Today I went and attempted to trace the route of the 1808 Batsto Road. This road was the former route to Batsto from the Mullica River. Essentially, what we now know as Rt. 542 only went as far as Crowleytown, where the original route kept straight, away from the Mullica to Batsto, as opposed to now, where it hugs the Mullica as it travels up to Batsto past Hermann City.
^ This is Thomas Gordon's 1833 map. The road is marked at "Sooys."
I parked at the Crowleytown Campground, at the intersection of 542 and Burnt Schoolhouse Rd. I jumped right into the woods and wandered a bit until I got into the swamp. Feeling like I was headed in the wrong direction, I tried to keep a bit more to the right, which eventually led me to the 1808 road.
This road is (in places)
substantial. There was a lot of engineering that went into this road. It ploughs straight through the Mordecai, but instead of being a corduroy road, it's actually built up, so it's more like a causeway. In the swampy areas it's clear -- probably because it's higher than the cedars like, or perhaps it's filled in with slag. (Wild speculation on my part.)
The road crosses several streams as it heads to Batsto. The bridges are long gone at both of them. People do, however, seem to hike down the road, and there's accommodations for getting across. At the first stream, there's a large moss encrusted cedar plank thrown across the stream slightly to the side of the trail. At the other, someone has piled some sticks and branches to get across.
^ Here you can see the rise of the road on the opposite side of the bank.
^ What may have been a piling.
^ Another view of where the bridge was.
As you follow the road it eventually leaves the swamp and enters into a higher area. The road got choked with vegetation and briers, but there's a smaller path that runs alongside the road to cut around that. That brought me to a clearing that I investigated, but after going through there, I ended up getting lost and wasn't able to find the path. I ended up back in the swamp, lost, and very tired. The swamp, fortunately, was fairly dry, but every now and then I would put my foot down on what appeared to be solid ground and it would plunge down a foot or two. I began worrying about what would happen if I broke my leg out there. I wasn't far from Batsto, and I actually had a bar of signal on my cell phone, but still, the fear of being stuck out there started weighing in on my mind.
I did have my GPS, though, and I discovered that I could just move the "mouse pointer" over to a spot and hit enter and I could route to that spot. So, I looked at my tracks, saw where I got lost, and just drew a straight line to where the 1808 road "should" have been. I was about 600 feet off. I also had a hard time getting the unit to point me in the right direction, which was solved by me recalibrating the compass.
Those 600 feet were some really slow, tough going. The Mordecai has a lot of young, thin cedars, so they tend to cluster up. There's also just massive amounts of briers and blowdown cedars, so you're constantly having to make a bee-line, climb over fallen rotted cedars, and unstick yourself from the briers. Finally I made it through and found the road!
I followed it until it changed into a path, then the path got smaller and smaller and disappeared. It opened up into relatively clear upland forest (with a lot of what I assume to be oak leaves on the ground) which brought me right out to Batsto Village. Tired and exhausted, I didn't have it in me to retrace my steps, so I walked down from the village to 542, and followed that back to my Jeep.
I'm not sure how long of a walk it was, but it was pretty long.
I ended up driving down to Pine Barrens Liquors and Deli in Green Bank, getting a hamburger and a beer, and then visiting Friendship. It's been years since I've been there and I'm amazed at the changes.
