The Blue Hole
- Thread starter crazyoz
- Start date
crazyoz said:
The "famous" Blue Hole in in Winslow in the Winslow Wildlife Management Area. Enter off of Rt322 between Whitehouse Rd and Coles Mill Rd. The entrance is very close to the later and there is a sign for the WWMA there.
Go approxamately 2 miles and there is a road on the left.(note: if you look at a topo it shows the Blue Hole on the right side of the road that I told you to go in. It is wrong. It is on the left.) This time of year you should be able to drive down it. In the summer it is quite grown over. It's not a long walk if you decide not to drive it. If you go let me know if it is blue. It looked green the two times I was there.
Steve
BEHR655 said:
Aha, that's interesting. Then I'll bet the maps on my Garmin GPS have that same error. I was there last year and couldn't find it. Those shotgun blasts did make me nervous though! But they seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the river.
The blue hole is most definately an old marl pit excavation void that filled with water. The marl is blue/green (bright) in color. There is one in Birmingham too. The stuff was a hot seller for atime in the mid to late 1800's. It was used for fertilizer and then for some other uses later on.
That particular blue hole showed up in one of Becks books and made it more famous than some of the others. When I visited it, it was more like a brown puddle than a blue hole, but it might have been the time of year/rain fall at the time.
Jeff
Jeff
Roostriz, The blue hole is rumoured to be bottomless, characterized by sudden tempeture drops, and many have allegedly drowned in it. It has also been known as the Devils' bathtub or swimming pool or something like that. The Jersey Devil lives in it's depths.
Jeff
Jeff
The only thing I don't understand is that you can clearly see the bottom. There was a story of a scientist a long time ago that tied a rope to a brick and the line played out before the brick hit any bottom. It has a lot of stories about it. I am guessing locals might of made them up to keep kids away from it since there has been drownings?
Although it looks a bit like a marl pit, it is a natural spring. Here is a quote from a Garden State Environet article
" One spring-fed pool in the Winslow Wildlife Management Area, a short
walk from the Egg Harbor River, was famed throughout New Jersey as the
mysterious Blue Hole. Bubbling with artesian flow, the water was so
deep-blue and cold that it was reputed to be bottomless.
The spring spawned creepy folk tales about the Jersey Devil dragging
swimmers to their doom. Travel writers like Henry Charlton Beck came
to check it out in the early 20th century.
In his "Forgotten Towns" collections of rural New Jersey stories,
Beck included a chapter titled "Maybe a Meteorite," speculating on a
celestial origin for the 130-foot-wide round hole. Whether it was a
space rock or the last ice age that made the spooky pool, it's just a
ghost of its old self today.
"There it is: the fearsome Blue Hole," Demitroff said, peering into
the now-still pond, brown-green with dead leaves and algae."
Lowering ground water levels must have reduced the pressure that once
churned the sand bottom and kept water flowing, he said.
" One spring-fed pool in the Winslow Wildlife Management Area, a short
walk from the Egg Harbor River, was famed throughout New Jersey as the
mysterious Blue Hole. Bubbling with artesian flow, the water was so
deep-blue and cold that it was reputed to be bottomless.
The spring spawned creepy folk tales about the Jersey Devil dragging
swimmers to their doom. Travel writers like Henry Charlton Beck came
to check it out in the early 20th century.
In his "Forgotten Towns" collections of rural New Jersey stories,
Beck included a chapter titled "Maybe a Meteorite," speculating on a
celestial origin for the 130-foot-wide round hole. Whether it was a
space rock or the last ice age that made the spooky pool, it's just a
ghost of its old self today.
"There it is: the fearsome Blue Hole," Demitroff said, peering into
the now-still pond, brown-green with dead leaves and algae."
Lowering ground water levels must have reduced the pressure that once
churned the sand bottom and kept water flowing, he said.
Blue Hole
The Blue Hole in Winslow existed there even in the early 1800's. I know because my grandfather used to tell stories about its existance as well as my father having swam in there many times when he was young. It was always very cold & always very deep. People were rumored to have drown there but my grandfather & father attributed that to the fact that the sides were very steep & not necessarily to easy to get out of, especially dangerous because you could apparently get pretty cold in there quickly, just like Inskips, the cedar stream that runs along near the Blue Hole.
The Blue Hole in Winslow existed there even in the early 1800's. I know because my grandfather used to tell stories about its existance as well as my father having swam in there many times when he was young. It was always very cold & always very deep. People were rumored to have drown there but my grandfather & father attributed that to the fact that the sides were very steep & not necessarily to easy to get out of, especially dangerous because you could apparently get pretty cold in there quickly, just like Inskips, the cedar stream that runs along near the Blue Hole.
Here is a link to Mark Demitroff's papers on spungs, cripples, blue holes and much else:
http://copland.udel.edu/~mdemitrf/index_files/Page390.html
Best start with the fourth one down: “A Geography of spungs and some attendant hydrological phenomena on the New Jersey Outer Coastal Plain.â€
http://copland.udel.edu/~mdemitrf/index_files/Page390.html
Best start with the fourth one down: “A Geography of spungs and some attendant hydrological phenomena on the New Jersey Outer Coastal Plain.â€