Burlington County Research Articles

Identifying Colonial Roads in Southern New Jersey: An Application of Remote Sensing, Field, and Archival Methods to Document the Locations, Condition, and Routes of Critical American Revolutionary War Supply Chains

This paper explores the identification, use, and preservation of historic roads in the state of New Jersey that primarily travel through public lands. The authors examine in detail the historical significance of several unpaved routes that continue to exist in Burlington County, NJ, as well as discuss various methods that can be used to identify routes with historical significance and document their physical characteristics. Field research was conducted to establish the current location of these historic routes, using LiDAR, GPS, and geographic information systems methods to estimate their likely date of construction. Further examination and mapping of these routes was undertaken, followed by documentation of the historical events linked to their use, thus establishing historical context. We identified likely routes used as critical Revolutionary War supply routes. The paper concludes with a discussion of appropriate actions that should be considered in the preservation of these routes and offers planners some options in relation to public policy.

Timbuctoo and the First Emancipation of the Early-Nineteenth Century

Timbuctoo is an unincorporated community in Westampton Township, Burlington County, New Jersey. It was settled by formerly enslaved and free Black people beginning in 1826, reaching approximately 125 residents by 1860. The community also included at least two churches, two schools, and a benevolent association that helped people in the community in need. A vast collection of documentation of Timbuctoo’s founding and early development is available for research, including more than 100 years of deed and legal documents in a single PDF file; deeds and certificates of incorporation for churches, schools, and the benevolent association; newspapers that include death notices and feature articles as early as 1851; as well as vital records. The vital records are found in the New Jersey Births and Christenings Index and the New Jersey Deaths and Burials Index, with Timbuctoo resident listings as early as the 1850s. Prompted by recent emphasis on celebrating the end of slavery with the establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday, this article explores what emancipation meant for an antebellum free Black community in southern New Jersey, drawing substantially from the primary sources above to provide a unique contemporaneous perspective. Questions for future research are mentioned throughout the narrative to illuminate compelling potential research projects.

Status Creation and Maintenance among the Delaware Valley Elite: The Rise and Fall of the Field Family

Archaeological excavations at the White Hill Mansion in Fieldsboro, Burlington County, New Jersey, revealed material evidence of identity construction and maintenance among the Delaware Valley’s rural elite during the late colonial and early Republic periods. This article focuses on the lives and experiences of the Field family at White Hill and, in particular, three of the property’s owners: Robert Field II, a successful merchant; his wife Mary Peale Field; and their son Robert Field III. The Fields were significant participants in the distinctive Quaker-influenced regional culture of the Delaware Valley, at times successfully and at times less so. Through agency theory, social constructs of gentility, documentary research, and both above- and below-ground archaeological evidence, the ways in which the Fields and their relatives employed material culture to create and maintain social, economic, and political identities from the 1750s to the 1810s are examined. The evidence reveals that individual family members used various methods and cultural behaviors to cultivate and sustain desired identities that occasionally had unintended and destructive consequences.

Court rules in favor of college

Case name: Dinnerstein v. Burlington County College, No. 17‐3623 (3d Cir. 03/08/19).

OCR: College's actions didn't discriminate against student

Case name: Letter to: Rowan College at Burlington County, No. 02‐17‐2544 (OCR 01/08/18).

OCR: College's actions didn't discriminate against student

Case name: Letter to: Rowan College at Burlington County, No. 02‐17‐2544 (OCR 01/08/18).

Traditional Patterned Brickwork in New Jersey

This article traces the history of the first architecture of refinement in colonial New Jersey: traditional patterned brickwork, the artful ways in which bricklayers used vitrified bricks to decorate the outer walls of the houses they built. These practices had their roots in 16th-century England, where they were employed in fashionable and prestigious architecture, and where they remained the common knowledge of bricklayers a century later during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666. With the slump in the building trades that resulted from the rebuilding, Quaker bricklayers and brickmakers joined the migration to the Delaware Valley, where they found the greatest abundance of brick clay in West New Jersey. In the century that followed, Burlington County experienced the largest number of patterned brickwork buildings, while Salem County became home to the second largest number, the greatest variety of patterns, and most of the best examples. The best and best-preserved of its early buildings, the Abel and Mary Nicholson house, has been designated a National Historic Landmark for its patterned brickwork. The rise of the Georgian style of architecture reduced the popularity of patterned brickwork after 1750. After the Revolutionary War, the ascendancy of the Federal style was incompatible with patterned brickwork, and that sealed its eventual disappearance. This article combines an understanding of these buildings as physical artifacts while collectively placing them within the larger narrative of New Jersey’s development during the colonial period.

Visualizing and Evaluating Interdependent Regional Traffic Congestion and System Resiliency, a Case Study Using Big Data from Probe Vehicles

Big data from probe vehicles is increasingly becoming an important contributor for determining the regional performance of a transportation roadway network. Recent research has applied aggregated speed data from probe vehicles to quantify travel time variations as a result of recurring congestion, incidents, weather events and other non-recurring congestion. Through the establishment of a base travel time for all roadway segments in a region, any increase in travel time characteristics in the regional networks can be quantified temporally and spatially. This characterization is especially important when determining a region’s congestion resiliency, which is being defined as the ability of a roadway network accommodate failures and return to a baseline congestion after a major capacity reduction to the roadway network. This paper demonstrates how aggregated big data on vehicle speeds obtained from regionally deployed probe vehicles could be used to characterize and visualize the interdependent congestion impacts between regions and across roadway types (interstate, arterial, and local). To demonstrate the models and methodologies, an in-depth analysis of the I-276 Bridge closure incident in Burlington County, NJ near Philadelphia, PA was conducted. The bridge was clzosed after a routine inspected identified a crack in one of the structural members. In total, 90 days of data, which included 90-million speed records, were commercially collected for 1765 roadway segments, was analyzed. A novel performance metric was developed to allow an impact analysis by comparing Burlington County to two adjacent counties, Mercer and Camden. The results showed that the bridge closure did have a definitive, quantifiable impact on the primary road network of the adjacent counties. Subsequent analysis identified specific roadways that were most impacted by the closure. Although this research explores historic speed data, the methodologies presented can be applied to real-time speed data to assist in developing efficient traffic operation plans during major incidents, lane closures and weather events.

“Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken:” Anti-German Sentiment in Hoboken, 1917-1918, Some Examples

In the early 20th century, urban centers in New Jersey, especially locations such as Newark, Hoboken, and Camden, were home to many immigrants from Europe. Hoboken stands out amongst these as it was the major port of embarkation for American troops en route to the World War I. The city saw American immigrants supporting the war effort in varying ways. Irish immigrants, for example, may well have looked at American support for Great Britain in a different light than native-born American citizens. Similarly, German-Americans, especially between 1914 and 1917, were ambivalent as American “neutrality” towards Germany shifted towards outright hostility. What can local newspapers, some of which catered to ethnic interests, tell us about the tensions between ethnic loyalties and the call for patriotic support for the Allies as the United States went to war? This paper focuses in part on editorial comments on the need for “loyalty,” and/or “patriotism” once war was declared in April, 1917. It was originally presented as a paper at the NJ Historical Commission’s 2017 conference, “New Jersey and The Great War,” held November 3-4, 2017 at Rowan College at Burlington County and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

Abner Woolman's Colonial World: Quaker Politics and Literature Before the American Revolution

Abner Woolman's Colonial World:Quaker Politics and Literature Before the American Revolution Daniel Gorman Jr. (bio) "A breed apart from the diarists who write simply to collect the days or preserve impressions of foreign places are those who set out in their books to discover who they really are. These are generally very serious people, more in the way of pilgrims, with inward destinations, than mere travelers. Some of them are after the sight of God; others are out to realize their full 'potential,' spiritual and otherwise; and some of them are carrying burdens of suffering they are unsure they can shoulder—they want to use their diaries to test, and add to, their strength." —Thomas Mallon.1 Introduction The journal of Abner Woolman, the younger brother of renowned Quaker mystic and abolitionist John Woolman, was never published during its author's lifetime. After Abner's death, John combined the journal with two letters Abner wrote to Burlington and Wilmington Quakers.2 As John explains in his introduction, he recopied the journal, "collect[ing] the substance, of sundry short chapters, part . . . from a stitched book, and part from loose papers which I found in said book. . . . The original papers in his hand writing I have by me. . . ."3 This post-mortem revision of a person's writings, combined with new commentary by members of the Society of Friends, was a common practice in the transatlantic Quaker community.4 When John died on a missionary trip to England in September 1772, the Friends around him documented his demise, just as he had written an account of Abner's death.5 Before he left for England, John sent Abner's manuscript and some of his own writings to the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings.6 The Meeting for Sufferings, a program of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, had responsibility over philanthropy, poor relief, records of the dead, and some book publishing in the mid-Atlantic colonies.7 By forwarding Abner's letters to the Meeting, John [End Page 19] fulfilled (and, by adding the journal to the manuscript, went beyond) Abner's hope that the letters "might be continued to be handed about" after his death.8 The layered structure of the Abner manuscript evokes a matryoshka doll. John's reflective introduction and epilogue bookend the manuscript. Some of Abner's original handwriting apparently survives, thanks to the two letters following John's introduction, before the recopied journal passages begin.9 The first letter (September 1770) is addressed to the Burlington County, N.J., meeting, while the undated second letter "concerning trading to the west indies" is addressed to Wilmington Quakers.10 42 short "chapters," written mainly between 1760 and August 1771, follow. 12 Abner's holographs are not extant. Despite his connection to John Woolman, Abner has received little scholarly attention. Mercy Griffith Hammond wrote in 1898 that the Woolman brothers shared a "singleness of purpose and humility of expression" alongside their "uncompromising testimony."12 Henry J. Cadbury (1968) deems Abner's journal valuable only for its insights into John's activities in 1770–72, and considers it "disappointing" that "so little of it [is] the original composition of John Woolman."13 James Proud (2010) takes the opposite view, deeming it likely that John wrote most of the Abner manuscript.14 Proud classifies the journal as part of John's ephemera. Thomas Slaughter (2008) and Geoffrey Plank (2012), like Cadbury, support Abner's authorship, while giving greater consideration to the journal. Plank highlights Abner's intellectual similarities to John.15 Slaughter deems the journal inferior to John's much-lauded Journal, but concedes that Abner's text is "a good example of the genre, reflects Abner's distinctive journey, and sheds light on John and on the brothers' relationship."16 I agree with Cadbury, Slaughter, and Plank in recognizing Abner's authorship, but I want to provide a more complete study of the journal's contents. I resist Hammond's description of singleness in regard to the Woolmans' literary voices. The revision of Abner's papers is a minor episode in John's career.17 Still, Abner should not be subsumed beneath John's reputation. Abner's prose matches the intensity of...

“Built on Christian Principles”: Archaeologies of St. Mary’s Hall, a New Jersey Female Seminary

The archaeology of academic institutions provides an opportunity to examine gender construction, women’s education, and identity creation. Documentary, landscape, institutional, and gender archaeologies were all employed in the examination of a 19th-century female seminary in Burlington City, Burlington County, New Jersey. Originally operating as a Quaker female seminary between 1829 and 1836, the school was later purchased by Bishop George Washington Doane in 1837 and reconstituted as an Episcopalian secondary school for teenage girls, known as St. Mary’s Hall. It continues to operate today, though as a coeducational institution known as Doane Academy. Archaeology at St. Mary’s Hall/Doane Academy sheds light on 19th-century academic curricula, institutional goals, female agency, and the ways students negotiated the discipline of boarding-school life as they strove to create their own identities and forge important friendships. Data examined include archived student letters, annual institution catalogs and registers, recovered school supplies, existing and former school buildings, and discarded personal items.

Butterflies & Skippers (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea, Hesperioidea) of the Franklin Parker Preserve, Burlington County, New Jersey

ABSTRACT In 2009 and 2010, a butterfly and skipper survey was conducted at Franklin Parker Preserve (FPP) located within Woodland Township, Burlington County, New Jersey. This survey was part of the joint cooperation between the American Entomological Society and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation and funded by a Research Experience for Undergraduates grant. Franklin Parker Preserve is located in the center of the Pine Barrens, where insect fauna has not been strongly studied and inventoried, specifically with the Lepidoptera fauna. Through this survey, fifty-three butterfly and skipper species have been documented to occur on Franklin Parker Preserve property. Time of year and abundance of these species were recorded. Three Species of Special Concern listed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection were found at FPP: Callophrys hesseli Rawson & Ziegler (Hessel's Hairstreak) Euphyes bimacula Grote & Robinson (Two-Spotted Skipper) and Hesperia attalus Edwards (Dotted Skipper.) This paper...

Disrupting Print: Emigration, the Press, and Narrative Subjectivity in the British Preaching and Writing of Zilpha Elaw, 1840-1860s

This essay examines Zilpha Elaw's Memoirs and her peripatetic theology as acts of resistance against British print culture. In 1827, Elaw began an itinerant Methodist ministry in Burlington County, New Jersey, and traveled extensively from Maine to Virginia. She moved to England in 1840, wrote and published her Memoirs , and continued her ministry into the 1860s. Elaw remarried in 1850, establishing a permanent home in London where she lived until her death in 1873. Both her written and her oral work were rejections of a British press that was overzealous in its depictions of American enslavement and its self-congratulatory representations of England as a bastion of free and enlightened civilization. The essay reads news articles, advertising, and ephemera in local papers of London and northern England as both a means of consumption of and knowledge production about American slavery. Elaw gets scripted by but writes her way out of those boundaries and redefines her own place in the print culture of nineteenth-century religious diaspora.

Species Composition and Seasonal Distribution of Mosquito Larvae (Diptera: Culicidae) in Southern New Jersey, Burlington County.

A total of 36,495 larvae consisting of 45 species from 11 genera were collected from 7,189 sites from southern New Jersey, Burlington County between the months of March and October, 2001-2014. Density and seasonal distribution were determined among natural and artificial habitat. The most dominant species collected from natural habitat was Aedes vexans (Meigen) followed by Ochlerotatus canadensis canadensis (Theobald), Culex restuans Theobald, Culex pipiens L., and Culex territans Walker. The most dominant species collected from artificial habitat was Aedes albopictus (Skuse) followed by Ochlerotatus japonicus japonicus (Theobald), Cx. restuans, Cx. pipiens, and Ochlerotatus triseriatus (Say). Cx. restuans and Cx. pipiens were the only species categorized as dominant among both natural and artificial habitat and comprised greater than half the total density. Sympatry was common among dominant species from artificial habitat where a significant percentage of the total collection contained multiple species. The most common types of natural habitats were forested depressions and stream flood plains whereas rimless vehicle tires and various plastic containers were the most common artificial habitats. The pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea L. was the only habitat exclusive to one species.

Under Arrest and Overexposed: The Fourth Amendment Allows Visual Body Cavity Inspections for Misdemeanors

The Fourth Amendment allows the government or its agents to search or seize an individual if the search or seizure is reasonable. And, pursuant to the Fourth Amendment, reasonableness has many interpretations, which are designed to protect all of the general interests affected — the government’s interest in protecting its citizenry and the individual’s interest in privacy. Yet, in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of Burlington County, the Supreme Court permitted prisons to create policies entailing the strip search and visual body-cavity inspection of any individual, both felon and misdemeanant, to discover and deter contraband smuggling during the prison-intake process without requiring a prerequisite reasonable suspicion. The author disagrees with this Supreme Court holding because the individual’s rights were not afforded enough weight when the Supreme Court balanced them against the government’s interest in maintaining safety in jails. The author discusses the case history leading to this decision, explains why a reasonable suspicion should still be required to strip search and inspect the body cavities of misdemeanants, and illustrates how determining a reasonable suspicion is possible, if not practical. Accordingly, this issue should be reconsidered so the privacy rights and interests of future misdemeanants are not gravely affected.

Collaborative Archaeology, Oral History, and Social Memory at Timbuctoo, New Jersey

This article discusses ongoing research concerning the African-American community of Timbuctoo in Burlington County, New Jersey. Through the course of this work, a group of community descendants, Temple University archaeologists and vested community members utilize a collaborative approach to the history and archaeology of the town. Along with analysis of archaeological and written sources, researchers interviewed former residents and community descendants in an effort to better contextualize the past. Joining a growing movement of community-based archaeology projects, this work seeks through collaboration to complicate histories and interpretations of Timbuctoo. This collaborative approach seeks to better understand the past of Timbuctoo and to facilitate discourse on the constructions of race, class, and power in the present.

Rutgers Manuscript Sources Relating to the African-American Community in New Jersey

Special Collections and University Archives at the Rutgers University Libraries holds several manuscript collections relating to the AfricanAmerican exper ience in N e w Jersey. O n e of the earliest holdings is a volume of minutes of the African Association of N e w Brunswick. T h e minute book dates from 1817 to 1824. T h e Association was founded to provide funds for a school in Parsippany, N. J . , organized by the Presbyterian Synod of N e w York and N e w Jersey. T h e goal of the school was to educate Young M e n of Colour to be Teacher s and Preachers to People of Colour within theses States and elsewhere. Included in the volume are the Association's constitution, a list of subscribers, receipts, certificates of permission to join, and texts of addresses delivered before the Association by Jeremiah Gloucester of Philadelphia (January 1, 1820) and Augustavus Cesar (January 1, 1821). Rutgers also holds the records of the N e w Brunswick Colonization Society which include its minutes , memberships lists, and constitutions. T h e Society was active in 1838-1839 and revived in 1853-1854. T h e r e are collections that relate directly to slavery in N e w Jersey as well as to the lives of free African-Americans during the pre-Civil War period. T h e records of M i d d l e s e x County , N. J . , include a vo lume of slave manumiss ion records, 1800-1825, and a vo lume recording the births of Black children in the county, 1804-1844. T h e manumission register's entries include the name (and somet imes age) of the freed slave, the date of manumission, and the name and residence of the person registering the manumission. T h e volume is indexed by the name of person freed. Entries in the birth register include the name and sex of the child, the mother's given name, the name of the person reporting the birth, and the dates that the birth was reported and recorded. T h e Peter Still Papers (Burlington County, N . J . ) include correspondence, 1850-1875, relating to the purchase of his wife and family held as slaves in Alabama and to the publication of his biography. T h e collection also includes a Still family genealogy, 1798-1821.

OPERATING A 250 KW LANDFILL GAS FIRED MICROTURBINE AT A 0.4 HECTARE RESEARCH AND DEMONSTRATION GREENHOUSE

A 250 kW landfill gas-fired microturbine system was installed at a 0.4 ha research and demonstration greenhouse located at the Burlington County Resource Recovery Complex in Columbus, NJ. The landfill gas is scrubbed of sulfur (H 2 S), compressed, and chilled (to remove moisture and siloxanes) prior to combustion in the turbine. Waste heat contained in the exhaust gasses is reclaimed using a gas-to-liquid heat exchanger. The captured waste heat is used to help heat the greenhouse and is distributed through the hot water heating system. The electricity generated by the turbine is used to power electrical equipment (including the supplemental lighting system) in the greenhouse facility. Excess electricity is exported to the local utility grid. The exported electricity provides a separate revenue stream in addition to the crops produced in the greenhouse. Furthermore, every 1000 kWh of electricity produced generates a renewable energy credit that can be sold to third parties to satisfy requirements for renewable energy portfolios. The microturbine uses the relatively low energy content landfill gas (-17.1 MJ m -3 ) at a rate of approximately 51.9 L s -1 and converts it into 220 kW of electricity (yearly average). Approximately 30 kW of electricity is required to operate the equipment, primarily the compressor and chiller (parasitic losses). In addition, approximately 1.16 GJ h -1 of heat energy is recovered. The estimated annual run-time percentage is 80% or higher. This paper includes operational data as well as a discussion of potential management strategies for operating the equipment as economically as possible. Since grid electricity prices fluctuate rapidly depending on demand, time-of-day, season, etc., and crop requirements change depending on weather conditions, crop stage, harvesting schedule, etc., the operational management of the combined heat and power equipment and greenhouse equipment can be quite challenging. Consequently, decision support tools for growers and operators were developed.

First Report of the Sting Nematode Belonolaimus longicaudatus on Soybean in Delaware.

In late July of 2005, several, large, irregular areas of severely chlorotic, stunted, and dead soybean plants were observed in two fields of soybean (Glycine max), 8.05 km apart, in sandy soil (94% sand, 2% silt, and 4% clay) in southwestern Sussex County, DE. The grower also had observed stunted corn the previous year in the same areas and thought the fields had a fertility problem. The morphology of adults and molecular analyses of the juveniles isolated from soil samples established the identity of the species as the sting nematode, Belonolaimus longicaudatus (1-4). The population density was 216 nematodes per 250 cm3 of soil. Morphological characters used for identification included female body, stylet and tail length, shape of head, stylet knobs, tail and tail terminus, number of lines in the lateral field, and vulva percentage in relation to body length. The male characters critical for identification were the following: body, stylet, spicule, and gubernaculum length; shape of head and stylet knobs; and number of lines in the lateral field. Measurements of females (n = 5) included body length (range = 2,035 to 2,120 μm, mean = 2,073.7, standard deviation [SD] = 37.0), stylet (117.0 to 127.5, 123.4, 4.5), V% (48.4 to 52.3, 50.6, 1.5), and tail (109 to 140, 120, 14.2). The lateral field had one incisure. Shape of head, stylet knobs, and tail were also consistent with B. longicaudatus. Males (n = 4) were characterized by the body length (range = 1,500 to 2,070 μm, mean = 1,753.3, SD = 290.2), stylet (117.0 to 127.5, 121.5, 5.4), spicules (41 to 50, 47, 5.2), and gubernaculum (17.0 to 18.5, 17.8, 0.8). Molecular diagnosis as B. longicaudatus was confirmed by sequencing two ribosomal DNA markers from three juveniles. Sequence of the internal transcribed spacer region ITS1 and 2 (GenBank Accession No. GQ896549) from this population was 99% identical to Florida isolate BlCi6 (DQ672368), and the 28S large ribosomal subunit D2-D3 expansion region (GQ896548) was 99% identical to Florida isolate BlCi4 (DQ672344). A high degree of similarity (>98%) was also shared by several other B. longicaudatus sequences (1). This detection represents a new state record in Delaware for B. longicaudatus. Since this detection in 2005, there have been no new reports of other observations of sting nematode or spread from these two fields tilled by the same farm operator in Delaware. Elsewhere, B. longicaudatus is known to occur in subtropical regions of the lower coastal plain, from Virginia to Florida and along the Gulf Coast into Texas. On the east coast, USDA Nematode Collection records document this nematode from Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Within Delaware, another sting nematode species, Belonolaimus maritimus, was detected on American beachgrass (Ammophila breviligulata) and bitter panicgrass (Panicum amarum var. amarulum) from Fenwick Island, near the Maryland border. Sting nematodes have also been reported in Burlington County, NJ.

Ready or Not: Preparation Through Simulation

Immediately after 9/11, Burlington County College (BCC) realized that the focus of emergency preparedness must change. BCC responded by identifying community needs, developing customized simulation training using high-fidelity human patient simulators and laptop/desktop technology; developing partnerships, and securing outside funding. Over 8,500 individuals, at all levels, have received training.