The 1808 Hiking Trail from Batsto to Crowleytown on the Mullica River opened today. From a Facebook description, it:
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.)
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