markbetz.net

I’ve lived in New Jersey now, off and on, for nearly twenty years, but I’m not a native. I was born in Michigan and have at various times lived in New York, Indiana, Rhode Island, Maryland, California, New Hampshire, and the British Virgin Islands. None of the places I’ve lived has been perfect. They all [...]

I’ve posted an account of a recent visit I made to the Paulinskill Viaduct, a crumbling concrete edifice that was once an integral part of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad’s “Lackawanna Cut-off” route across hilly northwestern New Jersey. Like the Pequest Fill, also a part of the same route, it is a monument both [...]

A couple of weeks ago I set out to trace the route of the abandoned Lehigh and Hudson River Railway north from its crossing at Johnsonburg Rd. near Allamuchy, NJ. You can find the post related to that excursion here. The LHRR was once one of the most important rail links in the Northeast, serving [...]

On the 16th of last month I posted about my attempts to locate the Van Campen burial ground near the former site of Calno, New Jersey, and about the overgrown mess I found once I was successful. At the time I expressed disappointment with the National Park Service for not keeping the property cleared. I [...]

Click Here to View the Gallery It comes up occasionally, among antiquarians and history buffs, and those given to poking around in ruins and old documents: what sort of fingerprints our great civilization would leave on the land if it were suddenly to disappear, as so many civilizations of the past seem in retrospect to [...]

At the worst of it I found myself nearly immobile. Vines stretched tightly across my chest, thorns dug into my forearms with every move, and my feet, down somewhere in the invisible nightmare below the foamy ocean of green in which I swam, were in the tangled clutches of evil flora with long, sinuous tentacles. [...]

I walked up the forest trail, leaving the Old Mine Road behind. It’s called a trail now on all the Park Service maps, but like so many of the trails in these parts it was once a road. The trail has a name, and the data buried in modern GPS devices gives it that name [...]

The sandy loams of the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey are a porous filter for the water that trickles through purifying layers to feed one of the largest aquifers on the East Coast. Hours after the rain has fallen the ground is for the most part dry again, and undisturbed. Into this same ground [...]

My feet wandered back into the area of old Millbrook this weekend, and I expect they will tread that way again soon, and hopefully for years to come. This region, like the Pine Barrens in the Southern part of the state, completely fascinates me, and for the same reason. For such a small state New [...]

I headed back into the hills of Pahaquarry this past weekend in search of an old road, and some old farms, and found quite a bit more of the former, and less of the latter, than I had hoped. The steep hillsides of Pahaquarry Township were once part of New Jersey’s rural agricultural heritage, and [...]