Mordecai's Moorings

Mordecai’s Landing was one of the earliest landings on the Mullica River, dating from the early 18th century. There were in fact two landings bearing the name Mordecai. Lower Mordecai Landing was situated a quarter mile above Crowley’s Landing at a bend in the river where Abe Nichols’ tavern stood, while Upper Mordecai Landing was located two meanders upstream. The landings bear the name of Mordecai Andrews, a Quaker of English descent and one of the first white settlers of the Little Egg Harbor area.

Mordecai was born in 1664 in Oyster Bay, Long Island (or, as other records indicate, Sandwich, Cape Cod), the firstborn of eight children. His father, Samuel Andrews, was a shipbuilder, a pioneer, and an early settler of Long Island. His mother, Mary Wright, was a devout and talented minister for the Society of Friends whose preaching once put to open shame Governor Endicott of Massachusetts who had intended to hang several Quakers. Samuel and Mary were married in 1663, five years after a tumultuous time in Mary’s life during which she was imprisoned in Boston for about a year and subsequently banished to the wilderness where she and 27 other prisoners made the treacherous trek from Boston to Oyster Bay where her parents resided.

In 1683, the Andrews family moved from Oyster Bay to Mansfield Township, Burlington County. In 1691, Mordecai married his wife, a French woman named Mary, and they started a family of their own. Just prior to 1700, following after Henry Jacob Falkinburg, Mordecai and his brother Edward relocated their families from Mansfield to the area that would eventually come to be known as Tuckerton. The journey through the woods was a long one, but the Amerindians had long ago cleared a path for them--the path that would eventually become the Tuckerton Stage Road. Also making the trek was Edward’s brother-in-law, Jacob Ong, “whose hut,” Father Beck once wrote, “goes on being a hat just because people didn’t remember their Dutch when they deciphered the name of a forgotten town.” Edward purchased 500 acres on the east side of Tuckerton Creek (then known by the Lenape name “Pohatcong”), while Mordecai purchased 927 acres on the west side. Mordecai and Edward would clear extensive farms on their properties, and each brother would build a house on their respective lots. Mordecai’s home still stands over 300 years later, making it the oldest homestead in Ocean County. As did many of the early settlers of the coastal wilderness, the Andrews brothers had at first lived in caves. These “caves” were in fact cellars that they had dug out and fortified with cedar timbers. Here they would make their humble abodes with their families while building their permanent homes. Tradition has it that Mordecai also lived part of the time in a lean-to along the Mullica. If this is true, it is quite possible that the lean-to would have been located near one of the landings where Mordecai would be in close proximity to his lumbering operation.

Both Mordecai and Edward were tall, robust men with a dark complexion, black eyes and black hair. Edward Andrews was, in his younger years, a promiscuous and lighthearted man whose singing and violin-playing provided regular entertainment for his fellow settlers and the local Lenape. After disturbing the bones of an ancient Indian while plowing his field one day in 1704, Edward committed himself to his cave where he read his Bible and contemplated life and death. Thus began his rapid transformation into a stern religious man, and with haste he destroyed his violin and ceased singing the secular songs of England. He would eventually establish the Friends Meeting House at Little Egg Harbor and he came to be known as a great Quaker minister. Edward was also known to have been the first man to dam the Tuckerton Creek (1704), although, to the credit of beavers, he had constructed it upon a substantial dam that had been built by the critters many years prior. Just below the dam, Edward dug out some raceways and constructed both a sawmill and a grist mill.

Mordecai himself was a prolific businessman who was among the first white men to put to industrial use the forests and salt meadows of South Jersey. Aside from lumbering, he ran a charcoal operation and a salt works, and he held abundant acreage to serve his purposes. Sometime in the early 18th century, Mordecai purchased a large tract of land near Batsto, most of which was cedar swamp. Now known locally as Mordecai Swamp, this tract of wetlands was once home to the towering virgin cedars that were characteristic along the Mullica and her tributaries in those bygone days. Some reaching a height of perhaps two hundred feet, and an age of perhaps hundreds of years, one can only dream of the majesty of these ancient giants. To Mordecai, though, their majesty was no match for their monetary value, and they would soon start falling, one by one, to be converted into profit.

As were all landings of old, Mordecai’s were placed in geographically convenient locations. Lower Mordecai Landing was positioned at the southeast of his sizeable cedar swamp where the river curves and the water is quite deep. The upper landing was established at the southwest of the swamp overlooking another bend in the river where the water is even deeper. With the river becoming significantly wider immediately downstream from the bend, the upper landing was a befitting terminus for shipping. The unusual depth of the river at the upper landing is likely due in part to the fact that in prehistoric times the confluence of the Atsion and Batsto rivers was further downstream from its modern location at the Forks. By the power produced by these two significant streams joining forces, the Mullica’s channel was deeply incised at the upper landing where the river winds immediately below the ancient confluence.

It is not known whether or not Mordecai had the timbers cut into lumber before sending them down the river, or if he loaded logs onto craft bound for Edward’s sawmill on Tuckerton Creek. If the timbers were converted into lumber prior to being brought to the docks, then it is possible that Mordecai dammed the nearby Maple Creek - which runs through Mordecai Swamp - in order to form a pond by which to power a sawmill. In this case, one of the dunes (Ice Age relicts) that are scattered throughout Mordecai Swamp could have served as a natural levee, thus saving Mordecai considerable trouble in constructing a dam. It is also possible that the timbers were brought to a nearby sawmill operated by someone else, perhaps even an early sawmill on the Nescochague Creek where Cripps’ Mill would later be situated circa 1740. The question, then, is whether or not it would have been more profitable for Mordecai to go through the trouble of damming a stream and building a sawmill, or to pay a local sawyer to cut the timbers into manageable sizes, or to continually haul logs for miles down the torturous channel of the Mullica, into the open waters of the Great Bay, through the inlet into Little Egg Harbor Bay, and up Tuckerton Creek to his brother’s mill.

Mordecai died in 1736 and was buried on a hill nearby Tuckerton Creek where his wife and his daughter are also buried. He left much of his estate to his son Mordecai Jr., but history has forgotten if the son continued the father’s lumbering operation on the Mullica, or if the cedars were exhausted and the operation abandoned prior to Mordecai’s death. In either case, considering the fact that Joseph Ball (manager and owner of the Batsto iron works) owned Mordecai’s tract, it is likely that the landings were revived during the Revolutionary period. In a letter to his father in August of 1796, Samuel Richards wrote: “I have purchased Pleasant Mills from Mr. Ball and all his estate in that neighborhood including Mordica [Mordecai] Swamp…” During the reign of the Richards’ iron empire, Mordecai’s landings were utilized by Batsto and Atsion, and perhaps other iron works such as Hampton. From the landings were exported iron products, lumber, and charcoal to the cities of New York and Philadelphia. The ships would return with many of the necessities which made village life possible. It is likely that Mordecai’s landings continued to serve the needs of Batsto up until 1867, when the fire at the glassworks burnt out one last time. Evidence discovered at one spot along the upper landing indicates that left-over iron products were shipped out as scrap metal sometime after the furnace ceased operations in the late 1840’s. Also found lying along the shores of the landings are loads of limestone and sea shells, a testament to the fact that boats, loaded with flux for the furnace (and later for the glass factory at Batsto), once regularly arrived at Mordecai’s Moorings.

Sea shells, because of their sheer abundance along the shores, bays, and river estuaries, were the first and foremost supply of flux in the early years. However, what was once an abundant commodity was to fast become a scarcity, for shells served many purposes. The lime derived from them provided, among other things, fertilizer for farmers, mortar for builders, and flux for the furnace workers. Lime-burners would take the shells wherever they could find them, even if it meant pillaging ancient shell mounds, those relic refuse piles left behind by the Lenape and their predecessors. When the supply of shells had severely dwindled, the iron masters began importing limestone, both crude and refined. In a letter written in 1773 by Henry Drinker, one of the early owners of the ironworks at Atsion, it is mentioned that “lime stone refined is brought from the North River [Hudson River] to Egg Harbour River [Mullica River] and delivered at Batsto Furnace for use thereof for Fluxing Metal.” Limestone was not the only foreign commodity imported to Batsto for the furnaces. When the bog ore that was once so plentiful in the Pine Barrens rivers and bogs became more and more rare, foreign iron ore was brought into Batsto. Jesse Richards is known to have imported Scottish ore, pieces of which can still be found at the landings.

It is hard to imagine what the area looked like during those busy years of industry, and it is bewildering to contemplate how quickly everything changed at the hands of men who saw in the river the means to become wealthy. All the old giant cedars that once lined the river banks had been cut down, as well as the upland pines and oaks, leaving a treeless plain stretching across South Jersey. It is even said that the masts of sailing ships at Chestnut Neck could be seen from the Forks! At the landings, the ground was covered with charcoal that would daily fall off of the wagons, and the water was likewise blackened. The sounds of sawmills soared throughout the land and sawdust could always be seen floating along the river. The hammers of the nearby Batsto Forge could be heard incessantly pounding pig iron as people would crowd the landings in anticipation of the arrival of ships bearing goods. Schooners could be found sailing up and down the river or tied to the many docks that lined her banks. When the Mullica had become a major highway, new channels, shortcuts, and coves were dug out in order to accommodate the abundance of vessels that navigated the river at its more narrow stretches. Such times are now but a distant memory, nearly forgotten. The river is no longer the industrial highway it used to be. It is now used recreationally by boaters, jet skiers and paddlers, most of which travel up and down the river without giving a thought to the rich history all around them.

By the time the area came under Joseph Wharton’s possession, the landing had been abandoned for at least ten years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it would ever wake from its slumber. Thus ended a century and a half of activity at Mordecai’s Moorings. There is not much left by way of physical evidence to remind us of the importance that Mordecai’s Landing had in early industrial South Jersey. The pilings seem to have all rotted away. The docks have long ago vanished. The last boat to depart the landing has long since become a ghost ship. Trees have reclaimed the land and their roots have covered the footprints of yesteryear. Ballast rocks, limestone, and sea shells are about all that remains to tell the mostly untold story of this lost landing on the Mullica.

Works Cited

Pierce, Arthur D. Family Empire in Jersey Iron

Blackman, Leah History of Little Egg Harbor Township

Boucher, Jack E. Absegami Yesteryear

Ewing, Sarah W.R. Atsion: A Town of Four Faces

Decou, George Moorestown and Her Neighbors

Beck, Henry Charlton Jersey Genesis