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The Pine Barrens
Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The few people who dwell in the region, the €œPineys,€ are little known and often misunderstood. Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people€”and their distinctive
149 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
About the author
John McPhee
135 books1,968 followersJohn Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
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October 23, 2026
The Pine Barrens are truly unique – a vast and unspoiled wilderness in the midst of the urban and suburban megalopolis that takes up much of the Northeastern portion of the United States. John McPhee captures well what is unique about this region, in terms of both its ecology and its human culture, in his 1968 book The Pine Barrens.
McPhee is considered to be one of the founding authors of creative nonfiction – a unique genre that applies literary techniques to narratives that are otherwise factually accurate. His talent for combining an elegant, prose-poetic style with careful observance of real-life detail informs books like Coming Into the Country, his 1977 look at Alaskan life, nature, and culture.
McPhee is also a New Jerseyan to the core – born and raised in Princeton, a graduate of Princeton University, and still a professor of journalism at Princeton. Considering his status as a son of the Garden State, one might find it unsurprising that McPhee turned his attention toward one of the most unique and distinctive parts of his home state.
McPhee starts The Pine Barrens by pointing out that “New Jersey has nearly 1,000 people per square mile – the greatest population density of any state in the Union. In parts of northern New Jersey, there are as many as 40,000 people per square mile” (p. 4). By comparison, McPhee could have added, Japan has “only” about 875 people per square mile.
And yet, by contrast, “In the central area of the Pine Barrens – the forest land that is still so undeveloped that it can be called wilderness – there are only fifteen people per square mile.” The contrast between the wild Pine Barrens, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the nearby cluster of cities and suburbs that puts New Jersey squarely at the center of “the great unbroken city that will one day reach at least from Boston to Richmond” (p. 4), clearly inspired McPhee’s literary imagination.
In an early chapter of the book, McPhee tells us that “One of the geological curiosities of the Pine Barrens is that rainwater soaking down through fallen pine needles and other forest litter from the sands below; the dissolved iron moves underground into the streams, where it oxidizes”; eventually, “this iron-oxide film permeates the sands and gravels of the riverbanks and cements them together into a sandstone composite that is known as bog iron” (p. 24).
This bog iron, we learn, is “remarkably reluctant to rust.” It made excellent cannonballs for the U.S. Army and Navy in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and “In some graveyards in the Pine Barrens, there are iron tombstones, and around old houses are walks made of iron flagstones. Iron stoves that bear the town name ‘Atsion’ over their fuelling doors were made in a community that had a population of 700 in the early 19th century and has a population of 15 today” (p. 25). Please note the 97.9% population decline that Atsion experienced. Today, there is an Atsion Lake, and an Atsion Village Historic District with seven “contributing buildings”; but the old iron-making town of Atsion is one of what McPhee refers to as “The Vanished Towns” of the Pine Barrens.
Yes – in case you were wondering – the “Jersey Devil,” the legendary monster of the Pine Barrens (and the inspiration for the name of New Jersey’s Newark-based National Hockey League team), does get a respectful mention here, with several hair-raising accounts of how the creature supposedly came into existence and got its name. McPhee recounts how “People used to hang up lanterns to scare the Jersey Devil away”, and adds that “Most people now look upon the Jersey Devil as pure legend, but there are many who do not. Unexplained and sinister events will still cause its name to be spoken in serious voices” (p. 68).
But McPhee is much more interested in the real people of the Pine Barrens. Long-time residents of the Pine Barrens, he explains, refer to each other, and to themselves, as “pineys,” though outsiders would do well not to use the term in a resident’s presence. McPhee writes with interest and respect about the people of the Pine Barrens, stating that they work hard but do not want to be tied down to a routine (cranberry bogs and blueberry patches are a mainstay of the Barrens’ economy). They are confident that “no one who knows the woods and is willing to do a little work on his own is ever going to go hungry”, and they have “a special feeling about the landscape they live in; they know that their environment is unusual and they know why they value it” (p. 50).
Historically, some of the ways of making a living in the Barrens were, shall we say, less official than harvesting blueberries or cranberries. Moonshining was widespread in the Barrens during Prohibition; and when U.S. Navy blimps left the Lakehurst Naval Air Station (yes, that’s the Lakehurst where the Hindenburg exploded and burned in 1937), “it was common for the big airships to return to Lakehurst with holes in their envelopes. As the blimps hung over the woods, moonshiners frequently shot at them, in the mistaken belief that the sailors in them were sweeping the woods with binoculars in search of stills” (p. 77).
Of course, much has changed since vanished towns like Atsion were forging bog-iron cannonballs for Stephen Decatur’s naval squadrons of 1814. “Electrical lines, the Second World War, and television successively brought an end to the utter isolation of the pineys” (p. 51). But even the coming of the Garden State Parkway and the Atlantic City Expressway could not break the people’s love for their land. McPhee writes that “I have met Pine Barrens people who have, at one time or another, moved to other parts of the country. Most of them tried other lives for a while, only to return unreluctantly to the pines. One of them explained to me, ‘It’s a privilege to live in these woods’” (p. 52).
McPhee is interested in the ecosystem as well as the people of the Pine Barrens. The region has been ravaged by devastating forest fires over the years, and the reader of McPhee’s The Pine Barrens learns some of the reasons why:
Pine Barrens oak leaves…have so much protective oil concentrated within them that they appear to be made of shining green leather. The ground soaks up rainfall so efficiently that the litter on its surface is, more often than not, as dry as paper. In the sand soil, there are no earthworms and few bacteria to consume the litter, and it piles up three and four inches deep. In all, the Pine Barrens respond explosively to flame… (p. 100)
Yet fire may not be the most dangerous thing that has ever threatened the life and the health of the Pine Barrens ecosystem. A chapter titled “Vision” makes it only too clear that, like the Everglades in Florida, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey have often been threatened by ambitious entrepreneurs with elaborate plans to “improve” the Barrens via varying forms of economic development. In the time when McPhee originally wrote The Pine Barrens, the latest such threat – the “most exhaustive and expensive one yet” – was a “proposal for a jetport and a new city” (p. 129). The details, as McPhee introduces them, are more than sufficiently damning:
Under this plan, a spur of the Garden State Parkway would take off into the woods from Toms River, soon passing beneath the central business district of a city of 250,000 people. Beyond the city, the road would go through a green belt, then through an industrial park, and then under the runways and past the terminal building of the largest airport on Earth – four times as large as Newark Airport, LaGuardia, and Kennedy put together. As a supersonic jetport, it would serve a third of the United States, and supersonic jets would land there ninety minutes after leaving Paris. Shuttle jets would fly passengers to inland airports, and 150-mile-an-hour trains would take travellers to Philadelphia in twenty minutes, and to New York in thirty. (p. 129)
Jesus wept.
Let’s overlook, for the moment, the fact that the supersonic jet plane movement did not exactly, well, take off. The U.S. Senate voted down Boeing’s Supersonic Transport (SST) program in 1970. An Air France Concorde crash near Paris in the year 2000 eroded public confidence in the plane, and the last flight of the Concorde took place in 2003. But SST’s or no SST’s, the mega-jetport plan for the Pine Barrens clearly would have been an unmitigated disaster. Fair-minded as always, McPhee interviews a developer who pushed for the jetport, and the developer actually comes across as a decent fellow. The developer just can’t see that the jetport he champions so passionately would destroy a unique natural and cultural treasure – one of the last true stretches of wild land on the East Coast of the United States.
For a 1981 reprinting of The Pine Barrens, McPhee returned to the region, revisiting old informants and friends in the company of National Geographic photographer Bill Curtsinger. I found that Curtsinger’s stark, deep-focus black-and-white photos of the Pine Barrens’ landscape and people provided an effective visual complement to McPhee’s flowing prose poetry.
Today, more than one million acres of Pine Barrens land, across seven counties of central New Jersey, are protected as the Pinelands National Reserve – so I suppose we don’t have to worry about that jetport too much nowadays. That’s a hopeful sign.
And while I previously knew about John McPhee and Coming Into the Country – it was impossible to be a graduate student in English at the University of Maryland in, say, 1986 and not hear about John McPhee and Coming Into the Country – I knew nothing about McPhee’s The Pine Barrens until I happened into a Barnes & Noble store in Paramus and saw it in the regional-literature section – a bit of good luck for which I am most grateful.
This is one of the best studies that I have ever read of the ecology and the society of a North American region. Now I look forward to paying another visit to the Pine Barrens someday. Just hoping that I won’t end up, like that fellow in the Bruce Springsteen song, with my car “all stuck in the mud,/Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey…”
McPhee is considered to be one of the founding authors of creative nonfiction – a unique genre that applies literary techniques to narratives that are otherwise factually accurate. His talent for combining an elegant, prose-poetic style with careful observance of real-life detail informs books like Coming Into the Country, his 1977 look at Alaskan life, nature, and culture.
McPhee is also a New Jerseyan to the core – born and raised in Princeton, a graduate of Princeton University, and still a professor of journalism at Princeton. Considering his status as a son of the Garden State, one might find it unsurprising that McPhee turned his attention toward one of the most unique and distinctive parts of his home state.
McPhee starts The Pine Barrens by pointing out that “New Jersey has nearly 1,000 people per square mile – the greatest population density of any state in the Union. In parts of northern New Jersey, there are as many as 40,000 people per square mile” (p. 4). By comparison, McPhee could have added, Japan has “only” about 875 people per square mile.
And yet, by contrast, “In the central area of the Pine Barrens – the forest land that is still so undeveloped that it can be called wilderness – there are only fifteen people per square mile.” The contrast between the wild Pine Barrens, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the nearby cluster of cities and suburbs that puts New Jersey squarely at the center of “the great unbroken city that will one day reach at least from Boston to Richmond” (p. 4), clearly inspired McPhee’s literary imagination.
In an early chapter of the book, McPhee tells us that “One of the geological curiosities of the Pine Barrens is that rainwater soaking down through fallen pine needles and other forest litter from the sands below; the dissolved iron moves underground into the streams, where it oxidizes”; eventually, “this iron-oxide film permeates the sands and gravels of the riverbanks and cements them together into a sandstone composite that is known as bog iron” (p. 24).
This bog iron, we learn, is “remarkably reluctant to rust.” It made excellent cannonballs for the U.S. Army and Navy in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and “In some graveyards in the Pine Barrens, there are iron tombstones, and around old houses are walks made of iron flagstones. Iron stoves that bear the town name ‘Atsion’ over their fuelling doors were made in a community that had a population of 700 in the early 19th century and has a population of 15 today” (p. 25). Please note the 97.9% population decline that Atsion experienced. Today, there is an Atsion Lake, and an Atsion Village Historic District with seven “contributing buildings”; but the old iron-making town of Atsion is one of what McPhee refers to as “The Vanished Towns” of the Pine Barrens.
Yes – in case you were wondering – the “Jersey Devil,” the legendary monster of the Pine Barrens (and the inspiration for the name of New Jersey’s Newark-based National Hockey League team), does get a respectful mention here, with several hair-raising accounts of how the creature supposedly came into existence and got its name. McPhee recounts how “People used to hang up lanterns to scare the Jersey Devil away”, and adds that “Most people now look upon the Jersey Devil as pure legend, but there are many who do not. Unexplained and sinister events will still cause its name to be spoken in serious voices” (p. 68).
But McPhee is much more interested in the real people of the Pine Barrens. Long-time residents of the Pine Barrens, he explains, refer to each other, and to themselves, as “pineys,” though outsiders would do well not to use the term in a resident’s presence. McPhee writes with interest and respect about the people of the Pine Barrens, stating that they work hard but do not want to be tied down to a routine (cranberry bogs and blueberry patches are a mainstay of the Barrens’ economy). They are confident that “no one who knows the woods and is willing to do a little work on his own is ever going to go hungry”, and they have “a special feeling about the landscape they live in; they know that their environment is unusual and they know why they value it” (p. 50).
Historically, some of the ways of making a living in the Barrens were, shall we say, less official than harvesting blueberries or cranberries. Moonshining was widespread in the Barrens during Prohibition; and when U.S. Navy blimps left the Lakehurst Naval Air Station (yes, that’s the Lakehurst where the Hindenburg exploded and burned in 1937), “it was common for the big airships to return to Lakehurst with holes in their envelopes. As the blimps hung over the woods, moonshiners frequently shot at them, in the mistaken belief that the sailors in them were sweeping the woods with binoculars in search of stills” (p. 77).
Of course, much has changed since vanished towns like Atsion were forging bog-iron cannonballs for Stephen Decatur’s naval squadrons of 1814. “Electrical lines, the Second World War, and television successively brought an end to the utter isolation of the pineys” (p. 51). But even the coming of the Garden State Parkway and the Atlantic City Expressway could not break the people’s love for their land. McPhee writes that “I have met Pine Barrens people who have, at one time or another, moved to other parts of the country. Most of them tried other lives for a while, only to return unreluctantly to the pines. One of them explained to me, ‘It’s a privilege to live in these woods’” (p. 52).
McPhee is interested in the ecosystem as well as the people of the Pine Barrens. The region has been ravaged by devastating forest fires over the years, and the reader of McPhee’s The Pine Barrens learns some of the reasons why:
Pine Barrens oak leaves…have so much protective oil concentrated within them that they appear to be made of shining green leather. The ground soaks up rainfall so efficiently that the litter on its surface is, more often than not, as dry as paper. In the sand soil, there are no earthworms and few bacteria to consume the litter, and it piles up three and four inches deep. In all, the Pine Barrens respond explosively to flame… (p. 100)
Yet fire may not be the most dangerous thing that has ever threatened the life and the health of the Pine Barrens ecosystem. A chapter titled “Vision” makes it only too clear that, like the Everglades in Florida, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey have often been threatened by ambitious entrepreneurs with elaborate plans to “improve” the Barrens via varying forms of economic development. In the time when McPhee originally wrote The Pine Barrens, the latest such threat – the “most exhaustive and expensive one yet” – was a “proposal for a jetport and a new city” (p. 129). The details, as McPhee introduces them, are more than sufficiently damning:
Under this plan, a spur of the Garden State Parkway would take off into the woods from Toms River, soon passing beneath the central business district of a city of 250,000 people. Beyond the city, the road would go through a green belt, then through an industrial park, and then under the runways and past the terminal building of the largest airport on Earth – four times as large as Newark Airport, LaGuardia, and Kennedy put together. As a supersonic jetport, it would serve a third of the United States, and supersonic jets would land there ninety minutes after leaving Paris. Shuttle jets would fly passengers to inland airports, and 150-mile-an-hour trains would take travellers to Philadelphia in twenty minutes, and to New York in thirty. (p. 129)
Jesus wept.
Let’s overlook, for the moment, the fact that the supersonic jet plane movement did not exactly, well, take off. The U.S. Senate voted down Boeing’s Supersonic Transport (SST) program in 1970. An Air France Concorde crash near Paris in the year 2000 eroded public confidence in the plane, and the last flight of the Concorde took place in 2003. But SST’s or no SST’s, the mega-jetport plan for the Pine Barrens clearly would have been an unmitigated disaster. Fair-minded as always, McPhee interviews a developer who pushed for the jetport, and the developer actually comes across as a decent fellow. The developer just can’t see that the jetport he champions so passionately would destroy a unique natural and cultural treasure – one of the last true stretches of wild land on the East Coast of the United States.
For a 1981 reprinting of The Pine Barrens, McPhee returned to the region, revisiting old informants and friends in the company of National Geographic photographer Bill Curtsinger. I found that Curtsinger’s stark, deep-focus black-and-white photos of the Pine Barrens’ landscape and people provided an effective visual complement to McPhee’s flowing prose poetry.
Today, more than one million acres of Pine Barrens land, across seven counties of central New Jersey, are protected as the Pinelands National Reserve – so I suppose we don’t have to worry about that jetport too much nowadays. That’s a hopeful sign.
And while I previously knew about John McPhee and Coming Into the Country – it was impossible to be a graduate student in English at the University of Maryland in, say, 1986 and not hear about John McPhee and Coming Into the Country – I knew nothing about McPhee’s The Pine Barrens until I happened into a Barnes & Noble store in Paramus and saw it in the regional-literature section – a bit of good luck for which I am most grateful.
This is one of the best studies that I have ever read of the ecology and the society of a North American region. Now I look forward to paying another visit to the Pine Barrens someday. Just hoping that I won’t end up, like that fellow in the Bruce Springsteen song, with my car “all stuck in the mud,/Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey…”
June 27, 2020
When I drive to the New Jersey shore points as I did this past week - and for the last six years and many others previously - I have to make a right turn, though not a hard right turn, around Philadelphia and then follow a choice of roadways south to the beach of my choice. Regardless of my choice of road, I will travel fifty or so miles with nothing but trees on either side of the road. Pines mostly. And thick enough to prevent seeing beyond. Oh, there are exits, and you'd think you might see the occasional outpost, but you'd be wrong. I did spot a good-sized farmer's field on the way back, but it just seemed incongruous.
And I've wondered about that all these years. Just car-steps away from some of the most densely populated pockets in America, and just trees. Yet, they form a curtain.
I was more curious this year, but the trailheads were only in my mind. If I could only park the car, head west through the first pines, and on. Or maybe there's a book . . .
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
So this year I took John McPhee with me, who did venture through those pines quite a few years ago:
-- It's sandy soil, not good for agriculture. Folks have been trying for centuries but you have to ship the dirt in to be a right farmer. Which at least originally is the reason that the barrens have not been developed.
-- It's good for cranberry bogs, though, and blueberries. More about the latter later.
-- Because of that soil, the land holds a very pure water. Always has. Sea captains, back in the day, used to take the Pines' water, called cedar water, on long voyages because that water would remain sweet and potable longer.
-- There are forest fires in the Pines Barrens. And fairly widespread ones. The type of pines there - pygmy pines - are quick to sprout anew. As are the abundant blueberry bushes. Indeed, the blueberry bushes do better after a burn. And so, although there is the occasional act of nature and the sometimes careless human act, the vast majority of wildfires in the Pine Barrens are arson, intentionally set by blueberry pickers.
-- Tories fled to the Pine Barrens during the American Revolution, as did Quakers who were insufficiently Quakerly. Current last names reflect this.
-- The first Indian reservation was in the Pines. It didn't last, but not (this time) because they were forced out.
-- Marriages were pretty casual in the pines late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. For lawful weddings, people had to travel beyond the woods, to a place like Mt. Holly. Many went to "squires," who performed weddings for a fee of one dollar. No questions were asked, even if the squires recognized the brides and the grooms as people they had married to other people a week or a month before.
-- Applejack is the laureate liquid of the pines. It is known as jack, and its effects are known as apple palsy.
-- "Collier" is a fairly common last name here. I didn't know it meant "charcoal-maker." I do now.
-- Whenever Fred Brown referred to a man's wife-including on one occasion, the wife of the President of the United States-he said "his woman." Fred says "spagnum" for sphagnum," "braken" for "bracken," and "fastly" for "quickly," and when he was telling me that he had never flown in a plane he said, "I could have flewn lots of times, but I never cared to."
-- A woman named Elizabeth Kite wrote a paper about some inbred idiots she found in her research in the Pines. And there were genuine specimens. Superficial readers took that to mean that the incest and the resultant genetics were prevalent. They were not, yet the notion persisted.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
I read this book after getting to my beach spot. No one else seemed interested, although I offered a few pine combs. Perhaps there was nothing to disapprove, so why bother. That said, it was a much more interesting drive back through the Pines than it was coming down.
I stopped long enough before writing this to check on some things since the book was written, after all, in 1967. But from the highway things seemed the same. And what I've learned since is that the Pines have been designated as a protected reserve by both the United States and the United Nations. 1.1 million acres. Which, I have to tell you, is a lot of blueberries.
And I've wondered about that all these years. Just car-steps away from some of the most densely populated pockets in America, and just trees. Yet, they form a curtain.
I was more curious this year, but the trailheads were only in my mind. If I could only park the car, head west through the first pines, and on. Or maybe there's a book . . .
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
So this year I took John McPhee with me, who did venture through those pines quite a few years ago:
-- It's sandy soil, not good for agriculture. Folks have been trying for centuries but you have to ship the dirt in to be a right farmer. Which at least originally is the reason that the barrens have not been developed.
-- It's good for cranberry bogs, though, and blueberries. More about the latter later.
-- Because of that soil, the land holds a very pure water. Always has. Sea captains, back in the day, used to take the Pines' water, called cedar water, on long voyages because that water would remain sweet and potable longer.
-- There are forest fires in the Pines Barrens. And fairly widespread ones. The type of pines there - pygmy pines - are quick to sprout anew. As are the abundant blueberry bushes. Indeed, the blueberry bushes do better after a burn. And so, although there is the occasional act of nature and the sometimes careless human act, the vast majority of wildfires in the Pine Barrens are arson, intentionally set by blueberry pickers.
-- Tories fled to the Pine Barrens during the American Revolution, as did Quakers who were insufficiently Quakerly. Current last names reflect this.
-- The first Indian reservation was in the Pines. It didn't last, but not (this time) because they were forced out.
-- Marriages were pretty casual in the pines late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. For lawful weddings, people had to travel beyond the woods, to a place like Mt. Holly. Many went to "squires," who performed weddings for a fee of one dollar. No questions were asked, even if the squires recognized the brides and the grooms as people they had married to other people a week or a month before.
-- Applejack is the laureate liquid of the pines. It is known as jack, and its effects are known as apple palsy.
-- "Collier" is a fairly common last name here. I didn't know it meant "charcoal-maker." I do now.
-- Whenever Fred Brown referred to a man's wife-including on one occasion, the wife of the President of the United States-he said "his woman." Fred says "spagnum" for sphagnum," "braken" for "bracken," and "fastly" for "quickly," and when he was telling me that he had never flown in a plane he said, "I could have flewn lots of times, but I never cared to."
-- A woman named Elizabeth Kite wrote a paper about some inbred idiots she found in her research in the Pines. And there were genuine specimens. Superficial readers took that to mean that the incest and the resultant genetics were prevalent. They were not, yet the notion persisted.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
I read this book after getting to my beach spot. No one else seemed interested, although I offered a few pine combs. Perhaps there was nothing to disapprove, so why bother. That said, it was a much more interesting drive back through the Pines than it was coming down.
I stopped long enough before writing this to check on some things since the book was written, after all, in 1967. But from the highway things seemed the same. And what I've learned since is that the Pines have been designated as a protected reserve by both the United States and the United Nations. 1.1 million acres. Which, I have to tell you, is a lot of blueberries.
November 5, 2018
The New Jersey Turnpike is not a highway. It’s a sleight of hand, a confidence trick. I drove it for the first time this past summer on a family vacation. In our rented car we entered the Turnpike at the Delaware River near Wilmington and followed it up the length of the state until we passed under the Hudson, by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, into Manhattan.
The swindle of the Turnpike is that it leads you through the middle of New Jersey while denying you any evidence that New Jersey exists. You do not see it: no towns, no countryside. Trees and shrubs hem you in completely. When you want to stop for gas or lunch, you are channeled into service centers immediately alongside the highway. There are, I think, fewer than a dozen exits in more than one hundred miles of road. The point is to move you as efficiently as possible out of the state.
Forbidden any real acquaintance with the place, I drove through the New Jersey of my imagination, humming Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper.” Somewhere to the left, in the direction of Philadelphia, one of my ancestors had settled, a yeoman farmer of the colonial period. Somewhere ahead was Princeton, where my brother had attended graduate school twenty years ago. Off to the right for mile after mile, vast and dim in my reverie, were the Pine Barrens.
The name sounds like a doom, a place of exile. The Pine Barrens are a broad elevated tract of sparsely settled land, poor in soil, thick with woods, drained by slow molasses-colored rivers with strange names like Batsto and Mullica. In John McPhee’s telling it is a place of social isolation, ghost towns swallowed in undergrowth, dead industries, real-estate bubbles, anomalies of flora and geology, mafia murders, moonshiners, cranberry bogs, and mythological creatures like the Jersey Devil.
When McPhee published his book in 1967, a new round of development was planned in the Pine Barrens, including an international air hub and a modern city of a quarter million people. A spur of the Turnpike was proposed that would have cut through the Pine Barrens from approximately Trenton to Atlantic City. Like the grandiose ambitions of planning committees in earlier generations, none of these has materialized, which I find gratifying.
Himself a native of New Jersey, John McPhee found perfect subject matter in the Pine Barrens: a bit of wilderness, with a history and culture all its own, in the middle of the country’s most densely populated state. He does it justice. How much better it is to ride along with McPhee and his companions through the labyrinthine sand roads of the Pine Barrens than to find oneself dozing off, in need of coffee, on the featureless Turnpike of the mind.
The swindle of the Turnpike is that it leads you through the middle of New Jersey while denying you any evidence that New Jersey exists. You do not see it: no towns, no countryside. Trees and shrubs hem you in completely. When you want to stop for gas or lunch, you are channeled into service centers immediately alongside the highway. There are, I think, fewer than a dozen exits in more than one hundred miles of road. The point is to move you as efficiently as possible out of the state.
Forbidden any real acquaintance with the place, I drove through the New Jersey of my imagination, humming Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper.” Somewhere to the left, in the direction of Philadelphia, one of my ancestors had settled, a yeoman farmer of the colonial period. Somewhere ahead was Princeton, where my brother had attended graduate school twenty years ago. Off to the right for mile after mile, vast and dim in my reverie, were the Pine Barrens.
The name sounds like a doom, a place of exile. The Pine Barrens are a broad elevated tract of sparsely settled land, poor in soil, thick with woods, drained by slow molasses-colored rivers with strange names like Batsto and Mullica. In John McPhee’s telling it is a place of social isolation, ghost towns swallowed in undergrowth, dead industries, real-estate bubbles, anomalies of flora and geology, mafia murders, moonshiners, cranberry bogs, and mythological creatures like the Jersey Devil.
When McPhee published his book in 1967, a new round of development was planned in the Pine Barrens, including an international air hub and a modern city of a quarter million people. A spur of the Turnpike was proposed that would have cut through the Pine Barrens from approximately Trenton to Atlantic City. Like the grandiose ambitions of planning committees in earlier generations, none of these has materialized, which I find gratifying.
Himself a native of New Jersey, John McPhee found perfect subject matter in the Pine Barrens: a bit of wilderness, with a history and culture all its own, in the middle of the country’s most densely populated state. He does it justice. How much better it is to ride along with McPhee and his companions through the labyrinthine sand roads of the Pine Barrens than to find oneself dozing off, in need of coffee, on the featureless Turnpike of the mind.
July 7, 2021
"As the last of the iron furnaces gradually blew out and the substitute industries failed, people either left the pines or began to lead self-sufficient backwoods lives, and while the rest of the State of New Jersey developed toward its twentieth-century aspect, the Pine Barrens all but returned to their pre-Colonial desolation, becoming, as they have remained, a distinct and separate world."
McPhee wrote those words over 50 years ago, yet this substantial portion his New Jersey has stayed this “barren” in many ways and, thus, McPhee’s book still resonates. When people think of the United States and remote, isolated living they think of nooks and crannies of the Appalachian Mountains or of the solitary Idaho valleys or of portions of Alaska; not somewhere an hour or two from Philadelphia or New York City.
McPhee has an affinity for geography and geology but that only augments his affinity for people. And it is the people that he chronicles and interacts with that takes this book to a higher level.
And what is this book? I prefer to think of it as an ode to a particular geography and a chronicle of the kind of personality traits that allow a person of the 21st century to enjoy, and remain in a place so little changed. Yet, with respect to those who are “of the Pine Barrens,” he notes: "I have met Pine Barrens people who have, at one time or another, moved to other parts of the country. Most of them tried other lives for a while, only to return unreluctantly to the pines. One of them explained to me, “It’s a privilege to live in these woods.”"
McPhee makes us aware on many levels as to why this area should continue to be treated as a national treasure. Though I want to dig further into the changes that have taken place since he published this book, I have no trouble giving him high marks for it.
McPhee wrote those words over 50 years ago, yet this substantial portion his New Jersey has stayed this “barren” in many ways and, thus, McPhee’s book still resonates. When people think of the United States and remote, isolated living they think of nooks and crannies of the Appalachian Mountains or of the solitary Idaho valleys or of portions of Alaska; not somewhere an hour or two from Philadelphia or New York City.
McPhee has an affinity for geography and geology but that only augments his affinity for people. And it is the people that he chronicles and interacts with that takes this book to a higher level.
And what is this book? I prefer to think of it as an ode to a particular geography and a chronicle of the kind of personality traits that allow a person of the 21st century to enjoy, and remain in a place so little changed. Yet, with respect to those who are “of the Pine Barrens,” he notes: "I have met Pine Barrens people who have, at one time or another, moved to other parts of the country. Most of them tried other lives for a while, only to return unreluctantly to the pines. One of them explained to me, “It’s a privilege to live in these woods.”"
McPhee makes us aware on many levels as to why this area should continue to be treated as a national treasure. Though I want to dig further into the changes that have taken place since he published this book, I have no trouble giving him high marks for it.
October 23, 2010
I lived in New Jersey for over a year without anyone mentioning this book. Although I had a long history with Encounters with the Archdruid I was somehow unaware that McPhee had written The Pine Barrens. This book about the Pine Barrens of New Jersey (written in 1967) examines the people and well as the forest. It is a portrait of a community within a diverse pine forest. He explains a history of prejudice against the inhabitants and shows the depth of dignity of a people countering any image of degeneracy. He mingles natural history with industrial history. He incorporates folk history with political history. The Pine Barrens shows that to write the story of a place is to write a story of the past as much as the present and the people as much as the ecology. On a side note, I had no idea that more blueberries were grown in New Jersey than in Michigan (at least in 1967). Also, in the chapter “Fire in the Pines,” McPhee mentions the glacier that stopped in Morristown (the edge of Drew University, actually) that I learned about from Drew’s geologist. I look forward to taking my students to the Pine Barrens next month, after we have read McPhee’s book.
July 3, 2010
Fabulous!
The Pine Barrens take up about one-quarter of the most dense state in the nation. It is my playground. Rich in life, history, and folklore, there is nothing barren about this gem of a place.
I've been exploring the Pines more fully for the past dozen years now. McPhee's book has been recommended any number of times. I purchased it several years ago but only picked it up yesterday.
Written in 1967, this tells of a different age. Interestingly though, the Pines hadn't changed much over the previous 200 years and hasn't changed that much in the nearly 50 years since this was written.
I was familiar with most of what was here. Nevertheless, this was a valuable read. Two significant things I picked up from the book was really how short the prosperous times were in the Pines. Once the Revolution was over, the need/desire for the bog iron fell off as better iron and coal were found in western Pennsylvania. Everything after that was trying to hold onto what once was. By 1850, things changed into paper milling and then to cranberries and blueberries.
The second significant part of the book was that this was written prior to the Pinelands preservation. That was huge news in my youth. In 1967, it sounded woeful that preservation would be had. I found the jetport proposal to be highly interesting. An airport that would have been thrice as large as Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK combined would have been massive! That was news to this reader.
McPhee did well to present the Pines fairly and accurately. We got plenty of the Piney stuff. But McPhee also dispelled much of the nonsense regarding the backwardness that is oft-attributed to the folks who live here. He presented the folklore, but did not dwell upon it.
His descriptions matched almost perfectly with the areas of today. I could see Washington, Hog Wallow, Martha, etc. as he described them. Some of the structures are gone and fewer people live in the forests these days, but other than that, yup, the same.
McPhee writes beautifully. I thoroughly enjoyed the pace and language he used throughout the book.
The Pine Barrens take up about one-quarter of the most dense state in the nation. It is my playground. Rich in life, history, and folklore, there is nothing barren about this gem of a place.
I've been exploring the Pines more fully for the past dozen years now. McPhee's book has been recommended any number of times. I purchased it several years ago but only picked it up yesterday.
Written in 1967, this tells of a different age. Interestingly though, the Pines hadn't changed much over the previous 200 years and hasn't changed that much in the nearly 50 years since this was written.
I was familiar with most of what was here. Nevertheless, this was a valuable read. Two significant things I picked up from the book was really how short the prosperous times were in the Pines. Once the Revolution was over, the need/desire for the bog iron fell off as better iron and coal were found in western Pennsylvania. Everything after that was trying to hold onto what once was. By 1850, things changed into paper milling and then to cranberries and blueberries.
The second significant part of the book was that this was written prior to the Pinelands preservation. That was huge news in my youth. In 1967, it sounded woeful that preservation would be had. I found the jetport proposal to be highly interesting. An airport that would have been thrice as large as Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK combined would have been massive! That was news to this reader.
McPhee did well to present the Pines fairly and accurately. We got plenty of the Piney stuff. But McPhee also dispelled much of the nonsense regarding the backwardness that is oft-attributed to the folks who live here. He presented the folklore, but did not dwell upon it.
His descriptions matched almost perfectly with the areas of today. I could see Washington, Hog Wallow, Martha, etc. as he described them. Some of the structures are gone and fewer people live in the forests these days, but other than that, yup, the same.
McPhee writes beautifully. I thoroughly enjoyed the pace and language he used throughout the book.
February 24, 2020
I read things about New Jersey all the time written by idiots. John McPhee knows what’s up. I grew up on the edge of the pine barrens, this book rings true.
February 22, 2022
Somewhere between 3-3.5
I'll be honest, I was mostly attracted to this one by a) the pretty cover of the Daunt edition and b) that it brought to mind that classic Sopranos episode (which incidentally also includes one of the best lines in the show).
But ugh I don't know. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on McPhee: I thought The Patch was fantastic, and I even read a whole book about oranges (aptly titled Oranges) because he's so good at what he does. This was by no means bad, but some essays interested and engaged me much more than others. Interestingly - probably only just to me! - for someone who always preferred physical geography over human geography at school the ones about the people of the Pine Barrens were much more engaging and memorable than the ones about the local flora and fauna.
Perhaps it just comes down to not being in quite the right mood when I picked this up. I'll still give his other work a try (maybe Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process is more up my street).
I'll be honest, I was mostly attracted to this one by a) the pretty cover of the Daunt edition and b) that it brought to mind that classic Sopranos episode (which incidentally also includes one of the best lines in the show).
But ugh I don't know. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on McPhee: I thought The Patch was fantastic, and I even read a whole book about oranges (aptly titled Oranges) because he's so good at what he does. This was by no means bad, but some essays interested and engaged me much more than others. Interestingly - probably only just to me! - for someone who always preferred physical geography over human geography at school the ones about the people of the Pine Barrens were much more engaging and memorable than the ones about the local flora and fauna.
Perhaps it just comes down to not being in quite the right mood when I picked this up. I'll still give his other work a try (maybe Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process is more up my street).
February 20, 2017
Every region has its weirdos. Upstate New York could be the setting for a remake of DELIVERANCE. But, as usual, New Jersey beats them all. THE PINE BARRENS by John McPhee notes the anomaly of a vast wilderness stuck between the megacities of the Eastern Seaboard, inhabited by the mysterious backwoods Pineys and thick with legions. But this in New Jersey, a state where anything is possible. I learned about the Pine Barrens when I dated a girl from Atlantic City and the cheap casino bus that ferried me to her would cut through the endless woods. She was the one who first told me about the Jersey Devil, who is given a couple of pages here, but that's not even the weirdest thing about this geographic and sociological wonderland. Beneath its sandy soil is one of the largest fresh water reserves in the world, the Mexican Lindbergh crashed and died there, but like most dark forests it conjures visions. It continues to play in the imagination, at least mine, and McPhee’s.
June 30, 2019
What fantastic fun! To think such a strange place as the Pine Barrens lies just 30-50 miles from Philadelphia and New York City. That we have canoed and orienteered through various parts of the Pine Barrens lent an extra level of pleasure to reading this, but it is still a quirky, fascinating piece of nonfiction that played a big part in catapulting author John McPhee into fame and fortune. Curious characters living alternative kinds of lives carefully and intentionally avoiding the ever-suburbanizing America give this a refreshing feeling of freedom. The Pinelands comprise a big chunk of New Jersey, but very few know much about them. You can see the pines from the Atlantic City Expressway, but no one on that road is stopping there, believe me! With the two major highways, Turnpike and Parkway, passing by on either side of the Pinelands, even those traveling through New Jersey have no idea what lies under those thousands and thousands of acres of pine trees. This short book tells you and charms you.
November 7, 2021
2.5 Stars!
The tone and feel of this put me very much in mind of Errol Morris’s “Vernon”. This was interesting enough in places, but to be honest it wasn’t anything to write home about. I found the most memorable parts were to do with the descriptions of the wildfires which occasionally rip through the area, beyond that this was a kind of middle of the road account, the written equivalent of inoffensive background music.
September 12, 2025
Charming. Will be reading more McPhee!
May 21, 2020
It is rare that I would pick up a nonfiction book from 1968 and read it. But this book is a quick 155 pages and while there is valuable information on history and botany and geography, the real life characters who populate the book are what drives it and makes it valuable fifty years later. In addition to bringing to life local legends like Carranza, the ghost stories and yes, even the Jersey Devil are great fictional (or are they?) diversions. I taught high school on the eastern and western edges of the pine barrens and finished my career deep in the pine lands, so the family names are familiar. The great John Mathis is discussed in the first chapter and my family descended from his. If you have driven through the sweet smell of the pines to get to your favorite beach you have passed through the lands where rogues have smuggled goods from pirate ships through the Mullica and up hidden roads. It’s all here in this fantastic book.
November 28, 2008
I want McPhee's essays about the pine barrens to be true today. Growing up there, but not necessarily being a piney, I suppose I represent a type of person McPhee could not have been writing about in the 60s. But for a nostos I don't entirely have access to, this book does it for me in every way. & since a you can still get lost, temporarily, in the pine barrens or (like I did) become accidentally submerged in a cranberry bog, his writing is relevant enough.
November 19, 2024
I am slowly working my way through the vast catalog of John McPhee’s work. I have just finished listening to this excellent audiobook narrated by Grover Gardner. Like much of McPhee’s work he applies a singular focus to a particular place and then takes you, the reader, on a journey exploring that place and the people that inhabit it. The place is The Pine Barrens in New Jersey. Great listen.
February 27, 2022
Lovely picture of a part of New Jersey I never knew anything about (and which, I’m glad to see, is mostly still there, 50 years later). McPhee describes the unpainted nature of the people and the land without caricature. Simpler than some of his books, but welcoming in its simplicity.
March 7, 2026
I love my country New Jersey
September 5, 2025
I’ll be honest some of this didn’t hit for me (and I’m the target audience). But he pulls it together very well. I am still looking for “nature writing” (horrible term) to floor me so if you guys have any recs…
May 28, 2026
I got this title from a list of 100 books every man should read. It was interesting, I learned a lot about New Jersey.
May 24, 2012
What a great book. I enjoyed it much more than, say, Desert Solitaire -- not sure if that's because I am from the area or because McPhee's writing is engaging and the stories are unusual and interesting. Probably a little bit of both. I also love the way this "man out in the wilderness" book subverts the ego. This book is really not at all about McPhee or his experience...he dedicates himself to listening, and I think that technique works much better for the genre than Thoreau-esque self-centered ravings.
The context of the book (published in 1968 or 69), before the Pine Barrens National Reserve in the late 1970s, is a little bit outdated, but it's interesting to see the kinds of ecological concerns for those who lived in the Pine Barrens at that time. Now, the forests are more protected fro industrialization -- although still at risk in new ways. I wonder how influential this book was in raising awareness about the Pines?
I visited Batsto recently, and I was really hurt to find that they don't even carry this book in the gift shop. What a shame.
A great find. In the future, I am sure this book will be entirely important to my work as a writer.
The context of the book (published in 1968 or 69), before the Pine Barrens National Reserve in the late 1970s, is a little bit outdated, but it's interesting to see the kinds of ecological concerns for those who lived in the Pine Barrens at that time. Now, the forests are more protected fro industrialization -- although still at risk in new ways. I wonder how influential this book was in raising awareness about the Pines?
I visited Batsto recently, and I was really hurt to find that they don't even carry this book in the gift shop. What a shame.
A great find. In the future, I am sure this book will be entirely important to my work as a writer.
June 23, 2021
I had meant to read this book while I lived in New Jersey but better just a year later than never.
It turns out an enormous part of the Southern half of the state is this huge titular pine barrens. While the vast majority of the state is heavily populated and fairly industrial, there is a mostly unknown and unrecognized wilderness filled with pine trees, some kooky locals, and forest fires. As usual, McPhee is a delight in his open wonder at nature, and also his acceptance and lack of judgment when it comes to the locals.
I did worry a bit about reading a book published in 1968 if I was reading about an area that doesn't even exist anymore (it does although it might be a touch smaller). And instead of it feeling out of date, I felt like I somehow knew the future (no, supersonic jets won't be the only way we fly! In fact, we'll pretty much get rid of them! And we certainly won't blast a supersonic jet airport bigger then LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark put together in the middle of the pine barrens.)
As always with a McPhee, the book was quiet and relaxing and makes me feel I understand the world better.
It turns out an enormous part of the Southern half of the state is this huge titular pine barrens. While the vast majority of the state is heavily populated and fairly industrial, there is a mostly unknown and unrecognized wilderness filled with pine trees, some kooky locals, and forest fires. As usual, McPhee is a delight in his open wonder at nature, and also his acceptance and lack of judgment when it comes to the locals.
I did worry a bit about reading a book published in 1968 if I was reading about an area that doesn't even exist anymore (it does although it might be a touch smaller). And instead of it feeling out of date, I felt like I somehow knew the future (no, supersonic jets won't be the only way we fly! In fact, we'll pretty much get rid of them! And we certainly won't blast a supersonic jet airport bigger then LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark put together in the middle of the pine barrens.)
As always with a McPhee, the book was quiet and relaxing and makes me feel I understand the world better.
December 6, 2012
From jacket "Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited." This book "tells how this geographic anomaly has come to be…"
February 28, 2020
lol the Pine Barrens were more fucked up than i thought already
June 2, 2020
I’m which I learned that New Jersey isn’t all suburb.
December 10, 2020
This book is a fire hose of information about the pine barrens! Pirates? The Jersey Devil? Botanists? Arson? Ill-fated daredevil Mexican pilots? Iron works? Quirky people? Property scams? There is all of that and then some.
This is fascinating to anyone who's been around that area and heard stories (my spouse grew up in the area and still has family in the region).
The book isn't structured in any particular way. It feels like the topics arise randomly in the author's head and then information about those topics comes tumbling out. It was a little too disorganized for my tastes, and that's the principle thing that keeps this at 3 stars for me (and will prevent it from being a slam-dunk recommendation to family), but admittedly it was also kind of exciting? You aren't sure if you are going to be talking about botany or culture from one page to the next.
When I started the book I also didn't realize when it was written (first published 1967). Most of the information is as relevant and interesting now as it ever would have been, and it caught an important snapshot of that generation of people living the the barrens. There are a few exceptions to the timeliness. Obviously a supersonic jetport did not come to pass, and feels like a very 1960s kind of thing to be excited/worried about. In a small handful of places the author uses language that is somewhat off color in the context of modern norms.
I kind of want a volume 2 to know what's become of the area relative to what this snapshot described. I guess you could say that about a lot of places; snapshots every 50 years would tell an interesting story.
This is fascinating to anyone who's been around that area and heard stories (my spouse grew up in the area and still has family in the region).
The book isn't structured in any particular way. It feels like the topics arise randomly in the author's head and then information about those topics comes tumbling out. It was a little too disorganized for my tastes, and that's the principle thing that keeps this at 3 stars for me (and will prevent it from being a slam-dunk recommendation to family), but admittedly it was also kind of exciting? You aren't sure if you are going to be talking about botany or culture from one page to the next.
When I started the book I also didn't realize when it was written (first published 1967). Most of the information is as relevant and interesting now as it ever would have been, and it caught an important snapshot of that generation of people living the the barrens. There are a few exceptions to the timeliness. Obviously a supersonic jetport did not come to pass, and feels like a very 1960s kind of thing to be excited/worried about. In a small handful of places the author uses language that is somewhat off color in the context of modern norms.
I kind of want a volume 2 to know what's become of the area relative to what this snapshot described. I guess you could say that about a lot of places; snapshots every 50 years would tell an interesting story.
April 5, 2025
Brief but informative book about the New Jersey pine barrens - a unique ecosystem and wilderness area in America's most densely populated state. This was written in the 1960s, at a time when some "pineys" (residents of the rural Pine Barrens communities) still didn't have electricity or running water in their homes and could recall the transitions as tiny communities disappeared around them with shifting industries. The book covers the cultural history of the area, how communities grew around the processing of bog iron and charcoal, as well as the harvesting of blueberries and cranberries. It goes into the ecological importance of the area, the various unique plants native to the area, and the relationship the forest has to fire. Recent historical moments are also discussed, including major forest fires and the death of a Mexican aviator on a nonstop goodwill flight. This was a really cool read to learn more about a super interesting place, and I especially enjoyed it as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in the pine barrens and found it pretty magical. It was fun reading about places I've visited there, including Wharton State Forest, the historical town of Batsto, and the Emilio Carranza memorial, and learning more about the history of the area. I felt like the chapters could have flowed a bit better, and the ending felt a little abrupt. But I guess this was originally published in a magazine so maybe the formatting is more oriented towards that. This is definitely worth a read to gain more insight into such an interesting and special place.
April 20, 2021
I discovered John McPhee long before I started reading his books. His book on Alaska, 'Coming Into The Country', from the 1970s was my first. Born and raised in South Jersey, this book had to be my second. It's a brief snap of 150 pages and there is a lot to learn about the lands, its ecosystems, the folks who live there, and who have studied it. It made me want to drive by and through them (I have once long ago and just remember fields of trees). It's fun to learn where The Jersey Devil got its origins from, especially as a kid who grew up with those rumors--essentially the Bigfoot of NJ--and how big cranberries are there (for the most part it's all blueberries, but McPhee discusses berries all around!). I wonder how much of the ecosystem has changed over the years. This book was published in 1967 and a lot has burned down, flooded, and dried up since then. Either way: a great study in focused, sharp writing. More list and informational than narrative. 'Coming Into The Country' would come out a decade later and is about five times the length (Alaska is, after all, so big it spans the space from FL to NY) but I can feel McPhee working out some ideas, or so I tell myself I can. Recommended for anyone native to NJ or anyone interested in ecological writing.
August 7, 2020
John McPhee has given us a delightful series of essays about the beauty, history and unique world of the NJ Pine Barrens. As a life-long NJ resident, and having spent the summer of '84 living in the land of sandy soil and cedar lakes, I loved this book. It did a good job of explaining the changing and unchanging life of the Pines over the last 150 years, dispelling myths while still retaining the wonder of this one of a kind forest. I only wish it were updated. It was originally written in 1969 and, while the Pine Barrens are pretty timeless, I am sure a few things have changed. Fortunately some of John McPhee worst fears of expansive development have not come to pass in the last 50 years.
October 11, 2020
This is the best book I have read in a while. I loved learning about the ecology of the NJ pine barrens as well as the people that inhabit them (or at least inhabited them in the 1960s) as well as the folklore! Fred and bill, as well as the more transient "characters" in the book, are brilliantly described. The author is a wonderful, insightful writer. I would recommend this to everyone! It's very heartwarming but also realistic and eye opening about issues surrounding the pine barrens. It has definitely helped me understand the value of the pine barrens.
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