The Magical Land of Lahaway

This paper, about the area that is mostly Great Adventure Six Flags today, was written for the July 27, 1916 Allentown Messenger by R. P. Dow, Secretary of the Brooklyn Entomological Society and member of the American Museum of Natural History.

(Provided by, and reprinted with permission from John Fabiano, president of the Allentown-Upper Freehold Historical Society.)

On the excellent maps issued by the State of New Jersey and the U. S. Government from the surveys of 1883, a spot just east of the northwest edge of Ocean county is marked in letters of unusual size “Lahaway Plantations.” One might imagine from the map that quite a village was there. Two miles to the west is Prospertown, distinguished on the same map by its large mill pond. To the southeast, about four miles is a town called on the map “Cassville,” but even to-day more generally known by its original name of Goshen. The large towns are all about fourteen miles away-to box the compass, Lakehurst, Lakewood, Freehold, Hightstown, Allentown, Robbinsville (still popularly known by its original name of Newtown), Bordentown, New Egypt, Burlington and Mount Holly.

But there is no village at Lahaway, not even a highway approaching the place. The survey party had floundered long through a tangle of marsh in the pine barrens when they discovered a single inhabited house on a high dry islet. Here they met the owner, J. Turner Brakeley, graduate of Princeton College and the Harvard Law School, who in 1872 decided to forgo the society of his fellows and adopted the hermit life which endured to until his death in 1915. Brakeley knew every path of the whole region, and aided the surveyors so much that in gratitude they put a name on the map, the name of Brakeley’s choosing.

The creek which rises on the spot and flows into the Delaware River has been known for a century and a half at least as Lahaway. The accent is on the second syllable. Farther down most people pronounce it as though spelled “Lay away.” There is a legend that a Jewish pack peddler passed by and stayed a night at the house of a poor farmer. He was never seen again, but thereafter the farmer became wealthy. The peddler was supposed to have much jewelry, and it was surmised that murdered and robbed he was laid away in a secret grave by the bank of the creek. The story is rather absurd, and it is more probable that Indians named the stream. It was from nearby that the Indians carried cranberries to the early settlers near Camden. The first mention of cranberries in literature is dated 1684. They were found wild everywhere in marshy places. So the name of Lahaway Plantations was taken from the creek.

A century ago the region all around Prospertown was much more prosperous than now. Its wealth has faded, but its character remains. Its people are poor, simple, hospitable and self respecting. The stranger coming within their gates likes to come again. But the grist mill below the dam is silent. The last tenant found it too hard to make a living. The saw mill has rusted away. A mile down the road a branch stream was dammed to operate an apple jack distillery, but this dam was washed away many decades ago. People do not drink much apple jack now.

The bogs of Lahaway were famous iron mines a century ago. Prospectors walked through the wet moss thrusting an iron rod far down through the soil. The experienced touch knew every obstacle encountered. Most were cedar roots which never rot. The harder and larger boulders of bog iron ore, masses of red oxide of iron. These were dug out and smelted. The first railways were laid with them. Some of the oldest houses cling with together with nails made from the iron of home making. But this industry, too, has gone the way of progress. It cannot compete with iron digging on the Mesaba, where equally good ore is scooped out with steam shovel, loaded on cars alongside and transported to steamer at a cost of not over a dollar a ton. New Jersey is dotted with blast furnaces abandoned half a century or more ago.

The through stage from Trenton to Toms River and Atlantic City, etc., passed by Prospertown four corners. This, too, has rusted away into the eternal silences. The railroad is roundabout, but it killed coaching.

Years ago Bill Horner’s father made hand shaven baskets of white oak. They lasted a life time and no wetting could hurt them. But the industry is gone, for it cannot compete with cheap machine made baskets which warp to ruin at the first wetting. And so it has come that the people of Prospertown merely till the soil of an unfertile pine barren. No church is there. Religious meetings are in the little school house in the pine woods.

To understand, the scholar first studies his map, especially the geodetic and geological. This tells the story. Across the State, somewhat on the slant and about following the Camden and Amboy Railroad, runs the line of red shale. The whole soil is red with land which makes the pink blush on the sunny side of each peach. This was once the seashore line. The fresh water streams took down another kind of rich soil. They made the land which is now largely grown to rye, the stand of which is fair and tall. In another place, sloping to the west, the alluvium of a geological age deposited soil so rich that the hay is wonderful. The cattle now graze all the unmown lots, and it is no wonder that the place is called Cream Ridge. It flows with milk and honey.

On a line southward from Cream Ridge lies a stratum which no geologist has ever understood. Past Hornerstown as far as New Egypt there lies pockets of marl, a substance of unknown origin, possibly vegetable. The peculiar soil supported once a big industry. It is a splendid fertilizer. But, a quarter of a century ago the phosphate rock of Florida and Georgia was dug up and treated with sulfuric acid. It cost so little that it drove marl as a fertilizer wholly out of the market.

Marl is now coming again into use. It is the base of some of the scouring powders. It is strange stuff, an impalpable powder, feeling soapy to the touch, and always of bright color, green, red, blue, etc. Some remote age the sunlight kissed it and gave it rainbow hues. To Science to-day it has an absorbing interest. It preserves the bones of all animals which happened to die in it. The seashells from the Hornerstown marl are among the oldest evidences of life, perhaps tens of millions of years ago.

Less than half a mile east of Hornerstown railroad station the country changes. Great patches of bare sand support cactus and a gray-green weed peculiar to the seashore. Here begins the land which was ocean bed and which rose from the sea very shortly before mankind was evolved. In geology we call this period the cretaceous, for at this time chalk (which is merely the bones of countless sea creatures) appeared on the dry land. This sea sand now becomes the surface soil all the way to south and east. Lakewood and Lakehurst are in the same geological belt. All, except where reclaimed by cultivation, is pine barren, for this only is the vegetation springing naturally from the sea sand made dry a quarter of a million years ago.

Few readers of the Messenger are unacquainted with the aspect of the sandy seashore on all the low lands from Long Branch to Cape May. We all know how back from the shore lie the dunes, sand, sand, and sand shifted hither and thither by the winter winds. This was the soil of Prospertown, Lahaway, in fact all the way to the coast. Little by little through many centuries plants thrust down their roots and fixed the soil until it no longer shifted, except in isolated spots. Little by little the streams trickled over, dropping clay to keep the soil from blowing around and making swamps of the whole region.

The secret of Lahaway is now easier to explain. It lies exactly on the height of land, the mid-rib of New Jersey, which is almost too feeble to be noticed to the south, but which becomes mountainous west of Plainfield. For untold centuries the sand shifted year by year. Long before the pyramids of Egypt were built the pines took root and began to fasten the soil. The oaks soon followed (there are twenty species of oak tree at Lahaway). The hickory took root and the slopes were covered with mountain laurel, still white and sweet in early June. At one spot the windswept pile is still 179 feet high. At the exit of the creek from the estate the level is 97 feet. A plain was washed from six hundred springs. Underneath, from two to ten feet, lies clay, water proof and giving endless nourishment to plants having roots long enough and strong enough to reach it. On the hillside this clay may be a hundred feet below the surface. Over the clay there has developed a wonderful flora. Feeding on the diverse flora has evolved a wonderful fauna.

Lahaway has been aptly described as an islet of the Delaware River transplanted into the pine barrens. Mr. Brakeley built a lofty stand on each of his two hills, from which one may look many miles around. To the west the woods cut off the view. To the northwest lies Cream Ridge, almost of equal height at the summit. A little east of north is a hill five miles away, higher by sixty feet. To east and southeast lie miles upon miles of pine swamp, low lying, rising a few feet here and there, swamp and dry island, pathless. Anyone losing his way may easily remain lost a day to come out he knows not where.

There are almost no stones in the region, only rounded sea pebbles and irregular masses of pebbles cemented together by liquid iron rust. One such pile lies in the swamp, from which the Indians carried stones for many miles to make the little piles necessary to support their cooking pots.