Pine Barrens: Legends & Lore

by William McMahon

The New Jersey Pine Barrons are a legendary place with a fascinating history, rich in mystery, adventure and romance. Across its great green canvas flash pirates and plunder, patriots and villians, boom towns and ghost towns, brawling millworkers and firebreathing preachers, witches, wizards and, of course, the Jersey Devil. Today, all that remains of the colonial settlements and once-thriving, boisterous mill towns are occasional bits of crumbling rubble in thje deep woods-and a wealth of stories about the past that have been handed down from one Pine Barrons family to the next. This book is a delightful grab bag collection of just such lore, accumulated by the author in the course of a lifetime's fascination with the Pine Barrons. A number of these yarns are pretty good local history, some are of the strictly-for-fun-variety, and some are read late at night with the lights turned low, and the doors and windows securely bolted!

Genres: Nonfiction

149 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Local history is an important part of history and this was good to read as a transplant to the Pine Barrens. Of course, a lot of this is hogwash, but it has the virtue of being obvious hogwash, unlike some things I've believed for 20 years or more before disabusal. There's a shame to it, as well, as the Pineys were much reduced in 1980, when much of the book was written, and have sadly been pushed along the same path of homogenization as the rest of the country has over the last fifty years.

[Robert Schlatter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book of stories from South Jersey

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of tales and lore. Much of it is known, there were some bits that were new to me. I found the language piece interesting. "Happy as a clam at high tide" is an expression that we used in our house growing up.

Learning about bouncing cranberries (crane berries) to determine their ripeness was new to me. The naming of Hammonton was equally enlightening.

This is a fun and easy read, although more of a collection than a weighty reference.