I am trying to find out any info I can about these two place names. They can be seen on maps of Winslow Twp but I can't find any info except that Penbryn had a sand mine many years ago and it is now a lake. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Dicktown & Penbryn
- Thread starter johnrocket
- Start date
Hey Rocket, I looked up both and the only thing I can find is that Dicktown is just a small community in Winslow, the other 'Penbryn' if it had a sand mine then i can only guess that is the Winslow wildlife management areas They are both old sand washes
CS.12 SCR
Dicktown Gloucester Township: Cross Keys Road a bit west of Kearsley Road. On
[1913 Geological Survey of New Jersey, Sheet No. 31, M 83.90.525] off
Rt 706, now Wilton's Corner development; Kearsley Road went through
from Cross Keys Road to Route 706.
Here's A little technical info of dicktown, I couldn't bring anything up for Penbryn
Ther's more I'm sure of it . Ask Brusett or TeeGate Or any body who is an explorer or higher
Dicktown Gloucester Township: Cross Keys Road a bit west of Kearsley Road. On
[1913 Geological Survey of New Jersey, Sheet No. 31, M 83.90.525] off
Rt 706, now Wilton's Corner development; Kearsley Road went through
from Cross Keys Road to Route 706.
Here's A little technical info of dicktown, I couldn't bring anything up for Penbryn
Ther's more I'm sure of it . Ask Brusett or TeeGate Or any body who is an explorer or higher
Two Towns
Dicktown still has a sign there of that name. And the older of the buildings there look to be the hunting club and a house across the street that looks a little grown in. As for the other town, same thing. The sand pit is the only thing I have ever heard of from there.
Kevin
Dicktown still has a sign there of that name. And the older of the buildings there look to be the hunting club and a house across the street that looks a little grown in. As for the other town, same thing. The sand pit is the only thing I have ever heard of from there.
Kevin
Johnrocket:
Here is information concerning Dicktown, courtesy of research from a late friend, Bill Farr:
DICKTOWN
This toponym appears on several maps as a settlement of sorts on or near the Cross Keys-Berlin Road, but little is known about it, and an assured location is lacking.
The Nunan 1850 Gloucester Township map shows a meandering indistinct “road” from Clementon through present Pine Hill to the Cross Keys Road. It would appear from several maps that the Clementon Road crossed the main road to end at Erial-Brooklyn Road (Winslow Township Street Map, rev. 1981, which shows its name as Clementon-Brooklyn Road, as does the Gloucester Township tax map. But it is not recognizable on the ground, and a new housing development is wiping out any roads that previously existed.
The portion of the Clementon Road from the Cross Keys Road up to Clementon, at the request of Theodore B. Gibbs and others, was laid out in 1880 (Cam RR-222) and improved and is now county road No. 704 (Kearsley Road). The road return starts at the Cross Keys-Berlin Road at "John Dick’s house now occupied by Samuel Gilmore, within a few feet where John Ware was shot and killed by his son John Ware." (This crime resulted in a notorious 1871 trial, and the initial first degree murder conviction in Camden County; Life, Trial, Confession, and Conviction of John Ware). Since the father was shot in front of his house, he must have lived at the intersection. It appears from the testimony in the murder trial that the Clementon Road was then known as the Joseph Green road, at least from that end.
The route of the road from Cross Keys-Berlin Road to Erial Brooklyn Road is now obliterated by the housing development. But several maps show a dirt road (also obliterated) starting at PENBRYN and running southwest, below Prosser’s Pond Branch, to meet the now obliterated Clementon-Brooklyn Road (1953 Clementon Quad, Topo No. 31, and Harry Marvin’s 1928 map of Winslow Township).
The Clementon Quad shows Dicktown at the spot where the Clementon Road crossed Cross Keys-Berlin Road, as does the Gloucester Township tax map and the 1991 Patton map of Camden County. But Topo No. 31 locates it where the dirt road from Penbryn meets the Clementon-Brooklyn Road. The Winslow tax map, as well as the 1986 Patton county map (thus before the housing development), show a road leaving Clementon-Brooklyn Road (on the latter map, the Erial-Brooklyn Road), not far above where it meets the latter road, and running east about 1500 feet, then turning north to Prosser’s Pond Branch (on the Patton map, further on to Sharp’s Branch), and it is named both Woods Road and John Dick Road. And Harry Marvin, with a long time and personal knowledge of that section of the county, also located Dicktown at that location on his 1928 map.
Nothing has been found which acknowledges the existence of this place, or shows its location, other than the maps mentioned. This writer is inclined to believe that, notwithstanding the use of "town", Dicktown was a sectional name for a scattering of houses in the vicinity of the roads mentioned, there being no other settled community for several miles in all directions.
I will try to post information tomorrow on Penbryn.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
Penbryn
Johnrocket:
Mr. Farr’s files failed to yield any information on Penbryn, but I have pieced together some data from my own research files. The place name stems from a failed subdivision planned in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. Only Penbryn Road and Reading Avenue survived from the original development. Apparently the would-be developer sought to capitalize on the large development by the same name then being built in the Glenside section of the Philadelphi suburbs. The private sale of individual lots began to appear about 1915. Various spellings of the New Jersey community include “Penbryn,” “Pennbryn,” and even “Pen Bryn.”
Sand operations began in Penbryn about 1904-1905 when the Reading Sand Company, a subsidiary of George F. Pettinos, Incorporated, began producing silica sand from a Cohansey formation deposit. At one time, the pit here produced glass sand, but in more recent years, Reading excavated and washed foundry sand for use in casting work.
If I find additional information in the coming days, I will post it.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
Johnrocket:
Mr. Farr’s files failed to yield any information on Penbryn, but I have pieced together some data from my own research files. The place name stems from a failed subdivision planned in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. Only Penbryn Road and Reading Avenue survived from the original development. Apparently the would-be developer sought to capitalize on the large development by the same name then being built in the Glenside section of the Philadelphi suburbs. The private sale of individual lots began to appear about 1915. Various spellings of the New Jersey community include “Penbryn,” “Pennbryn,” and even “Pen Bryn.”
Sand operations began in Penbryn about 1904-1905 when the Reading Sand Company, a subsidiary of George F. Pettinos, Incorporated, began producing silica sand from a Cohansey formation deposit. At one time, the pit here produced glass sand, but in more recent years, Reading excavated and washed foundry sand for use in casting work.
If I find additional information in the coming days, I will post it.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
I do not know any historical info on Penbryn but it is located off of New Freedom Rd. where the Stellas Farm stand is. If you go back there, the sandwash is on your right and has been turned over to the state so it is patrolled by rangers. We used to ride our quads back there and go swimming but that is obviously off limits now. There are actually quite a few houses back there too...Nice and quiet.
Hey JerseyMan. The location of Dicktown is now Wiltons corner The info i dug up shows it to be there ,Cross Keys Rd. and Erial Rd
Dicktown is generally thought to be at the intersection of the Berlin Cross Keys Road and the New Brooklyn- Erial Road (Route 706), part in Gloucestrer Township and part in Winslow Township. At one time there was a small gas station on the Northwest corner and a gray stone house on the Southwest corner. The gas station is long gone (I believe the remains were torn down in the 70's) and the house has been replaced by dentist (large neon blue tooth over door) and chiropractor's offices. The northeast corner has an octagonal building that was originally the sales offices of Wilton's Corner. The area behind this building was once mostly woods but had a piggery and the locally infamous "Bloody Bucket Road", a dirt lane into the woods where legend holds that a bucket of blood was found hanging from a branch of an oak tree. This is now all Wilton's Corner houses. The Southeast corner has a retention basin and a housing development behind it, but years ago was an auto junkyard. In the woods behind the junkyard was an oil-fired still with beautiful cedar fermentation tanks all covered with camouflage netting and a gasoline powered Delco generator. In the late 50s or early 60she operation was discovered and the cedar tanks cut into kindling. The still, boiler and generator was confiscated by the State, thus depriving Sicklerville folks of their locally made moonshine.
Penbryn is in the area of Williamstown Junction, on the Berlin-Cross Keys Road near the train tracks. The Johns Manville insulation plant is now closed and the premises are being monitored for ground water contamination. See
http://penbryn.blogspot.com/
I live in Wilton's Corner in a house built eight years ago. The exact spot where our house is located is pretty far off the Cross Keys/Route 706 intersection and shows up as an open field with what appears to be a dirt road close by in Historic Aerials. Since we bought the place we've done a lot of digging....for planting beds, two patios, and below the frostline for new back steps, all done by hand with shovels. The amount of animal bone fragments we've found has been unbelievable. We were starting to think that maybe Jimmy Hoffa was buried under our house. So the Bloody Bucket Road story puts it all together for us. There was no way these were the bones of random wildlife that simply passed. There's just too many of them.
That area contained a large piggery for many years.
Bone fragments would be remnants from garbage fed to the pigs and pigs that may have been processed or discarded onsite.
Bone fragments would be remnants from garbage fed to the pigs and pigs that may have been processed or discarded onsite.
If you live in the Sicklerville area, sometimes when you post on Facebook, it says you're posting from Dicktown.
That's exactly what happened to me, and of course my friends were chuckling about it. "You live WHERE?" But I'm originally from north Jersey and my husband is from central Jersey, so try even explaining to a "yankee" where Camden County is and they think you either live in Camden or "down the shore". I gave up a long time ago.
There's a board dedicated to towns with funny names on a popular travel site, and there were questions there as to where Dicktown NJ is and who has been there. I told them not to get excited. At any point in history it was a small unincorporated area at best, and it doesn't exist as an actual place today. Now if there were a post office called "Dicktown" then I could at least have the fun of using it in my mailing address, which I'm sure would elicit many "Beavis-and-Butthead" style laughs.
There's a board dedicated to towns with funny names on a popular travel site, and there were questions there as to where Dicktown NJ is and who has been there. I told them not to get excited. At any point in history it was a small unincorporated area at best, and it doesn't exist as an actual place today. Now if there were a post office called "Dicktown" then I could at least have the fun of using it in my mailing address, which I'm sure would elicit many "Beavis-and-Butthead" style laughs.
I found this forum while trying to find some info on John Dick. I grew up in Sicklerville and have been told that he owned alot of ground in Sicklerville. I'm not sure if he owned where wiltons corner is but he did own alot of the surrounding woods. Some of his property markers can still be found, square white stone markers which my father called John Dick stones. He also has his name on 2 stained glass windows in the old Sicklerville methodist church. As for where wiltons is, there were basically 2 big fields when I was young, one called bliss field the other sisslers field. I never heard of the area there referred to as Dicktown only as the 2 fields. If you look on historic arials, the field closest to cross keys rd. was bliss. The remnants of the piggery was at the back of what is now Normans Ford Drive ; where the creek crosses meeting house rd was called bowmans gut and Bloody Bucket Rd was the dirt road from Kearsley across to Erial Rd. Also Prossers pond was called the duck pond by everyone in the area and the road across to Penbryn was called Causeway Rd. Causeway had cedar logs across it at all the low spots which could still be seen in the 60's. There is a name for this type of road but I can't remember what it is.
Take a look at this old aerial from 1931. You can clearly see the dirt roads. I'm assuming the road where I've placed the blue arrows is Bloody Bucket Rd? The two red lines are Erial Rd and Cross Keys Rd. The area with the red circle is where the piggery would have been according to jd5410's description. The green check mark is the location of my house. Does anyone know what road the one with the green arrows is? And jd5410, which field is which on this aerial view? I may have dug up one of those "John Dick" property markers. We unearthed a light colored stone that's about a foot square and HEAVY as hell. It was buried for a long time so there's no visible markings on it that I can see, and the exterior is grainy and worn now. It's too heavy to lift, so we just rolled it over to the side of our house and it's still sitting there. You can imagine the fun we had when our shovel hit it, and we struggled for many hours trying to free it so we could pull it out. Our house would have been right along the dirt road marked in green and after the foundation was dug, the excavated soil was just put back into the hole. We found this stone a few feet from the back of the house in what would have been the excavated area.
It's also interesting to note that if the dirt road next to the blue arrows was Bloody Bucket Rd, the streets in Wilton's Corner were drawn out to keep the general line of the old road. From Cross Keys Rd, Kelly Drive was never completed all the way out, and I'm pretty sure there's still a dirt path there. Then it follows down Kelly Drive, picks up again at Militia Hill Rd, then you're almost down to Erial. The path of the other dirt road wasn't followed in the street layout at all, except for about the last five or six homes on both sides of Wildcat Branch Dr before it intersects with Meetinghouse Circle.
If the piggery was up the dirt road where the red circle is, someone must have still been chucking animal bones down the road, because we've dug up an awful lot of them. They look too small to be from deer.
Does anyone know where the old stills were for making moonshine?
Sorry for my obsession, but one of my favorite hobbies is old maps, old roads, and piecing together what was on a piece of land before the present structure was, and the fact that the area wasn't solid woods but dirt roads and open fields tells me there had to have been some goings on. Much more interesting than just woods.
Pfrey21 The only still I knew of was on the opposite side of Erial Rd. Its location was approximately where Orlando Drive intersects with Silvius Ct. Apparently it was raided with a helicopter which my dad said was a big deal back then. The road leading in from Cross Keys was naturally called Still Rd. Remnants of the still could still be found up until it was cleared in the 90's.
Bloody Bucket is the blue lines you marked. The piggery is where you circled; found alot of Horn and Hardart silverware there back in the day. Dad said it was one of the places they got the slop for the pigs. Your probably finding bones from the piggery which got pushed there when it was cleared. The road leading to Cross Keys Rd towards Albion from the piggery was called Block House Rd. I'm pretty sure you live in Bliss field but I always got the 2 confused. I have an older friend who will remember. As of your green line, I don't think that was a road as much as probably the farmers property line which leads me to believe you found his property marker maybe even a John Dick stone. There's a road between your top 2 green arrows that leads towards Williamstown Junction. That road is called Sand Knoll Road and it basically runs parallel with the river. I'll let you know on the field names.
Bloody Bucket is the blue lines you marked. The piggery is where you circled; found alot of Horn and Hardart silverware there back in the day. Dad said it was one of the places they got the slop for the pigs. Your probably finding bones from the piggery which got pushed there when it was cleared. The road leading to Cross Keys Rd towards Albion from the piggery was called Block House Rd. I'm pretty sure you live in Bliss field but I always got the 2 confused. I have an older friend who will remember. As of your green line, I don't think that was a road as much as probably the farmers property line which leads me to believe you found his property marker maybe even a John Dick stone. There's a road between your top 2 green arrows that leads towards Williamstown Junction. That road is called Sand Knoll Road and it basically runs parallel with the river. I'll let you know on the field names.
Pfrey21 I spoke with my 77 year old friend and learned some. Your house is in Sissler's field, Bliss is the other. Dad called it Bliss, he calls it Cassidy's. Dad was older then my friend and Cassidy farmed it after Bliss. Sissler had the piggery and had a partner named Willis so he says. Cassidy lived in the house opposite Erial Rd between what is now Sherman Lane and Erial Rd. My friend's father called where you live Dicktown so sorry yes you live in Dicktown. There was still a house standing in Bliss in the 60's and my friend confirmed that the person living there called himself Jesus. Apparently he was a squatter until the house fell down. The house was very close to what is now what I think is your meeting house-pool house? Bowman's gut was named by the Dilks family who's house foundation is possibly still there inside the development. Learned more, possibly more than I want to know but he knew almost nothing on John Dick, which is what I'm after.