Day One: Camden to Cape May
 Pine Barrens occupy the center of South Jersey. Settlements for three centuries have clustered along the Delaware River, like beads on two strings. 
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| Dr. Fisher |
The Capital of southern New Jersey alternated between Salem and Burlington, and the King's Highway ran between them atop a clay ridge all of fifty feet above sea level. Colonial villages are strung along Kings Highway about ten miles apart, just like villages in the Midwest and for the same reason. That was about the distance a farmer's wagon could travel to market and return in one day. Travel by boat modified that somewhat. One unexpected feature: the marl clay ridge was eventually found to contain the first known dinosaur bones, now proudly on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences Below the big river bend at Salem, we'll defer until Day Two describing the interesting origins of the coastal route on the Delaware side of the bay. In New Jersey the counterpart is the Del-Sea Drive, rapidly disappearing in response to school crossings and traffic. Although almost everything of interest is along these three roads, for this tour we propose taking President Eisenhower's interstate highway system, with side-trips as needed.
The retreating British Army sailed out of Philadelphia in 1778, went from Camden to Haddonfield and turned north on King's Highway. For this tour, we go south from Haddonfield, pausing for a glance back at Camden. Poor Camden scarcely exists any more, but the battleship New Jersey is parked there, the waterfront view is awesome, and Walt Whitman's home is open to tourists. Once the home of ship building, Campbell's Soup, RCA Victor, and the terminus of railroads at the ferries to Philadelphia, the town was first injured by the Pennsylvania Railroad going down the other side of the river, and then the construction of the Ben Franklin Bridge in 1926. Toll houses could be found along the turnpike to Haddonfield until 1960, but the automobile made Camden obsolete. What's left begins with the suburbs five miles away.
Haddonfield was a plain little Quaker town with undiscovered dinosaurs buried underneath it until the Revolution, when the fugitive New Jersey legislature met in the Indian King Tavern. Because the fortifications of the Delaware River at Fort Mifflin/Red Bank blocked the British fleet, Hessians were sent to attack Fort Mercer from the rear, staying overnight in Haddonfield. One young Quaker, a famous runner, ran ten miles to alert the defenders of Fort Mercer, who then defeated the Hessian attackers the next day. Later on after the British occupied Philadelphia, General "Mad Anthony" Wayne rounded up cattle in Salem County and drove them to Trenton, then over to Valley Forge to relieve Washington's starving troops. The British responded to this with a famous massacre in Salem County by cavalry under Col. John Simcoe. So off we go to National Park, originally called Red Bank, to see Fort Mercer. From here we travel to Salem, seeing its sadly dilapidated Colonial buildings, and the oak tree which was already famous among the Indians for its huge size in 1683. Along King's Highway we pass through Mickleton, Mullica Hill, and Woodstown, three cute little Quaker villages about to be overwhelmed as suburbs.
From here we go to Greenwich, named for Connecticut settlers, where Paul Revere stirred up a tea-burning party in sympathy with the Boston event on the same occasion. Greenwich is sometimes referred to as a second Williamsburg, but what's here is original, not reconstructed. In passing, this tour takes us past Hancock's Bridge where Simcoe massacred those farmers who sold cattle to Anthony Wayne. That's local history speaking; in fact, Tory-Rebel reprisals were very bitter on both sides. Until ten years ago, this blood stained site stood alone in the lonely moors, but unfortunately it's pretty much built up and hard to find in the new suburbs.
From Greenwich we go on to Cape May, with a brief detour to Bivalve. The point about this stop is the perfectly gigantic pile of oyster shells left over from the days as a center of oyster harvesting. Notice the roads; they're paved with oyster shells. Oysters eat algae, sewage fertilizes algae. Overfishing the oysters caused rotting algae and bacterial overgrowth in the river. The result was depletion of the dissolved oxygen, dead areas for fish, murky water instead of a clear stream. It's an opportunity for oyster farming, but the vast piles of shells at Bivalve are a warning of how far we have to go before we restore the river.
Cape May was the first Atlantic Ocean beach resort, reached from Philadelphia and Tidewater Virginia by boat long before roads were usable. We are told Cape May was formerly a separate barrier island, joined to the rest of South Jersey only later. It was originally a whaling port, and the Quakers of the region were more related to Nantucket than to Philadelphia. As you would expect, this cute little place has many fine restaurants and hotels. The hotels are so authentic that strangers share common bathrooms the way they always used to do, so bed and breakfast places can be preferable for snootier tourists. Those whose great-grandparents once stayed in places like the Chalfonte, however, find it important to rough it in traditional summer places. From here, we take the forty-minute ferry ride to Lewes, Delaware.
Cape Henlopen, on the Delaware side of the entrance to the bay, is appreciably southeast of Cape May. That means that a line directly east from Cape May points to Slaughter Beach, or Mispillion Point. The ocean salt water turns to fresh river water at about this level, making for remarkably good fishing at certain times of the year. Furthermore, horseshoe crabs come ashore here on both sides of the bay to lay eggs. Birds who took off from South America months earlier swoop out of the skies to eat the crab eggs on the appointed day. Hawks pause in the woods to fly together in flocks over the bay, based on their own signals. Mispillion Lighthouse is the greatest place on the Atlantic fly-way for bird-watching, crab-watching, fishing and nature loving. But you have to know when to go there, and remember the best local hotels do get filled up.
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