Finding the Ford Faesch house

Following our unexpected side trip to the Mount Hope Mines, Ivan and I were even more set on finding the Ford-Faesch House in Rockaway, the colonial-era home of the mine's developer, John Jacob Faesch. I'd already done a little research to discover that the house had other historical ties as well. It had been built by Colonel Jacob Ford, who also built the eponymously-named mansion in Morristown that General George Washington had made his headquarters for a time during the Revolutionary War. In fact, the two homes are somewhat similar in layout, but the Morristown estate is whitewashed while the Rockaway home retains its stone faced exterior.

Given that we had some trouble finding the house, it wasn't surprising that Ford had left the house in 1770 for his new and probably much more convenient digs in Morristown. (If you doubt that, consider how close it is to present day Interstate 287.) The Swiss-born Faesch, already known as ironmaster for the Ringwood Mine, was the first of what would eventually be a succession of mine owners and superintendents. He was also a well-regarded patriot, having supplied the Continental Army with munitions. In 1931, the house became a two-family home, remaining inhabited until 1973, when it was put on the New Jersey Register of Historic Sites.

All we knew to look for was an old stone house on Mount Hope Road, and as the pavement curved through suburbia and less populated areas, we began to wonder if somehow it might have disappeared. I'd found an outdated website about the house and hoped restoration was still in the cards, but in the absence of involvement of a major historical organization, you can never be too sure.

Then, the road revealed a broad opening in the wooded boughs and revealed a broad grassy hill topped by a stone house flying an American flag from its front door. The wayside marker revealed it to be... the Ford-Faesch House. Nowadays, it overlooks the entrance to a large quarry facility and a broad body of water. We pulled up and around the back of the house, expecting to find a small parking lot or even an indication of where to enter, only to find nothing. I pulled out and parked down the hill, concerned we'd driven somewhere we shouldn't have.

Returning to the house, we found that restoration appears to be ongoing: there are a few building permits posted on a back window, and a bare bulb lit inside the first floor. Other than that, though, there wasn't much evidence of human habitation. Wandering around the property, we found a large pile of logs configured much like the signal fires the Continental troops had constructed along the Watchungs to warn of enemy approach. It made me wonder if perhaps a historical society occasionally held programs there, but we couldn't find evidence of that, either. From my internet research, it appears that the Historical Society of the Rockaways is responsible for the restoration, upkeep and operation of the house.

Recalling what I'd read in the past about the house, I though there might also be an old, shuttered church nearby, also awaiting restoration. We walked further up the side street and eventually found it, sectioned off in a field across the street from the house and marked with NO TRESPASSING signs. It seemed a bit odd that the church was situated so that its side, rather than its entrance, was facing the street it was visible from. In fact, the entrance was facing an overgrown tract about the size of the house's lot, surrounded by a very well-constructed stone wall that was occasionally broken up by stairways leading into the brush.

A bit of research shows that this was the Mt. Hope Methodist Church, built in 1868. In addition to being a house of worship for both miners and the well-heeled, it also served as a school and, at times, as a hospital. Ultimately, the congregation dwindled to a few families and the building was left to deteriorate and suffer the indignity of vandalism. From what I can find online, it appears that the church was open for visitation as recently as three years ago, but it honestly doesn't look all that inviting now.

As for the tract in front of the church, our best guess is that it might have been the church's cemetery. We walked as far as we could (legally) around the property and couldn't get a clear view in to see any stones or monuments. One wonders who might be resting there.

Four thousand holes in Mount Hope...

If New Jersey was the crossroads of the Revolutionary War (or the cockpit, as others have said), Morris County was the arsenal. It was no coincidence that Washington spent a fair amount of his time here: the hills were full of iron which were used to make guns and ammunition, making the area well worthy of defending.

Ivan and I braved the mosquitoes on Memorial Day to check out the Mount Hope mining area in Rockaway. I'd remembered that several years ago, a developer wanted to build a pumped storage hydro power plant in the area, capitalizing on the long shafts of a huge iron mine that had been tapped out and abandoned many years ago. Essentially, pumped storage uses two reservoir areas, one higher than the other, and connected by shafts with turbines in them. Power is created when water is released from the upper reservoir into the shafts, turning the turbines as the water flows downward. Gravity does the work. As part of the plan, the company was to restore several historic buildings, including a Revolutionary-era house and church.

Move ahead several years, and the project has yet to move forward. Approvals from several agencies, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, were needed to enable the hydro plant to connect to the electricity grid to contribute power, and, well, you know how that kind of thing goes.

I had an address for the house on Mount Hope Road, but barely an idea of what to look for. When we saw signs for the Mount Hope Historical Park, we thought we'd found it, but instead we'd found a new adventure: a series of paths leading to a string of smallish but often deep mine holes.

After parking the car, we were on our trek into the woods. Appropriate to the humidity of the day, we ran into tons of mosquitoes along the rocky path. It didn't take long for us to find the first mine pits, also known as subsidence pits that once led to mines developed by John Jacob Faesch just before the Revolutionary war. The property had been mined for about 50 years before he'd come to it, but he's considered to be the first true developer of large-scale iron mining in the Mount Hope area. The trail map showed we weren't far from the Picatinny Arsenal run by the U.S. Government.

You can still see evidence of the stone paths that were probably used to cart the iron ore out of the mine area,  and there's some sign of a few building foundations well into the woods. That said, it's still hard to believe that the tract was mined until the late 1950's. It's amazing how quickly nature will reclaim land that man leaves fallow. While we were there, Ivan heard a host of songbirds and even spotted a neat little reddish-orange Eastern Newt eft dashing through the underbrush of leaves.

And as for the house and church, they clearly weren't to be found on this stop, at least not unless we wanted to take along walk along the power line cut. Onward...

Keeping New Jersey safe for democracy: Coastal Defenses Day at Fort Hancock

Each May, generally the weekend before Memorial Day, Sandy Hook's Fort Hancock pulls out all the stops for its annual Coastal Defenses Day. Celebrating the Fort's role in keeping New York Harbor safe from enemy attack, the National Park Service conducts tours and discussions of many of the defensive structures, much with the assistance of re-enactors from the Army Ground Forces Association. Indeed, if you didn't know better, all of the period uniforms in some places would have you convinced you'd stepped right into the early 1940's.

The unmarked entrance to the Harbor
Defense Command Post

Though none of Hancock's guns were ever fired in defense of the country, the fort played a crucial role in deterring Axis powers from attacking the New York area. It's known that several U-Boats patrolled the coast, but no naval or air attack was made, nor a serious threat incurred.

Four of the defensive batteries were open for touring on Sunday, but my big goal was to get into the inner corridors of the Mortar Battery. On its own, the battery is regularly available for wandering, with its two rear gun pits easily accessible any time the park is open. Getting to the front pits and the innards, though, is a much rarer opportunity, and, in fact, the corridors that were open for Coastal Defenses Day hadn't been accessible to the public for decades.

The Mortar Battery itself is one of the first fortifications built at the fort and is, on its own, nothing fancy to look at. However, in the early days of World War II, the army came to see its value as a strategic location for the Harbor Defense Command Post. From this protected location, the armed forces could manage all of the intelligence related to the harbor, including information coming via underwater cable from Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and Fort Tilden in Queens.

From the outside, the door to the bunker is unmarked and looks rather unassuming. Without inside information, enemy invaders would have no indication that this is where the strategic leadership convened. Entrance to the post was restricted to a select few, with sentries posted outside who knew by sight who was permitted to enter. There was no secret password, no secret handshake -- they just knew who was in and who was out. Before getting into the main corridors, personnel would pass through an airlock that would seal the bunker in event of a gas attack.

Corridor where communications specialists would have
maintained contact with the Harbor's other forts.

The visitor today is immediately struck by how cold it is inside -- that steady ~55 degree climate you find inside caves. Right now there's nothing much to look at but a few photos and signs explaining what each of the rooms was used for, but you can imagine how frenetic the place would have been, had there been an actual attack on the harbor. It reminded me a little of Churchill's wartime bunker under the streets of London, especially when I read that the commanding officer had a bed in his office for use in event of an extended stay.

Kilroy wasn't here, but apparently Robert was.

A thin whitewash covered most of the walls, but as we explored, Ivan and I also found signs of those who'd been in the bunker well after the war. Apparently the place had either been used at some point in the last 35 years, or someone had found their way in with little trouble. The graffiti we found had been placed after the Army transferred the property to the Park Service, but who knows what kind of arrangements they might have had for additional use of some structures.

The Nike missile radar site and Batteries Potter and Gunnison were also open for touring, with plotting and gun loading demonstrations taking place at the latter, but we chose to skip them for the time being. Both are well worth a visit and open at regular intervals through the year. Check the Sandy Hook calendar for more information.

Eider way, it was a productive morning

This past weekend's Sandy Hook jaunt was one of our classic birding/history mixed trips. Ivan had heard about a rare sighting of a male king eider in full breeding plumage at the north end of the hook, and the National Park Service was running its annual Coastal Defenses Day at Fort Hancock.

Given how exhausted we were after the South Jersey jaunt, and the overcast outside, we got a bit of a late start, but fortunately that doesn't really matter when it comes to shore birds. When we got to our destination, we stopped first at New Jersey Audubon's Sandy Hook Bird Observatory to check the log for sightings. Was the eider still around? Apparently he was still somewhere at the end of the Fisherman's Trail, but according to another birder, there "wasn't much else." Well, one person's feast is another's famine. Off we went to determine what our own menu for the day would become.

The Fisherman's Trail is at the very northern tip of the hook, accessible from the parking lot just to the west of the Nine Gun Battery. It winds past the small and decaying Battery Peck and the adjacent hawk watching deck (funny how they watch birds from Peck, don't you think?), and then through the dunes to the shore. It's very sandy, with no firm base below, which means you're essentially spending about 15 minutes wading along with things shifting below your feet. It's not an easy walk, but it beats having to do the stairmaster at the gym.

At the end of the path, you're rewarded with a broad beach littered with all sorts of flotsam, from driftwood to whatever plastic trash happened to find its way there. Substantial parts of the beach dunes are blocked off for the endangered piping plovers to nest, and the occasional human-built enclosures mark where some of them have chosen to raise their young. They're great little shorebirds, and as Ivan noted, they're pretty high up on the cuteness scale. Seeing them on the beach is always such a treat.

The top of the hook isn't a bathing beach -- it's far too much work to get there -- but plenty of sport fishers will make the hike for a good catch. Just off the coast, plenty of fishing boats large and small anchor for a few hours, and the buoys marking the shipping channels are visible. On a good day, you can see Brooklyn and Staten Island along with the connecting Verrazano Narrows Bridge. In really clear weather, you might even be able to see a hint of lower Manhattan in the distance. Sunday, though was overcast and even a little foggy. Not a great day for sightseeing.

We came upon a birder carrying a scope and tripod, returning from his walk. He told us that he'd seen two eiders just out of view of where we were then standing. Ah, good news! We walked along the beach looking for the elusive fowl both on the sand and in the water; an online report had included a photo of him nestled comfortably on the beach, so it was quite possible he could be anywhere.

Alas, though, we were not destined to meet the king eider on this trip. It's the way it sometimes goes: you don't always see what you came to see, but you often still see something very worthwhile.

For me, it was another view of one of my favorites, the black skimmer. They tend to fly in flocks and then rest on the beach almost in formation. To me they look like airplanes parked on the tarmac, just waiting for their next flight. And of course, it's always fun to watch the smaller shorebirds dart their beaks into the sand for food, and then run quickly as the tide washes in.

Looking through the grounded birds, Ivan noticed a couple of red knots, glad to see a few of this rapidly decreasing species. Maybe we didn't see the eider, but perhaps the knots were just as good, if not better. The birder at the Audubon office was wrong: there was 'much' out there.

Traveling into the vortex of Ong's Hat

Running into some massive construction-related congestion on the Parkway north from Brigantine, we took the first available exit and ended up on Route 72 west.

Nowadays, it's almost a reflex to grab the GPS to get the next best route, but in this case, we knew it was just going to put us back into the road mess we were seeking to avoid. Other than the traffic light-infested Route 9, there aren't a heck of a lot of other roads that link coastal South Jersey back to home base. It was a job that only a map could handle, as Ivan reminded me. I was riding shotgun, so he suggested I look in the glove compartment, as there had to be something useful there.

I rattled around and found an official New Jersey map published by the state… for the Bicentennial. Yup, on the back was the characteristically bad photo of then-governor Brendan Byrne, and a classically colonial scene on the front. Ah, yes, New Jersey was the crossroads of the Revolution. Not surprisingly, while it showed the key mid-20th century roads, the map was just a little inaccurate after 35 years. Shadows of the proposed paths of Interstates 287 and 78 were outlined where there are now regular rush hour traffic jams.

"This map is ancient!" I exclaimed.

"Hey!" Ivan protested. "Some of those dirt roads are still in existence!" Come to think of it, we were in the part of the state where that's true, so this map was as good as anything else that might be hiding in the glove box. Who was I to talk, anyway? I was consulting a 70 year old WPA travel guide to New Jersey for roadside attractions. As we continued west on 72, I scanned the map, looking for an alternate route, I saw a familiar name.

"Ong's Hat! We've gotta go to Ong's Hat!"

What the GPS would have looked like,
had we still been using it. No road is always the sign
of a good road trip destination.

It's a funny name for a strange little town ... or lack of town. Among Jerseyphiles, Ong's Hat is both famous for its story and a prime roadtrip destination because it doesn't really exist anymore. Located deep in the Pinelands, it was a thriving little community during colonial times and into the mid 1800’s. According to legend, it was home to a dandy named Ong who was quite the ladies' man. His multi-dating ways apparently angered one of the local young ladies so much that she grabbed his silk top hat and tossed it into a tree in frustration. The hat was so noticeable and stayed in the tree so long that it became a landmark: "Make a right turn at Ong's Hat."

Much, much later, Ong's Hat became the setting for a very strange supernatural tale that takes a variety of different directions, depending on who you talk to. The writer Joseph Matheny claims that it all started with a man named Wali Fard, who bought a few hundred acres of the Pinelands in the 1950’s. Along with a couple of anarchist lesbians (or are they lesbian anarchists? You decide!) and some runaways from Paramus (why is it always Paramus?) he started a cult called the Moorish Science Ashram.

That’s not all that strange, but it gets better. Allegedly, the site held a vortex that led to an alternate universe, discovered by discredited Princeton physics professors who were somehow influenced by the nearby Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base. The proximity to the famed Lakehurst Air Naval Base probably didn’t hurt either: it was the site of the famous Hindenberg explosion. Through a series of experiments, the scientists found the gateway to another dimension, which they’d accessed through use of a capsule shaped like a human sized egg. I wouldn’t doubt that there were drugs involved, too. From a story like that, you’d kind of expect there were. Or maybe even hope… In any case, it’s the kind of story that makes the Jersey Devil pale by comparison.

With this kind of information in hand, is it any wonder I got Ivan to steer the car to the traffic circle where Routes 72 and 70 intersect? Yes, like everything else in the Garden State, Ong’s Hat isn’t far away from a traffic circle, the original Jersey vortex.

Trouble was, I can never remember which of the turns off the circle will bring you to Ong’s Hat, and it’s not as if there’s a sign to point you. And once you do make the turn, there’s a good couple of miles of solid scrub pine before you reach any sign of civilization. In other words, it takes a while to confirm you’re on the right path. Unless you’re very good at recognizing specific trees – not species of tree, the tree itself. Or unless you’ve got the GPS running, which we no longer did.

After a piece, though, I realized we had, indeed, made the wrong turn, which created a small bit of frustration, but we worked it out and found our way to Ong’s Hat Road. And then zipped right through it, avoiding the vortex completely.

Downtown Ong's Hat.

In reality, the supernatural story was the product of some very active imaginations on the internet, and there’s nothing at Ong’s Hat now but the shuttered Magnolia Road Tavern. It used to be a biker bar, with bars on the small windows and the Tasmanian Devil and other Warner Bros cartoons painted on the walls. The tavern was for sale when I first visited in late 2009, and it’s still for sale today. If you have $155,000, an interest in vortices and a willingness to run a biker bar, it's all yours.

As for Ivan and me, we'd already had a long day and we just wanted to get home. We'd have to leave Ong's Hat (and birding the surrounding pines) for another day.

Back to the Brig

Now that the weather is reliably above freezing, it was really a joy to check out Edwin Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Brigantine this past Saturday. You'll recall that back in January/February we spent a frozen afternoon there, being dive-bombed by gulls. On an earlier trip, we'd seen an immature bald eagle and an elusive American bittern, but mostly we spent the day avoiding the bitter wind and being very cold.

Fish again?!?!?!?!?!

This time it was just plain beautiful -- sunny and relatively warm -- and it was a good day to check out all of the various environments at the refuge. If the predicted Rapture were to come, there were much worse places to spend one's final hours. It seemed that many other birders were thinking the same thing, so we basically saw where others were going... and didn't go there.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay...

On earlier visits, we hadn't spent very much time in the wooded areas or foot trails, preferring to take the marsh drive in the relative warmth of the car and then bop outside for a few minutes from time to time. This trip, we made some very productive walks about, finding a variety of songbirds and even a beautiful indigo bunting. And while we didn't see much in the way of mammals, other than people, we came upon a couple of tiny toads on the path.

The marsh drive added quite a few shorebirds to the day's take, with a fair number of black bellied plovers hanging out with the ubiquitous gulls. And I have to admit that even as a big fan of great egrets, I was getting a little weary of seeing so many standing amid the spartina.

All in all, Ivan logged over 60 birds (being lazy, I don't keep a list), not a bad take for a couple hours of observation. It's always good to get to the Jersey marshes before the insects get nasty.

See a new side of Thomas Edison on June 4

Mark your calendars: June 4 is Edison Day! What's that, you ask? Thomas Edison National Historical Park opens the gates for a full day of special events and exploration, all totally free of charge. I'll be there along with a host of other volunteers, helping the staff share the story of the world's most prolific inventor.

Come on out and check on Edison's desk!

If you grew up in New Jersey, you no doubt visited the site on a grade school field trip, seeing Edison's library and the heavy machine shop where his muckers put together prototypes and the machines that were needed to manufacture the successful inventions. Now you can see and explore all three floors of the invention factory, including the world's first audio recording studio and the place where the motion picture camera was invented.

Besides the usual exhibits, Edison Day is a great chance to check out plenty of special events and presentations:

• The heavy machine shop will be running periodically during the day, giving visitors a rare opportunity to see and hear what it was really like to work there during Edison's time. For as many times as I've been there, I've never seen them run, so I'm especially looking forward to that part of the day.
• Musicians will be on hand to be record on wax cylinder, always a popular event at the park. It's pretty cool to listen to a contemporary performance and then hear it played back from the cylinder, sounding like something recorded during the early days of the 20th century.
• The Edison archives will be displaying documents that trace what Edison and his team were up to in 1911 ... 100 years ago!
• Glenmont, Edison's 13-acre estate just a mile or two from the labs, will be open for guided house tours, with the garage and greenhouse open, too. If you're interested in concrete buildings, you'll be interested to know that both the garage and potting shed represent Edison's experiments in casting cement structures.
• An exhibit in the home's conservatory will track the many famous and obscure visitors who cross the threshold of the Queen Anne-style mansion. 
• If you've ever wondered what might be in the basement of the house, come check out the home's new geothermal climate control system. It's a technology that Edison no doubt would have found totally fascinating. 

Finishing up the day, Glenmont will also host an evening ragtime concert with the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra at 6 p.m.

There's even more stuff on tap...stop on by and check it out!