While we typically think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the defining horrors of World War 2 bombing, the March 9, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo is generally thought to have been more deadly. As this article writes, “Three hundred B29 bombers dropped nearly 500,000 cylinders of napalm and petroleum jelly on the most densely populated areas of Tokyo.” The bombs killed an estimated 100,000 people according to Wikipedia, though the roundness of that number hints at the fact that death tolls for city-obliterating bombings are all guesswork.

There are some well-known ruins of early twentieth-century munition plants in South Jersey. The most well-known is the World-War-I-era Bethlehem Loading plant in Estell Manor, which is located in what is now one of the loveliest parks in the county, amidst nature trails and beautiful views of rivers and tidal marshes. The ruins are cool and in this bucolic setting, it’s easy to forget that their products resulted in thousands of deaths.

The Tokyo napalm was made elsewhere, though, at the National Fireworks plant northwest of Mays Landing. I’ve only just learned of it via Reddit and haven’t gone back there. From pictures the ruins look unremarkable (and right now is the height of tick season so I’m not trudging back there). The plant produced M69 napalm cluster bombs, built not to explode but to set cities aflame. From the book Twilight of the Gods:

The workhorse of the firebombing raids was the M69 napalm incendiary submunition, clustered in a 500-pound E46 cylindrical finned bomb. Nearly all had been produced at a remote and secret plant in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, about 15 miles inland from Atlantic City. Each M69 submunition or “bomblet” was essentially a cheesecloth sock filled with jellied gasoline, inserted into a lead pipe. Thirty-eight M69s were clustered together in an E46, bound by a strap that burst open on a timed fuse. The clusters were timed to open at 2,000 feet above the ground. Three-foot cotton gauze streamers trailed behind each bomblet, causing them to disperse over an area with a diameter of about 1,000 feet. On impact with the ground, a second fuse detonated and an ejection charge fired globules of flaming napalm to a radius of about 100 feet. Whatever these globules hit-walls, roofs, human skin- they adhered and burned at a temperature of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to ten minutes, long enough to start raging fires in the teeming, close-built wood and paper neighborhoods at the heart of all Japanese cities.”

While Hiroshima and Nagasaki are rightly remembered for ushering into the nuclear age—a single modern weapon could kill millions—the Tokyo bombing seems to have been deadlier and it certainly set a precedent, that it was acceptable to destroy entire cities full of civilians for military goals.

follows a road that ran in part between Crowleytown–where the Buttonwood Campground is today–and Batsto Village more than 200 years ago. The 1808 Hiking Trail is lined with massive, towering Atlantic white cedars in several places and cuts through Mordecai Swamp affording fantastic views deep into it. The 1808 Hiking Trail will provide two new hiking loops from the Batsto Visitor Center: a 1.7 mile loop and a 7 mile loop via the Batona and other connecting trails including the new Sand and Water Hiking Trail (0.9 miles, orange blazes) also opening on June 5.

Don’t believe the mileage: I was expecting a 1.7‑mile loop but ended up on a 7‑plus-mile out and back hike!

Here’s a thread on the always excellent NJPinebarrens forum on the Mordecai trail. The swamp was named after Mordecai Andrews, one of the earliest Quakers on the Atlantic side of South Jersey, a founder of the seaport town of Tuckerton in 1699.

Here’s a great article by Gabe Coia on Mordecai’s business empire. He was among the first English settlers in Little Egg Harbor and went about extracting the lumber resources upriver on the Mullica. There’s some great descriptions of thousand-year-old trees the size of 20-story buildings that were taken down by Andrews’s teams. Update: I thought the original roadbed of the trail was built as part of the logging enterprise but Gabe Coia emailed me that the roadbed of the 1808 Trail was built by Batsto owner Jesse Richards (in 1808, surprise!) and postdates Andrews’s lumber business in the area.

Putting a  swamp and felling all of these massive trees would have been a very labor-intensive undertaking. Coia’s article mentions Mordecai’s ties to Barbados: “The ships would return with produce, rum, and other goods to replenish supplies for the community at Little Egg Harbor.” The Caribbean island was the first economic break-out star in the British New World and it was the first place where Quakerism spread like wildfire outside of the British Isles. It also boasted an economy built almost entirely on massive slave-labor camps, where even individual Quakers sometimes owned hundreds of slaves. Given the well-documented trade, at least some of other goods Mordecai’s ships were probably bringing back were kidnapped Africans. This would have been the labor who logged impenetrable swamps.

Genealogy sites back up my suspicions. I looked Mordecai Andrews and slaves and found this, about his son-in-law John Mathis, who took over much of his business:

The virgin forest of the surrounding area provided timber for the ships which supported successful fishing and trade ventures that became the foundations for Great John’s ambitious land acquisition program. Mathis schooners, one of which was captained by his son Daniel, engaged in the West Indies trade, swapping South Jersey lumber for produce and other goods that enabled the Mathis farms to prosper. By the time of the Revolution he had four farms in operation containing about 5000 acres, which were worked and cleared by slaves. Was said to be an extensive slave holder and one of the earliest merchant smugglers. He became one of the largest land holders and one of the wealthiest and most distinguished men of Little Egg Harbor.

John Mathis’s son (Mordecai’s grandson) Micajah was disowned by Friends for refusing to emancipate the family’s enslaved Africans (he “did not then coincide with the rest of his society” when it finally adopted an antislavery stance in the 1770s). He must have recalculated his options by the time New Jersey started abolishing slavery and repented and manumitted everyone in time to be buried in the meetinghouse cemetery, natch.

All-in-all, it’s weird how so many local histories paint early settlers were like some kind of Ingalls-family subsistence farmers, living in caves and eking out hardscrabble lives in the wilderness. I’m sure there were rough patches, and don’t get me wrong: I like my hot shower in the morning and wouldn’t want to swap lifestyles outside of a few camping weekends a year. But in many cases these families planted themselves in abandoned Lenape towns connected by well-established Lenape trails with water access to international trade, amassed title to hundreds of acres of land because plagues and wars had decimated the locals, exploited non-renewable resources like thousand-year-old forests that were only now accessible because of enslaved labor brought from 4,000 miles away. (I’ve written before about how colonial Quakers made fortunes out of other’s wars.)

Insert record-scratch sound effect: but back to a pleasant early June afternoon. On today’s trip, the newly accessible path of the trail is beautiful and a must-visit trip for any nature-lover in South Jersey.

(Post updated various times as I dug more into the Andrews/Mathis family tree.)

As a lover of maps, I’ve often be intrigued by the environs  of the Delaware River. As the tides go up and down, the timelessness of the river becomes a kind of gentle solace to the industrialization along its banks. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the islands which somehow remain in its course. I’ve camped at Pea Patch Island down by Delaware and found a surprising family connection in its convoluted ownership. But closer to my commute is Petty Island, sitting alongside the New Jersey mainland a short distance north of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Petty Island is owned by the Citgo oil company and until just a few months ago was still dotted with its oil tanks and a large marine cargo facility. Satellite views still show this twentieth century industry. But in a very long and oftentimes-uncertain process it’s due to become part of New Jersey natural lands and eventually to become a preserve. The public is generally still not allowed on the island but there are occasional trips and on this past Saturday I got to tour the island.

We were very lucky to have Bob Shinn as our tour guide. He’s a walking encyclopedia of the island and the state geopolitics and waves of names and commercial uses it’s been through. He literally wrote the entry on Petty Island in the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of Quakers in the early recorded history and the deed between the first Quaker owner and three Lenape representatives is intact in the Haverford College collections (this deed was also a major part of a talk by Lenape–settler history given by Jean Soderlund a few months ago at Rancocas Meeting (see also her book Lenape Country)).

The ever-changing, never-settled history of the island continues with its name. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and—most importantly—Bob Shinn call it “Petty Island,” while the guard shack, welcome sign, NJ Audubon Society, and New Jersey Natural Lands Trust adds the possessive to make it “Petty’s Island.” The latter is especially awkward-sounding to my ears, as South Jersey place names characteristically drop the apostrophes over time (for example, the river landing named after Captain George May is now the town of “Mays Landing.”)

Remnants of the industrialization remain: the massive three-story loading facility has been kept to become the bones of a future visitors center; the adjacent asphalt parking area has just been replanted as a meadow and is mostly a lot of rocks and short blades of grass (with some Fowler’s toads!). We were lucky enough to be the first public group to be there since this had all been cleared away.

Bonus: I didn’t realize till we were about to get in our cars that South Jersey Trails was also on the tour. He wrote it up too! If you look carefully, I’m in the background of one of the shots, and now that I’m looking I think that’s him in some of mine.

I just came back from what was billed as a kind of hearing/information meeting on New Jersey Transit’s planned shutdown of the Atlantic City Line. At least two of us had taken this seriously enough that we had written 500-word statements (here’s mine) but as soon as I walked into the Atlantic City rail station this morning at 8am, I realized that this was just a pro-forma, disorganized PR appearance.

The chief executive of New Jersey Transit, Kevin Corbett ¹, was there telling us the same list of excuses for the shutdown they’ve been telling us, namely, that this is about Positive Train Control (PTC) testing ². At least I think he was. NJT apparently doesn’t believe in microphones. I squeezed as closely as I could in the amorphous crowd of maybe 100 passengers who had turned up but I still could only make out a few words. Nearest Corbett were video cameras whose spotlights lit up his face. Maybe I can watch the news tonight and hear the meeting that I drove forty minutes to attend³.

I did hear repeated invoking of “PTC” but no of those words were admissions or mea culpas about the long-simmering labor problems that have led to train crew shortages. Because NJ Transit’s management have been behind targets for training new crews, and because engineers have been leaving for better-paying jobs on Amtrak and Metro North, there aren’t enough crews to run all of its lines and also do PTC testing. The easiest fix to the labor shortage is to just shut down the least politically connected train line and redeploy its crews to NYC-bound trains. We’re told this is a temporary fix but what if the management problems hiring, training, and retaining crews continues to bottom out?

After half an hour of this, Transit police found portable line markers so that passengers could line up to talk to Corbett. There were many passengers I recognized from my 15 years of commuting this line and I stood trying to hear them but again, to no avail. It was clear he was just giving the line.

Nearby was a table with schedules. I was pretty unhappy but I asked them a specific question ⁴. At least the Transit employee said she didn’t know and would look into it. She even wrote “Farley” on a pad of paper. I guess my trip wasn’t totally wasted.

If you’re a South Jersey local affected by all this, there’s a petition to sign. My friend Joseph (bicycleriiights on Twitter) has also done a great job writing about the possibilities of visionary South Jersey transit reform. Update: Also, NoreasterNick did a much better job getting to the front of the line and challenging Corbett. His video is great.

When it ended early on the fourth day, New Jersey had been treated to a remarkable political spectacle, even by Trenton standards, complete with dueling press conferences, nasty backroom shouting matches, and even propaganda posters.  Some of it played out publicly — very publicly. What didn’t is told here, the inside story of what caused — and what finally settled — the New Jersey government shutdown of 2017.

It’s especially depressing to read the kind of horse trading that was going on behind the scenes: other measures floated to end the standoff. It was a game to see which constituency the politicians might all be able to agree to screw over. I presume this is normal Trenton politics but it’s not good governing and the ramifications are felt throughout the state.

Read: The inside story of The Jersey Shutdown, 2017

The bike parade was again sponsored by Toy Market, the independent toy store in town (supplier of much of our household’s Santa delivery). They had a table full of red, white, and blue bunting that we could apply to the bikes. We all had a lot of fun.

Notes for next year: a tandem extension on a adult bike looked like fun and then 7‑yo Gregory will be a good age for this (we should dig ours out from the back of the garage). Also: the parade has a dog contingent so maybe a much-calmer Francis will be able to be part of that next year (we’re due to pick up the service dog in 12 days!, eeek!!!)

Floating above the city and river.