Saturday, April 21, 2018

GHOST TOWNS OF NEW JERSEY – A TOUR OF OUR FORGOTTEN PLACES


Ghost Towns of New Jersey – A Tour of Our Forgotten Places, Timothy Regan, Schiffer Publishing Ltd, Atglen, PA, 2017, 112pp, $24.99.
Ghost Towns of New Jersey: A Tour of Our Forgotten Places
As soon as I saw this nicely constructed book, I knew it was created by someone who truly loved New Jersey history, and since this book has a thick, hard cover with durable pages, the book can be used as a reference book with no chance of the pages being ripped.
        From the title, I expected stories about towns with ghosts, but instead there was listed towns that were abandoned, except for a small story on the Jersey Devil.
        Everyone in New Jersey knows about The Jersey Devil, but few know the story of the strange creature that haunts the southern half of the state. In 1735, a mother had already given birth to 12 children, and when told she was having another child, said she wasn’t having any of it so she said let the devil have it. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy that shortly transformed into a cloven-hoofed beast with the head of a collie, the snout of a horse and tail of a dragon.  After that were different stories: the beast left through the chimney, or the beast ate everyone in the room before leaving through a hole in the roof.  It’s also called the Leeds Devil and has been menacing the citizens of Burlington, Salem, Camden, and Cape May counties, appearing to over 2000 people over the years. It's attacked chickens, dogs, and cats. The Devil made an appearance in X Files when the two stars traced the beast with a state ranger through the Pine Barrens. Continued efforts to capture, corral or photograph the Devil has been unsuccessful, although footprints have been discovered and shrieks have been heard.
        I have been interested in the history of New Jersey for close to 65 years and I thought I knew everything about this state’s history, but I was mistaken. I only knew 5 of the 18 towns that were covered in the book. It is obvious the author did much investigation of the sites, since many of towns are not very well known. If you like history and want to know about the lesser known New Jersey towns of long ago, then you’ll want to read this book. The colorful vignettes of the towns are most endearing, and each town is treated with a very brief history of its beginning and the events that led to its being abandoned. Sometimes there are old pictures with current pictures for comparison.
        Good reasons for the location of a town would depend on the industry needed for the people in the area, i.e. iron works, sawmills, forges, ice cutting, or transportation. Other towns were created as a crossroads for delivering valuable raw materials during the Revolutionary and Civil War.
        Towns that didn’t succeed may have been destroyed by natural causes like fires or destroyed by the British during the Revolution or during the Civil War. Some populations elected to move from the town because the industry or craft was no longer needed due to the development of new technologies. For example, instead of relying on iron bogs to get iron, industries found iron ore in Pennsylvania, which required a different process and transportation method. Other towns were in the way of land improvements and had to be removed. When a dam was built in response to constant flooding in the Delaware Gap area, many homes were bulldozed and people were relocated, but unfortunately the dam was never built. 
        Although some towns were deserted because of new technologies, others benefited. The Morris Canal began in 1831 to bring goods and coal from Pennsylvania to Newark and the path of the canal went right through Waterloo, which gave an obscure town like Waterloo Village a resurgence and it continued to be popular until the canal peaked during the Civil War when the railroads started to take over.
        It has been a nice trip through New Jersey’s lost history of ghost towns. It’s amazing how history, economy, industry, wars, and even recreational towns play a part a town’s ability to survive. I plan to go to some of the locations in the book and will now see these towns in a different way. I am so glad the author has made it easy for me to find these places when he included the visitor information and GPS coordinates conveniently at the end of each chapter.
        Sometimes, when a town is abandoned, there are sure to be a few ghosts hanging around. If you visit and find any, please tell Psychic-Magic about it.
- Mary Moskello

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