Manumuskin,
The area marked as Ghetto in the Woods is historically accurate, odd as this may seem. Ghetto’s are parts of cities where specific economic or social groups live. In Italy, the ghet was the island where Jews were allowed to stay in Venice. In the States ghetto was first used to describe Jewish neighborhoods. Starting in 1882, with the beginning of Russian pograms, many Jews bypassed American cities to settle the Pine Barrens. This back to the land movement was conceived as the new Israel.
I’ll be presenting on this topic at the April 11 Hamilton Township Historical Society meeting in Mays Landing. The talk,
Come Ernest Homeseekers: Ethnic Settlements in the Pines, was developed for the PPA’s Pinelands Heritage Series. Libby Marsh, a Stockton Professor, called the southern Pinelands an ethnic archipelago for good reason.
Buena Vista Township (in the 1867 sense) had the first Pinelands ethnic hamlet (
c.1848),
Germantown, or Woolytown, so named for those wild and woolies who came from Prussia. Swiss Germans founded
Buckhorn (
c. 1880).
East Vineland (
c.1875), like most early Italian hamlets around Vineland (
New Italy &
Wheat Road,
c. 1870), was comprised of stock from Northern Italy. Beginning around 1880, Southern Italians were enticed to develop farmland surrounding Hammonton. Northern Italians flocked to
Landisville,
Richland,
Buena, and
Milmay.
Minotola, named for a fictional Minot Indian chief, was a glass factory town with mix of workers form throughout Italy.
New Rome was to be Sicilian, along with nearby
Gigantic City (north of Mizpah).
Newtonville and
Mizpah were black charcoal camps. The former was formally laid out by Landis as farm plots with the coming of the Camden and Atlantic (1854). To learn about black/white dynamics there, see the download for:
The latter became Jewish (1891), then Italian (
c.1897) and finally returned to Black after World War I.
Although poor, our towns are hardly ghettos. We have a strong sense of place and community, and most families have remained here for generations because of that. In another recent post I related how a young
New Kuban lad recently perished in a terrible house fire. The the response from the surrounding communities has been stellar. For example, the funeral parlor had to double its allotted time for viewing just to handle attendees. He was buried in Friendship Church’s cemetery, with a dinner that evening at the Landisville fire hall. Our family has offered to put them up for a while, as have other neighbors. Everyone’s doing their part to help them get back on their feet. These are nice places, even if just a little rough around the edges.
S-M