Your posts are always informative, Jerseyman. I enjoy them alot. In fact, your post here has stimulated some brain-cells on vacation, so here goes. When I was a kid I recall stories from a friend about some woods adjoining the (Deptford/Westville?) Texaco refinery on Rt. 130, I believe north of the refinery. Here he and his dad would fined arrowheads (he had quite a collection, mind-boggling) and his dad had a metal detector and would find old coins. He claimed there was an amusement park there many years ago, years since dismantled. Do you know anything about this park? I look forward to your response!---David
Thanx for the kind words, Furball. You are requesting information on Billy Thompson's Washington Park on the Delaware, which served as the Queen of all Delaware River amusement parks from its Grand Opening on Memorial Day 1895 until it closed for good in 1911 after enduring two conflagrations—the second one all but destroying the park. Please see the story below:
William J. Thompson, aka Billy Thompson, aka "the Duke of Gloucester," was an Irish-Catholic entrepreneur and politico who established Gloucester City as the "poor man's Cape May." Beginning in the 1870s, Thompson and his cronies turned the city's waterfront area into a major blue-collar resort area. On the weekends, Thompson's Gloucester ferryboats would be mobbed with Philadelphians seeking relief from the so-called "blue laws." Gambling parlors, saloons, beer gardens, brothels and all types of amusements became available on Gloucester's waterfront. On some days, the population of the city swelled by 50,000 or more.
In 1887, Thompson purchased additional ground and erected a baseball park to allow the Philadelphia Athletics to play on Sundays. The A's planyed major league games at this park until 1891. He also built the Gloucester Racetrack and even held races on Sundays. He garnered much negative press over this activity. Thompson became so powerful that his minions elected him as a New Jersey state senator and he held sway over the so-called "jockey legislature." It took the reform movement, given birth in women's clubs around the state, to unseat Thompson.
Thompson also incorporated and constructed the Camden, Gloucester & Woodbury Railway, a pioneer trolley line built in the early part of the 1890s. The impetus for this line's
raison d'etre was the inability of Thompson's Gloucester ferryboats to handle the press of crowd coming from Philadelphia. He created a trolley line that originated at the Kaighn's Point ferry in Camden, allowing many more would-be visitors to enter the Valhalla of sin and amusement.
Thompson's crowning achievement, and the one that he is best remembered for, was the construction of Washington Park on the Delaware. This amusement park was located just over Big Timber Creek in West Deptford Township, Gloucester County. A grander amusement park never existed on the river before or since. Thompson had to have the biggest and best of everything—the largest Ferris wheel, 100 feet in diameter; the tallest water slide; the wildest scenic railway; and the longest pier along the river. If you arrived by steamboat, you had three choices to travel from the pier into the park: you could walk; you could climb aboard the cars of the scenic railway; or ride a trolley on a spur from the tracks of the Camden, Gloucester & Woodbury. The park burned in 1905; Thompson rebuilt, severely straining his finances and his health. In 1911, a second fire all but destroyed the entertainment center. Thompson was too sick and too bankrupt to rebuild a second time and his business colleagues razed the park.
Soon thereafter, the Joseph Campbell Company, forerunner of the Campbell Soup Company, purchased the land to use as an experimental farm, but the firm never completed their plans. When America entered World War I, the United States government leased the large parcel and retained a company to construct and operate the Woodbury Bagloading Plant, a facility that employed many women in filling powder bags with the necessary explosive pellets. Following the end of the First World War, the land again lay fallow until the Texas Oil Company—Texaco—leased or purchased a portion of the land in 1948 from Campbell to build its first eastern refinery outside of the Lone Star State. Today Sun Oil or Sunoco operates this refinery.
Washington Park on the Delaware occupied land primarily north of the main refinery property, although a portion of it extended onto the oil facility property. If I have the opportunity tomorrow, I will scan and post a few images of the park.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
