The Weymouth Township area presently in Atlantic County, New Jersey, was originally called Eysen Haven (Egg Harbor) by the Dutch. It was later spelled `New Waymouth' on various documents. New Waymouth was a large area in West Jersey settled by Quakers from England, a few Swedes and more local Lenni Lenape Indians. It was loosely affiliated with Gloucester County. In 1694 these ties were dropped and a constable was chosen for the new area called Weymouth, encompassing five townships. An act was passed in 1837 which created Atlantic County.

• 1774, Galloway Township separated from Weymouth Township.

• 1813, Hamilton Township, with 60,000 acres, was created from Weymouth Township.

• 1854, Atlantic City separated from Egg Harbor Township.

• 1867, Buena Vista Township was created from Hamilton Township.

• 1906, Folsom was created from Buena Vista Township.

• 1922, Corbin City (5,500 acres) was shed from Weymouth Township.

• 1925, Estelle Manor took 31,000 acres from Weymouth Township, leaving 10,000 acres, consisting of Belcoville and Dorothy.

• 1957, an additional 38 acre tract was annexed from Weymouth Township. This was essentially the properties of Elia Clemenson and Louis Strouse.

 

The Lenni Lenape Indians of New Jersey were members of the Delaware tribe, of the great Algonquin family of Indians. These Algonquins were scattered along the Atlantic seaboard from Labrador to the Everglades of Florida. They lived along the river valleys because of good transportation and the adequate supply of nature's food in the forests and in the water. They never cut down trees or destroyed the environment.

The Lenni Lenape were described by early settlers as being lovable and hospitable. The first Europeans arrived desperate for food and shelter. The Indians introduced them to new types of foods, such as corn, beans, squash, melons, pumpkins, cauliflower and tobacco. The Indians would dig holes about three feet apart, place a fish in it for fertilizer, and plant several seeds of corn, beans and squash in it. The corn would grow a stalk on which the beans would climb, and the squash would come along later.

The first winter the Indians helped the settlers to build temporary homes since they hadn't time to fell trees for log cabins. They made wickams, like the Indians, by creating a light frame of small trees and covering this frame with branches and pieces of bark. The following year one-room cabins were built with a large fireplace. Cracks were filled with mud and moss. Small windows were added, covered with oiled paper to allow more light to enter. Heavy wooden shutters were also added.

The Europeans began to mix with the Indians, resulting in the Indians' decimation due to contracted diseases for which the Indians had no natural immunities. Statistics suggest that more than fifty percent of the Lenni Lenape succumbed to diseases such as smallpox, measles, etc. There is no record of massacres or treachery by the Indians in our area where the Quakers settled. This was principally due to the love of peace and justice exemplified by the Quakers. However, the Friends Society agreed that they ought not sell the Indians any rum, as the Indians reacted badly to alcohol.

Along our shores may be found the shell mounds where the Lenni Lenape buried their people with their belongings, some inscribed with their totem, the turtle. A newspaper article dated January 28, 1890 records the finding of skeletons under an oyster shell mound near the bay in Pleasantville. One was thought to be the remains of an old chief, since the skull was encased in a turtle's shell, surrounded by clam shells and arrowheads.

A later newspaper account (February 1, 1905, also from Pleasantville), states that fourteen skeletons were exhumed from the top of a mound 60'x60'. The bodies had been buried three feet deep. Flints and arrows were found with the bones.

Eventually, the Lenni Lenape became upset about being pushed from their land. In 1758 the Colonial legislature appropriated the equivalent of $2,000 and appointed five commissioners to pay any just claims due the Indian nations of the colony. In 1762, 74 pounds of this was expended to purchase 3,044 acres of land for a reservation, called Brotherton (now Indian Mills) in Burlington County. This was the first reservation in the United States. About one hundred Indians were brought there and required to relinquish titles to all unsold land. The government built them houses, a store, a sawmill and a meeting house.

The reservation experiment became a failure. Indians could not live in a closed village. The Indians became very poor and received assistance for food and clothing. In 1801 a tribe in New York invited the New Jersey tribe to join them. This began the years of moving from reservation to reservation in other states. By 1820 the Delaware who remained in the United States crossed the Mississippi River. Ultimately (1867) this tribe purchased a district in present Oklahoma from the Cherokee tribe, where a few Lenape still remain within the Cherokee Nation.

War with England became inevitable because of growing differences in life, thought and economic interests between the American colonies and the mother country. War broke out in New England and moved to New Jersey when General George Washington, in retreat, made his unexpected crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas, 1776, to defeat a Hessian force at Trenton. The Americans then struck at Princeton.

The first schools appeared about 1800. They were usually a single room, built in conjunction with a church. Schools were not free. During the summer a teacher would canvas the area for pupils, going house to house. The charge was $3.50/quarter/pupil. The teacher received $10 a month and board. She would board around with her pupils' families. Even earlier, churches were used as school buildings, with the minister teaching. These schools were of Dutch, English and Quaker origin.

A feeling prevailed that all children should be allowed to attend school, whether they were poor or rich, and regardless of religion. In 1820 towns were allowed to raise money from taxes to pay for the poor. Thus, the first schools were called ``pauper schools''. In 1871, New Jersey passed a law requiring all public schools to be free for all pupils.

In the late 1700's, Bishop Asbury introduced Methodism into South Jersey. According to Early History of Atlantic County, the first church meetings were held in homes at the present Port Republic (Wrangleboro) and Smithville areas. By 1800 numerous churches had sprung up, including one in 1771 at Head of the River. The ministers went around a circuit of churches on horseback over Indian trails, visiting each congregation every four to eight weeks, as possible. At first only summer meetings could be held since the churches were simply constructed and not finished with windows, heat or candle light.

During the next few years windows, plastering and a ten-plate stove were added to the Port Republic two-story frame meeting house, which was 25 feet square. In 1792 a new, more substantial church was built at Head of the River which still stands. In fact, meetings still are held there once a year to keep the church active, and the cemetery is also maintained.

In 1828 a Bargaintown Circuit was formed which included South River, Estel's, Weymouth Furnace and the Mays Landing area.

The first Catholic Church in Atlantic County was built in 1827 at Pleasant Mills, near Hammonton, where a sawmill and iron forge were set up which drew a colony of wood choppers and sawyers. Many Catholics had settled in the area from Germany, where they had been religiously persecuted. They sought peaceful homes but found bigotry here also. They practiced their faith in private houses until chapels could be built for services. The Revolutionary War brought together all faiths, and thus differences diminished and rights became recognized. The Jessie Richards family bought the Pleasant Mills and nearby Batsto businesses and donated land for the first Catholic church south of Trenton.

The Catholics in Mays Landing had to travel to Egg Harbor for church services until Mrs. Patrick McGeary opened her home to children of the faith. Due to her interest, the new St. Vincent DePaul Roman Catholic Church and parochial school were built in 1906. Dorothy churches will be included later.

Sturdy wood choppers leveled the forests of pine, oak, and white cedar. The heavy timbers were sent to the mills for making lumber and the cedar was hand split into shingles. The branches were converted into charcoal and used in the furnaces and forges, or shipped to Philadelphia for fuel where it was burned in charcoal burners. The charcoal was transported by slow-moving oxen, taking three to four days to return from Philadelphia.

In the forests wood choppers' shanties and smoking tar kilns or charcoal pits were tucked here and there. These operations took eight to ten days to complete. The tar run would be checked to see whether it was ready to be drawn.

The charcoal burners, or colliers, were better paid but were isolated from their families for weeks at a time. For the best grade of charcoal, the collier would have to canvas the forest for gum, maple, poplar or oak; cut these trees to length and transport the wood back to the site. About three cords were used per burn. The wood was placed in a circle with a center opening for starting and admitting a limited amount of air. The pile was covered with sod down to the ground. Holes were made on the side of this mound for draft. A piece of burning wood would be dropped into the center opening and allowed to smolder. If white smoke came from the side holes, it was fine. Black smoke indicated too much draft and rapid burning, so the side holes were closed over bit by bit. One batch produced one ton of charcoal. According to Dr. Ralph K. Turp's accounts, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia used charcoal from Mays Landing.

In 1788, charcoal cost five pence/bushel. One year's room and board was fifteen pounds, or $75.00. One shilling (British) equaled twelve pence.

Tuckahoe, Mays Landing and Somers Point were important early shipbuilding and repair centers. George May built several ships in Mays Landing on Babcock's Creek. This was at the time of the blockade by England, with no trade allowed with them. Therefore there was a need for ships to trade with the West Indies which supplied us with rum, spices, tobacco, salt and molasses. Our ships also traveled to Mexico and even around the Horn to the Pacific coast. Local ships transported lumber, ice, fish, grain and special commodities ordered.

In 1800 Christopher Vansant built a full rigged vessel in Bargaintown along Patcong Creek. Five more ships were built there during the next fifteen years and in 1825 John Somers opened his shipyard at Sculls Bay. The woods used were pine, oak, gum and hickory. During the next half century shipbuilding boomed when hundreds of vessels were built, mostly in the 30-40 ton size. These schooners plied between Gravelly Run (Mays Landing) and Manhattan and carried much charcoal, lumber, iron and products such as stoves and pipe.

A strange condition existed in Dennis Creek (Dennisville), which is seven miles from Cape May Court House. Many ships from 500-1,000 tons were built here, with as many as eleven ships in stock at one time. Due to narrowness of the creek, the ships had to be launched sideways, getting many launching guests drenched.

In this area of shipbuilding, as well as Mays Landing, captains built unusual three-story homes, topped by a cupola called a ``Widow's Walk'' or ``Watch'' whereby captains' wives could oversee the entrance to the bay and could keep watch for the safe return of their husbands' ships.

Iron furnaces started to be built in the 1750's and finally petered out around the 1860's. These foundries proliferated since there was wealth to be made. Tradesmen emigrated from England and Europe and were offered considerable land and even an interest in the business in order to accelerate production through their skills. The iron product was cast iron, which has a very high carbon content and therefore does not oxidize or rust readily, as does today's refined iron and steel. The first cast iron water pipes cast for Philadelphia at Walkers Forge to replace the original wooden ducts are one hundred and fifty years old. Some of these still exist intact.

Bog iron is actually a soft pile of rust. It was harvested from the lowlands (bogs), was heated with charcoal and smelted with limestone. It melted at over 2000 F. and ran into molds to make iron ``pigs''.

The furnaces employed a lot of help and some locations provided free living quarters, usually only two or three rooms. Work was steady, six or seven days a week. (The Weymouth Furnace inaugurated a six day week, to allow all to celebrate the Sabbath.) Each location lasted 15-50 years or more, as the raw materials of iron and wood were available. People came to these areas to form new towns. When the resources were gone, the towns disappeared.

When planning for a new furnace on a creek, provisions were always made and approved by the authorities to enable damming the creek to provide water-wheel power for ancillary businesses such as forges, gristmills and sawmills. This provided more work and made the area self-sufficient.

In our locale were many furnaces: Weymouth Furnace, Walkers Forge, Aetna Forge, Atsion Furnace, etc.

Labor costs around 1806 for professional carpenters were $1.00-$1.25/day. Furnace workers and laborers received considerably less. The furnaces discussed below represent the general nature of the business and products produced.

Weymouth Furnace

First operated by Joseph Ball, the Weymouth Furnace was built around 1754 and was in business until 1865. A forge was added later which made cannons and balls for the Continental Army and the War of 1812. Weymouth was a large furnace and produced 900 tons of castings annually. The forge had four fires and two hammers which could produce 200 tons of bar iron per year. This was used principally in the shipbuilding industry nearby. The furnace and foundry employed about nine hundred men who lived free in company housing.

A gristmill and sawmill were added which employed another 90 men. After the furnace was closed down, a paper factory was built to make paper for books. Today, only the ruins of a mill race and foundry remain. Mays Landing Water Company acquired the property and the site was later contributed to the Atlantic County Historical Society as a historical site.

Aetna (Etna) Furnace

The Aetna Furnace, later called Tuckahoe Furnace, was a smaller installation, located on the Tuckahoe River below Head of the River. It was built by Joshua Howell and John R. Coates. The furnace was 25' high, with a 14' base and a 3' diameter top. A ramp at the rear was used to charge the furnace. The furnace chimney was 60' high and made of Jersey reddish stone. It was operated from 1816-32. It produced bar iron, nails and spikes used in the local shipbuilding industry in Tuckahoe and Mays Landing.

Walkers's Forge

Walker's Forge was located nearby on South River, just east of present Belcoville. It was built by young Lewis M. Walker, who was born in Berks County, Pa., in 1791. At the young age of twenty, he became the manager of the large Weymouth Furnace. As this furnace ran out of bog iron, Walker traveled to Tuckahoe in search of iron ore. He liked what he saw, purchased land along South River, and in 1820 left Weymouth works to build his own furnace. He got approval to dam the river for water power for a forge and sawmill. He also built himself a beautiful two-story Jersey ironstone mansion on Maple Avenue, which I remember as a youngster. It was since carried away, stone by stone, to build fireplaces.

The dimensions of the furnace were 30' high, by 30' square at the bottom, which tapered to 15' square at the top. A long ramp was also used to feed the furnace. It was said that eight wagonloads of charcoal were needed each day. Approximately one hundred men were employed, including those who produced the charcoal from the hand-cut wood and branches. Pipes and fittings were cast as well as stoves. Iron bands and fittings were made, along with nails and tools.

The local iron industry died out after the 1860's as the supply of bog ore and wood was depleted. (The old bog iron furnaces required charcoal from 1,000 acres of woods per year.) Meanwhile, iron ore deposits and hard coal were discovered in western Pennsylvania in great quantities. New and more efficient smelting operations were started there around 1840 and later developed by Andrew Carnegie.

Since lumbering is closely related to charcoal production and cord wood trading, much of this subject has already been covered.

The era of building iron furnaces in South Jersey brought new workers such as wood choppers, sawyers, teamsters and laborers, who formed new towns.

Shingles were split by hand from cedar wood, which abounded in the swamps. These shingles were shipped to New York and Philadelphia. Much later, enormously large fallen cedars dating back thousands of years were found and retrieved from six foot depths below the swamp surfaces. Sawyers also used white cedar to make clapboards, lumber, lath, shipboards and cedar paneling used in better homes.

South Jersey had fine white sand (silica) that was needed for making glass. The early furnaces were fired with oak and pine wood and needed intense heat to melt the glass at 3100° F. Limestone was added to improve the glass and lower the melting temperature. When the glass starts to cool, it becomes plastic and can be formed. At this time a hollow rod blowpipe was used to gather a glob of molten glass from the furnace. This glob was rolled on a piece of stone or metal plate to shape it, and then blown to stretch out the center of the glob, which hangs onto the blow tube. It is then placed in a clay, wood or iron (jar) mold and blown out to fit the mold. Today this process is automatized and done with great precision.

Other early glasshouses were built in Glassboro in 1775 and Port Elizabeth in 1799, by James Lee. Later, in 1806, Lee started an operation in Millville, which evolved into the present large Kerr Glass Manufacturing Corporation.

In 1825, John Scott erected a glass works on Stephen's Creek in Estellville in the old Game Preserve. In 1834, Daniel and John Estelle invested in the booming business. The 1825 Tariff Law had given a preference to glass made in this country. The works produced window glass and later was converted to blowing bottles and employed approximately eighty men. With the gristmill and sawmill, the population of Estellville blossomed. The glassworks operated until 1877 when the fuel supply was depleted.

Slavery was common in Europe for one hundred years prior to its establishment in the colonies. Most of the hard labor was done by slaves. In the early 1700's, the Duke of York was president of the ``Royal African Slave Company''. Queen Anne instructed the governor of the province of New Jersey to negotiate with the Slave Company to obtain a sufficient number of Africans at a moderate price and that a bounty of 75 acres of land be given to any man who brings or sends a slave, over fourteen, to the province of New Jersey. There was also a duty to England for the importation of slaves. They were harshly treated according to accounts in 1733, when they could be burned alive for assaulting a white woman. In 1737, New Jersey had 3,981 slaves.

Perth Amboy, where vessels landed from Africa, was the distributing center for slaves. The slaves were held in barracks until sold.

As early as 1696, the Quakers in the north advised the abolition of slavery. In 1784, Governor Livingston proposed the emancipation of slaves and freed his own two. In 1804 by law in New Jersey and New York, all negro infants were born free. By 1820, the number of slaves dropped to 674.

Slave importation to the United States was outlawed in 1808. However, illegal smuggling continued until the Civil War. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. At the Batsto Mansion one can still see the false floors under which slaves were hidden, presumably as part of the Underground Railway.

Reading several diaries written during the past several centuries, it was gleaned that working men in the 17th century survived on the average into their forties, while their wives lived ten years longer. In the 18th century men lived into their fifties; and in the 19th century, into their 60's. In the 20th century men survive into their 70's and women five to seven years more. Of course, there were always a few who outlived these averages.

An amusing piece of South Jersey folklore that has existed since the early 1800's concerns the Jersey Devil. This monster allegedly originated in Estellville, from which it flew to Leeds Point. The story claims that a Mrs. Leeds of Estellville was expecting her thirteen child. Thoroughly fed up, she shouted in anger, ``I hope it's a devil!''

The subsequent child was purportedly born with horns, tail, batlike wings and a head like a horse. It flew out the window and over to Leeds Point, where it is supposed to reside. According to local superstition, it always reappears preceding the start of a war. A number of people have sworn to have seen it over the years. At one time, a reward had even been offered for its capture, since it was thought to be a rare Australian bat.