Ancient history renews itself on Raritan Bay

Usually I'm pretty single-minded when I'm traveling to or from Sandy Hook: it's a non-stop trip from home to the Hook, or vice versa, interrupted only by a stop for gas or maybe a custard cone. Yesterday, however, Ivan had other ideas as we made our way home after a productive birding excursion. 

"Let's stop on the bay," he said. "There's some good shorebird habitat there, and maybe we'll run into something else." 

"Something else" is usually a historic spot or a notable sign or something. This time it wasn't. Once we parked the car near a newish townhouse development, Ivan led the way along a sandy dirt path until we reached the waterline. On one side was the bay, with a nice tract of spartina being flooded by the incoming tide. On the other was the mouth of a small creek, edged by a dirt/sand mixture of shoreline. I was a bit birded out for the day, so I focused on what was moving around in the water. There was plenty to watch!

We'd arrived just in time for the start of the daily horseshoe crab spawning. In a routine that's gone on for more than 500 million years, the females glide up to the area between low and high-water levels to lay their eggs, followed by a host of males that fertilize them. Check out the brief video I recorded, showing how quickly the seemingly lumbering animals move to lay their eggs. (You may want to shield the children, as there is graphic arthropod mating action going on here.)

One mistake I made on the narration: horseshoe crabs aren't as plentiful as we need or would like due to overharvesting. They're actually quite popular for use as bait in the eel and conch fishing industries, plus their blood has certain benefits for use in medicines for humans. While they can be effectively bled and then returned to their customary habitat, the bleeding process has a horseshoe crab mortality rate of 10 to 15 percent.

Raritan Bay shorebirds will likely enjoy some of the eggs we saw being laid, but the acute need for horseshoe crab spawn is on the shores of Delaware Bay. Hundreds of thousands of migrant birds, including the threatened red knot, customarily land on the beaches looking for their first meal after a long journey. Without horseshoe crab eggs to count on, it's likely that many of them would die of starvation. Thus, organizations like New Jersey Audubon have been sounding the call for conservation and protection of these prehistoric animals. They may not look especially attractive, but they're a crucial link in our ecosystem.

If you happen to be on the beach around high tide, keep an eye out for these ancient helmet-shaped creatures. You'll get a biology lesson you won't soon forget. I know I won't.

A cranky Patersonian changes the world of art

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art contains one of the world's finest and most diverse collections, thanks in large part to a cranky, uncharitable Paterson industrialist. By most accounts, the guy didn't even care that much about art.

If you visit the Met and read the small placards next to the works on display, chances are you'll frequently see the words "Rogers Fund" as the funding source. That's referring to Jacob Rogers, the aforementioned curmudgeon. The son of Rogers Locomotive Works' founder Thomas Rogers, he became the manufacturing concern's president upon his father's death in 1856. The company was the largest of five locomotive manufacturers in Paterson, turning out a new railroad engine every two days.

While Jacob Rogers was among the wealthiest men in the city, there's no trace of his generosity anywhere in Paterson. In fact, he seemed to enjoy turning down requests for donations and small favors. Young boys who asked if they could use a portion of his land for a ballfield were told he'd lease them the land for $2000 per month -- after they erected a $5000 fence around it. Even when he chose to give funds to a worthy cause, the donations could end at any time. A representative from a local hospital suggested that Rogers might be able to afford a monthly gift of more than the $100 he had been sending; the stipend was quickly and permanently stopped.

Much of this behavior stemmed from restrictions the Paterson city government had put on Rogers' business, primarily forbidding the company from starting any of its locomotives within the city. Undoubtedly this meant having to use protracted and expensive means of moving product out of the factory to customers. Rather than seeking a mutually satisfying compromise, Rogers instead held a grudge against the city to his dying day.

That's a good explanation for why there are no grand tributes to Rogers' largess in Paterson, but how does he become one of the Met's most influential donors? It seems that his contrariness is a major factor. He'd read about a wealthy man who'd died in the Midwest in the 1880s, leaving his entire estate to a group of educational institutions. The man's family contested the will, but it held up in court.

Rogers, a lifelong bachelor, didn't believe in inheritance and saw an opportunity in the Midwestern man's approach. He became a member of the Met, delivering his $10 membership fee to the museum director each year. He asked about the institution's management structure and finances, and though he mentioned he'd be addressing the Met in his will, the director didn't think much of it. It seems that the only times Rogers visited the museum were to deliver his annual dues -- not exactly the type of member one would expect more than a couple thousand dollars from after death. Apparently the Met management was unaware he was a wealthy locomotive magnate. They just thought he was an unusual man who was curious about where his membership money was going.

Rogers' seeming obscurity at the museum ended with his death in 1901. Other than small inheritances to a few of his nephews, he left the entirety of his estate -- liquidated property and all -- to the Met. The $5 million was the first gift over $1 million the struggling museum had ever received. Rogers stipulated that his bequest was to be invested and the principal left untouched; the museum was allowed to spend only the income. Unlike other donors, however, he set no boundaries on the types of art the institution could purchase with the proceeds of his gift. As the museum's then director Luigi Palma di Cesnola said of New York millionaires at the time, "They will give money for buying collections, and for building purposes, because both remain visible monuments of their generosity, while endowment funds are invisible and remain unknown to the general public."

Since then, the income from Rogers' gift has funded the museum's productive archaeological expeditions in Egypt as well as the acquisition of legendary works by Rembrandt, Velasquez and other acclaimed artists. The principal continues to grow and earn, ensuring that a Patersonian known in life as tightfisted and mean will, nonetheless, endure as an example of generosity.

Remnants of the South in Middlesex County

Drive down Middlesex County Road 615 and you'll eventually run into the town of Helmetta, its welcome signs highlighted by a rendition of the community's most notable feature: the Helme Company snuff mill. It's not hard to locate the massive brick factory building that housed the business. Located adjacent to the road and the paralleling railroad tracks, the structure is emblazed with a fainting painted sign stating

Helme Products Inc.

Manufacturers of Snuff & Tobacco

Factory No. 4 5th Dist NJ

Just a small part of the existing Helme Products mill.

Given that snuff is a form of pulverized tobacco, one would wonder why it would be manufactured in New Jersey rather than below the Mason-Dixon line. The Helme factory was once the world's largest snuff plant, primarily shipping its products to southern states.

This dichotomy mirrors the life of the founder of the company (and the town), George Helme. Though born in Pennsylvania, he practiced law in Louisiana and was an officer in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. His wife's family lived and operated a small snuff mill in Spotswood, and George soon became a partner and then sole owner of the company, incorporating it under his own name in 1884.

Expansion of the business also called for expansion of the community. In classic company town fashion, Helme bought additional land to build more factories along with worker housing, government services, and the like. He named the town Helmetta after his daughter, Etta. At a point, 500 people were employed at the mill, likely making for a lively, close-knit community of families. According to the WPA Guide to New Jersey, the snuff business continued to be profitable even through the Great Depression while providing solid jobs to 375 people.

Today, Helmetta is much quieter. Many of the homes that mill workers and management lived in are still there, though updated and individualized to the point that they don't look much like company town housing anymore. The mill stands empty and silent, having been shut down in 1993 by a successor company that moved the New Jersey operations to West Virginia. Though the mill district was been placed on the US and state registers of historic places in 1980, several of the structures have been demolished since.

As I've researched the town, I've discovered that plans have been put into place to demolish the plant buildings and erect townhouses, multi-family housing (apartments?) and a community center. The borough council put several stipulations into place, apparently to ensure that the demolition and construction would be  completed as quickly as possible after a suitable developer was chosen. Some of the area appears to have been cleared, and the pond I visited was clearly remediated, but otherwise, there's no sign the mill will be coming down anytime soon.

Perambulating poultry in Union

Okay ... confession time here: Ivan and I actually left New Jersey for a week. With tax season completed, he needed a break and who was I to deny that? And as he rationalized, we're always on the lookout for a little bit of New Jersey wherever we go. You never know what we'll find. The good thing is that now we'll have more time for exploration, birding and letting you in on what we discover.

In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy a little story from about 20 years ago that combines exploration and birding of a sort.

Not the chicken that crossed the road in Union.

I've mentioned that I grew up in Union, which, like many New Jersey communities, was once host to many farms. By the time I was born, though, most were gone, with perhaps small farm stores left in their places. One was still in operation on Stuyvesant Avenue in the late 1980s, right across from my bank, selling shrubbery, plants, gardening supplies and perhaps some produce. A cranky old rooster walked the grounds, unimpeded, despite the fact there hadn't been an actual farm there for many, many years.

One day I was driving to the bank when I saw the rooster standing on the yellow line in the center of Stuyvesant Avenue, frantically looking back and forth, perplexed. Not a sight you see very often in Union.

Aloud, I asked myself, "Why is that chicken crossing the road?"

I started laughing so hard that I had to pull to the side of the road. Fortunately, I came nowhere near the bird.

This story is entirely true. I swear. I even sent it to the New York Times for publication in its old New Jersey Diary section of reader recollections. A few weeks later, they published it, along with an editor's note: "Why did the chicken cross the road? To open a chicking account."

E pluribus unum, alive and well over Helmetta Pond

Often, when we hit the road, birding's the top priority, with the hopes of finding something obscure or historic along the way. This time of year, the trips start at the crack of dawn so we can be in the appropriate spot by the time the birds wake up for the morning. The primary equipment is binoculars, and many times the only camera on board is the one in my cell phone.

Other times, I make targeted journeys to places I've heard of and want to investigate, camera and notebook in hand. If I find some interesting habitat along the way, I'll make note and maybe stop for a few minutes to check it out for a future return trip with Ivan. I keep a spare set of cheap bins and a Sibley guide in the car in case something compelling shows up, but they often go unused.

Last week I made the latter type of jaunt to the small hamlet of Helmetta, formerly a company town for a snuff mill. After taking a few photos of the shuttered factory, my camera quit on me, so I thought, "that's snuff," and decided to check out what's behind the big building. The story of the factory is for a future post; for now I'll say it's been closed for about 20 years and some of the surrounding property appears to be in a stage of remediation. 

From Main Street, I crossed the railroad tracks in front of the factory and headed down the road between two of the buildings that make up the plant complex. Helmetta Pond is to the left, fronted on the street by a small playground and parking area. New benches, relatively fresh concrete and cinder walkways and a wooden plank observation deck led me to believe that this body of water is being brought back to health after possibly having served as a dumping area for the plant's liquid waste. The opposite side of the pond is fronted by woods and looks a lot less disturbed by the hand of humans.

I noticed a solitary birder with bins raised to eyes, so I figured it was worth taking out the spare optics, rudimentary as they are. I didn't hear anything distinctive, just the usual goose honks and red-winged blackbird calls. Swallows skimmed along the pond's surface, looking for insects, and I figured that might be as exotic as my finds would be on this trip. Still, though, you never know. Somehow I sensed the other birder knew what he was doing, and he was hanging around, so I decided to invest a few more minutes in looking.

Walking along the cinder path, I kept an eye out for movement and an ear out for something, anything but the birds I'd already ID'd. Perhaps there was something on the far end of the pond, maybe a heron or an interesting duck? 

Things didn't look very promising, but then I saw something large flying the length of the pond, from left to right, about 20 feet above the water's surface. It was too dark to be a red-tailed hawk or an osprey, and its white head and tail meant it wasn't a turkey vulture. Could it be?

I watched as it flapped its wings to soar higher and farther away from me. "Come on, come back," I said under my breath, quickly inventorying as many of the bird's attributes as I could while trying not to influence my own judgement by hoping it was what I thought it could be. (Just about any beginning birder can wish a house sparrow into becoming a rarity.)  Despite my whispered entreaties, the bird continued to the farthest end of the pond and did a few circles before coming to rest in one of the leafed-out trees.  

What other bird is that big and has a white head and a white tail? This fella obviously wasn't going to give me another look, so I did the next best thing and called Ivan for an opinion. "The only other possibility is black-backed gull," he told me, but no way could a gull be as big as the bird in question.

Yup, I'd just identified a mature bald eagle on my own, for the very first time. I've already seen a handful with Ivan, and belatedly identified an immature one I scared off on my March solo trip to Brigantine, but this one was special. I hadn't been expecting to bird that day, and nothing about the place had indicated I'd find anything but the usual suspects there. And, well, there's something eminently satisfying about making such a great discovery in a place that's not exactly a well-known birding hotspot.

The other birder was still around, so I asked if he'd seen the eagle. He hadn't but said it was likely what I saw; there's a nesting pair not far away in Old Bridge. He also told me he'd seen a much wider array of birds in the park than I had, making it a nice little spot to check out in the future. Score one for the novice!

Finding Pike's Peak in Trenton

I'm particularly tickled when a site that's expected to present one story ends up revealing another. That's the experience we had on a blustery visit to Trenton. Parking near the capital building to check out the original Masonic lodge, we found a sign that totally tripped me up. It said, in the customary New Jersey Tercentennial Sign haiku* format:

Brig. Gen. Zebulon Pike, explorer, 

born near here, 1779. 

Captured York, Canada, 

1813, but killed in attack. 

Pike’s Peak named for him.

Yet another western explorer born in New Jersey? You got it. In fact, one of his forebears was the founder of Woodbridge. His father, also named Zebulon, served as an officer under Washington in the Revolutionary War and continued his military service in the newly formed United States Army after independence had been won. As a result, the younger Pike spent most of his youth at forts in what was then the American frontier: Ohio and Illinois. He followed his father's footsteps and joined the army at the age of 15, rising to the rank of first lieutenant by the time he was 20.

While his military responsibilities seemed to focus more on administration and logistics, Pike came of age in the army just as western exploration was coming into vogue. The 1803 acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the nation, but much of the territory was unknown terrain to all but the natives who lived there. Young Pike was in the perfect place to make an impact, and in 1805, General James Wilkinson, Governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, appointed him to lead an expeditionary force to find the source of the Mississippi River and bring back influential natives for negotiations. While Pike misidentified the river's origin, the other geographical information he gained was among the first learned for the U.S. government.

Wilkinson sent Pike on a second expedition in 1806 to locate the sources of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, establish relations with the natives and gain a greater understanding of the region's natural resources. Unlike the Lewis and Clark expedition, this journey started without authorization from President Jefferson and may have even been a spy mission. Some historians conjecture that Wilkinson may have been secretly collecting information for the Spanish government, using Pike as an unknowing accomplice. There's even a school of thought that the general was working in league with Aaron Burr to overtake the western United States, though it's never been proven. (Burr seems such a ready villain to some historians that one wonders if they'd charge him with starting World War I if they could.)

In any case, it was on this second expedition that Pike found the mountain that would eventually bear his name. Arriving in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in November, lacking sufficient winter clothing and food, he and his team tried to reach the summit of the 14110 foot-high mountain but thought better of it and turned back. He was quoted as claiming that it was likely no man would ever reach the top.

The journey back was a lesson in hardship and disappointment. Pike and his men soldiered on through the winter, some suffering gangrene and frostbite along the way. Captured by Spanish soldiers near Santa Fe, they were interrogated and their records confiscated for a time, but they were generally well treated and eventually set free to return to undisputed U.S. territory.

You'd think that they'd receive warm welcome upon their return, but it wasn't the case. Jefferson himself was more enamored of Lewis and Clark's natural and scientific findings, and rumors had already begun to swirl about Pike's supposed involvement in the Burr conspiracy. Neither he nor anyone on his team received any special consideration for their efforts and hardships endured. If it weren't for Pike's Peak itself, it's doubtful that Zebulon Pike would be anything more than an answer to a particularly tough trivia question.


* Yes, I know that haiku generally take the three line, 5-7-5 syllable format. Go with me on this one.

Cooperative living down on the farm: Cook College's Helyar House

If you make it to Cook College Ag Field Day tomorrow (and I hope you do!), take a few minutes to stroll down College Farm Road to Helyar House. The 1960's-era building is the modern representation of the resourcefulness of an innovative professor and the persistence of his students during the Great Depression.

Like many students in the 1930s, a host of young men at Rutgers' agriculture school struggled to meet the costs of tuition and college living expenses by doing odd jobs around campus. The farm itself had plenty of opportunities for enterprising young people to keep after the animals, make sure the furnaces stayed lit, and so on. In exchange for their labor, the students with these jobs would get a small room as sleeping quarters. It was a spartan existence, and likely a lonely one.

Agriculture professor Frank Helyar saw an opportunity to change the situation a slight bit. A good part of the ag school campus had been a working farm before Rutgers bought it, and it included an old farmhouse once occupied by a minister named Phelps. Why not open the building to students who were willing to work in exchange for room and board? Beyond the jobs they already had around campus, the residents would also manage the house, make the meals and so forth.

Apparently it was a hard sell to administrators who couldn't see the difference between this planned house and a fraternity, but Helyar stressed the cost-sharing arrangement and the need to provide students with a good living experience. The first group of young men who moved in proved him right: they were hard workers and made the cooperative living arrangements work. Along the way, they also put a spin on the fraternity concept and called their house Alpha Phalpha, the second part being an adaptation of the last name of the house's previous owner.

By the time I got to Rutgers, the frat-derived name was gone in favor of honoring Helyar, and the house had already been taken down in favor of the newer building, but the affable young men who lived there still basically ran the house on their own. It was a great environment to visit, and I'm sure it was a great education for the residents as it still is today. Female and male students at Cook College's successor school can apply for space at the house, which continues to offer a significant cost savings when compared to other on-campus residence options. I'll bet Professor Helyar would be proud and happy to see that his Depression-era concept lives on.