LOCKWOOD GAP, A JOURNEY ACROSS THE JERSEY HIGHLANDS
Speaker: Kevin W. Wright
8 PM, April 17, 2008
Second Reformed Church, 436 Union Street, Hackensack, NJ 07601
The story of dramatic changes to the Highlands over millennia, largely the consequence of human habitation, has never been fully told.
Lockwood Gap, A Journey Across the Jersey Highlands, is an illustrated excursion across time, through an important natural corridor connecting Andover and Waterloo in Sussex County. This journey tracks the transition from wood fuel to coal, echoing the present competition for declining oil reserves. Along the way, the audience will encounter hunters, teamsters, canal-boat captains, mules tugging ore cars, locomotive drivers and automotive vacationers as they transit this rugged terrain.
This historical perspective is most timely as New Jersey is projected to soon reach “build-out.” Legislative protection of the Highlands in 2004 as a vital watershed provokes controversy. With competing values at play, conflict is inevitable. Though once considered a barrier to trade and travel, increasing numbers of outdoor recreationists, preservationists and real estate developers are now attracted to this recovering wilderness.
Hunters and gatherers began to subsist upon the natural bounty of the Highlands after the return of a temperate climate at the end of the last glaciation. Extensive documentary research reveals an unexpected cultural diversity among the indigenous peoples, which nineteenth century myths largely disguised and confused. Beginning late in the seventeenth century, colonists competed with the native owners for resource-rich lands. And so the Highlands became an important segment of America’s first “colonial” frontier. During the so-called French and Indian War, New Jersey developed into one of the world’s leading iron producers, founded upon the mines, forests and waterpowers of this geologic region. The lecture tells the history of the Andover Ironworks, which played a unique role in the earliest domestic production of steel and was therefore considered critical to the war effort during the American Revolution. There is also the history of Andover Forge, which grew into the canal hamlet and railroad junction of Waterloo, but eventually faded into obscurity, only to be reincarnated as a “restored village,” one of northern New Jersey’s best-known tourist attractions.
Avenues of travel across this formidable natural barrier steadily improved and the Highlands’ treasury of metallic ores figured prominently in the industrial revolution that transformed American life in the nineteenth century. The gradual, haphazard linkage of state-chartered, locally directed short-line railroads into long-distance carriers gradually wove a national marketplace, pushing America to the forefront of a global economy. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the industrial city became the hive of commercial activity and the old mill and forge ponds of the Highlands either developed into municipal reservoirs or were abandoned. The narrative concludes as once busy crossroads declined into quiet backwaters, allowing nature to reclaim her domain.
