A few miles north of the Delaware Water Gap lies a mining complex surrounded by legend.

The first thing the visitor might notice from the Coppermine Trail parking lot is a small shed built into the side of the hill. It stands out better in pictures with snow.

The stone shed might have served as an icehouse in its day. Inside it has an arched ceiling and some odd graffiti.

The foundation of a large mill is terraced into the hillside nearby.

The mill was obviously a large building, and this photo from around 1905 shows what it looked like when the mine was in operation.

Today the foundations are covered in moss as the stones are reclaimed by the forest.

The explorer should be careful around these walls, as there are plenty of opportunities for injury.

A side trail along the brook leads to a mine entrance. On the way is a trench that might have been an exploratory working.

Farther up the creek is an old adit (a roughly horizontal mine shaft).

Unfortunately it is shut with a steel cage that makes me think of Jurassic Park for some reason. Looking through the cage you can see that it would be an exciting place to explore.

The mines here were worked in a series of stages from the mid 1700s until the early 1900s.

Legend holds that Dutch settlers, lured by Indian tales and a sense of adventure, first prospected for copper in the Pahaquarry area during the 1650s. They were supposed to have built a road over 100 miles northeast to Kingston (then called Esopus or Wiltwyck) to transport copper ore to the Hudson River for transport, as the Delaware river is not navigable by large vessels at this point.

A marker along Old Mine Road relates this story.

However, as many historians have argued, this story is most likely not true.

Herbert C. Kraft makes a thorough case against the legend in his book The Dutch, the Indians, and the Quest for Copper. Kraft notes that there is no archeological or documentary evidence of Dutch mining in the area. The legend is based on a pair of letters that appeared in a journal in 1828. The dubious story claimed to present “traditional accounts” of a copper mine and a road to Kingston built by Dutch miners. Wishful readings of other sources have given the legend the appearance of historical truth.

Besides a lack of evidence, there are other reasons why the Dutch origin story is unlikely. The Minsi Indians who lived in the area did not mine or work with copper, so Dutch settlers a hundred miles away would not have heard of copper deposits from them. This is partly because the copper at Pahaquarry exists in low concentration in very hard sandstone – hard enough that the wrought iron tools in use in colonial times would not have lasted long. Even tempered steel drills were quickly worn out during a futile effort to make the mine profitable in 1901. Wagons used in the New Netherland colony could not have hauled the heavy rock very far, and there is no evidence that smelting facilities were built in New Netherland.

In addition, it would have been difficult for the Dutch to travel so far through hostile territory. Relations between the Dutch and Esopus Indians were hostile and broke into open war in 1655. While the Minsi did not wage war on the Dutch, they were friendly to the Esopus.

The situation stabilized somewhat after the English took over New Netherland in 1664. Limited mining at Pahaquarry probably began in the mid 1700s, though progress would have been stalled by the French and Indian War (1756-1763). The Minsi had started to leave the area by this point. They had signed an agreement with English settlers in 1713 but felt like they had been shorted because they disputed which tracts had been ceded and they expected to be allowed to continue hunting.

The Old Mine Road started at Kingston and gradually went southwest as settlers pushed farther into the interior. It finally reached the Delaware Water Gap in 1830 when the first road through the Gap on the New Jersey side was built. Presumably a small spur would have led to the mine when it was active, though the earliest mapped road to the mines was built in 1790 and required crossing the Delaware river a mile south of the mines.

Later mining ventures proved unsuccessful despite the expansive operations.

A new dam near the mouth of the Mine Brook was built around 1902. A few chunks of concrete sticking out of the ground were probably part of the dam.

Another adit can be found up the hill along the Coppermine Trail. It has a surprisingly small opening.

A sign next to this opening says that the mines were closed because humans might spread diseases that harm bats. Years ago the National Park Service gave tours of the mines.

The Pahaquarry mine property was bought by a Trenton Boy Scout council in 1925, and the last government survey, during the tough years of World War II, once again concluded that mining the area was not worth it. The federal government bought the land in the 1960s for the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

The Coppermine Trail continues up the ravine on its way to the Appalachian Trail. The hiker can easily forget the busy complex below as the trail curves by narrow waterfalls and undisturbed boulders.

Boysen, Robert L. Kittatinny Trails. New York – New Jersey Trail Conference, 2004. Pages 67-68.

“Dutch Colonies.” National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/kingston/colonization.htm

“Hikes: The Gap and New Jersey.” Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/dewa/planyourvisit/upload/sb2Hikes-2.pdf

Kraft, Herbert C. The Dutch, the Indians, and the Quest for Copper: Pahaquarry and the Old Mine Road. Seton Hall University Museum, 1996. Pages 43, 46, 68-71, 90-92, 96-101, 105, 116, 123, 155-157.
Map photo is from page 122. Thanks to whoever listed this book on the Wikipedia Pahaquarry page.

Muller, FL. “Old Dutch Mine.” Unearthing New Jersey, New Jersey Geological Survey. Vol. 5 No. 2, Summer 2009. Pages 8-9. http://www.njgeology.org/enviroed/newsletter/v5n2.pdf

“The Dutch Mines: Fact or Myth?” Spanning the Gap, National Park Service. Originally published in 1988, revised in 2004 by Susan Kopczynski.
http://www.nps.gov/dewa/historyculture/upload/cmsstgCOPER.pdf

Stretching across the northwest corner of New Jersey is a ridge that the Lenape people called Kittatinny – the Endless Mountain. Kittatinny is part of an Appalachian ridgeline that extends from southern New York to Virginia.

One of the few passages through the mountain is formed by the Delaware River: a feature called the Delaware Water Gap.

Looking West from Mount Tammany, a point named for a Lenape chief honored for his diplomacy, the observer sees Mount Minsi across the water in Pennsylvania.

The climb up is fairly steep, and on a cloudy day you can see how high a 1500 foot elevation can be.

This area was once home to a branch of the Lenape known as the Minsi, whose name means “People of the Stony Country.”

Today, Interstate 80, a high-speed corridor from the Hudson River to points west, travels through the Gap. Numerous hikers ascend Mount Tammany all year.

A quieter and slightly longer trip to the peak can be made by taking the Blue Dot Trail.

Looking south from the ridge, the old Lackawanna Cutoff rail bridge over the Delaware can be seen. Trains that crossed this bridge would have then headed through the Gap.

Speaking of the Lackawanna Cutoff, an astute observer can also find the top of the Paulinskill Viaduct peeking out over the treetops.

Kittatinny is a region rich in history. Today it still forms a boundary and a landmark for travelers going between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The best way to appreciate the mountain is of course by walking on it.

Notes:

Boysen, Robert L. Kittatinny Trails. New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, 2004.

Hikes at the Gap, National Park Service.
http://www.nps.gov/dewa/planyourvisit/upload/sb2Hikes.pdf

Lane, Wheaton J. From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and Transportation in New Jersey, 1620-1860. Princeton University Press, 1939. (Minsi Name, page 15).

Norwood, Joseph White. The Tammany Legend. Meador, 1938.
http://www.archive.org/stream/tammanylegendtam00norw/tammanylegendtam00norw_djvu.txt

Within northern New Jersey’s Watchung Reservation, a cluster of cottages in various states of repair mark the location of a mill town that became a summer resort.

Native Americans called the region the “Wach Unks,” which means high hills. A number of Native American artifacts have been found around the village site, and it is believed the area was used for winter residence. The land was sold to white men in 1664.

In 1736, Peter Wilcox purchased a 424 acre tract from the Elizabethtown Associates. He soon established a mill along the Blue Brook.

Early settlers are buried on a hill near the village. According to a Park Commission book from the 1960s, all of the original markers had disappeared, but the head stone of John Willcox was recovered and put into storage to prevent it from being stolen again.

In 1845, David Felt bought about 760 acres with water rights along the valley. He chose the location because the water was considered good for making paper and there were already two mills ready for his use.

Walking through the area today, passing families enjoying some time outdoors and people leisurely walking their dogs, you don’t get a sense of how regimented life here once was.

Felt considered the area “an ideal spot on which to found a village where the inhabitants would be removed from the temptations and sorrows of city life and would enjoy goodness, peace, and plenty.”

He set up housing for workers, but also subjected them to rigid rules on and off the job.

According to one account,

The owner of the village was a man of a strong, positive nature, cold and reserved, and he ruled the village people as far as he could with as much methodical strictness as he applied to his boxwood hedges and well trimmed cedar trees. All of his employees were compelled to trade at his store, and those who lived in his two large boarding houses had to keep within the strictest bounds. At seven o’clock in the morning the bell on the great barn at the ‘Mansion House’ rang for work to begin. At twelve and one o’clock it rang for the dinner recess, and when it sounded again the millwheel stopped and the mill hands came trooping out of the big door and climbed the winding paths beneath the trees on the bluff for their suppers. When night had fallen and nine o’clock came, the bell rang out again, and ill-fared the youth and maiden who were found strolling in the rocky glen or beside the rushing millstream, for a rigid rule was laid down that all in the village must be within doors when the last bell echoed through the darkened woods.

But Feltville would soon become a place of leisure. In 1860, David Felt sold the village and returned to New York City. Future owners failed to keep successful businesses. Mills crumbled and houses were abandoned as the place became a local curiosity known as the Deserted Village.

In 1882 the property was bought at auction by Warren Ackerman, who rehabilitated it as a summer resort called Glenside Park.

A brochure boasted that “The air is dry, clear and entirely free from even a hint of malaria.” Located on a wooded hillside a short carriage ride from a train station, the resort was largely successful until the mid 1910s. Its decline has been attributed to an increasing popularity of shore resorts and to the automobile making other places more accessible to people in the resort’s target market.

Glenside Park’s land was soon bought by a number of proprietors, then by Union County during the establishment of the Watchung Reservation in the 1920s.

During the Great Depression, the Park Commission restored the cottages and rented them for cheap to families who had lost their homes and properties. Soon all the cottages were occupied and a community identity was established.

To this day, some of the cottages are private residences, outposts of habitation among nearly identical buildings making a slow return to nature.

The people who have lived in the places we explore had different reasons to be there. For some, the Feltville area was handy housing for a nearby job exploiting the resources of wood and water. Some spent winters there and others enjoyed the country air during the summer. For today’s visitors, the Deserted Village offers a chance to witness time and nature weathering old structures while on a nice stroll through the woods.

Notes:

Hawley, James B. The Deserted Village and The Blue Brook Valley. Union County Park Commission, 1964.
http://www.mountainsidelibrary.org/HistoryFiles/DesertedVillBBValley.pdf

If you have traveled on Interstate 78 between the Newark area and I-287, you might have noticed driving under bridges with trees on them. These bridges link areas of the Watchung Reservation, a large county park split by the interstate.

One of the bridges carries no pavement at all.

The Watchung Mountains are a fairly low range in northeastern New Jersey. In the 1950s the region was characterized by rural towns and park lands. When the US government announced a plan for an interstate highway through the area in 1957, it began a long fight with local officials and conservationists.

The Watchung section of Interstate 78 was finally completed in 1986. The highway cut through the northern part of the Reservation, and bridges were constructed to serve as wildlife crossings.

As I was searching online for information about the Watchung Reservation, I found that the Wikipedia page on the topic said, “Land bridges designed to allow wildlife to travel safely between the severed parts of the Watchung Reservation were built, but they have failed and are largely not used by animals.[citation needed]”

That is a bold statement to make without citations. I figured that while I explored the area I should look for signs of wildlife. Unfortunately the previous day’s snow had turned to rain during the night, so it was not as easy as I hoped it would be.

I did find numerous animal tracks, which are kind of hard to photograph.

There were several piles of droppings on the wildlife bridge.

Laying on the ground to photograph feces was a new experience for me!

There was also a game trail that went all the way across the bridge through some bushes.

There are deer bones on the bridge too.

Even hawks like the place.

“Largely not used” is a pretty vague statement, but it is clear that animals do use the crossing to some degree. There are plenty of downed tree branches in the area for anyone who would be interested in building a blind and sitting in highway noise and fumes for a few hours to observe wildlife.

West of the bridge without pavement is the old Nike Road crossing. It is named after the Nike missile base that used to be in the area, one of the many air defense installations that ringed New York and other major cities until the Nike system became obsolete. The Watchung installation, NY-73, was operational from 1958 to 1963.

There is a gap between the road surface and the wooded shoulder of the bridge, which is a little spooky to look through and see tractor-trailers scream by below.

The road makes a sharp turn and heads uphill.

It would be a nice view if not for the incessant highway noise.

A rusty fence topped with barbed wire is presumably a remnant of the Nike base.

Near the top of the hill, the road curves back and ends at a residential neighborhood. But a side path leads to the grounds of a high school, near where the Nike radar installation stood.

While much of the Watchung Reservation is surprisingly quiet, the noisy parts have a few stories to tell. The federal government’s support for automobile and highway travel, its conflicts with locals about new construction, and the effort to accommodate or appease environmental concerns are part of America’s post World War II story just as much as the missiles deployed to intercept Soviet bombers. Taking the time to explore on foot gives you a chance to gain a new understanding of a place you might have driven through hundreds of times.

Notes:

“The Bunny Bridge of Watchung.” The Lostinjersey Blog. March 19, 2009.
http://lostinjersey.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/the-bunny-bridge-of-watchung/

Di Ionno, Mark. Backroads, New Jersey: Driving at the Speed of Life. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Pages 17-20.
Preview at Google Books.

“MISSILES in Mountainside — Nike Battery NY-73.” The Hetfield House, Mountainside Historic Preservation Committee, November, 2009.
http://www.mountainsidehistory.org/files/HHnewsletter09final.pdf

Watchung Reservation Trail Map. Union County Department of Parks and Community Renewal. Bob Cosman, 2001, Updated 2010.
http://ucnj.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/wrmap804.pdf

For more Watchung Reservation adventures, see the Head First post on Feltville and the Hidden New Jersey post on Surprise Lake and the Glenside Avenue overpass.

The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway is a great place to enjoy a view of the river and the New York skyline.

Looking south gives you a great view of the Freedom Tower and both sides of the river. But if you are like me, you will start to wonder what the little tower by itself on the New Jersey  side is (the western side – on the right in this picture). And you will want to take a walk and find out.

The tower stands on the end of a long pier.

A similar building stands nearby, surrounded by an upscale development and park benches.

It turns out that both of these structures are directly over the Holland Tunnel. This is easy to find out with a smartphone map, but should be confirmed using street signs and landmarks anyway.

The buildings’ relation to the tunnel is even more apparent when you notice the Holland Tunnel sign above one of the doors.

Not surprisingly, there are two similar buildings across the water.

The Holland Tunnel was the first automobile crossing between Manhattan and New Jersey. Construction began in 1920 and the tunnel tubes opened to traffic in 1927. The tunnel is named after Clifford Milburn Holland, who designed the tunnel and served as chief engineer until he died in 1924.

A major engineering challenge was how to keep vehicle exhaust from building up in the 1.6 mile tunnel. The solution, attributed to the project’s third chief engineer Ole Singstad, was to build a massive automatic ventilation system. Four buildings, two on each side of the river, house 84 fans that move air through the tunnel. According to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, this was an innovation that made the Holland Tunnel the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel. That thing on the water looks to be one of the four.

When you are wondering about something in the distance, the best thing to do is to wander over and check it out. Sometimes it’s an important historical structure. But always, it’s an adventure that will make your week more interesting.

Notes:

History – Holland Tunnel. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
http://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/holland-tunnel-history.html

How Was the Holland Tunnel Built? New York Historical Society Museum and Library.
http://www.nyhistory.org/community/holland-tunnel-built

In 1851 Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews founded Modern Times, a community based on Warren’s ideas of individual sovereignty and equitable commerce. Modern Times quickly grew into a stable and unique village within the Long Island town of Islip. Its marks can still be seen even as its founding principles have been gradually replaced by more conventional ideas.

Josiah Warren was born in Boston in 1798. By 1851, he was an experienced innovator and activist. He made several contributions to printing technology and invented a lard-burning lamp that provided good light using cheaper fuel than tallow. From 1824 to 1827, he lived with his family at Robert Owen’s utopian community, New Harmony, where Warren worked as a music director.

Warren soon realized that New Harmony, run on communitarian principles with Owen in charge, did not provide a solution to economic injustice. Warren did not leave as a reactionary but remained an innovator. He developed his philosophy of individual sovereignty, and advocated individually-held property with an economic program of “equity” or “equitable commerce.”

After leaving New Harmony, Warren opened a new store in Cincinnati. Prices were based on cost with compensation for the storeowner’s time, and labor notes were used as a medium of exchange. The storekeeper agreed to exchange his time for an equal amount of the customer’s time. The system was modified through experience, and began to allow for different valuations of different kinds of labor. Warren’s “Time Store” was very popular and had a major effect on local business. But Warren had his mind on broader changes.

In 1831 Warren established the first “equitable village” with four hundred acres and a few families. The experiment had to be abandoned due to disease, a major problem for new and old communities at the time, but Warren believed that he was onto something. He explained his ideas his publication The Peaceful Revolutionist. In 1847 he established Utopia, a village in Ohio. Individuals traded with each other using labor notes, and in doing so were able to acquire homes and small plots of land despite their previous poverty.

Warren returned to Boston in 1848 and met other reformers, then went to New York City in 1850, where he developed his relationship with the writer and reformer Stephen Pearl Andrews. It was time to demonstrate equity at a new location.

Warren and Andrews purchased land in the town of Islip, New York. They developed 90 acres of their purchase, laying out a grid of streets and dividing blocks into smaller lots that would be sold at cost.

Through labor capital and cooperation, Modern Times pioneers were able to afford homes, some for the first time. By 1854, 37 families were living in Modern Times. In 1857 the octagonal-shaped one-room schoolhouse was opened.

Reporting in the New York Tribune brought attention to the village, and didn’t always bring the expected crowd.

While Modern Times residents were generally non-conformists for their time, some pushed the envelope further than others, including a family of nudists, an advocate of polygamy, and followers of strange diet fads. Warren remarked that “A woman with an ungainly form displayed herself in public in men’s attire, which gave rise to the newspaper comment that ‘the women of Modern Times dressed in men’s clothes and looked hideous.’”

True to their principles of individual sovereignty, residents were largely tolerant of what they considered odd as long as their neighbors did not invade the rights of others.The community’s tolerance, and probably the money to be made in sensational reporting, led Modern Times to be widely viewed as a den of sin and dishonesty. The prevalence of a casual view toward marriage and non-interference in personal relationships contributed to outside disdain.

In 1864, Modern Times residents voted to change name of the town to Brentwood, which is the name of the area today. William Bailie contends that the pioneers continued to prosper but “often let the statement go forth that the experiment had come to an end in order to escape the interminable annoyance of sensational press reports and equally obnoxious visiting cranks.”

One goal of Modern Times was to demonstrate on a small scale what could be done if the principles of equity and individual sovereignty were applied on a large scale. In this sense, Modern Times was a failure as a public relations project, but it was not a failure as a community. It was an attractive place to escape the control of capital and conformity.

In 1857, a resident praised Modern Times in a letter to an English friend.

You have been here, Sir, and I ask you, considering the natural obstacles to overcome, if you ever saw greater material success attained in so short a time, by the same number of people without capital, and with only their hands and brains to operate with, under all the disadvantages of habits formed by a false education and training…. And as it regards individual and social happiness and the entire absence of vice and crime, I am confident this settlement cannot be equalled.

A visitor’s account of Modern Times reveals a strong combination of individualism and community spirit.

No two persons were expected to dress alike, think alike, or act alike; nothing was in such disrepute as sameness, nothing more applauded than variety, no fault more venial than eccentricity….
There was, too, an easy, cordial relation of one with another, a frankness and simplicity of intercourse, which gave assurance that they were held together by a genuine attraction and sustained by mutual sympathy.

Bailie writes that Modern Times moved away from Warren’s ideas mainly due to the scarcity of employment other than agriculture, and the reluctance of the outside community to adopt its economic principles.

Capital was needed to start factories for the manufacture of articles for which there was a demand in the outside world. The pioneers had but little resources, and the labor-note currency, while of great service amongst themselves, could not help them in transactions with those who neither understood the principle nor accepted the practice of Equitable Commerce.

The Panic of 1857 and the changes wrought by the Civil War contributed to the gradual dissolving of the community’s identity.

George Woodcock writes that Modern Times “maintained its mutualist character for at least two decades, eventually turning, like Utopia, into a more or less conventional village with cooperative tendencies.”

The schoolhouse closed in 1907 and became a private residence.

In 1989 the schoolhouse was moved to a spot on the school district property, and locals are making efforts to restore the structure.

Exactly how equitable commerce could have worked on a regional or broader scale is a good question. Numerous time-based currencies have come, and many have gone, since the 1830s. Warren would certainly favor innovation and peaceful competition to find the best way, as he did when he ran the Time Store. The solution could not be imposed by force, but had to be freely adopted and adapted by individuals who recognized it to be in their interest.

Josiah Warren wrote about social and economic philosophy until his death in 1874. He was an innovator who learned through experience and put his ideas into practice for refinement and demonstration. The peaceful revolutionist influenced a number of American reformers and rebels, and was considered a forefather of individualist anarchism.

Stephen Pearl Andrews continued his involvement in reform movements until his death in 1886. Promoting Warren’s ideas was one of his numerous contributions to nineteenth-century politics.

In a way Modern Times symbolizes an ideal of America as a somewhat wild land of opportunity where pioneers – innovators, people willing to build new lives for themselves and their neighbors – have the freedom to experiment. It is of course an ideal that was not fulfilled on a wide scale, an ideal that coexisted with slavery, speculation, sexism, cronyism, and conquest. But it is a promise that can bring hope to a land enclosed and foreclosed upon, a promise that Warren, Andrews, and many Modern Times residents worked to fulfill, a promise that today’s innovators may deliver to more people.

It is an ideal that shines through stories found along the road.

Notes:

Accounts of Modern Times are quoted from Bailie, Josiah Warren, Chapter 8.

The Josiah Warren Project at Crispin Sartwell’s website is an excellent place to begin research on Josiah Warren.

References:

“A Message From the Brentwood Historical Society.” Brentwood Historical Society.
http://www.brentwoodhis.org

“Andrews Biographical Information.” Anarchy Archives. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/andrews/SPAbio.html

Bailie, William. Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1906. Online at Anarchy Archives.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/bright/warren/bailie.html
Modern Times history from Chapter 8, “Modern Times”; Background info from Chapters 1, 2, and 10.

Berger, Jay. “Brentwood History Trail Guide,” Brentwood Public Library.
http://brentwoodnylibrary.org/brentwoodtrail/brentwoodtrail.htm

Brentwood Public Library, history room, Visited February 18, 2013.

Maloney, Cory, Discussion with author, February 18, 2013.

Projects, Brentwood Historical Society.
http://www.brentwoodhis.org/projects

Sartwell, Crispin. “Timeline of Josiah Warren’s Life.” The Josiah Warren Project.
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/warrentimeline.htm

“Today in History: August 24, The Panic of 1857.” American Memory. The Library of Congress.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/aug24.html

Warren, Josiah. “Modern Education,” 1861. Josiah Warren Project.
http://www.crispinsartwell.com/warreneducation.htm

Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004. Pages 391-394; quoted from 393.

Image Credits:
Anarchy Archives (first Josiah Warren image)
Brentwood Historical Society (old photos of school building)
Helen Nayfeld (photos of current Brentwood)
Josiah Warren Project (Labor Note, Josiah Warren)
Molinari Institute (Stephen Pearl Andrews)