Windows into Groundwater
Goose ponds are often shallow features with bottoms flat as a billiard table. These Ice Age blowouts deflated to a water-table levels, much like the playa out West that race cars run on. The above Big and Little Goose Ponds are shallow features, typically having 6- to 8-inches of water-fill. Roman and Good (1983: 48) indicated that a long-term wetland baseline drop of only 4 to 8 inches “could cause significant alteration in [vegetational] community structure and composition.” Using historical records and local knowledge I’ve drawn a reasonable conclusion that there has ever so slowly been a general trend of Pine Barrens groundwater-level drop over the last hundred years or more.
For example, Egg Harbor’s Little and Big Goose Ponds once had an analog near Millville called the “Hog Holes,” but is now land now dry enough to permit forest growth.
http://maps.njpinebarrens.com/#lat=39.37254228960952&lng=-74.98145341873169&z=16&type=nj1930&gpx=
A charcoal community associated with Cumberland Furnace called Cossaboontown grew up along side the Hog Hole basins. A sister community, Hesstown, still exists today a couple miles to the East on Route 49. It doesn’t take much water loss to dry up Pinelands basins, and many basins are going or are now gone. Just two days of USGS test pumping in wetlands near Lake Fred on the Richard Stockton campus unexpectedly dropped shallow groundwater levels to Roman and Good’s critical threshold, and work abruptly stopped.
Click to enlarge for a 1931 aerial photomosaic view of Cossaboontown’s Hog Holes.
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