also says...finally the shack disappeared and few visited long cripple save those who would find that rare little fern, Schizea pusilla. In later years you found the spot where it grew designated as Schizea glade, the lettering on a shingle so announcing it being in the bold and flowing hand of Bayard Long, or so it was said.
It was also "fabled that there was a still here in the days of prohibition, but I never happened to stumble upon it."
In another chapter entitled The Plains, he writes: You come on "The Plains suddenly as you follow the cart tracks that serve as a road from Woodmansie to Long Cripple. From the broken light of the open woods you emerge, as if by a fall to another worlkd, into the blinding light of the heath. That light, unrestrained by green boughs of pitch pine and by brown pyramids of white oak leaves, pours with infinite largess over the low whorls of stunted conifers and over the impoverished scrub oaks and blackjacks...the rise of land between you and Barnegat puts a rim toyour view of the heath toward the sea. That ridge is close to 200 feet above the tide."
"All the way from Woodmansie to where they were lumbering at the cedar swamp there was not a house, nor was there any longer a house in the distance we walked beyond Long Cripple, to a point within sight of Barnegat Light."
"(Witmer) Stone was anxious to find schizea, a little fern like plant that Bayard Long had come upon close by a week earlier. We found his legended shingle stuck in the sand, announcing "schizea glade", but no schizea. Alsmost as if cut with a knife, the swamp of white cedar ended and "The Plains" began.
"We make our way eastward for a mile over very gently rising ground, and then climb more sharply until we reach the top of the low ridge that has been our horizon. There is a triangular stone at the hill crest, a surveyor's mark. From here we can see the Marconi receiving station. All the way out to our cross road, that from Old Half Way southward, and back again, we saw but two birds.....Way off to the westward was smoke that looked like that of a forest fire, and the curve of a cedar swamp as it followed some bent cripple, and solid stands of dark pitch pine on a rise of the barrens."
"Desert, our great heath beyond Long Cripple has often been called, and from old time. Witmer Stone, in his Plants of Southern New Jersey tells us that he has found the Pine Barrens gentian depicted as early as 1748 as Gentian of the Desert."
Does any of that ring a bell for anyone?
Renee
