London Calling at the Pole Farm

On any given summer day, an 800-acre expanse of grasslands and forested tract on Lawrence Township’s Cold Soil Road is alive with buzzing insects and chirping birds. Ninety years ago the tract was alive with state-of-the-art radio technology that transmitted telephone calls to Europe, South America and the Caribbean. 

Locals dubbed it the Pole Farm for the ever-increasing number of oversized telephone poles that sprouted up to meet increasing demand for international telecommunications service. Today the poles are gone and the site is part of Mercer Meadows, a unit of the Mercer County Park System.

The Pole Farm’s quaint appellation belies the magnitude of its stature as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's Long Lines Overseas Telephone Radio Transmitting Station. More than two dozen steel towers, and then hundreds of towering poles were erected between 1929 and the 1960s to support antennae that transmitted telephone calls via shortwave radio to points across the Atlantic.

These days, we take international telephone service for granted; with the advent of web-based services, many of us skip the phone for video anyway. In the early 20^th century, however, telecommunication was limited to places that had been physically wired into the system. Thus, North America could talk to North America, and Europe could talk to Europe, but there was no way for people in the Eastern Hemisphere to talk with those in the Western Hemisphere.

Enter the wonders of radio, which was becoming commercially viable for voice signals in the early 1920s. Bell Labs engineers first devised a way to transmit converted phone signals to London and back via long-wave radio signals, but that was on an expensive single circuit. If AT&T had any hope of selling international telephone service to the public, it had to be both cost effective and available on demand.

The answer came in shortwave radio, which overcame the issues of long-wave but brought its own limitations. (Big science alert here!) To beam powerful signals long distances, specialized radio antennas would have to be located precisely, built under exacting conditions and suspended by large arrays of towers. Bell Labs engineers again got to work, determining what kind of equipment the service would need and where it would need to be located to operate optimally. Their solution also had to address the very real problem that the wavelengths of shortwave vary in how well they work, depending on the time of day. If the service were to be reliable, engineers would have to overcome the limitation with a better antenna.

Beyond the knotty radio transmission challenges, AT&T needed two pieces of land - one to build a transmitter and another to build a receiver - far enough away from each other to assure that the arriving and departing signals didn't interfere with each other. Building them in sparsely populated areas would assure that there wouldn't be much if any other radio traffic to interfere. The transmitting station needed to be relatively close to U.S. Route 1, where the primary East Coast telephone system trunk line was located.

Netcong in hilly, rural western Morris County proved to be a suitable location for the receiving station, narrowing the possibilities for a transmitting station to the south. Lawrence and Hopewell Townships proved to be just the spot, with appropriately level farmland that was largely cleared. AT&T’s land acquisition team quietly began negotiating with 14 farmers in 1928, moving quickly in the hopes that deals would close before local chatter would prompt property owners to raise their prices. Word got out in the local newspaper, and while AT&T initially denied being in the market for farmland, it eventually admitted the transactions and closed the deals.

Following the purchases, AT&T quickly got to work on the infrastructure, both here in New Jersey and the first two international locations, London and Buenos Aires.

The Lawrence Township facility included two radio transmission buildings complete with an innovative water cooling system for the powerful vacuum tubes that generated the necessary shortwaves. To the outside world, the most remarkable feature of the facility was the v-shaped configuration of 180-foot-high steel towers – 26 in all – which supported a series of wire-mesh antennas. Placed about 250 feet apart, the lines of towers extended about a mile in each direction, aimed to beam signals to London and Buenos Aires. Somewhat like shades that could be rolled up and down, the mesh curtain antennas were precisely tuned to accommodate the complexities of shortwave technology at a given time of day or night. Machinery hoisted the various curtains on Roebling cable at the appointed hours to ensure reliable telephone service 24 hours a day.

Work was completed in Lawrence and London in 1929, right on schedule, with Buenos Aires coming online in 1930. Technological advancements soon improved efficiency and capacity, enabling the site to handle more calls on a single radio channel and bringing the cost of a call to $30 for three minutes. Meanwhile, some of the farmers who once owned the land had made deals to lease it back, and continued to raise crops in the shadows of the towers. One could say the property was bearing fruit for everyone.

An example of the layout of a single rhomboid antenna,
illustrated on the Pole Farm's concrete map. 

Just three years after the massive towers were erected, AT&T introduced the rhombic antenna – a five acre-wide diamond-shaped array of eight poles, each 80 feet high, holding up the antenna wire. These smaller, less expensive arrays spelled the end for the giant curtain antennae, which were dismantled in 1939. Further advancements brought the twin rhombic antenna (think one diamond next to another). It’s the proliferation of those, over time, that led locals to dub the tract the Pole Farm. With farming still going on around and amid the antennae, it probably didn’t take much imagination for an onlooker to conclude that the tract’s big crop was oversized telephone poles.

By the mid 1950’s, the site was the largest facility of its type in the world, handling more than a million calls a year. The site’s remaining woodlots and orchards were cleared to erect even more antennas, totaling more than 2000 poles by the 1960s. Old farmhouses, previously converted to housing for AT&T workers, were either moved offsite or demolished to create more space.

In the end, the technological progress that had given birth to the Pole Farm was what ultimately what created its demise. The successful introduction of transatlantic telephone cables and then satellite telecommunication proved to offer more reliable, less costly service. AT&T relegated the Pole Farm to backup status in the 1960s, removing antennae as they were taken out of service. In the final years, the facility that once provided groundbreaking voice communications to world capitals was now left to serve small markets in countries most Americans couldn’t easily locate on a map.

AT&T fully decommissioned the Lawrence Overseas Telephone Radio Transmitting Station on December 31, 1975. By the end of 1977, virtually every standing structure on the Pole Farm had been demolished – everything but a single pole from the Tel Aviv rhombic. Farmer Charlie Bryan had requested that it remain standing as a lightning rod to protect his home and barn nearby.

Other traces of the Pole Farm’s infrastructure are largely gone, through you might find the stray cable or concrete footing among the ground foliage as you stroll along the wooded paths. The county has memorialized the two transmitter buildings with steel arches that approximate where their entrances would have been. The site of Building Two, not far from the parking lot, includes a large concrete map of the antenna configurations that once stood on the grounds. One can walk from Bogota to Berlin, to Moscow, to London, to Willemstad, to Bermuda, imagining the conversations that flowed through those radio waves.

Turns out, too, that the Pole Farm is a remarkably lovely place to visit on a summer afternoon. In the two decades since Mercer County bought the property, 435 acres of the former farmland has been converted to native grasslands. It’s great habitat for Short-eared Owls and Harriers in winter, and Grasshopper Sparrow, Bobolink and Meadowlark in summer. The Washington Crossing Audubon has pegged the fields as outstanding for butterflies if the county leaves the grasses and wildflowers unmowed for the summer.

Level gravel paths make the entire place very welcoming to anyone on foot, bicycle, stroller or wheelchair. As you walk or roll or run, consider that some of the very routes you’re taking are the service roads that linemen once used as they maintained the antennae that connected the world’s voices. Stop to look closely in the woods, and you might even see vestiges of the poles, guy lines and concrete footings that stabilized the antennae. Interpretive signage along the paths offer photos of the structures that once stood there, along with portraits of some of the people who kept the station humming. A leisurely visit will leave you marveling at what once stood there.

While I’ve covered a lot, there’s so much more to the Pole Farm, from nature to history to technology. Lawrence Township historian Dennis Waters’ very informative presentation for the Mercer County Park Commission, available on YouTube, dives a bit deeper into the technology, the people who worked at the site, and the post AT&T history. It’s definitely worth watching.

Let's go fly a (Mississippi) kite: feasting on cicadas at Belleplain

I hate cicadas. There. I said it. As a nature lover, I know I should appreciate them. I know I should marvel at the recent brood, which has emerged from the ground after a 17 year wait. And I know I should probably be thrilled by the otherworldly spaceship-kinda sound that indicates their presence in a stand of trees. I know all that, but I just don't like 'em. There you go.

When several of my naturalist Facebook friends started posting their cicada sightings and observations, I asked the question, "Which birds feast on cicadas?" One particularly enthusiastic friend practically shouted, "Kites!" The smallish (14 inches from bill tip to end of tail feathers) Mississippi kite and his larger (22 inch long) swallow-tailed cousin survive on dragonflies and cicadas they capture midair.

Only thing is, neither is an abundant visitor to New Jersey. They generally spend all their time south of the state, and though Mississippi kites have been making a very slow progression northward, it's still a big treat to find breeding pairs here. In any case, a handful of accidental visitors would be no match for the millions of cicadas emerging from their long slumber in the soils of New Jersey. We could only hope that word would get out on the kite network, and much as seafood enthusiasts head to shellfish festivals, these raptors would zoom up to the Garden State for a once-in-a-lifetime gustatory event.

And, indeed, it didn't take long before an observant birder announced a sighting at Belleplain State Forest in Cape May County. Not just one Mississippi kite made it up here for the feast: as many as 15 at a time have been spotted roosting in a dead tree along Lake Nummy. Neither Ivan nor I had ever seen one in New Jersey, let alone more than a dozen, so we weren't going to let this opportunity pass us by.

Belleplain is situated midway between the Atlantic and Delaware bayshores in upper Cape May County, in the lower range of the Pinelands. A fair amount of the 2000 acre property is designated for small campsites, and the kites were said to be visible from one of them in particular. We drove in, found a place to park at a trailhead near the side of the road and asked two passing hikers for quick directions to the campsite area. I was inclined to just head toward the most intense cicada hum, but Ivan preferred a more direct route.

As an entry-level Pinelands experience, you couldn't ask for a nicer venue than Belleplain. Pitch pines dominate the woods, and the sandy level ground is cushioned with fallen and dried needles and leaves. Plenty in interpretive signs are posted along the hiking path, alerting strollers to the plants and natural features around them. We even found a bit of history near Lake Nummy, which had once been a cranberry bog owned by the Meisle family before the state acquired the land in 1928. During the late 1930s, members of the Civilian Conservation Corps had actually dug the lake by hand where the bog had been, creating a new recreational feature while also planting scores of pine trees to re-establish the forest.

After a bit of unintended additional exploring, we found the (fortunately uninhabited) camping area and searched for the appropriate site from which to see the kites. Another birder was already at one of the lakefront sites, spotting scope poised. Hmm, I guess we found the right place. Indeed, we looked across the lake to the top of a tall dead tree and found a good dozen large birds visible to the naked eye. A quick glance through the binoculars confirmed it.

Watching the congregated kites seemed almost a bit voyeuristic, as several were passing the time by preening and grooming. Others would lift off occasionally, presumably to nab a cicada in mid-flight. In general, they seemed pretty happy with where they were, no worries about having to seek out food. We were able to study them to our heart's content, a rare opportunity in our own state.

So, I guess I have to give the cicadas credit: they brought us good luck with the kites. The luck for the cicadas, well, not as good.

Hiking the wilderness over Route 78

Even when you think you have a pretty good idea of what a site holds, it's always worth checking out a stray trail or two. Recently I discovered a narrow, unblazed footpath along Watchung Reservation's Surprise Lake and found my way to a whole new habitat I'd never known to be accessible. Ivan and I explored a bit farther a few days later, eventually finding the lake's marshy conclusion, hard by a sound barrier separating it from the roar of Route 78 traffic. I'd always figured that the waterway had to end somewhere; I'd just never bothered to try to get there.

It's really quite a beautiful place, if you can ignore the constant hum of interstate traffic. Choked with lilypads and wetlands grasses, the marsh is home to a number of aquatic birds, including two of my personal favorites: wood ducks and green herons. They're both fairly shy species, and our arrival caused a few to wing off to other hiding spots somewhere on the lake, but others simply swam to more secluded areas where we couldn't track them. From a wildlife viewing perspective, the place couldn't be more accommodating. Earthen berms cross the lake at two locations, allowing people (and horses in one area) to get a sense of the full length of the lake by basically standing on it. The first time around, we crossed the farthest berm out and returned to our starting point via another narrow path. It brought us up an embankment nestled against the sound barrier, the trail wandering a hundred feet or so away from but parallel to the lake's edge. Eventually we made it back to the point where I'd concluded my original exploration, and we returned to the car via the bridle path.

On our second visit this past Sunday, we discovered that the recent rains had created a stream across the start of the footpath, so we had to start our journey on the bridle path. Getting out to the berms was easy enough, and we crossed back to continue the trip. This is where we got a bit tripped up. Instead of taking the lower path that would have had us retracing our steps from the last time, we took the upper path that led uphill and closer to the sound barrier. Thing was, we didn't realize it until we were well down the path.

Route 78 overpass: a deer's eye view.

Something seemed a bit off. First, there was a steady stream of water coursing down the path. It wasn't troublesome, but it seemed like storm sewer water looking for level ground. The last time we were there, it hadn't rained for several days, so that wasn't a clear sign we were on the wrong path. Second, this route seemed noisier. I remembered hearing the dull roar of Route 78 traffic before, but I didn't recall it being so close. And third, the farther we got along the path, the more different the foliage was. Rather than a lot of underbrush, we had a pretty clear path through a tunnel of honeysuckle. It smelled wonderful, but still, it was a little offputting.

The noise issue seemed weird but only got stranger when I sensed the hum of traffic below us. Could we be on the famous Watchung Reservation bunny bridge?

If you're familiar with Route 78, you know that a series of bridges pass over the road in the Mountainside area. The easternmost carries Glenside Avenue across the highway, the westernmost holds an abandoned road that once led to a Nike base, and the one between them is covered with plants and trees. That wooded one is the bunny bridge, or wildlife overpass.

Why build a bridge for mammals and reptiles? The short answer is compromise. Originally, Interstate 78 was slated to run directly through Watchung Reservation, the largest plot of preserved land in Union County. Environmentalists and local residents held up construction for years, seeking an alternate route or perhaps to stop the road altogether. Meanwhile, the Federal government continued building and opening other segments of the highway, forcing travelers to find another route through the Mountainside/Summit/Springfield area.

To get the road built, government officials agreed to move the road to the edge of the Reservation and excavate a right-of-way into the Second Watchung ridge to lessen the sound impact. They also built a bridge from the main part of the Reservation to the thin sliver remaining on the westbound side of the highway, allowing wildlife to move easily between the two areas. With those elements in place, the road opened in 1986. Depending on who you talk to, the bunny bridge has been either accepted or shunned by animals.

Coincidentally, I'd recently gotten an e-mail from Hidden New Jersey reader Darian Worden, relating his own adventure on the bunny bridge. I thought we might be following his footsteps when we heard the humming traffic, but we weren't. A paved road and chain link fence joined us as we walked, raising a new discovery. I hadn't realized it, but the Glenside Avenue overpass also carries its own lane of vegetation and, presumably, the occasional mammal. We kept walking and eventually came to an athletic field where a girls' soccer league game was taking place. It was kind of like being in Field of Dreams, but without the baseball bats.

We hadn't found the bunny bridge, but something even odder (at least I think so). A view of the map shows that our path leads to additional county open space, but I'm not sure that deer are welcome there any more than they are throughout suburban New Jersey. I guess if you want to walk across Route 78 in relative safety, it's a place to do it, but you'd have to go through a bit of trouble - and mud - to do it.

(Incidentally, if you'd like to check out Darian's account and photos of the bunny bridge, surf on over to Head First Adventures.)

Feeding our inner Forrest Gumps on the East Coast Greenway

A few weeks ago, I wrote about our random jaunts on the Appalachian Trail, all the while forgetting about the mammoth Maine-to-Florida path that passes within yards of my front door. Yes, there's a north to south walk and bikeway that's mapped right through suburbia and the heart of some of New Jersey's largest cities.

The East Coast Greenway was conceived in 1991 as an urban sister of sorts to the AT, enabling walkers, runners and users of non-mechanized vehicles to enjoy a safe excursion. By linking many local trails, the ECG gives users the path to experience local attractions for a day or maybe even an extended jaunt through a given state or region along the way. A fair amount of the route is already established, but the alliance managing the Greenway is still working to settle links that will bring users out of overly trafficked or heavily-used areas. As it stands, certain urban portions may not be as safe as desired for inexperienced cyclists or wheelchair users to traverse.

Remember that part of Forest Gump where the title character decides to start running one day -- and ends up on a two year journey? Ivan and I indulged that concept a little Saturday morning as we were walking back to my place after breakfast. Seeing the Greenway blaze on a utility pole, he suggested that we follow the path and see where it goes. A mile and a half later, we'd walked through my neighborhood to a nearby river, crossed a large county park and forged on to the main drag in the next town. Along the way, we both wondered whether we could walk the entire New Jersey section of the path in a weekend. I'd seen some flyers about a 50-miles-in-a-day Greenway event last spring, but that was for cyclists and didn't cover the stretch between Trenton and Edison. What about walkers and hikers? What would we do, and how long would it take? If the path goes through towns and cities, we wouldn't have to carry much in the way of food and water, and we could find hotel rooms for the overnights. Heck, we could even stay at my place one night if we planned properly.

Checking out the New Jersey trail map, we discovered the state section is 78 miles long, from Trenton to New York City, but a portion of that actually routes you onto the PATH train from Newark to Jersey City. Additional alternates will take you up to 93 miles, ending at the George Washington Bridge. I can only guess that the rail portion is there until they can figure a route that gets you between the cities without sticking you onto impossibly congested roadways, but still, it seems kind of silly that a path puts you on a train, even if it's a PATH light rail. Rails to trails, indeed!

Still, though, taking to the ECG for a weekend or more is an intriguing concept for us. What kinds of Hidden New Jersey could be nestled along the way? Stay tuned... this idea may have legs.

Trying out the Appalachian Trail

Many years ago, I had a secret ambition to walk the full 2175 miles of the Appalachian Trail. It was back when I was hiking a bit more than I have in the past few years, and I'd seen a PBS series on the trail. The producers had given three or four hikers each a camera to record their experiences as they made their way up from Springer Mountain, Georgia up to the northern terminus, Mt. Katahdin in Maine.

My brief enthusiasm for a through-hike went away a bit ago for several reasons, including the fact that my cat would probably resist the prospect of living in a backpack for six months. I always meant, though, to try out the relatively brief portion that jogs across the northernmost corner of New Jersey. At least I could say I was ON it.

This is not the part of the A Trail
that runs along Interstate 80.

I didn't know until recently that Ivan has also felt the tug of the trail. He mentioned it earlier this summer, when we did a short jaunt on the trail off of Route 94 in Sussex County to see some bobolinks. Leaving the car at a marked lot, we traversed a farm field (the only place where the trail actually crosses farmland) and went a few hundred feet into a very rocky portion of the woods. I was surprised at the narrowness of the trail across the field -- really only wide enough to accommodate single-file trekking. Then again, doing the through-hike is largely a solitary experience, each hiker facing his or her own challenges, both physical and mental.

Since then, we've had the chance to taste the trail in three other states and visited the Appalachian Trail Conservancy headquarters in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Thus, it didn't completely surprise me when, as we were driving along Route 80 recently, Ivan suggested we stop and check out the trail near the Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area's Kittatinny Ridge Visitor Center. If you're familiar with Route 80, it's the last exit before you get to Pennsylvania, and it circles under the highway to the banks of the Delaware. Actually, if you want, you can grab the trail on the westbound side of 80, but we chose to get a little information from the rangers before heading out. As I guided the car to a parking spot, Ivan noted that it was a novelty to just about be driving on the trail.

Kittatinny Ridge Visitor Center is open seasonally and appears to be a newish building; I recall stopping at another building at or near the same location. In any case, Ivan had the chance to chat with a ranger about the trail in New Jersey and possible camping spots for a trial excursion over a weekend. While he was doing that, I scanned through the displays of flora and fauna of the Water Gap. It's been a long time since I've done any ground-level camping (well, any camping of any stripe, to be honest), and it was interesting to hear that many hikers eschew the ground for a hammock.

With information in hand, we headed outside to look for the A Trail's characteristic rectangular white blazes. Ivan finally found them through his binoculars, and they led... right along the access road we'd driven on just a few minutes before. Apparently his earlier comments were truer than either of us expected they would be. We set off on the paved surface and followed the blazes along the guard rail, observing that this had to be one of the most level portions of the entire trail. No doubt it's even a bit disconcerting to the average through-hiker, considering the number of cars speeding by just yards away.

It was pretty much a certainty that we wouldn't cross the path of any bears during our brief jaunt, but we did have two unexpected encounters. Two large-ish gray snakes slithered away and into some roadside riprap just before we passed one spot, both on our walk out and our return trip a few minutes later. From what we could tell, they weren't the poisonous kind, but nonetheless, it's a bit disquieting to think of them snuggling up to you in your backpack. All of a sudden, that hammock sounds like a good idea.