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Deb, I'll be presenting 7:00 PM Wednesday, August 15 at the Vineland Historical Society about Pinelands ethnic settlements, and speak to the Kallikak issue. http://www.vinelandhistory.org/ Above is a slide from the talk, with a diagram excerpted from the 1934 German translation Die...

It looks like Maurice River Township wilderness could be the next Richland Village. Pinelands redevelopment initiatives may not be limited to Villages. A Planned Highway Business District is being proposed for turning wilderness into a center of place development along the Route 47 bypass in...

Guy, Outages are part of the Pinelands experience. This is still a rural place. Neighbors help each other. We don't expect too much from government, but got a lot anyway. Public works was out cutting with chain saws just as the storm passed around 2:00 AM. At 6:30 AM their loaders opened my...

Entered the 20th century last Thursday when the electric service was restored after 7 days out. Returned to the 21st just today when the phone & internet wires were repaired 11 days out. In retrospect I have no complaints. Atlantic Electric and Comcast did a splendid job under difficult...

Woo-hoo! Four Asplundh and two Davy bucket trucks on our road this morning. Hoping for electric restoration by Saturday. Prolonged power outages is a price we are willing to pay for solitude, although hauling water is getting a bit old. I wonder if the abandoned hand-pump well by the old...

Much of western Atlantic County was particularly hard hit. Wires still look like spilled spaghetti all along my road a week after the storm. I don't see how repair crews will get here for another day or two, since we are the last place at the end of a long circuitous run of service line. It is...

LOL! Oji, the Martians were just fine. My daughter co-presented to them at the Lowell Observatory. Mars blueberries are rich in iron (hematite, actually), so a little hard to chew. I tried to upload a lower resolution copy of the poster, which compares ice-age Pine Barrens with the frozen red...

Serendipity! I was at Lost Town Hunter's 50th anniversary celebration last Saturday, a wonderful event. He introduced one of his long-time associates, suggesting the two of us may have grown up in the same area. It turned out we were neighbors, even if temporally a generation apart. We moved...

Good find, Guy! Thanks.

I thought it might be fun on Memorial Day weekend to provide an account of someone who lived on my farm, Evard Snell. He came to the property as a young boy to live with his Aunt Rachel and Uncles Jenk & Thomas, original Welsh settlers to Richland. Things weren’t so good back home in Vineland...

New state agreement affirms Pinelands role in sewer plans, But critics fear it may lead to more growth. http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012305250053 "The Pinelands Commission will keep on calling the shots for future development in the nearly 1 million-acre region, with a new...

Feedback has been good. I certainly learned a lot of new material! The symposium was a delicate balance between the cultural and environmental elements of McPhee’s work. Five of six presenters were from South Jersey, and four of those Pinelands residents. Stockton's renewed interest in things...

"Urban Wilderness," maybe?

That’s a refreshing perspective, seen through the lens of an industrial historian! Jerseyman’s absolutely right. The Pine Barrens have been ruthlessly exploited for its natural resources since the end of the seventeenth century, through the 1930s. Its forests were razed again and again for...

Thanks Bob, Perhaps I should have used "flattened," as in how a spoon widens out. The channel seems to narrow towards the north. Does the narrow section, that towards Chamberlain Branch, cut through sandy ground?

Is there a broad, flat depression to the south of the narrow channel (yellow dash below on old aerial)? If so, then that is what is often referred to as a "spoon-shaped" vale. Specifically it is the broad upper portion that is the vale. It is a little difficult to make out the exact shape...

Guy, Vales and dales are old English names for broad, shallow, round-headed depressions attributed to unusual conditions of erosion, usually in association with cold, non-glacial or periglacial regimes. England was also ice marginal, sharing South Jersey's periglacial heritage. Early settlers...

I had the great pleasure to catch up with two NJ Pines bloggers at the 2012 Atlantic County Utilities Authority Earth Day celebrations, Turtle & Glowordz. Needless to say, Sunday was a very wet day. My daughter manned Richard Stockton’s EDIBL (Environmental Discourses on the Ingestion of...

Yeah, it wasn't so easy either. Why the soil's so poor here I had to fertilize the telephone pole before I could hear relayer talking long distance...

This is a hopeful sign not just for my village, but for other villages that wish to maintain their rural Pinelands character. They too are slated to become Priority Growth Investment Areas. This means "an area where more significant development and redevelopment is preferred and where investment...