So why is Pea Patch Island (supposedly) owned by Delaware?

September 8, 2014

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How did a sand­bar halfway between New Jer­sey and Delaware become the prop­er­ty of one state and not the other?

The British roy­al gov­ern­ment was noto­ri­ous­ly slop­py in its award­ing of land grants in its colonies. There’s a lot of bound­ary ambi­gu­i­ty and over­lap­ping claims. With Amer­i­can inde­pen­dence, the task for ref­er­ee­ing fell to the new fed­er­al government.

The spe­cif­ic prob­lem of Pea Patch was as young as the nation itself. Accord­ing to tes­ti­mo­ny record­ed in the 1837 records of the U.S. Sen­ate, Pea Patch was formed around the time of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion when a ship loaded with peas report­ed­ly sunk there (smells of a tall tale to me but I’ll let it stand). Allu­vial deposits formed a sand­bank around the wreck and it even­tu­al­ly coa­lesced into a full-fledged island.

When claims over­lap on an island in the mid­dle of a bound­ary riv­er, it’s typ­i­cal to look at two mea­sures: the first and most obvi­ous is to see if it’s clos­er to one side’s river­bank. The oth­er is to look at ship­ping chan­nels and use this as a de fac­to bound­ary. Accord­ing the the Sen­ate tes­ti­mo­ny, Pea Patch Island is both clos­er to New Jer­sey and on the New Jer­sey side of the ear­ly nineteenth-century ship­ping channel.

There’s also human fac­tors to con­sid­er: accord­ing to tes­ti­mo­ny in the Con­gres­sion­al Record the island was gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered a part of N.J.‘s Salem Coun­ty through the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. In 1813, New Jer­sey res­i­dent Hen­ry Gale bought Pea Patch Island and began devel­op­ing fish­eries on it. New Jer­sey for­mal­ly min­ut­ed the island as his prop­er­ty, con­firm­ing the land deeds and giv­ing it to his “heirs and assigns for ever [sic].”

State own­er­ship of Pea Patch would seem to be a pret­ty straight-forward deci­sion then: geo­graph­i­cal­ly New Jer­sey’s, cul­tur­al­ly a part of Salem Coun­ty, and owned by a South Jer­sey businessperson.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for Gale, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment thought it was a good strate­gic loca­tion for a new fort. They offered him $30,000 but he did­n’t think it was a fair price. They did­n’t want to nego­ti­ate and so made a side deal with the State of Delaware. They decid­ed the state bound­ary line should be drawn to the east of the island to make it a part of Delaware. The state declared Hen­ry Gale a squat­ter and gave full own­er­ship of the island to the U.S. War Depart­ment. Gale was forcibly evict­ed, his build­ings demol­ished, his fish­ery busi­ness ruined. It does­n’t take a con­spir­acist to imag­ine that the Con­gres­sion­al Delaware del­e­ga­tion got some­thing nice for their par­tic­i­pa­tion in this ruse.

(Lat­er on, con­tin­u­ing bound­ary dis­putes between the two states led to the truly-bizarre geo­graph­ic odd­i­ty that is the 12-Mile Cir­cle. Any­thing built off the New Jer­sey coast into the Delaware Riv­er is Delaware’s. This still reg­u­lar­ly sparks law­suits between the states. If you could get behind the scenes I imag­ine you could set a whole Boardwalk-Empire-like show in the Delaware land grant office.)

A cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er the crum­bling ruins of Fort Delaware would come under the admin­is­tra­tion of the Delaware Depart­ment of Nat­ur­al Resources and Envi­ron­men­tal Con­trol. The DNERC folks do a great job run­ning Fort Delaware. When read­ing up on this I was sur­prised to find Hen­ry Gale’s name. My wife’s fam­i­ly has Salem Coun­ty Gales so Hen­ry is at least some sort of dis­tant cousin of my kids. I think Delaware should give us a spe­cial toot on the fer­ry horn every time they land back on the soil of their ances­tral home.

QuakerQuakers in the World

January 19, 2010

I was able to make up this list that displays Quak​erQuak​er​.org membership profiles and upcoming gatherings in a geography-focused way.

Countries

Aus­tralia
Bel­gium
Cana­da
France
Ger­many
Greece
Ire­land
Kenya
Mex­i­co
Nether­lands
New
Zealand

Unit­ed
Kingdom

Unit­ed
States

Select Cities

Lon­don

Philadelphia


New York


Richmond


Greensboro


Portland


Seattle


Birmingham


Boston


Minneapolis


San Francisco

U.S. Regions

New
England


Mid-Atlantic


South­east US


Great Plains


Southwest


Midwest


North Pacific

U.S. States

Alaba­ma
Alas­ka
Ari­zona
Arkansas
Cal­i­for­nia
Col­orado
Con­necti­cut
Delaware
Dis­trict
of Columbia

Flori­da
Geor­gia
Hawaii
Ida­ho
Illi­nois
Indi­ana
Iowa
Kansas
Ken­tucky
Louisiana
Maine
Mary­land
Mass­a­chu­setts
Michi­gan
Min­neso­ta
Mis­sis­sip­pi
Mis­souri
Mon­tana
Nebras­ka
Neva­da
New
Hampshire

New
Jersey

New
Mexico

New
York

North
Carolina

North
Dakota

Ohio
Okla­homa
Ore­gon
Penn­syl­va­nia
Puer­to
Rico

Rhode
Island

South
Carolina

South
Dakota

Ten­nessee
Texas
Utah
Ver­mont
Vir­ginia
Wash­ing­ton
West
Virginia

Wis­con­sin
Wyoming

Gatherings by Theme

Con­ver­gent
Year­ly
Meetings


Gatherings

Retreats
Online

Young Adult

Gatherings by Location

New
England


Unit­ed Kingdom


Mid Atlantic


Baltimore


Philadelphia


Great Plains


Northwest

Ohio

Mike’s Precision Carpentry

December 3, 2009

Mike's Precision CarpentryMichael Oliv­eras is a long-time union car­pen­ter mak­ing the entre­pre­neur­ial jump and start­ing his own busi­ness: Mike’s Pre­ci­sion Car­pen­try, serv­ing the New Jer­sey, Penn­syl­va­nia and Delaware from his shop in Ham­mon­ton, NJ. He came to me look­ing for a web­page to adver­tise his new enterprise.
It’s a sim­ple design, a typ­i­cal small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The col­or scheme match­es his busi­ness cards for a bit of brand­ing. Oliv­eras faced a prob­lem typ­i­cal for new busi­ness­es: a lack of good pho­tos. The work he’s done for many years is not tech­ni­cal­ly his own (per the employ­ment con­tracts) so for now the pic­tures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I’m sure he’ll have a well-rounded port­fo­lio before long and we’ll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the mean­times, he added a cou­ple of great pic­tures of him and his fam­i­ly on the “About Us” page to give it that per­son­al touch.
See it live: www​.mike​s​pre​ci​sion​car​pen​try​.com

Doing it Twitter style

May 5, 2008

I’m a big user of both Del​.icio​.us, the social book­mark­ing sys­tem (it pow­ers Quak­erQuak­er and the dai­ly posts of links) and Twit­ter, the “micro-blogging” sys­tem that puts mini-messages into Quak­er Ranter (cur­rent­ly with a brown woodsy box­es). They both serve dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es for me and have dif­fer­ent styles. Well, I just real­ized I had writ­ten a Deli​.icio​.us post in a Twit­ter style.

I was book­mark­ing a new post by Dave the “Quak­er Agi­ta­tor,” who’s look­ing for help writ­ing a small grant. I left a minor com­ment and book­marked the post in Del​.icio​.us. I try to do that for most com­ments so that I can go back lat­er and see if any inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion took place in the mean­time. This time though I made an appeal for read­ers direct­ly through the Del​.icio​.us descrip­tion: “The Quak­er Agi­ta­tor is look­ing for help writ­ing a small grant. Any Ranter read­ers able to lend a hand?” I did this know­ing that a few hun­dred sym­pa­thet­ic read­ers will see this tomor­row morn­ing when the links go up. It’s prob­a­bly a moot point as the Quak­er Agi­ta­tor has a much larg­er audi­ence of sym­pa­thet­ic readers.

But styl­is­ti­cal­ly it’s an exam­ple of a cul­ture of a new media form start­ing to change an old­er form. This is a com­mon phe­nom­e­non in this fast-moving Web 2.0 world. Whether my Del​.icio​.us style will adapt or not I don’t know. It’s just an obser­va­tion for now.

Offers not refused

February 1, 2008

Microsoft­’s Steve Ballmer is the God­fa­ther of our age. His let­ter to Yahoo’s board in their unso­licit­ed takeover attempt is the twenty-first cen­tu­ry white col­lar rewrite of The God­fa­ther’s “I’ll make him an offer he don’t
refuse”:

“Depend­ing on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right
to pur­sue all nec­es­sary steps to ensure that Yahoo’s share­hold­ers are
pro­vid­ed with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to real­ize the val­ue inher­ent in our
proposal.”

Are the chills going up your spine? Flickr, Del​.icio​.us, Yahoo Pipes, heck half my uni­verse would sud­den­ly be run by the boys from Red­mond, coders not par­tic­u­lar­ly known for their Web 2.0 sleek­ness or social ingenuity. 

Opening up the QuakerQuaker listings

January 9, 2007

Every­one can now add posts to the Quak­erQuak­er cat­e­go­ry list­ings. Sim­ply book­mark the post in Del​.icio​.us, list the QQ cat­e­gories and it will be added to the page.
For exam­ple, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Con­ver­gent Friends. Go to the “Con­ver­gent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag” – in this case “quaker.convergent”. Book­mark the post you like, write a title and descrip­tion and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so lat­er the post will show up on the Con­ver­gent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruc­tion on how to use Del​.icio​.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.

Con­tin­ue read­ing

Call for Tom Fox memorials

March 17, 2006

John Paul Stephens has asked if I could help com­pile a list of online trib­utes to our Tom Fox, the fall­en Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er for FreetheCaptivesNow.org’sTom Fox Memo­ri­als page. I’ve start­ed a list, now up on Quak​erQuak​er​.org, that I’ll keep up for a few months. Any read­ers who know of some­thing that should be includ­ed should either email me at martink-at-nonviolence-dot-org or tag it “for:martin_kelley” in Del​.icio​.us. Thanks. Here’s my list so far:

h3. See also:
* “FreetheCaptivesNow.org”:http://freethecaptivesnow.org/
* “Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Watch”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/christian_peacemaker_teams/ over at Quak​erquak​er​.org
* “My posts on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er witness”:/martink/cpt
* “A real­ly nice page on Tom over at Elec­tron­ic Iraq”:http://electroniciraq.net/news/2302.shtml