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  1. Scroggy

    Downer & Willimstown Branch

    Resurrecting the necro-thread here because I've been thinking about the other end of the W&DR. The Baltimore & Ohio built a track on the south side of Wilmington, Delaware down to the Christina River, about where the I-295 bridge is now. That would have been their ferry connection to the W&DR, I...
  2. Scroggy

    Safety tips from the past

    4. Do not dig up dead bodies you have seen in dreams. Mysterious boxes are still OK, though. "People used to put gold coins in buckskin bags and bury them all over these woods." 5. Do not look for the Jersey Devil during a snowstorm. (Crossing threads a bit, here.)
  3. Scroggy

    Safety tips from the past

    Yes, it was Warner's name that caught my eye in that paragraph. Lynden died of liver cancer, according to the church's burial record. Oddly enough, a different Uriah Bowker features in Beck's "Slabtown and Copany" as a blind Civil War veteran turned mail carrier for Browns Mills. As is often...
  4. Scroggy

    Safety tips from the past

    Unearthed while researching something entirely different. From the Mount Holly News of May 28, 1912: Mr. Bowker had reached the ripe old age of 19 at the time, but there may have been more in play regarding his casual attitude towards the flammable. The News of August 31, 1915 reported that...
  5. Scroggy

    Atsion Turntable

    Probably due to wheel slip (from slippery rail, starting a heavy train, etc.)
  6. Scroggy

    Cape May County Explorations

    It's common enough as an invasive in Piedmont successional forests.
  7. Scroggy

    Missing Woman

    A quick review suggests that it takes some adaptation to make a GoPro suitable for a "daily driver" dashcam (it's not easy to save specific footage from being overriden). My guess would be that the couple was using it to make "MY DRIVE TO THE JERSEY DEVIL" TikTok content or something so it...
  8. Scroggy

    Old Foundry Water Tower Ruins??

    Zinc chloride toxicity (cf. the link to 1942 operations) is acute; it appears to be the result of hydrolysis to zinc oxychloride and hydrochloric acid, the latter of which will burn mucous membranes, etc. Zinc contamination is bad for aquatic life (high concentrations may affect the embryonic...
  9. Scroggy

    Missing Woman

    I have questions.
  10. Scroggy

    Cape May County Explorations

    Phragmites is a freshwater plant, although it does tolerate brackish water.
  11. Scroggy

    Cape May County Explorations

    Their yard may have sumac, and it may have poison ivy, but unless it's a high-quality freshwater wetland, it probably doesn't have poison sumac. (I was afraid of all sumacs and things with pinnately-compound leaves generally as a kid, not understanding this distinction.)
  12. Scroggy

    Spring/Summer Flora

    Ooh, a peloric Pogonia. I remember seeing a peloric Calopogon on a PBC trip to Forsythe about 15 years ago (you might have been there, in fact).
  13. Scroggy

    This oak

    Twinkle, twinkle--there's my post. ;) A good indicator of other types of "barrens" habitat--you find it on former serpentine savannas that have succeeded to closed canopy, for instance.
  14. Scroggy

    The Prince of Chatsworth

    Thanks for your kind words! I'm a little pressed right now, but I'd be happy to try to clean this up a bit for the front page in the future. There was a lot of careful nosing around in online sources for this one, but there's a lot more potential archival work. The Curtis family papers at Yale...
  15. Scroggy

    Tabernacle Mayor

    I think "open Satanist" is probably less a moral statement and more a signal of the kind of personality that can't be happy unless they've visibly upsetting people around them. Sort of like getting something lascivious tattooed on your face, but easier to reverse. But yes, what does the deputy...
  16. Scroggy

    Tabernacle Mayor

    We hear a lot about how terrible anonymity is on social media, but boy, people will post some absolutely deranged stuff under their real names on Facebook (and probably Nextdoor).
  17. Scroggy

    Bobwhite quail

    The answer is probably sheer lack of resources; the Forest Fire Service spends a lot of time, well, putting out fires. Obviously a well-thinned forest poses less overall fire risk, and they try, but they have a lot of territory to manage and a lot of wildland-urban interface to worry about. DEP...
  18. Scroggy

    Missing Woman

    I trolled through the State Police Facebook post comments so you don't have to. Supposedly her car was found hydrolocked in a hole on Lost Lane "the day she went missing". (4/13?) Someone pulled it out and posted it to the "NJ Stuck in the Mud" Facebook group. It looks like she may have been...
  19. Scroggy

    The Prince of Chatsworth

    Nah, that was the last part. It's mostly little fragments carefully extracted by targeted searches in Google Books, the Library of Congress newspaper database (patchy but still useful!) and some other odds and ends. I find writing up pieces like this helps me integrate what I've been learning...
  20. Scroggy

    The Prince of Chatsworth

    Part 3: A Pack of Princes The Almanach de Gotha, that famous handbook of European nobility, lists the five sons of Prince Mario Ruspoli: Costantino Carlo Michele Agustino (b. July 8, 1891) Marescotti Carlo Maurizio Gilberto (b. October 17, 1892) Alessandro Edmondo Eugenio (b. May 14, 1895)...
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