National Park Service: Southern New Jersey and the Delaware Bay (Chapter 5)

Gristmills and sawmills were among the earliest local industries, built on outlying creeks and rivers, and in Bridgeton and Millville where they marked the first sign of settlement. Tide mills powered by the ebb and flow of the creek waters existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Greenwich, Mill Creek, and Mannington Meadows. [50]

One of the earliest was Hancock's Sawmill, built in 1686 on Mill Creek (Indian Fields Run) in present-day Bridgeton. Richard Hancock also constructed a dam and mill here, which changed hands several times until 1807-08, when Jeremiah Buck bought them and built anew on Commerce Street. Ephraim Seeley built another dam and gristmill in 1700 north of the present dam on Commerce Street. When Buck bought Seeley's dam and mill he undertook a series of improvements. He built a new dam, thus enlarging the mill pond, and in 1809 he erected a new gristmill and sawmill. A decade later Buck's fortunes declined and Dr. William Elmer purchased the property; Elmer's heir later sold the sawmill, but continued to operate the gristmill into the late nineteenth century. These and other mills were especially important because they predicated the establishment of Bridgeton. Farther east, another dam and mill played a similar role in the development of Millville.

In the late eighteenth century the Union Company was started by Henry Drinker and Joseph Smith who purchased 24,000 acres near Millville. The company used the dam to power sawmills; the lumber was then floated down river where it was loaded on to ships bound for market. In 1795 Joseph Buck, Eli Elmer, and Robert Smith bought the Union property. Buck then planned the city of Millville—slated to contain mills and other industries fueled by water passing over the dam. Many mill and factory owners here gained access to the nearby waterpower by digging canals to their property.

Buck's plans for the city became reality when David Wood and Edward Smith established Smith and Wood Iron Foundry, as previously discussed. Wood's brother, Richard, added to the family prosperity by establishing a cotton mill next to the foundry in 1854. The business operated as New Jersey Mills until 1860 when a bleachery and dye house were added; this became Millville Manufacturing. Upon establishment of the bleachery and dye house, Wood then constructed a new dam, creating the largest manmade lake in New Jersey. The water power from the dam allowed the mill to produce its own electricity in the late nineteenth century. By 1870 the mill had 25,000 spindles, 500 looms, and 600 employees. Thirty-nine years later the number of employees had doubled.

Many Millville Manufacturing employees lived in homes constructed by the Wood family in the surrounding area. Moreover, they shopped at the company store located on Columbia Avenue next to the Wood Mansion (Fig. 73). The company also constructed a wood bridge across the Maurice River to shorten the distance for those workers who lived on the western shore. Though the worker housing exists today, many of the industrial buildings associated with Millville Manufacturing do not. However, buildings connected with the foundry exist, including the pump house used by the cotton mill (Fig. 75). [51] Like Millville Manufacturing, Hires, Prentiss and Company of Quinton's Bridge provided housing for its workers. The two-family dwellings are intact along the Quinton-Alloway Road/Route 581.

Figure 73. Wood Mansion was built by David Wood in 1804. Today the Wood family continues to use it as the headquarters for WaWa Markets, Inc.

Figure 74. Many of the employees of Millville Manufacturing lived in worker housing. This example is located on Foundry Street in Millville.

Figure 75. Now owned by Wheaton Industries, this complex of buildings includes the pump house once used by Millville Manufacturing Company.

Figure 76. Millville Manufacturing Co.'s: A) Two-family dwelling, B) Wood Mansion, C) Tenement housing, D) general store. Sanborn, 1886.

Like Bridgeton and Millville, the mills elsewhere in South Jersey encouraged settlement, and provided jobs as well as independence from Great Britain. In 1692 William Forest built a water-powered gristmill at Mill Hollow in Salem County. Ten years later, John Mason of Elsinboro built a flour mill on Stow Creek; about the same time Samuel Fithian erected a dam and sawmill in Fairfield, his son John, who lived nearby, co-owned a gristmill. The Fithians' property was acquired by John Ogden, then in 1743 by David Clark who moved the gristmill to the main road in Fairton, bringing in water via a mill race. In 1759 the mill dam in Fairton was changed to its present location.

In Cedarville, Henry Pierson purchased a mill from William Dillis and John Barns in 1753, which henceforth changed ownership many times. Major changes occurred in 1877 when Charles O. Newcomb bought the mill and replaced it with a modern facility—considered the best in the county at the time. Also nearby was the sawmill and gristmill John O. Lummis acquired in the 1830s; the former was built before 1789 (perhaps replacing an iron foundry), the latter was built in 1790. [52]

Windmills and steam mills were also popular in South Jersey—for grist and lumber—found primarily in Cape May County and occasionally the Leesburg area of Cumberland County. Cape May was an ideal location for windmills "because of the steady and dependable breezes from the ocean and bay." The earliest one was built for Thomas Press in 1706 on Windmill Island below Town Bank. The last extant example existed in Leesburg in the 1920s (Fig. 77). A variation of the one pictured, most windmills in the county were similar:

They were generally a six-sided building about 20' across the base with sloping sides [of] clapboard...and a moveable six-sided roof on a turntable of wooden rollers. Out from the dormer in one side of the roof extended a long pointed and tapered spindle to which 2" x 10" boards about 15' long were attached to form the sail arms. The cloth sails were fastened by two grids or frames on each side of the sail. These grids consisted of a framework with twelve spindles spaced about 10" apart. The grids were securely bound together, with sails between, and the whole unit was attached to a pole about 15' long which in turn was held on the end of the 2" x 10" board by iron bands. This assembly made the sail arms about 40-45' across. The entire windmill stood about 35' high. [53]

Figure 77. Windmills such as this derelict one in Leesburg provided mill power in Cape May and Cumberland counties. Wettstein, 1920.

Mill stones were on the second floor of the windmills. Many of the first stones that came from France were made of buhrstone, but by 1850 the cost of importation forced builders to turn to sopus stone from Ulster County, New York. [54]

In 1808 Jesse Springer built a windmill in Goshen. Two years later, Springer built another sawmill in Dias Creek, and in 1820 he built a gristmill for Thomas Gandy Sr. in Seaville. Springer is noted for his experimentation with the design of windmills; one of his designs featured a moveable top. Other windmills were located in Cold Spring, Cedar Swamp, and South Seaville.[55]

While Springer and others were experimenting with windmills in Cape May County, the White Stone Flour-Mill in Salem was working to perfect steam-powered mills. Built by the Salem Steam-Mill and Banking Company prior to 1826, White Stone Mill, was a stone structure five stories tall; its six runs of stone were driven by a large steam engine. The mills regularly dispatched wagons into Delaware and Pennsylvania to pick up grain to be ground into flour, operating until the latter part of the nineteenth century.[56]

By the nineteenth century, mills were common to almost every South Jersey town. According to the Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey, in 1834 Cape May County had eight gristmills and sixteen sawmills, while Cumberland County had forty-four gristmills, twenty-one sawmills, and one each fulling, rolling and slitting mills. Salem County had thirty-three gristmills, nineteen sawmills, and six fulling mills. [57]

Sixteen years later, Kirkbride's New Jersey Business Directory listed nine grist or grain mills in Cumberland County: R.D. Wood and Company, Millville; H. Shaw in Newport; Bateman and Conover, and John O. Lummis, Cedarville; Benjamin Reeve and Daniel Clark, Port Elizabeth; John Trenchard, Fairton; John Holmes, and Mounce and Lot, Bridgeton. Kirkbride also lists twenty-three mill owners in Salem County, five in the NJCHT area: Thomas F. Lambson (steam grist), Clement and Acton (steam saw), and Joseph Petit (grist) in the City of Salem; and J.W. Maskill at Lower Alloways Creek. This last structure is still standing and has been converted into a house.[58]

Cedar Mining

Cedar mining was an early, prominent, but short-lived industry in South Jersey, founded on the white cedar that grew throughout the swamps of Cape May County and in parts of Cumberland, Ocean, Atlantic, and Burlington counties. Here the conditions were ideal for trees to petrify once they died and fell into the muck. The durable and lightweight wood was made into shingles or other objects and used locally or exported to Philadelphia and other Delaware River ports. Much of the cedar came out of swamps in Dennis and Upper townships in Cape May County, and Maurice River and Fairfield townships in Cumberland. White cedar swamps closest to the salt marshes lost their trees to the tidal salt water first. As early as 1868, state geologist G.H. Cook described one Dennisville swamp where hundreds of acres were dotted by stumps and salt grasses overtook the living trees; swamp bottoms were soft and spongy, and here, 11' to 17' below the opaque surface, lay petrified cedar trees:

The peaty soil or muck in which the cedars grew was loose, porous and watery. The roots of the trees extended in all directions near the surface but did not penetrate to the solid earth below. The peaty soil or muck was added to each year by fallen leaves and twigs, and in the cool, shaded, wet swamp the timber buried beneath the surface was for the most part, after hundreds of years, sound and usable. [59]

Cedar mining consisted of removing the fallen trees from beneath the surface of the swamp. Cedar miners had to be skilled so as not to waste time in raising decayed trees that were worthless. Using a 6' to 8' iron rod, the miner probed the swamp for good logs, then he dug through the muck and tangled roots to take a sample of the wood. According to its smell, the miner determined if the tree had blown down or broken off; the former were more desirable because they were usually healthy and sound at the time. The miner then cut away the matted material around the log and sawed off each end. "By the use of levers the log was loosened, upon which it rose and floated to the surface, the bottom side always turning uppermost." [60] Some logs might measure as much as 3' in diameter, and though it appeared as if submerged only a matter of days, it was really several decades.

The log was then sawn into shingle lengths of 18" to 35", which were split into bolts using a froe or froe club; each bolt was then split along the grain to make four shingles, which were dried in the sun before being shaved, or smoothed, using a drawing knife. The size of the shingles ranged from 18" x 6" x 1-1/2" to 36" x 7-1/2" x 1-1/2". The average life span of such a shingle on a building is seventy to eighty years. [61]

In addition to shingles, the early settlers also used cedar for their fences, houses, farm buildings, canoes, staves, and cordwood. Future generations employed it in the manufacture of floors, rafters, joists, and doors as well as tanks, churns, firkins, pails, washtubs, paving blocks, siding, lath, crates, and furniture. In 1856, rails sold for $80.00 to $100.00 per 1,000, while in 1880 shingles brought $22.00 per 1,000.[62]

Like ship builders, cedar miners needed other skilled craftsmen in the community to supply them with tools. They made their own wood tools and handles, but relied on local smithies to forge iron axes, blocks, butters, crosscut saws, drags, drawing knives, levers, progues, froes, jointers, spades, and shaving horses; steel saw blades were also purchased. [63]

By the early twentieth century, the last of the shingle makers were gone and with them went a traditional skill. In 1937 the South Jersey Peat Company resurrected, however, the practice of extracting the cedar logs. The company relied upon modern tools to bring up logs from the Yock Wock Swamp below Mauricetown. Wire cables were looped around them and a power-driven windlass pulled them out of the muck. The logs were then sent to a sawmill to be machine cut into siding for boats, shingles, and box material. [64]

Lumbering operations such as this continued until the 1950s, with logs transported via wood sled and hauled from the swamp by a gasoline-powered tractor. Poles and boughs were laid across the trail in the softer places in an effort to keep tractors from sinking into the marsh. Upon reaching solid ground the logs were loaded onto a truck and taken to a sawmill. Lumbering operations have virtually ceased today because of changing technology and a decreasing supply of white cedar trees.[65]

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