If I were a crow, or, at least, had the faculty of flying with that swift directness which is proverbially attributed to the corvine tribe, and were to wing a southwesterly course from the truck of the flag-staff which rises from the Battery at New York, I should find myself, within a very short time, about fifty miles from the turbulent city, and hovering over a region of country as little like the civilized emporium just quitted as it is well possible to conceive. Not being a crow, however, nor fitted up with an apparatus for flying,—destitute even of a balloon,—I am compelled to adopt the means of locomotion which the bounty of God or the ingenuity of man affords me, and to spend a somewhat longer time in transit to my destination.
Over the New Jersey Railroad, then, I rattled, one fine, sunshiny autumn morning, in the year that has recently taken leave of us, as far as Bordentown, a distance of some fifty-seven miles, on my way to a locality the very existence of which is scarcely dreamed of by thousands in the metropolis, who can tell you how many square miles of malaria there are in the Roman Campagna, and who have got the topography of Caffre Land at their fingers' ends. It is a region aboriginal in savagery, grand in the aspects of untrammelled Nature; where forests extend in uninterrupted lines over scores of miles; where we may wander a good day's journey without meeting half-a-dozen human faces; where stately deer will bound across our path, and bears dispute our passage through the cedar-brakes; where, in a word, we may enjoy the undiluted essence, the perfect wildness, of woodland life. Deep and far "under the shade of melancholy boughs" we shall be taken, if together we visit the ancient Pines of New Jersey.
In order to do so, we must make at Bordentown the acquaintance of Mr. Cox, and take our seats in his stage for a jolt, twelve miles long, to the village of New Egypt, on the frontier of the Pines. Although the forest is accessible from many points, and may be entered by a number of distinct approaches, I, the writer hereof, selected that viâ New Egypt as the most convenient to a comer from New York, and as, perhaps, the least fatiguing to accomplish.
But, oh! the horrors of those New Jersey roads! Mud? 'Tis as if all the rains of heaven had been concentrated upon all the marls and clays of earth, and all the sticky stratum plastered down in a wiggling line of unascertainable length and breadth! Holes? As if a legion of sharpshooters had been detailed for the defence of Sandy Hook, and had excavated for themselves innumerable rifle-pits or caverns for the discomfiture of unhappy passengers! Up hill and down dale,—with merciless ruts and savage ridges,—now, a slough, to all appearance destitute of bottom, and, next, a treacherous stretch of sand, into which the wheels sink deeper and deeper at every revolution, as if the vehicle were France, and the road disorder,—such is a faint adumbration of the state of affairs in the benighted interior of our petulant little whiskey-drinking sister State!
But all earthly things come to an end, and so, accordingly, did our three-hours' drive. The stage pompously rolled into the huddled street of its terminus, and deposited me, in the neighborhood of noon, on the stoop of the only tavern supported in the deadly-lively place. No long sojourn, however, was in store for me. Presently—ere I had grown tired of watching the couple of clodhoppers, well-bespattered as to boots and undergarments with Jersey mud, who, leaning against a fence in true agricultural laziness, deliberately eyed, or rather, gloated over the inoffensive traveller, as though he were that "daily stranger," for whom, as is well known, every Jerseyman offers up matutinal supplications—a buggy appeared in the distance, and I was shortly asked for. It was the vehicle in which I was to seek my destination in the Pines; and my back was speedily turned upon the queer little village with the curiously chosen name. My driver, an intelligent, sharp-featured old man, soon informs me that he was born and has lived for fifty years in the forest. A curious, old-world mortal,—our father's "serving-man," to the very life! The Pines are to him what Banks and City Halls and Cooper Institutes and Astor Houses are to a poor cittadini; every tree is individualized; and I doubt not he could find his way by night from one end to the other of the forest.
We had driven no great distance, when my companion lifted his whip, and, pointing to a long, dark, indistinct line which crossed the road in the distance, blocking the prospect ahead and on either side, as far as the eye could reach, exclaimed: "Them's the Pines!" As we approached the forest, a change, theatrical in its suddenness, took place in the scenery through which our course was taken. The rich and smiling pasture-lands, interspersed with fields of luxuriant corn, were left behind, the red clay of the road was exchanged for a gritty sand, and the road itself dwindled to a mere pathway through a clearing. The locality looked like a plagiarism from the Ohio backwoods. On both sides of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of green, and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden of Paradise beyond. Not so, however; for our pathway squeezes itself between two melancholy sentinel-pines, tracing its white scroll into the forest farther than the eye can follow, and in a few moments we leave the clearing behind, and pass into the shadow of the endless avenue, and bow beneath the trailing branches of the silent, stern, immovable warders at the gate. We were fairly in the Pines; and a drive of somewhat more than three miles lay before us still.
The immense forest region I had thus entered covers an extensive portion of Burlington County, and nearly the whole of Ocean, beside parts of Monmouth, Camden, Atlantic, Gloucester, and other counties. The prevailing soils of this great area—some sixty miles in length by ten in breadth, and reaching from the river Delaware to the very shore of the Atlantic—are marls and sands of different qualities, of which the most common is a fine, white, angular sand, of the kind so much in request for building-purposes and the manufacture of glass. In such an arid soil the coniferae alone could flourish, and accordingly we find that the wide-spreading region is overgrown almost entirely with white and yellow pine, hemlock, and cedar. Hence its distinctive appellation.
It was a most lovely afternoon, warm and serene as only an American autumn afternoon knows how to be; and while we hurried past the mute, monotonous, yet ever-shifting array of pines and cedars, the very rays of the sun seemed to be perfumed with the aroma of the fragrant twigs, about which humming-birds now and then whirred and fluttered as we startled them, scarcely more brilliant in color than the gorgeous maples which grew in one or two dry and open spots. For three-quarters of an hour our drive continued, until at length a slight undulation broke the level of the sand, and a fence, inclosing a patch of Indian corn, from which the forest had been driven back, betokened for the first time the proximity of some habitation. In fact, having reached the summit of the slope, I found myself in the centre of an irregular range of dwellings, scattered here and there in picturesque disregard of order, and next moment my hand was grasped by my friend B. I had reached my destination,—Hanover Iron-Works,—and was soon walking up, past the white gateway, to the Big House.
Somewhat less than eighty years ago, Mr. Benjamin Jones, a merchant of Philadelphia, invested a portion of his fortune in the purchase of one hundred thousand acres of land in the then unbroken forest of the Pines. The site of the present hamlet of Hanover struck him as admirably adapted for the establishment of a smelting-furnace, and he accordingly projected a settlement on this spot. The Rancocus River forms here a broad embayment, the damming of which was easily accomplished, and one of the best of water-privileges was thus obtained. On the north of this bay or pond, moreover, there rises a sloping bluff, which was covered, at the period of its purchase, with ancient trees, but upon which a large and commodious mansion was soon erected. Here Mr. Jones planted himself, and quickly drew around him a settlement which rose in number to some four hundred souls; and here he commenced the manufacture of iron. At frequent intervals in the Pines were found surface-deposits of ore, the precipitate from waters holding iron in solution, which frequently covered an area of many acres, and reached a depth of from two or three inches to as many feet. The ore thus existing in surface-deposits was smelted in the iron-works, and the metal thence obtained was at once molten and moulded in the adjoining foundry. Here, in the midst of these spreading forests, many a ponderous casting, many a fiery rush of tons of molten metal, has been seen. Here, five-and-forty years ago, the celebrated Decatur superintended, during many weeks, the casting of twenty-four pounders, to be used in the famous contest with the Algerine pirates whom he humbled; and the echoes of the forest were awakened with strange thunders then. As the great guns were raised from the pits in which they had been cast, and were declared ready for proof, Decatur ordered each one to be loaded with repeated charges of powder and ball, and pointed into the woods. Then, for miles between the grazed and quivering boles, crashed the missiles of destruction, startling bear and deer and squirrel and raccoon, and leaving traces of their passage which are even still occasionally discovered. The cannon-balls themselves are now and then found imbedded in the sand of the forest. In this manner the guns were tried which were to thunder the challenge of America against the dens of Mediterranean pirates.
Hanover, too, in its day of pride, furnished many a city with its iron tubes for water and for gas, many a factory and workshop with its castings, many a farmer with his tools, but the glow of the furnace is quenched forever now. The slowly gathering ferruginous deposits have been exhausted, and three years have elapsed since the furnace-fires were lighted. The blackened shell of the building stands in cold decrepitude, a melancholy vestige of usefulness outlived. In consequence of the stoppage of the works, Hanover has lost seven-eighths of its population, and only about fifty inhabitants remain in the white cottages grouped about the Big House, who are employed in agricultural labors and occupations connected with the forest. Yet in this solitary nook the elegances and the tastes of the most cultivated society are to be found. The Big House, surrounded by its well-trimmed gardens sloping down to the broad Rancocus, with its comfortable apartments, and the diversified prospect which it commands, offers a resting-place which, although deep in the genuine forest, combines urban refinement with the quiet and seclusion of country-life.