate facilities for the keeping of criminals was undertaken in South Jersey. The interiors were better ventilated, the cells were larger, and in a number of them the cells were designed for one occupant only. By this time, separate institutions had been created for the mentally ill. Modern prisons, expressive of altered concepts in penology, have replaced the 19th-century structures.

      Poor farms and almshouses were provided for the indigent by most southern counties during the early decades of the 1800’s. The counties erected separate buildings for the insane poor shortly after their original almshouses were built. Debtors, as distinguished from the indigent, were still confined in the county jails.

      Salem led the state in establishing institutions for the poor when that county acquired a farm upon which to construct an almshouse in 1796. The first appropriation for a building on the land was in 1802, when the freeholders directed the trustees of the poor to spend an amount "not exceeding three hundred dollars for building a barn on the premises occupied for the use of the poor of the county." Monies were set aside for a poor house in 1804, and the structure was ready for occupancy in 1808. Gloucester County gave its attention to a similar project by the purchase of a lot in 1800. Plans for a poor house were drawn up in 1801, and by 1803 the building was finished and occupied. The facility was used jointly with Camden County from 1844 until 1860. A Cumberland County almshouse was ready for use in 1810. All of these buildings were replaced by larger, improved facilities around mid-19th century.

      Special facilities for the care of the physically ill were a late-19th-century development in South Jersey, the first of them coming at a time when the appearance of hospitals was a national phenomenon. Until then, patients were treated in their homes or at the almshouses, which served as hospitals throughout most of the century.

      The beginnings of a hospital were made at Camden in 1865, when a dispensary was opened. In 1874, the heirs of Dr. Richard M. Cooper, desiring to fulfill an unrealized wish of the late Camden physician, bequeathed more than a quarter of a million dollars from his estate for the erection of a hospital. Thirteen years elapsed before it was ready for its first patient. By the end of the century, hospitals were in existence in Atlantic and Cumberland Counties as well. The first Gloucester, Salem, and Cape May County hospitals were 20th-century institutions.

      By modern standards, the treatment of disease and the use of preventative medicine during much of the 19th century were backward, but no more so in South Jersey than elsewhere. Blood-letting, a therapy held in disfavor early in the century, was reinstated shortly before the Civil War and, according to reports from Cumberland and Gloucester Counties, was somewhat in vogue for the two decades following the war.

      The prevention of small pox by vaccination, a practice employed effectively early in the century, was neglected in the post-war years, resulting in epidemics. The most serious of them struck at Camden in 1872. That year, 1000 cases of small pox out of a population of 23,000 were reported, and 157 persons died from the disease. Other communicable diseases that ravaged South Jersey in the 1870’s and 1880’s were malaria, typhoid fever, and diphtheria. Tuberculosis also was common.

      The epidemics of the late-19th century effected an interest in public health that prompted municipal authorities to embark upon sanitation projects. The muddy streets of the area’s towns and cities were paved. Drainage was improved and sewer lines were laid for the removal of waste. Outside toilets were sanitized. Too often these measures were delayed until after an epidemic hit. Camden, for example, having cleaned the city following a cholera outbreak in 1866 was apparently lax in disease prevention again by 1872, when small pox struck. After the 1872 epidemic, Camden once more engaged in a clean-up campaign.

      Sewer construction proved to be of sullied benefit to public health. In the municipalities along the Delaware River, the water supplies, drawn from the same streams into which the sewers emptied, became contaminated. In Camden, for instance, an outbreak of typhoid fever struck after the city’s water supply had become polluted from the effluence of Camden and Philadelphia sewers. The need to provide its growing urban populace with pure water, along the Delaware as elsewhere in the state, forced New Jersey into a position of leadership in water purification in the 20th century.

      Personal and public health, of course, depended in part upon the competence of South Jersey’s physicians. Throughout the 19th century, the area’s medical practitioners were respected for the high quality of their training, performance, and dedication to the healing of the sick. Sons of prominent families entered the medical profession.

      In the 18th century, South Jersey had the usual assortment of quacks, herb doctors, and Indian medicine men setting themselves up in practice. There were few licensed or university educated physicians. The maximum training received, even by some of the best, was as an apprentice in the office of an older, local physician. However, the biographies of South Jersey doctors who started their practices in the first decades of the 19th century show that the educational standards of the profession were on the rise, as more and more are identified as being graduates of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. Many of them worked with their preceptors in the South Jersey towns before and after attendance at the university, while a number of them upon graduation interned at the Philadelphia Almshouse. County medical societies, the guardians of the profession, were formed around 1818.

      Later in the century, the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia shared honors with the University of Pennsylvania as the alma mater of most South Jersey doctors. Today, medical students from southern New Jersey still look

primarily to Philadelphia universities and hospitals for their studies and training.

      South Jersey was little different from other places in its treatment of the mentally ill. Until the waning decades of the 19th century, the insane were incarcerated, sometimes in chains, in the jails and almshouses. Although the first state hospital for mentally diseased patients was founded in 1846, after a jeremiad by Dorothea Dix before the state legislature, the treatment of these unfortunates was left largely to the counties well into the 20th century.

      Camden County opened a mental hospital in 1877, but by 1890, "the plan and manner in which Camden county keeps its insane" was decried as "a disgrace to all." Atlantic County had a mental hospital in 1895. Elsewhere in South Jersey, almshouses doubled as insane asylums into the 20th century. By 1931, three state mental institutions were in operation, to be joined by a fourth, the hospital at Ancora, in 1955.

      Humanitarian interest in the care of the mentally retarded was given concrete expression in 1888, when the Rev. Stephen O. Garrison opened the Training School at Vineland, a privately incorporated but state-subsidized institution. The same clergyman figured in the establishment of the Vineland State School. Garrison was succeeded as director of the Training School by Edward R. Johnstone, who gathered together specialists in medicine, pediatrics, psychology, and education for joint study and experimentation on the problems of mental retardation.

      The Vineland school achieved national prominence as a research laboratory in educational methods for the teaching of subnormal and deficient persons. It introduced to the United States the Binet-Simon intelligence tests, and devised mental tests used by the government in the selection of troops for the First World War. Later, the researchers at Vineland gave their attention to the discovery of improved methods for truck farming, dairying, and the poultry industry.

      Further progress in public welfare was accomplished in South Jersey in 1921, when an institution for mentally deficient men and boys was opened in the former agricultural school facilities at Woodbine.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Reading, Recreation, and the Arts

      The proliferation of newspapers in South Jersey during the 19th century is evidence of an enormous thirst for information from the printed page among a people of increasing literacy. Publishers, awake to this trend, trumpeted the benefits that accrue to a widely-read public.

      The inaugural editorial of the Salem Messenger, in 1819, urged heads of families to subscribe to newspapers in order to be informed "of what is transacting of importance in every part of the world," assimilating thereby mankind’s actions and ideas, a potential agency for bringing universal peace. A knowledge of "the improvements in arts, sciences, and mechanism" will dispel superstition. Newspapers, furthermore, are an incentive to children to read and learn. The editor reckoned newspapers second only to the Bible "in usefulness." To have one in the house was a duty a father owed to himself, his family, and his country.

      The Messenger was Salem’s second newspaper of the 19th century, trailing the 1816 publication of the SalemGazette by three years. Gloucester County had two newspapers, published at Woodbury and Camden, by 1818. The Washington Whig was published at Bridgeton in 1815, and a second Cumberland County newspaper, later called the West Jersey Observer, was started at the county seat in 1822. The people of Cape May County began reading the Ocean Wave in 1854.

      New publications rolled from the presses at an astounding pace until the end of the century. Frequently, they were the exponents of particular political parties, skewing their news and editorials vehemently in the direction of their party’s point of view. There was no intention or effort to report occurrences dispassionately or objectively. In the opinion of Lucius Q. C. Elmer, a Cumberland County historian writing in the 1860’s, such a volume of print was pointless: Bridgeton, in 1862, had three newspapers, whereas "only one really good one can thrive, this being a case where, as in most of the towns of the State, too much competition has not tended to increase the value of the article produced."

      After 1900, the number of daily and weekly publications decreased, but the aggregate circulation of each issue of the daily newspapers increased steadily.

      Readers desiring, for information or pleasure, a broader scope of material than that which lay within the columns of the newspapers turned to the public libraries. A library company was formed at Woodbury in 1794, and within the next ten years a library was started at Salem. Other South Jersey cities and smaller communities began providing a similar service for their residents during the last several decades of the 19th century.

      The urge to get into print spawned a plethora of essayists, poets, short-story writers, and a sprinkling of novelists in 19th-century South Jersey. Their works of literature brought them little recognition outside the subscribership of the local newspapers, where most of these effusions were published. Nonetheless, the compulsion was satisfied in an era that has been described as "a period of violent and prolific literary output," when to be an author "was a sign of social distinction."

      Pseudonyms were the rage. A Salem poet, David P. Brown, for example, used the pen name, David of York. This exuberant unknown, who made an unsuccessful try at writing novels as well as poetry, was a member of Salem’s Prescott Institute, a discussion club that encouraged its young members to pursue publication of their literary outpourings.

      A list of "Vineland Authors," printed in 1917, credits the city’s writers with seventy-seven volumes in hard cover and 142 pamphlets. To this there was appended in 1961 an additional list of twenty-two hard-cover books written by Vinelanders, most of which were published before or immediately after the turn of the 20th century. They ranged in titles from Quick, My Rifle to Items of Interest: A monthly record of Dental Literature. Camden authors included Stephen Pfeil and Arthur L. Manchester both of whom wrote articles for

professional periodicals. Several of the counties published local histories during this period. Florid, inaccurate, and incomplete as many of these volumes are, they are nonetheless a boon to today’s historians, who are relieved thereby of the necessity of working entirely from scratch.

      One 19th-century novel of South Jersey origin attained a modicum of fame, especially among readers who fancy local history. It was Charles J. Peterson’s Kate Aylesford, which weaves a story of real and imaginary Revolutionary characters at Pleasant Mills around a fictional heroine. The popularity of the novel can be gauged by its influence on local nomenclature: Elijah Clark has been deprived of identification with his 1762 mansion, known commonly for years as the Kate Aylesford Mansion; the fictional Sweetwater has joined the historical Pleasant Mills and Batsto as names for communities at the Forks of the Little Egg Harbor; and a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution has adopted Peterson’s heroine as the namesake of its organization. Peterson’s novel was first published in 1855. It was reprinted as The Heiress of Sweetwater in 1873, when Peterson took the pseudonym, J. Thornton Randolph.

      All in all, however, South Jersey’s literary product of the century was doomed to blossom unseen except by the eyes of a few newspaper readers of the time. Writers of more enduring fame who were associated with the area either came from elsewhere or, having been born in South Jersey, went elsewhere to write. Walt Whitman, born in Long Island, resided in Camden from 1873 until his death, in 1892. Throughout these years he was an invalid whose poetic vitality had been expended. James Fenimore Cooper, on the other hand, was Jersey-born (in Burlington), but moved with his family to New York State when he was but an infant. In the writings of neither was their connection with South Jersey a prominent factor.

      The sea, the surf, the beach, the dunes, and spanking, white sails on the horizon drew seascape painters to the South Jersey coastal islands in the late-19th century. They came to paint but did not stay to live. Except for George Essig, none were ever residents of the area. Essig was a painter whose work has come to be more and more appreciated in recent years, long after his death in or about 1919. Born in Europe, he studied under the Philadelphia marine artists, James Hamilton and Edward Moran. He spent much of his life in Ventnor.

      The wildlife artist and ornithologist, John James Audubon, traveled the Great Egg Harbor country for several weeks in 1829, and afterward located at Camden for an extended period. In 1829, George Conarroe, a portrait painter

from Salem, began to exhibit in Philadelphia. Thereafter he resided most of the time in the Quaker City.

      The paucity of artists and renowned literary figures in 19th-century South Jersey notwithstanding, the people counted themselves as being properly cultured by the standards of the time. The larger towns had their music and lecture halls, where local and itinerant troupes of players, singers, and speakers entertained, informed, and inspired enthusiastic audiences.

      Whereas, in some places, these halls were proudly called the "Grand Opera House," the fare dispensed within was rarely grand. Although Hamlet was staged, as at Salem in the 1860’s (when the lecture hall had not yet become the Grand Opera House), the preference was for such offerings as Ten Nights in a Barroom or Peck’s Bad Boy, the orations of Horace Greeley, and musical programs by a traveling company of Swiss bell ringers. A spectacle of mechanical wonder and electrical effects was featured in a performance of She, at Atlantic City’s Grand Opera House in 1890. A cycle of Shakespearean plays, with Julia Marlowe, filled the Temple Theatre in Camden for eight nights running in 1893, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the perennial favorite. Minstrel shows and vaudeville competed with melodrama and serious theater for the attention of South Jerseymen in their pursuit of culture.

      Traveling circuses, menageries, and animal shows of various sorts enticed one and all to thrilling exhibitions of skill and daring. In most, the animals alone were not the attraction. The feature performance was often preceded by a parade through town. A brass band would announce the appearance of a hundred horses drawing an enormous gilded chariot followed by dozens of carriages. On the carriages were cages from which fearsome tigers, lions, leopards, and other "wild" animals stared menacingly through the bars at the crowd, Later, inside the pavilion, in delirious excitement young and old would behold processions of trained jungle beasts, elephants walking tightropes, men walking on stilts, performing monkeys, equestrians, acrobats, clowns, aeronauts, contortionists, scalping scenes with real Indians acting, and other marvels too numerous to tell. Everyone turned out, even the preacher -- or so one did at Mays Landing in 1851 and thought the event of such import as to be worthy of mention in his journal. The Boardwalk had "Daniel Boone and His Trained Lions," and its show of twenty-four "Educated Horses," which did "everything but talk," but the small towns were not bereft of like entertainment.

      South Jersey music lovers in the 1890’s, if their appetite for the sound of the brass band was whetted when the circus came to town, could find satisfaction on the Boardwalk. In the morning on the lawns, on porches and in

pavilions in the afternoon, and in the grand ballrooms after dinner, the hotels along the wooden way offered band concerts during the season. John Philip Sousa was one of the great bandmasters who enthralled the Boardwalk crowds from the Gay Nineties to the Roaring Twenties. Sousa loved the city by the sea, married the daughter of a Boardwalk photographer, composed a march about Atlantic City, and in 1927 directed his band in the last of their thirty-five summer concert seasons on the Boardwalk.

      Of lesser note, but of greater access than Sousa’s band to the ordinary workers, who could spend at most a week of the year in Atlantic City, was Jennings’ Sixth Regiment Band of Camden or the City Silver Band of Vineland. The Vineland band, begun in 1881 as an outlet for musically talented employees of a shoe factory, matured in the 1890’s into a semi-professional group that was booked for concerts in towns and cities throughout South Jersey, until it was disbanded in 1936. On summer weekends, along the banks of the Delaware, outdoor band concerts entertained music lovers during the closing decades of the 19th century.

      Camden and other cities presented not just music to families with leisure hours to spend. Balloon ascensions, performed throughout the area, were magnetic in their appeal. Fireworks rocketed skyward in noisy color. Swings, seesaws, and merry-go-rounds delighted the children.

      Mechanical rides were the irresistible first choice of many bent on amusement. Camden had such a contraption long before Atlantic City and its amusement piers were dreamed of. A "Circular Pleasure Rail-way" was advertised in 1834 by a proprietor who "respectfully" informed the public that, upon his railway, "two elegant miniature cars are propelled, by an easy and healthful application of power by the passenger." A shaded grove, pure air, and the short walk from the ferries added to his amusement park’s felicity. Parents and teachers were assured that "perfect safety" and "propriety of conduct" would be maintained by his establishment.

      At Atlantic City, however, wheels, loops, dips, and revolving towers that whirled, spun, whisked, and inverted screaming vacationers attained the fantastic. A half-dozen carousels were on the Boardwalk in 1891, happily turning out pleasure for the throngs and just as happily turning in money for Atlantic City’s entrepreneurs. An "Epicycloidal Wheel," an "Observation Roundabout," and other variations of the Ferris Wheel lifted carloads of passengers up and around in breathless suspension over the Boardwalk. The braver riders boarded the toboggan slides, switchbacks, and serpentine railways - - all of them types of a ride known in later times as roller coasters. In 1893, an

amusement apparatus took its carload of riders in convoluted panic down a toboggan slide to a groove in a huge Ferris wheel, which caught them up, whirled them for five minutes, and then shot them out of the groove to the starting point. The Machine Age hit South Jersey with a bang.

      Another sort of vehicle on wheels, the bicycle, intrigued South Jersey pleasure seekers and health enthusiasts in the Gay Nineties. Atlantic City, of course, had its bicycles. In Cape May, streaking cyclists were such a menace to life and limb that the city, in 1896, set a bicycle speed limit of eight miles per hour. Haddonfield passed an ordinance barring bicycles from the town’s sidewalks. In Pennsauken Township, the two-wheelers had to be equipped with a bell, "to give warning of their approach," and a lantern or lamp, which was to be burning after dark.

      Gravel roads and bike paths from Cape May to Millville were constructed with funds raised by the Cape May Bicycle Road Improvement Association, while cyclists in Camden County campaigned for better roads, The cycling fever struck Camden with indoor races, outdoor races, long-distance races, and eventually six-day bicycle races. Vineland, as usual on the moving front of progress, conducted training sessions for would-be riders of high-wheeled bicycles as early as 1875.

      After the turn of the century, speedsters at Cape May, no longer content with the snail’s pace of bicycles, organized the Cape May Automobile Club for the purpose of sponsoring automobile races on the beach. The first of them was run in a downpour at the end of July, 1905, when the winner, in a 40-horsepower Winston touring car traversed a mile of strand in one minute, twenty-three and one-fifth seconds. Weather and elapsed times improved in the August races, when the 80-horsepower Darracq covered the mile in thirty-eight seconds flat.

      Most of the South Jersey sports events of the era were not so daring. Along the Delaware, speed skating in the winter and yacht racing in the summer delighted spectators gathered on the river bank. In the 1880’s, the Cooper Point regatta is said to have been one of the most prestigious in the nation, next after Newport. The majority of those who preferred athletic participation to observation settled for foot races, a long-honored sport in South Jersey that went back at least to 1837, when races for the fastest runners of Salem and Gloucester Counties were held at Swedesboro, and possibly back much further to colonial times. Throughout the century, they were a standing feature at the country fairs. Boxing, illegal until the 20th century, wrestling, and rifle and pistol shooting rounded out the individual sports of the period in South Jersey.

      Horse racing, too, was a favorite of spectators, but whether it was primarily an athletic event or a moneymaking business is a moot question. The breeding of race horses has long been a South Jersey enterprise, and running them in contests is of equal antiquity.

      The heaviest wagering at the county fairs was on the horses. A racetrack, the Thunderbolt, was completed in Salem County in 1868. At Gloucester City, a track was opened in 1890 by "Duke Billy" Thompson, a racing entrepreneur whose ghost was revived by opponents to the Garden State Race Track when it went into operation at Cherry Hill in the early 1940’s. Business or sport, horse racing has been a bane or blessing (depending upon one’s point of view) to South Jersey from the distant past to the present.

      Cricket, popular today in Great Britain but less in favor in America, was a team sport known in 19th-century South Jersey. The Philadelphia Cricket Club, organized in 1854, played their games in Camden. Later, in the same city, property owners fenced in their vacant lots, turned them into cricket fields, and charged admission to the matches. Cricket teams were organized in Paulsboro as well.

      Baseball, a sport given impetus by Civil War soldiers who relaxed with the game during their off-duty hours, was known in South Jersey by 1865, when Salem won by a score of 37-11 over a team from New Castle, Delaware, that summer. New local leagues appeared annually in the years following. Camden players went pro in 1883 with a team that dominated an early professional league, the Inter-State Association.

      Football and basketball, in 1900 still less popular than baseball, were played in Camden in the 1890’s under the sponsorship of the Athletic Association of Camden and the Y.M.C.A.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

South Jersey in the 20th Century

      Except for its two cities, Camden and Atlantic City, and a handful of large towns such as Woodbury, Salem, and Vineland, South Jersey was a rural society going into the 20th century. Seventy years of growing industrialization, improved highways and methods of transportation, speedier communications, and technological advances of all kinds, mixed with the trauma of war, a shifting of vocational goals, and a rearranging of social and personal values have altered the complexion of most of the region.

      The transformation from a rural to an industrial region began along the Delaware River as the 20th century dawned, when the manufacturing of explosives was introduced to Gloucester and Salem Counties, and the gigantic New York Shipbuilding Company was located at Camden. With the coming of the war in 1914, these nascent industries burgeoned, bringing in new people by the tens of thousands. At the same time, local farmers abandoned their fields to take up lucrative jobs in the factories.

      Sleepy riverside villages, like Penns Grove, bulged with a population that quintupled inside of five years. Hundreds of frame houses were hastily erected at Carney’s Point and Deepwater, while Pennsville, Woodstown, and Salem tried to absorb the overflow of workers and their families who were seeking housing. Fenwick’s Colony ceased for all time to be a purely agricultural community. After the war, new industries replaced the defunct powder plants; most Salem Countians did not return to the soil.

      Along the river bank, northward toward Camden, the same conditions prevailed after 1914. Nineteen thousand employees of the New York Shipbuilding Company, with their families, streamed into Camden, creating a mammoth housing problem. The huge Victor Talking Machine Company converted to wartime production, hiring thousands of additional workers. Another 6500 employees took up jobs at shipbuilding factories in Gloucester City. Government-subsidized housing was quickly and often poorly constructed in such developments as Yorkship (now Fairview) Village and Noreg Village.

      The interior regions of South Jersey did not escape the frantic industrialization brought on by the First World War. Bethlehem Steel set up a shell-loading plant outside Mays Landing. The quiet, county seat of under 2000 people was inundated with 6500 industrial workers and three times that number of dependents. The settlement of Belcoville accommodated them. Near Hammonton, construction began early in 1918 on the town of Amatol, planned for a possible population of 25,000. It was a community intended to house the families brought there by a shell-loading firm, the Atlantic Loading Company. Unlike the communities along the Delaware, however, the Atlantic County towns suffered few permanent effects from the industrial intrusion. Belcoville today is little more than a crossroads village, while Amatol is nonexistent. Only a historical marker, recently placed, and a sandy road or two give the passer-by a clue that it was there less than sixty years ago.

      During the years of the 1914-1918 war, the streets of Cape May were crowded with upwards of 15,000 men who were stationed at the Camp Wissahickon Naval Training Barracks. They were there to guard the merchant ships, troop carriers, and submarine chasers docked at Cold Spring Harbor.

      The thunder of guns from submarine warfare out on the water rolled back to the beaches. There was a flourish of patriotism expressed in Liberty Bond parades, victory gardens, patriotic songfests, and the home guards, organizations of men too old to go to the front. Late in the war, troops from all over South Jersey boarded trains bound for the ports of embarkation to the battlefields of France, while patriots sang songs to reassure the countrymen of Lafayette that, "we’ll be over, . . . and we won’t come back ‘til it’s over, over there."

      The "war to end all wars" over, South Jersey entered upon the Roaring Twenties. It was a brief era of euphoria for Atlantic City. The Boardwalk was a second Broadway, where shows destined for New York were tried out first before resort audiences. With the shows came a cavalcade of famous stars and wealthy first-nighters. Opera singers were at the Victor music hall, listening to

their own voices recorded on discs at the Victor studios in Camden. The first Miss America paraded down the beach in 1921. A promotional scheme to extend the summer season by another week, the Miss America Pageant was moved to the Boardwalk in 1922. The decade ended with the dedication of the Atlantic City Auditorium and Convention Hall in May, 1929, concurrent with the city’s Diamond Jubilee.

      Although the stock market crash was still five months in the future when the giant hall was opened, a pall of financial worry was already hanging over Atlantic City. Property values at the shore, having risen sharply when construction was begun on a Delaware River bridge (formerly the Camden Bridge, now the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) early in the 1920’s, plummeted sharply at the end of 1926, when the prosperity anticipated with the opening of the bridge failed to materialize. The entire beachfront, from Brigantine to Cape May, suffered from the collapse. The Miss America Pageant, created as a money-making device, was discontinued after the 1927 production, which went into debt to the tune of 79,000 dollars. The financial crisis brought on by the crash of October, 1929, merely exacerbated an already critical situation along the South Jersey shore.

      The seashore tourist industry was begotten by a railroad; the railroad, it seems, continued to be the artery that nourished it with a flow of health and well-being. When the railroads were supplanted by highways in the years after the First World War, as Americans took to their private automobiles, the life line of the shore in its halcyon days was cut off. It began to die slowly of anemia. Air travel in the post-Second World War era was the fatal blow.

      The increased use of roads necessitated the building of a highway link between South Jersey and Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the heart of old Camden, in some respects its best part, was demolished to make way for the approaches to the Delaware River bridge, while the city itself was cut in half. Under construction for four and one-half years, "The Bridge," a name for the span still spit out in contempt by those Camden residents who look back upon better days, was dedicated in 1926 by President Calvin Coolidge in time for the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition. Philadelphia businessmen looked across it for the crowds of Jersey people who, they hoped, would come to their birthday party. Residents of South Jersey, on the other hand, thought this longest suspension bridge in the world would be a conduit bringing them greater prosperity.

      A measure of prosperity did come, in the form of more industry, suburban development, and closer ties with Philadelphia. However, with the bridge came

also clogged roads, traffic jams, polluted air, and to some extent the decay of Camden’s inner city. Business, money, and the people who could afford to moved to the more attractive outlying areas of the county.

      At the end of the 1930’s, emerging slowly from the debris of the Great Depression, industrial South Jersey was injected with new vitality when the impending war in Europe triggered increased production along the Delaware. Camden was the first to feel the effects. In December, 1938, under a contract from the Navy Department, construction was started on the South Dakota at the yards of the New York Shipbuilding Company. As aid to the Allied powers was intensified, and as America’s own defenses were being reinforced, production surged.

      With America’s entry into the Second World War, thousands of new workers poured into the shipbuilding factories of Camden County in a mad rush to fill Navy contracts for battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers, and landing craft. At the New York Shipbuilding Company alone, 35,000 employees worked to turn out every conceivable type of modern warship. The R.C.A. plant shifted into war production in 1942, manufacturing electrical equipment critical to the prosecution of the war. The Campbell Soup Company took up the processing of C-rations for the Army. In all, 14% of New Jersey’s industrial war effort between 1940 and 1944 came from Camden County.

      In Salem County, the Du Pont Company manufactured chemicals, ammunition, and gunpowder. Toward the end of the war, scientists at the Deepwater installation were among those in the country working on the Manhattan Project. Wartime activity in Cape May County centered around the Naval Air Station and the Coast Guard base. A plant for making incendiary bombs was erected in Atlantic County, while the cotton mill at Mays Landing filled government orders for flags.

      Atlantic City and other beach communities were transformed from pleasure resorts into armed camps. The large Boardwalk hotels, leased by the government, were converted into housing and other facilities for the soldiers and airmen who trained on the beaches. In June, 1943, Convention Hall was leased to the government for $75,000 a year. Mid-way through the war, when other accommodations were constructed for the trainees, the hotels and Convention Hall became convalescent hospitals for sick and wounded soldiers.

      Meanwhile, strict blackout regulations were enforced to prevent the city’s lights from making American warships, silhouetted against the skyline, convenient targets for enemy submarines. German U-boats came within three

miles of the beach. As in the First World War, the sound of battle at sea reverberated on the shore.

      The multiplication of highways and bridges, industrial development in some areas and stagnation in others, an eroding of agriculture and tourism as economic staples -- these have been the continuing story of South Jersey since the end of the Second World War. The New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, the Atlantic City Expressway, and the Interstate Highways criss-cross a region that was held together by plank roads a century ago. Alongside the 1926 bridge over the Delaware are four others, more impressive than the first, and a bridge-tunnel to drain the traffic from the lower tip of the state into the South has been proposed. The Delaware River Port, centered at Camden and Gloucester but stretching from Trenton to Deepwater, is one of the busiest in the world. Scores of new factories line the waterfront in lower Camden, Gloucester, and Salem Counties. By contrast, in the city of Camden the New York Shipbuilding Corporation closed its shipyards in 1967. The yards were leased to ship breaking and salvage firms.

      Heavy industry’s gain was the farmers’ loss. The South Jersey farmer, having made the required adjustments in the past to maintain a livelihood, reeled before the onslaught of low farm prices and high production costs in the late 1950’s.

      Dairymen’s cooperatives and government milk controls staved off a total collapse of the dairy industry, but a dairy barn is now a precarious object on the South Jersey landscape. Whereas favorable prices doubled egg production in New Jersey between the war’s end and 1958, in that year the prices plunged, turning profits into losses for the egg producers in the Pine Barrens. The number of poultry farms in all areas of the business fell rapidly at the same time. Competition from other states was their nemesis.

      Crop growers have suffered less from the dislocations of the last two decades. The net value of livestock feed crops and orchard products has remained fairly steady. Vegetable growers, too, have been less devastated by the declining fortunes of New Jersey agriculture. By mechanization, for instance, they have been able somewhat to circumvent the problem of rising labor costs. The market, and the profits, in nursery and greenhouse products is on the rise.

      The tentacles of suburban sprawl reach deeper into Camden and Gloucester Counties, and westward from the shore into the mainland areas of Atlantic County. At the same time, trapped in an ambiance of decay, unemployment,

and dilapidated housing, people of the inner cities breed in their midst crime and despair, and scorn for the ways and values of the past. Programs of urban renewal are afoot, but progress is slow. As Atlantic City heralds the advent of its new messiah, casino gambling, the mayor of Camden promises a program for a revitalized city during his next term of office. The coming years will tell whether these are mere delusions and the holding out of panaceas or the true evangel of an impending golden age.

      Other perplexities beset South Jersey as it moves into the future. Will nuclear power generators off-shore guarantee unlimited energy or light the fuse of a holocaust? Do the people of South Jersey have the political power to decide whether they will take the risk? On the one hand, the moguls of industry warn the southern counties that a refusal to enter upon the modern world of factories and oil tanks, as North Jersey has done, spells certain doom; on the other hand, agriculturalists and advocates of environmental protection put the rest on notice that, "it’s not our fault if it’s all asphalt." Even the lowly frog in the Pine Barrens is a species endangered by the inexorable steamroller of progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

      This is a selected bibliography of printed sources relating to the history of southern New Jersey. Although a number of the titles are out-of-print, they are available at one or more of the state’s university, college, or historical society libraries. The vast quantity of unpublished primary and secondary material in these libraries is not included here, but their use is essential to in-depth research in any topic on the history of South Jersey. Students are advised to examine also microfilm and microfiche collections and the files of South Jersey newspapers.

      A score or more of histories of South Jersey towns and townships have been omitted from this bibliography because they are of strictly local interest. However, they should be consulted by anyone engaged in research on the specific localities with which they deal. For a listing, see the card catalogue of the appropriate county or city historical society library. Most of these histories are included in the Special Collections of the Rutgers University library at New Brunswick, where they are available for use but do not circulate.

      Many of the books on this list contain good bibliographies of specific topics. For further references, see Nelson R. Burr, A Narrative and Descriptive Bibliography of New Jersey, (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1964).

      BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS 

ACRELIUS, ISRAEL, History of New Sweden or the Settlements on the River Delaware. William M. Reynolds, trans. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876. 

ALEXANDER, ROBERT CROZER, Ho! For Cape Island. Cape May, 1956. 

ARCHIVES of the State of New Jersey. First Series, Vols. I-XLII. Newark: Daily Journal Establishment, 18801888. 

ASBURY, FRANCIS, The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury, 1771-1816. London and Nashville: Epworth and Abington Press, 1958. 3 vols. 

BARBER, JOHN W. and HENRY HOWE, Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey. New York: S. Tuttle, 1844. 

BECK, HENRY CHARLTON, Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961. Originally published by E. P. Dutton and Co., 1936. 

BECK, HENRY CHARLTON, Jersey Genesis. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Originally published by the Trustees of Rutgers College, 1945. 

BECK, HENRY CHARLTON, More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Originally published by E. P. Dutton and Co., 1937. 

BECK, HENRY CHARLTON, The Roads of Home. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1956. 

BILL, ALFRED HOYT, New Jersey and the Revolutionary War. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

BLACKMAN, LEAH, History of Little Egg Harbor Township. Tuckerton: Great John Mathis Foundation, Inc., 1963. Originally published in 1880. 

BOLE, ROBERT D. and LAURENCE B. JOHNSON, The New Jersey High School: A History. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

BOUCHER, JACK E., Absegami Yesteryear. Somers Point: Atlantic County Historical Society, 1963. 

BOYD, JULIAN P., Fundamental Laws and Constitutions of New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

BOYER, CHARLES S., Early Forges and Furnaces in New Jersey.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931. Reprinted 1964. 

BOYER, CHARLES S, Old Inns and Taverns of West Jersey. Camden: Camden County Historical Society, 1962 

BOYER, GEORGE F. and J. PEARSON CUNNINGHAM, Cape May County Story. Cape May, 1975. 

BRAINERD, JOHN, John Brainerd’s Journal (1761-1762). Transcriptions of Early Church Records of New Jersey (Presbyterian), Historical Records Survey, Works Progress Administration. Newark, 1941. 

BRAINERD, THOMAS, The Life of John Brainerd, the Brother of David Brainerd, and His Successor as Missionary to the Indians of New Jersey. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1865. 

BROWN, ALLEN H., An Outline History of the Presbyterian Church in West or South Jersey. Philadelphia: Alfred Martien, 1869. 

BROWN, ALLEN H., A Tribute to Rev. Allen H. Brown. Includes his autobiography, historical papers, and a few sermons. Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott, 1901. 

BURR, NELSON R., The Anglican Church in New Jersey. Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954. 

BURR, NELSON R., Education in New Jersey, 1730-1871. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942. 

CHALMERS, KATHRYN H., Down the Long-a-Coming; A descriptive review of historical scenes and buildings, and of the people who lived along this old Indian trail. Moorestown, 1951. 

COLLIN, NICHOLAS, The Journal and Biography of Nicholas Collin, 1746-1831, Amandus Johnson, trans. Philadelphia: The New Jersey Society of Pennsylvania, 1936. 

COMPENDIUM of Censuses. Trenton: State of New Jersey, Department of State, 1906. 

COWEN, DAVID L., Medicine and Health in New Jersey: A History. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

CRANMER, H. Jerome, New Jersey in the Automobile Age: A History of Transportation. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

CRAVEN, WESLEY FRANK, New Jersey and the English Colonization of North America. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

CROSS, DOROTHY, New Jersey Indians. Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, Department of Education, 1965. 

CUNNINGHAM, JOHN T., New Jersey: America’s Main Road. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1966. 

CUNNINGHAM, JOHN T., The New Jersey Shore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958. 

CUSHING, THOMAS and CHARLES E. SHEPPARD, History of the Counties of Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland, New Jersey. Philadelphia: Everts and Peck, 1883. Reprinted, 1974, by the Gloucester County Historical Society. 

DELAWARE Indian Symposium, A., Herbert C. Kraft, ed. Harrisburg, Pa.: The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1974. DORWART, JEFFERY and PHILIP ENGLISH MACKEY, Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976. Camden: Camden County Cultural and Heritage Commission, 1976. 

ECONOMIC and Social History of Colonial New Jersey. William C. Wright, ed. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1974. 

ELMER, LUCIUS Q. C., History of the Early Settlement and Progress of Cumberland County, New Jersey……, Bridgeton: George F. Nixon, Publ., 1869. Reprinted, 1976, by the Cumberland County Historical Society. 

ENGLISH, A. L., History of Atlantic City. Philadelphia, 1884. 

EWING, SARAH W. R. and ROBERT MC MULLIN, Along Absecon Creek. Absecon: Absecon Committee, New Jersey Tercentenary Celebration, 1965. 

FENWICK’S Colony. Fred L. McEnany, et al., eds. Salem: Salem County Tercentenary Committee, 1964. 

FITHIAN, PHILIP VICKERS, Journal and Letters, 1767-1774. John Rogers Williams, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1900. 

FITHIAN, PHILIP VICKERS, Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1968. Copyright, Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., 1957. 

FITHIAN, PHILIP VICKERS, Journal, 1775-1776, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1934. 

FLYNN, JOHN H., The Catholic Church in New Jersey. Morristown, 1904. 

FUNNELL, CHARLES E., By the Beautiful Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. 

GERDTS, WILLIAM H., Jr., Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey; Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

GOLDSTEIN, PHILIP REUBEN, Social Aspects of the Jewish Colonies of South Jersey. New York, 1921. 

GORDON, THOMAS F., Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey. Trenton, 1834. Reprinted, 1973, by Polyanthos, Inc., Cottonport, La. 

GORDON, THOMAS F., The History of New Jersey, from its Discovery by Europeans, to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. Trenton, 1834. 

GOWANS, ALAN, Architecture in New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

GUTHORN, PETER J., The Sea Bright Skiff. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971. 

HALL, JOHN F., Daily Union History of Atlantic City and County, New Jersey. Atlantic City: Daily Union Printing Co., 1900. 

HARRINGTON, N. R., The Indians of New Jersey, Dickon Among the

Lenapes. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Originally published as Dickon Among the Lenape Indians by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1938. For young readers. 

HESTON, ALFRED N., Absegami: Annals of Eyren Haven and Atlantic City, 1609-1904. Camden: Sinnickson Chew & Sons, 1904. 2 vols. 

HESTON, ALFRED N., Jersey Waggon Jaunts. Pleasantville: Atlantic County Historical Society, 1926. 2 vols. 

HESTON, ALFRED N., South Jersey: A History. New York: Lewis Publishing Co., Inc., 1924. 5 vols. 

INSTRUCTION of Johan Printz, The. Amandus Johnson, trans. and ed., Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society, 1930. 

JAMISON, WALLACE N., Religion in New Jersey: A Brief History. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

JOHNSON, AMANDUS, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 1638-1664. Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society, 1911. 2 vols. 

JONES, RUFUS N., The Quakers in the American Colonies. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962. First published in 1911. 

JUET, ROBERT, Juet’s Journal: The Voyage of the Half Moon from 4 April to 7 November 1609. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1959. 

KALM, PETER, Travels Into North America. John Reinhold Forster, trans. Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, Inc., 1972. Other editions available. 

KEMP, FRANKLIN W., A Nest of Rebel Pirates. Egg Harbor City: Batsto Citizens Committee, 1966. 

KOEDEL, R. CRAIG, Stones of Remembrance. Discourses delivered at Absecon on three Sundays of August, 1976; being a brief history of South Jersey Presbyterians In the Eighteenth Century, and of the Presbyterian Church at Absecon to the Present. Absecon, 1976. 

KULL, IRVING S., ed., New Jersey. A History. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1930-32. 4 vols. 

LANDIS, CHARLES K., The Founder’s Own Story of the Founding of Vineland. Vineland, 1903. Excerpts are in the Vineland Historical Magazine, Centennial Number, 1961. 

LANE, WHEATON J., From Indian Trail to Iron Horse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939. 

LEE, FRANCIS BAZLEY, New Jersey As a Colony and As a State. New York: The Publishing Society of New Jersey, 1902. 4 vols. 

LEIBY, ADRIAN C., The Early Dutch and Swedish Settlers of New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

LIPTON, BARBARA, Whaling Days in New Jersey. Newark: Newark Museum Quarterly, Vol. 26, Nos. 2 & 3, 1975. 

LUNDIN, LEONARD, Cockpit of the Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. Reprinted, 1972, by Octagon Books. 

MACKEY, HARRY D., The Gallant Men of the Delaware River Forts, 1777. Philadelphia: Dorrance and Co., 1973. 

MC CLOY, JAMES F. and RAY MILLER, Jr., The Jersey Devil. Wallingford, Pa.: The Middle Atlantic Press, 1976. 

MC CORMICK, RICHARD P., New Jersey from Colony to State, 1609-1789. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. Reprinted in paperback edition by Rutgers University Press. 

MC MAHON, WILLIAM, So Young. . .So Gay! Atlantic City: Boardwalk Centennial Committee, 1970. 

MC PHEE, JOHN, The Pine Barrens. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971. Originally in The New Yorker, 1967. 

MARING, NORMAN H., Baptists in New Jersey. Valley Forge, Pa.: The Judson Press, 1964. 

METHODIST Trail in New Jersey, The, Frank Bateman Stanger, ed. New Jersey Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, 1961. 

MICKLE, ISAAC, Reminiscences of Old Gloucester. Philadelphia: Townsend Ward, 1845. Reprinted, 1968, by the Gloucester County Historical Society. 

MIERS, EARL SCHENCK, New Jersey and the Civil War. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

MURRAY, DAVID, History of Education in New Jersey. Port Washington, N. Y.,: Kennikat Press, 1972. First published in 1899. 

MYERS, ALBERT COOK, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1912. Reprinted, 1967. 

MYERS, WILLIAM STARR, ed., The Story of New Jersey. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., Inc., 1953. 5 vols. 

NELSON, WILLIAM, New Jersey Biographical and Genealogical Notes. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1916. 

NEW JERSEY, A Guide to Its Present and Past. American Guide Series, Federal Writers’ Project. New York: The Viking Press, 1939. 

NEW JERSEY in the American Revolution, 1763-1783, A Documentary History. Larry H. Gerlach, ed. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975. 

NEW JERSEY in the American Revolution, Political and Social Conflict. Donald A. Sinclair, ed. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1970. 

NICHOLS, ISAAC T., Historic Days in Cumberland County, New Jersey, 1855-1865; Political and War Time Reminiscences. Bridgeton, 1907. 

NIEMCEWICZ, JULIAN URSYN, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree. Hetchie J. E. Budka, trans. and ed. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1965. 

PEPPER, ADELINE, The Glass Gaffers of New Jersey. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. 

PIERCE, ARTHUR D., Family Empire in Jersey Iron, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964. 

PIERCE, ARTHUR D., Iron in the Pines. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957. 

PIERCE, ARTHUR D., Smugglers’ Woods: Jaunts and Journeys in Colonial and Revolutionary New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960. 

PIERCE, JOHN R. and ARTHUR C. TRESSLER, The Research State: A History of Science in New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

PLAIN Dealer, The. A newspaper of the American Revolutionary Period published in Cumberland County, New Jersey. Bridgeton: Bridgeton Bicentennial Commission, 1974. First privately printed in 1894. 

POMFRET, JOHN E., Colonial New Jersey. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 

POMFRET, JOHN E., The Province of West New Jersey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. 

PROWELL, GEORGE R., The History of Camden County, N. J. Philadelphia: L. J. Richards & Co., 1886. 

ROLFS, DONALD H., Under Sail, the Dredgeboats of Delaware Bay. Millville: Wheaton Historical Association, 1971. 

SCHMIDT, HUBERT G., Agriculture in New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973. 

SHOURDS, THOMAS, History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony. Bridgeton, 1876. 

SICKLER, JOSEPH S., History of Salem County, New Jersey. Salem: Sunbeam Publishing Co., 1937. 

SIM, ROBERT J., Pages from the Past of Rural New Jersey. Trenton: New Jersey Agricultural Society, 1949. Reprinted, 1975. 

SIM, ROBERT J. and HARRY BISCHOFF WEISS, Charcoal-burning in New Jersey from Early Times to the Present. Trenton, 1955. 

SMITH, SAMUEL, The History of the Colony of Nova-Caesarea, or New Jersey. Burlington, 1765. Second edition in 1877. 

STEVENS, LEWIS TOWNSEND, The History of Cape May County, New Jersey, from the Aboriginal Times to the Present Day. Cape May: Lewis T. Stevens, Pub., 1897. 

STEWART, FRANK H., History of the Battle of Red Bank, with Events Prior and Subsequent Thereto. Woodbury: Gloucester County Historical Society, 1927. 

STEWART, FRANK H., Indians of Southern New Jersey. Woodbury: Gloucester County Historical Society, 1932. 

STEWART, FRANK H., Major John Fenwick. Salem: Salem County Historical Society, 1964. Reprinted from Salem Standard and Jerseyman, 1939. 

STEWART, FRANK H., Notes on Old Gloucester County, New Jersey, Philadelphia: The New Jersey Society of Pennsylvania, 1917-1937. 3 vols. 

STEWART, FRANK H., Salem County in the Revolution. Salem: Salem County Historical Society, 1967. First published in 1932. 

STILL, JAMES, Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still. Medford: Medford Historical Society, 1971. 

STILL, WILLIAM, Underground Railroad. New York: Arno Press, 1968. First published in 1872. Also 1970 reprint in Ebony Classics Series. 

STOCKTON, FRANK R., Stories of New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961. First published in 1896. 

STUDLEY, MIRIAM V., Historic New Jersey Through Visitors’ Eyes. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

SWEDES and Finns in New Jersey, The. Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration. Published by the New Jersey Commission to Commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Settlement of the Swedes and Finns on the Delaware, 1938. 

SYMPOSIUM Upon the First Fifty Years of the Jewish Farming Colonies of Alliance, Norma, and Brotmanville, New Jersey. Philadelphia, 1932. 

THIS Is Haddonfield. Haddonfield: Historical Society of Haddonfield, 1963. 

TURP, RALPH K., West Jersey Under Four Flags. Philadelphia: Dorrance and Co., 1975. 

VAN HOESEN, WALTER HAMILTON, Crafts and Craftsmen of New Jersey. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973. 

VECOLI, RUDOLPH J., The People of New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1965. 

WACKER, PETER O., Land and People. A cultural geography of pre-industrial New Jersey: Origins and settlement patterns. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1975. 

WEISS, HARRY B., Life in Early New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

WEISS, HARRY B., Early Sports and Pastimes in New Jersey. Trenton, 1960. 

WEISS, HARRY B., and GRACE M. WEISS, An Introduction to Crime and Punishment in Colonial New Jersey. Trenton, 1960. 

WESLAGER, C. A., The Delaware Indians: A History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972. 

WESLAGER, C. A., Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley, 1609-1664. Written in collaboration with A. R. Dunlap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. 

WESLAGER, C. A., The English on the Delaware: 1610-1682. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967. 

WEST, ROSCOE L, Elementary Education in New Jersey: A History, Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

WEYGANDT, CORNELIUS, Down Jersey; Folks and Their Jobs, Pine Barrens, Salt Marsh and Sea Island. New York and London, 1940. 

WHITE, MARGARET E., The Decorative Arts of Early New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

WILSON, HAROLD F., The Jersey Shore; A Social and Economic History of the Counties of Atlantic, Cape May, Monmouth, and Ocean. New York, 1953. 3 vols. 

WILSON, HAROLD F., The Story of the Jersey Shore. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964. 

WOOLMAN, JOHN, The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman. Phillips P. Moulton, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. This is the most recent of a score of editions of the Woolman work. 

WRIGHT, M. T., The Education of the Negroes in New Jersey. New York, 1941. 

      PERIODICALS 

Atlantic County Historical Society Yearbook 

Camden History, Camden County Historical Society 

Cape May County Magazine of History and Genealogy 

Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey 

New Jersey Historical Commission Newsletter 

New Jersey History. Formerly the Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 

New Jersey Society of Pennsylvania Yearbook. 

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 

Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society 

Vineland Historical Magazine 

      See also the state and national journals of professional organizations, businesses, religious denominations, etc. for articles on South Jersey and New Jersey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      R. Craig Koedel was born in 1927 in Tarentum, an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh. He was educated at Wheaton College (Illinois), Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University, and was ordained to the ministry by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). After three years as chaplain in the U. S. Air Force, the author served several churches in Pennsylvania. He was appointed to the faculty of Atlantic Community College (New Jersey) in 1966, where he taught courses in History, Religion, and Philosophy. He was for a time an Assistant Dean of Instruction and department chairperson. He remained at the College until his retirement in 1992. The writer's works of history include South Jersey Heritage: A Social, Economic, and Cultural History; God's Vine in This Wilderness: Religion in South Jersey to 1800; and articles on local history and education for more than a dozen historical and professional journals and newspapers. He was the compiler of New Jersey Vessels, 1784-1929, Philadelphia Maritime Museum and was research historian for the Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center. He and his wife Barbara, who has published works on Richard Somers, reside in Pittsburgh.