Ghostly in the Barrens

Most of the day was spent picking through briars, dodging low branches, slapping mosquitoes and squelching through the rusty streams and pools of the Pine Barrens. This is a wide expanse of southern New Jersey that resembles a tract of Siberia, or Finland, or Alaska, somehow detached and come to rest in a forgotten zone where old industrial ruins, dirt roads, shuttered gun clubs and abandoned (or not?) wooden shacks fight a losing battle against encroaching vegetation. The rich natural environment is fed by the nutrient-dyed underground springs and sheets of standing water where frogs and fungi multiply, orchids and carnivorous plants bloom unseen. The acidity of the pine needles gives the rich orange tint to what the locals call 'cedar-water'.

A century or two past however, this wilderness was, in places, harnessed to profit wealthy entrepreneurs who sought to establish industries based upon the natural resources of the land: water, iron ore, timber, sand. Iron furnaces, glass works, paper mills were established, the owners built mansions for themselves, humble dwellings for the workers. There were churches, schools and stores.

This old brick arch still supports the crumbling towers of a two-storey paper mill, and still spans the sluggish flow of a choked-up canal race bringing water from the river. Harrisville was a thriving community as late as the 1880s. Ownership disputes and changes in the processes of making paper produced financial problems; the factory closed, and was sold in the 1890s; by then most of the residents had moved away. A major fire swept the town in 1910, vandals and thieves took most of what remained. Now only dedicated local and natural historians, ghost town afficionados and hunters after game or mushrooms come visiting.

The local community has largely dispersed to the edges of the Barrens but there remain, it's said, those hermits, outlaws, and individualists who scavenge a living from the land and its products (moss, berries, scrap). These 'Pineys' as they are now proud to call themselves, are the descendants of the people who toiled in the mills and furnaces long ago. Once these people were dismissed as uneducable backwoodsmen. The notorious, invented, Kallikak family was based on a Pine Barren clan, their medical and personal histories grossly distorted by early 20th century eugenicists to illustrate the heritability of certain negative traits. Now the Pine people are proud of their heritage and remain the only ones who hold the key to the secrets of the Barrens and how to survive in them.

(The day's tour was an amazing opportunity to experience and learn about this extraordinary and little-known region, and our guides Walt and Heather deserve a grateful mention.)