The Pine Barrens – A wilderness in New Jersey
As the Tacoma’s build finishes up, this is to be a summer of road trips. There is a post-a-note on my desk with a list of places to visit this summer. The first on the list was the Pine Barrens in New Jersey.
The Pine Barrens is a short drive from the Baltimore / Washington DC area and is perfect weekend getaway. While not all of the Pine Barrens fall within the Wharton State Forest, that is where we concentrated our trip.
From a top of the Apple Pie Hill Fire Tower, a person can see in a sweeping glance a 360 degree view of hundreds of square miles of wilderness. Not what most of us think of when we think of New Jersey. But yet there it is with miles of sandy two tracks meandering through the pines connecting long lost ghost towns, foundries, mills, and cranberry bogs.
During my pre-trip research of the Pine Barrens, I discovered there are several rivers and small lakes perfectly sized for canoes and kayaks. I placed a call to Pinelands Adventures and scheduled a shuttle for Friday to drop me off and pick me up on the Batsto River. I’ll be posting a full write up on the paddle in a few days.
On Friday evening I was joined by Chris and Brittney, two friends from the Mid-Atlantic Overlanding Society. Late in the evening they set up camp next to my camp and we discussed trucks, campers, and places to visit until late into the night over the campfire.
The camps in Wharton State Forest are a perfect mix of marked campsites without being overly developed with gravel parking pads and such. We stayed at the Batona camp which is 12 unimproved shaded camp sites laid back on a sandy two track covered with pines and bordered by a swamp on the backside. The camp is on the Batona hiking trail and we watched as a few small groups of hikers dropped camp for the night before moving on down the trail.
One of the things I like to do before taking a road trip and visiting somewhere for the first time is get a few books and read up on the area. In this case I found two books that really made our trip. The first was John McPhee’s “The Pine Barrens”.
John McPhee’s book provides great incite to the history of the area, explaining the interesting people that once lived in the pine woods of New Jersey and the places they lived, worked, and gathered.
To find these places, we used “Ghost Towns and Other Quirky Places in the New Jersey Pine Barrens” written by Barbara Solem-Stull. The books includes handy little maps of the ruins and outlines driving loops to find and check out what little remains of the communities, that once existed in the Barrens.
Saturday with both books on the seat of the truck and the USGS map of the area uploaded on the Ipad navigation system in the Tacoma we took off on an adventure exploring the history of the area. We found empty fields with stone foundations of what once was the 1870’s thriving cranberry farming operation in Friendship and Speedwell. We traveled an old Stage road stopping at the site of the old Sooy’s Tavern built in 1773 where recruiting took place for the American revolution army before climbing around on the ruins of a barn and pit silo in the settlement once known as Washington.
Friendship was founded in 1869 on the site of a sawmill dating back to 1795. For a time, the cranberry business here was the largest in the area, but it declined and was sold to real estate speculators in the 1950s. The planned development never materialized and is the site of the first blueberry fields in New Jersey.
An early Pine Barrens industry was “bog iron,” which is formed when iron-bearing groundwater oxidizes and accumulates in shallow streams and bogs. It is relatively easy to mine, and many bog iron furnaces operated in this area from about 1765 until the deposits were exhausted in the 1820s. Hampton was an irons works during the late 18th and 19th centuries and later was turned into a cranberry village. Many of the foundations still exist in a small open grass area deep within the pine forest.
When one thinks of taking a weekend camping trip in the wilds of nature, New Jersey is not the first state one would think of visiting. However, as we spent the day driving the sandy trails of Wharton State Forest exploring the vast history of the area, this place is not the ‘jersey shore or the suburbs of New York. We were deep in the wilds of nature.
