Part 4 (1/2)

Large portions of these swamps have been worked a second and some a third time, since located. At the present time 1857 there is not an acre of original growth of swamp standing, having all pa.s.sed away before the resistless sway of the speculator or the consumer. ”Beesley's ”Sketch of Cape May” p. 197.

The great forest has long since been lumbered to death. The pines were worked for tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine until for lack of material the industry pa.s.sed southward through the Carolinas to Florida, exhausting the trees as it went. The Christmas demand for holly has almost stripped the Jersey woods of these trees once so numerous. Destructive fires and frequent cutting keep the pine and oak lands stunted. Thousands of dollars' worth of cedar springing up in the swamps are sometimes destroyed in a day. But efforts to control the fires so destructive not only to this standing timber but to the fertility of the soil, and attempts to reforest this country not only for the sake of timber but as an attraction to those who resort there in search of health or natural beauty, have not been vigorously pushed. The great forest has now, to be sure, been partially cultivated in spots, and the sand used for large gla.s.s-making industries. Small fruits and grapes flourish in some places. At the northern end of this forest tract the health resort known as Lakewood was established to take advantage of the pine air. A little to the southward is the secluded Brown's Mills, once so appealing to lovers of the simple life. Checked on the east by the great forest, the West Jersey Quakers spread southward from Salem until they came to the Cohansey, a large and beautiful stream flowing out of the forest and wandering through green meadows and marshes to the bay. So numerous were the wild geese along its sh.o.r.es and along the Maurice River farther south that the first settlers are said to have killed them for their feathers alone and to have thrown the carca.s.ses away. At the head of navigation of the Cohansey was a village called Cohansey Bridge, and after 1765 Bridgeton, a name still borne by a flouris.h.i.+ng modern town. Lower down near the marsh was the village of Greenwich, the princ.i.p.al place of business up to the year 1800, with a foreign trade. Some of the tea the East India Company tried to force on the colonists during the Revolution was sent there and was duly rejected. It is still an extremely pretty village, with its broad shaded streets like a New England town and its old Quaker meeting house. In fact, not a few New Englanders from Connecticut, still infatuated with southern Jersey in spite of the rebuffs received in ancient times from Dutch and Swedes, finally settled near the Cohansey after it came under control of the more amiable Quakers. There was also one place called after Fairfield in Connecticut and another called New England Town.

The first churches of this region were usually built near running streams so that the congregation could procure water for themselves and their horses. Of one old Presbyterian Church it used to be said that no one had ever ridden to it in a wheeled vehicle. Wagons and carriages were very scarce until after the Revolution. Carts for occasions of ceremony as well as utility were used before wagons and carriages. For a hundred and fifty years the horse's back was the best form of conveyance in the deep sand of the trails and roads. This was true of all southern Jersey. Pack horses and the backs of Indian and negro slaves were the princ.i.p.al means of transportation on land. The roads and trails, in fact, were so few and so heavy with sand that water travel was very much developed. The Indian dugout canoe was adopted and found faster and better than heavy English rowboats. As the province was almost surrounded by water and was covered with a network of creeks and channels, nearly all the villages and towns were situated on tidewater streams, and the dugout canoe, modified and improved, was for several generations the princ.i.p.al means of communication. Most of the old roads in New Jersey followed Indian trails. There was a trail, for example, from the modern Camden opposite Philadelphia, following up Cooper's Creek past Berlin, then called Long-a-coming, crossing the watershed, and then following Great Egg Harbor River to the seash.o.r.e. Another trail, long used by the settlers, led from Salem up to Camden, Burlington, and Trenton, going round the heads of streams. It was afterwards abandoned for the shorter route obtained by bridging the streams nearer their mouths. This old trail also extended from the neighborhood of Trenton to Perth Amboy near the mouth of the Hudson, and thus, by supplementing the lower routes, made a trail nearly the whole length of the province.

As a Quaker refuge, West Jersey never attained the success of Pennsylvania. The political disturbances and the continually threatened loss of self-government in both the Jerseys were a serious deterrent to Quakers who, above all else, prized rights which they found far better secured in Pennsylvania. In 1702, when the two Jerseys were united into one colony under a government appointed by the Crown, those rights were more restricted than ever and all hopes of West Jersey becoming a colony under complete Quaker control were shattered. Under Governor Cornbury, the English law was adopted and enforced, and the Quakers were disqualified from testifying in court unless they took an oath and were prohibited from serving on juries or holding any office of trust. Cornbury's judges wore scarlet robes, powdered wigs, c.o.c.ked hats, gold lace, and side arms; they were conducted to the courthouse by the sheriff's cavalcade and opened court with great parade and ceremony. Such a spectacle of pomp was sufficient to divert the flow of Quaker immigrants to Pennsylvania, where the government was entirely in Quaker hands and where plain and serious ways gave promise of enduring and unmolested prosperity.

The Quakers had altogether thirty meeting houses in West Jersey and eleven in East Jersey, which probably shows about the proportion of Quaker influence in the two Jerseys. Many of them have since disappeared; some of the early buildings, to judge from the pictures, were of wood and not particularly pleasing in appearance. They were makes.h.i.+fts, usually intended to be replaced by better buildings. Some substantial brick buildings of excellent architecture have survived, and their plainness and simplicity, combined with excellent proportions and thorough construction, are clearly indicative of Quaker character. There is a particularly interesting one in Salem with a magnificent old oak beside it, another in the village of Greenwich on the Cohansey farther south, and another at Crosswicks near Trenton.

In West Jersey near Mount Holly was born and lived John Woolman, a Quaker who became eminent throughout the English speaking world for the simplicity and loftiness of his religious thought as well as for his admirable style of expression. His ”Journal,” once greatly and even extravagantly admired, still finds readers. ”Get the writings of John Woolman by heart,” said Charles Lamb, ”and love the early Quakers.” He was among the Quakers one of the first and perhaps the first really earnest advocate of the abolition of slavery. The scenes of West Jersey and the writings of Woolman seem to belong together. Possibly a feeling for the simplicity of those scenes and their life led Walt Whitman, who grew up on Long Island under Quaker influence, to spend his last years at Camden, in West Jersey. His profound democracy, which was very Quaker-like, was more at home there perhaps than anywhere else.

Chapter IX. Planters And Traders Of Southern Jersey

Most of the colonies in America, especially the stronger ones, had an aristocratic cla.s.s, which was often large and powerful, as in the case of Virginia, and which usually centered around the governor, especially if he were appointed from England by the Crown or by a proprietor. But there was very little of this social distinction in New Jersey. Her political life had been too much broken up, and she had been too long dependent on the governors of New York to have any of those pretty little aristocracies with bright colored clothes, and coaches and four, flouris.h.i.+ng within her boundaries. There seems to have been a faint suggestion of such social pretensions under Governor Franklin just before the Revolution. He was beginning to live down the objections to his illegitimate birth and Toryism and by his entertainments and manner of living was creating a social following. There is said also to have been something a little like the beginning of an aristocracy among the descendants of the Dutch settlers who had ancestral holdings near the Hudson; but this amounted to very little.

Cla.s.s distinctions were not so strongly marked in New Jersey as in some other colonies. There grew up in southern Jersey, however, a sort of aristocracy of gentlemen farmers, who owned large tracts of land and lived in not a little style in good houses on the small streams.

The northern part of the province, largely settled and influenced by New Englanders, was like New England a land of vigorous concentrated town life and small farms. The hilly and mountainous nature of the northern section naturally led to small holdings of land. But in southern Jersey the level sandy tracts of forest were often taken up in large areas. In the absence of manufacturing, large acreage naturally became, as in Virginia and Maryland, the only mark of wealth and social distinction. The great landlord was looked up to by the lesser fry. The Quaker rule of discountenancing marrying out of meeting tended to keep a large acreage in the family and to make it larger by marriage. A Quaker of broad acres would seek for his daughter a young man of another landholding Quaker family and would thus join the two estates.

There was a marked difference between East Jersey and West Jersey in county organization. In West Jersey the people tended to become planters; their farms and plantations somewhat like those of the far South; and the political unit of government was the county. In East Jersey the town was the starting point and the county marked the boundaries of a collection of towns. This curious difference, the result of soil, climate, and methods of life, shows itself in other States wherever South and North meet. Illinois is an example, where the southern part of the State is governed by the county system, and the northern part by the town system.

The lumberman, too, in clearing off the primeval forest and selling the timber, usually dealt in immense acreage. Some families, it is said, can be traced steadily proceeding southward as they stripped off the forest, and started sawmills and gristmills on the little streams that trickled from the swamps, and like beavers making with their dams those pretty ponds which modern lovers of the picturesque are now so eager to find. A good deal of the lumbering in the interior pines tract was carried on by persons who leased the premises from owners who lived on plantations along the Delaware or its tributary streams. These operations began soon after 1700. Wood roads were cut into the Pines, sawmills were started, and constant use turned some of these wood roads into the highways of modern times.

There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed aristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia and Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning what they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking another virgin tract. The roughest methods were used; wooden plows, brush harrows, straw collars, grapevine harness, and poor shelter for animals and crops; but were the Virginia methods any better? In these operations there was apparently a good deal of sudden profit and mushroom prosperity accompanied by a good deal of debt and insolvency. In this, too, they were like the Virginians and Carolinians. There seem to have been also a good many slaves in West Jersey, brought, as in the southern colonies, to work on the large estates, and this also, no doubt, helped to foster the aristocratic feeling.

The best days of the Jersey gentlemen farmers came probably when they could no longer move from tract to tract. They settled down and enjoyed a very plentiful, if rude, existence on the products of their land, game, and fish, amid a fine climate-with mosquitoes enough in summer to act as a counterirritant and prevent stagnation from too much ease and prosperity. After the manner of colonial times, they wove their own clothes from the wool of their own sheep and made their own implements, furniture, and simple machinery.

There are still to be found fascinating traces of this old life in out-of-the-way parts of southern Jersey. To run upon old houses among the Jersey pines still stored with Latin cla.s.sics and old editions of Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old mill with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to find people who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools from the materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately a refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer.

This condition of material and social self-sufficiency lasted in places long after the Revolution. It was a curious little aristocracy-a very faint and faded one, lacking the robustness of the far southern type, and lacking indeed the real essential of an aristocracy, namely political power. Moreover, although there were slaves in New Jersey, there were not enough of them to exalt the Jersey gentlemen farmers into such self-sufficient lords and masters as the Virginian and Carolinian planters became.

To search out the remains of this stage of American history, however, takes one up many pleasant streams flowing out of the forest tract to the Delaware on one side or to the ocean on the other. This topographical formation of a central ridge or watershed of forest and swamp was a repet.i.tion of the same formation in the Delaware peninsula, which like southern Jersey had originally been a shoal and then an island. The Jersey watershed, with its streams abounding in wood duck and all manner of wild life, must have been in its primeval days as fascinating as some of the streams of the Florida cypress swamps. Toward the ocean, Wading River, the Mullica, the Tuckahoe, Great Egg; and on the Delaware side the Maurice, Cohansey, Salem Creek, Oldman's, Racc.o.o.n, Mantua, Woodberry, Timber, and the Rancocas, still possess attraction. Some of them, on opposite sides of the divide, are not far apart at their sources in the old forest tract; so that a canoe can be transported over the few miles and thus traverse the State. One of these trips up Timber Creek from the Delaware and across only eight miles of land to the headwaters of Great Egg Harbor River and thence down to the ocean, thus cutting South Jersey in half, is a particularly romantic one. The heavy woods and swamps of this secluded route along these forest shadowed streams are apparently very much as they were three hundred years ago.

The water in all these streams, particularly in their upper parts, owing to the sandy soil, is very clean and clear and is often stained by the cedar roots in the swamps a clear brown, sometimes almost an amber color. One of the streams, the Rancocas, with its many windings to Mount Holly and then far inland to Brown's Mills, seems to be the favorite with canoemen and is probably without an equal in its way for those who love the Indian's gift that brings us so close to nature.

The spread of the Quaker settlements along Delaware Bay to Cape May was checked by the Maurice River and its marshes and by the Great Cedar Swamp which crossed the country from Delaware Bay to the ocean and thus made of the Cape May region a sort of island. The Cape May region, it is true, was settled by Quakers, but most of them came from Long Island rather than from the settlements on the Delaware. They had followed whale fis.h.i.+ng on Long Island and in pursuit of that occupation some of them had migrated to Cape May where whales were numerous not far off sh.o.r.e.

The leading early families of Cape May, the Townsends, Stillwells, Corsons, Leamings, Ludlams, Spicers, and Cresses, many of whose descendants still live there, were Quakers of the Long Island strain. The ancestor of the Townsend family came to Cape May because he had been imprisoned and fined and threatened with worse under the New York government for a.s.sisting his fellow Quakers to hold meetings. Probably the occasional severity of the administration of the New York laws against Quakers, which were the same as those of England, had as much to do as had the whales with the migration to Cape May. This Quaker civilization extended from Cape May up as far as Great Egg Harbor where the Great Cedar Swamp joined the seash.o.r.e. Quaker meeting houses were built at Cape May, Galloway, Tuckahoe, and Great Egg. All have been abandoned and the buildings themselves have disappeared, except that of the Cape May meeting, called the Old Cedar Meeting, at Seaville; and it has no congregation. The building is kept in repair by members of the Society from other places.

Besides the Quakers, Cape May included a number of New Haven people, the first of whom came there as early as 1640 under the leaders.h.i.+p of George Lamberton and Captain Turner, seeking profit in whale fis.h.i.+ng. They were not driven out by the Dutch and Swedes, as happened to their companions who attempted to settle higher up the river at Salem and the Schuylkill. About one-fifth of the old family names of Cape May and New Haven are similar, and there is supposed to be not a little New England blood not only in Cape May but in the neighboring counties of c.u.mberland and Salem. While the first New Haven whalers came to Cape May in 1640, it is probable that for a long time they only sheltered their vessels there, and none of them became permanent settlers until about 1685.

Scandinavians contributed another element to the population of the Cape May region. Very little is definitely known about this settlement, but the Swedish names in Cape May and c.u.mberland counties seem to indicate a migration of Scandinavians from Wilmington and Tinic.u.m.

Great Egg Harbor, which formed the northern part of the Cape May settlement, was named from the immense numbers of wild fowl, swans, ducks, and water birds that formerly nested there every summer and have now been driven to Canada or beyond. Little Egg Harbor farther up the coast was named for the same reason as well as Egg Island, of three hundred acres in Delaware Bay, since then eaten away by the tide. The people of the district had excellent living from the eggs as well as from the plentiful fowl, fish, and oysters.

Some farming was done by the inhabitants of Cape May; and many cattle, marked with brands but in a half wild state, were kept out on the uninhabited beaches which have now become seaside summer cities. Some of the cattle were still running wild on the beaches down to the time of the Civil War. The settlers ”mined” the valuable white cedar from the swamps for s.h.i.+ngles and boards, leaving great ”pool holes” in the swamps which even today sometimes trap the unwary sportsman. The women knitted innumerable mittens and also made wampum or Indian money from the clam and oyster sh.e.l.ls, an important means of exchange in the Indian trade all over the colonies, and even to some extent among the colonists themselves. The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the white cedar, the mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world. They sold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters and also for lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their sloops also traded to the southern colonies and even to the West Indies.