Only a representative few of the
visionary
citizens of the County stand forward in this brief account of early
industry
and agriculture:
Charles Read (1713-1774) was an
eminent
public official at Burlington and an agriculturist at his farm, "Breezy
Ridge," near the forks of the Rancocas. His journal presents a broad
view
of early-Jersey plant culture and animal husbandry, and presents Read
himself
as a man of exceptional talent.
In the 1760's he was selling off
farmlands
and straining his financial and inventive capacities to the limit in
pursuit
of a new vision: the building of a chain of iron furnace towns across
the
County of Burlington.
He was not the first nor was he
to be
the last of the County's famed "Ironmasters." William Richards, Joseph
Ball, and a dozen others were to follow, in the later 1700's and early
1800's. Of prior standing were Colonel Daniel Coxe, who forged iron at
Farnsworth's Landing (Bordentown) as early as 1725, using bog ore from
Crosswicks Creek; and Peter Bard, who was instrumental in founding iron
works at Mount Holly and on the site of New Lisbon in 1730, likewise
making
use of bog-ore from nearby stream-beds.
The fact that the reddish sludge
of bogs
could be evaporated into iron was nothing new, therefore, when Charles
Read aspired to his new role as an iron-master. The rapidity of his
wide-scale
operations, in a day of slow structural methods and slower travel, was
something else.
Buying up in quick sequence more
than
12,000 acres of pinelands at four locations, Read in the three-year
period
1765 to 1768 established Taunton Furnace, Aetna Furnace, Atsion Forge,
and Batsto Iron Works - each a town in itself, where Read with
incredibile
energy arranged for damming streams, building furnace and forge
equipment,
and housing workmen numbering in the hundreds: Irishmen, Negroes,
Quakers,
Indians.
The chain of his operations took
him repeatedly
from Taunton to Aetna (now Medford Lakes) and along the sandy
down-County
roads flanking the Batsto River, until he could ride no more. His
health
and finances becoming equally precarious in 1771 and 1772, he sold his
Batsto interests and sailed for Antigua in 1773, leaving his remaining
properties in the hands of his son.
Charles Read never returned to
the scene
of his dramatic achievement as a founder of furnaces, forges, and
towns.
His death a year later came as a mystery, reported from a remote town
on
the Tar River in North Carolina.
In the year 1797 Charles Newbold
(1764-1835)
a descendant of Michael and Ann Newbold who sailed from York- shire in
1680 to settle on the Assiscunk Creek in Mansfield Township was hard at
work developing a new and radical improvement of a very old and basic
agricultural
implement: the farmer's plow.
The earlier "plough" ranged from
the primitive
furrowing stick of the Indian to the massive wooden contrivance of the
white planter. Charles Newbold's invention made for a lot easier going
in the field, for he succeeded in casting, at Hanover Furnace near
Browns
Mills, a plow iron consisting of "the moldboard, share, landside and
point
in a solid piece." The development involved more than $30,000 in
experimentation
and marketing, in a day when $30,000 was anything but a small sum.
The Newbold plow, patented in
1797, proved
itself finally as a great benefit to the farmer, but like many another
brilliant invention - of little benefit to the inventor. Initially,
farmers
were slow to accept the cast plow for an uncanny reason: they thought
it
might poison the soil.
By the time Newbold's idea
gained general
acceptance, competitors were producing somewhat similar plows. The
inventor
recovered only part of his investment, but had the satisfaction of
reading
a prominent agriculturist's praise of his invention in the writings of
Thomas Jefferson.
Josiah White (1705-1780) was
described
as a "tall young Quaker, with full black eyes and yellow hair" when he
appeared at Mount Holly in 1729, moving up from Salem to buy a small
fulling
mill from Samuel Gaskill.
He drew on his weaving
experience in enlarging
the mill, on Pine Street, and set a cloth-manufacturing precedent
followed
by numerous industrialists in Mount Holly ever since. In his time,
Josiah
White was a very popular citizen who, it was said, `put Mount Holly on
the map." This ingenious Quaker practiced "herb-doctoring" on the side
- in a period when self-trained men of medicine were almost the only
ones
around.
He sired an equally ingenious
family.
His grandson of the same name, born in Mount Holly, was one of the
first
men in the region to realize the potential of coal as a source of
energy.
He harnessed the "black diamonds" of Pennsylvania mines to the purposes
of heating the City of Philadel- phia, by forming the Lehigh Coal and
Navigation
Company; and in so doing was largely responsible for bringing to an end
the stripping of the forests for fuel.
Other notable descendants
remained in
New Jersey. Among them were Barclay White of Cherry Street in Mount
Holly,
and his son Joseph J. White.
In conjunction with his
father-in-law
James A. Fenwick, young Joseph J. White ranged across Burlington County
in the 1860's to create a series of cranberry bogs near the headwaters
of the north branch of the Rancocas.
Thus came the unique 3,000-acre
enter-
prise of Joseph J. White, Inc. - and the town of Whitesbog on the
northeast
perimeter of the County. Growing up on the tract was a remarkable
daughter,
Elizabeth C. White, who was born in 1872 and destined to become a
genius
of New Jersey agriculture.
Inheriting much of the active
manage-
ment of the bogs in the early 1900's, Elizabeth C. White began as early
as 1910 a series of plant experiments leading to a second major crop on
the Whitesbog acreage - cultivated blueberries. The first successful
crop
was marketed in 1916.
It was the beginning of an
entirely new
agricultural product, well adapted to the soil of the outlying reaches
of the County. Miss White also developed an idea for marketing - from
the
chance notice of a box of candy covered with a "window" of clear
plastic.
The plastic was from Europe, and she began importing it to package
blueberries
long before the word Cello- phane was coined. By the time of her death,
the various strains of cultivated blueberries had developed into a
million-
dollar crop annually in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Michigan.
Since that time the venerable
buildings
at Whitesbog have been transformed into a Conservation and
Environmental
Studies Center - over which broods, seemingly, the spirit of a
pioneering
Burlington County family.
