More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey

by Henry Charlton Beck

Book Overview

From Colonial days to the early 1900s, iron forges, glass plants, lumber and paper mills flourished in the New Jersey of the Pine Barrens, in old Burlington, Gloucester and Salem Counties. Around the inlets of the Atlantic shore and on Delaware Bay, whaling and shipbuilding were important industries. Times have changed. Many of the old towns have fallen into ruin or disappeared, swallowed up in the abandoned lands of South Jersey or swept away by the unrelenting tides of the Jersey coast.

Henry Charlton Black, raised in Haddonfield for years, shared his endless delight in the land and the lore of South Jersey. He, like a few other devoted Jerseyans, began to hunt out in the 1930s the old sites and to record the stories handed down from generation to generation, clear back to early settlers. In this sequel to Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey, his visits to the state's early heritage - churches, villages, and roads - are continued. He explores the routes of old railroads and the tangled wilderness of the Forked River Mountains, and he tells the lost stories of forgotten glass and iron and shipbuilding villages.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813504325
• ISBN13: 9780813504322
• Release Date: October 1963
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Another great book about NJ local history

This is Henry Charlton Beck's second book in a series all dealing with local history and lore of various sections of the state. Two of the volumes deal with locations found in southern NJ, and this was published a year (1937) after the first book. It has always remained in print. As in the first volume Beck visits and relates the history of roughly 45 forgotten (there once, now gone) towns (though many of these "towns" were more often just placenames on a map). Where the first volume concentrated primarily on the Pine Barrens region, here Beck spreads out a little more, reaching as far north as Upper Freehold Township and south as Cape May County. Many of the places he writes about are quickly falling prey to developers today: the photo of the sleepy Cassville intersection, which is only a short distance from Great Adventure, is a huge, busy intersection today. Another photo is mis-captioned: on p. 147, what's identified as an old tavern at Washington (a much-visited ruin not far off Rt. 563 just south of Jenkins in the Pines) is actually the walls of a stable. Beck's books are not only informative, but a lot of fun. He gets the juices flowing for wanting to go exploring, and once you start seeking out some of the places he describes, he fills in the sometimes empty, sometimes vastly changed locations with provocative historical information. Unfortunately, as in the first volume, there are still no maps, but there is an index this time.

One of the best books on South Jersey history and folklore.

This book is the companion volume to the original "Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey". If you own one of them, you must own the other. Excellent for discovering how things used to be (and still are, in some cases). If you live in NJ, and love local history, you need to buy this book.