Category Archives: Small Town USA

Shelburne, Massachusetts

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I heard by chance that the Spurs are in the playoffs, again. NBA games are on the list of things I don’t care about, but this is the Spurs we’re taking about, so Go Spurs. I’m old enough to remember when pro sports were considered a modest-priced entertainment, which would have been the days when the Spurs huffed along in the ABA. When that league went under, that paved the way for the basketball monopoly we now enjoy.

I remember a print ad for the Spurs from their early NBA days. A basketball, mostly in shade, set against a pitch black background; a small but bright light is emerging from a crack in the basketball; the tag line says, In the Arena, Everyone Can Hear You Scream. Brilliant.

Here we go again with the incongruous Massachusetts place names: “The village of Shelburne Falls is located partly in Shelburne and neighboring Buckland,” notes Wiki.

So I suppose I visited Shelburne Falls the whole time when I visited Shelburne and walked across a bridge to Buckland, and then back to Shelburne on a different bridge.

Interesting that a town in the United States is named for Lord Shelburne, a British prime minister when the Revolution was still ongoing. On the other hand, it was on his short watch – at the end of that war – when the British government said, enough already, be independent if you want it so much. So there ought to be something named for him on this side of the Atlantic (and there’s another in Vermont, besides one in Ontario).

The Bridge of Flowers

I had good weather for my return to the Midwest from the Northeast, beginning on a clear, warm day in Massachusetts. Large towns hang like pearls on Route 2, and while I would have made a selection of them to visit even in chillier weather — and spend time on foot in those towns — the spring warmth was one of those travel bonuses you can appreciate right away. Pop off Route 2 in Franklin County and you’re in Shelburne.

Shelbourne hugs the Deerfield River, so Shelbourne needs bridges. You can still drive across one erected in 1890, which the city fathers of the time signed like it was a work of art. As well they should have. Better, you can walk across the structure, which is known locally as the Iron Bridge. Bridge Street goes across it.

One of the more unusual metal benches I’ve encountered, just off the Shelburne entrance to the Iron Bridge. More iron. Yes, you can sit on it.

The Dearfield, major tributary of the Connecticut.

The Iron Bridge takes you to Buckland, though I guess you’d still be in Shelburne Falls, but anyway, a few steps along river – and I mean that literally, maybe 20 or 30 steps – is the Bridge of Flowers. The view looking back across at Shelburne.

Not many flowers at that moment, but replanting was underway. Long ago the narrow bridge carried a trolley, but after that business went bust in the late 1920s, the Shelburne Woman’s Club facilitated its transformation into a linear garden.

Mid-way across the Bridge of Flowers. Even though not flowering (much), a bridge very much worth crossing.

The view looking back at Buckland.

The sign on the Shelburne side.

Nothing is far apart in Shelburne, so a short walk takes you to a geological oddity.

Glacial Potholes

Another sign.

Follow the arrow and you pass a mosaic celebrating the locale. A high-quality image of this would make a good postcard.

Then come the potholes.

I didn’t know glaciers could create potholes, but it seems that they can and have. Also known as giant’s kettles.

Different in details — stone and coloration and process — but erosion as much as Sioux Falls in Sioux Falls. Or on the Bruce Peninsula. Or the coast of Maine, for that matter. Water doing its grind beyond the timescales of humanity.

The spillway was busy. It had been a rainy day before.

Artful rocks, with no artist except erosion.

Avenue A, Turners Falls, Massachusetts

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What’s this?

The first thing I saw on Avenue A in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, in mid-April was this sign. A small reminder of a bloody incident in a bloody war, all but forgotten – and I mean the incident and the war – outside of regional historians and eccentrics like me and, unsurprisingly, the descendants of the Algonquian tribes who were on the receiving end of a surprise attack by men under the command of Capt. William Turner in 1676 during King Philip’s War. Most of the Indians slain, mainly Nipmuc, were non-combatants, as neither side tended to make that distinction in that vicious war. Turner’s attack did not, however, go unanswered in real time: as he and his men were pulling back, they were beset by counterattacking warriors, who managed to turn the retreat into a rout, killing Turner, among many others.

All that I looked up later. In the moment I took a stroll on down the avenue, which is the main street of Turners Falls, an unincorporated village in the town of Montague. So it’s actually a neighborhood? Peculiar nomenclature, these New Englanders have, since I think of a village as a village and a town as a town, and one doesn’t get to be in the other.

According to the sign on the town office (above), the other villages in Montague are Millers Falls, Lake Pleasant, Montague Center and Montague City. So – Montague City is within the town of Montague? Massachusetts is just a little strange with its names, but never mind.

As a main street, Avenue A is lined with some handsome older buildings.

Good to see a small bookshop.

Other nearby retail includes Ed’s Barber Shop, the Country Creemee (ice cream), Ce Ce’s Chinese Restaurant, Kharma Salon, Booska’s Flooring, Waterway Arts, Mystic Pinball and the Upper Bend Cafe. Not exactly a day-trip retail selection, but elements of it are there.

Commercial artwork.

A relic of a commercial establishment long gone. About 100 years ago, A&P operated about 15,000 locations, including presumably one in Turners Falls.

Which only goes to show that retail empires rise and fall as surely as political empires, and are as little remembered as most of them. Keep that in mind next time you’re in a Walmart.

Public art: “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (2017). by Tim de Christopher, who used local red sandstone for the rock and Indiana limestone for the paper mill and barber shop — paper and scissors — evoking the town’s industrial and social history. (The barber shop is on the right, the mill in the middle, and the rock on the left.)

A geometric mural.

An elaborate graffiti-style mural.

Or maybe actual graffiti. Details.

And a fire hydrant.

As peculiar as the local nomenclature. A metal udder.

Turners Falls Canal

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I can’t say I hadn’t been warned.

FirstLight describes itself as a “clean power producer, developer, and energy storage company.” Such as from legacy dams of the Connecticut River watershed, though some of those are coming down.

Luckily, the nearby waters didn’t make any sudden moves in the vicinity of my person that afternoon. I was near the Connecticut River at a place called Turners Falls (no apostrophe), Massachusetts. The sign is posted on a man-made island, in fact, created by a canal paralleling the river – Turners Falls Canal.

I’d crossed the Connecticut via a bridge, and the canal too, and parked on Avenue A in Turners Falls near the Great Falls Discovery Center, which is housed in restored mill buildings on the south edge of the canal.

Great Falls Discovery Center, owned by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, includes open habitat exhibits, fish tanks, and dinosaur fossils, and is generally geared to small fry. It does have a nice, if underutilized, exhibit space in one of the restored buildings.

I understand that “Great Falls” is an earlier name of the falls, now the site of a dam, and that a fellow named Turner led an attack on a native settlement on the river 350 years ago, leading to the renaming of the falls – more about all that later. A path from the center leads to the canal.

A rusty foot bridge across the canal.

Looks a little dodgy, especially when the flow is strong, as it was that day in the wake of heavy spring rain the day before.

But not dodgy enough to keep me from crossing to take in the views of the canal from the footbridge.

Turners Falls Canal, Mass.

The tip of the island, while accessible at that point, is desolate. The rest of the island seemed to be fenced off.

But it does offer a view of the dam and its associated fish ladder. A powerful flow that day.

Also visible: the bridge across the Connecticut that I’d driven a little while before, the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge, completed in 1938 and renovated in the 2010s. Gill is the town on the other side.

I crossed back and took a stroll down the footpath along the canal: the Canalside Rail Trail.

An earlier canal – dug early in the 19th century, just as the U.S. canal boom was getting underway – provided passage via locks around Turners Falls, and a boon to trade in the area. Railroads made that canal obsolete by the mid-19th century, so when the river was dammed, a different canal, a “power canal,” was created to provide water power for factories (the first canal, I believe, was submerged, but I’m not quite sure). Anyway, those factories are closed in our time, but their husks linger.

Waiting for the time when the area’s population is growing again — perhaps during a reverse migration from the too sunny South in the next mid-century — and these sturdy structures can be remade into residential properties.

Leominster, Massachusetts

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The highway Massachusetts 2 – locally called Route 2 – traverses the northern reaches of the commonwealth, from the Boston Common to the border with New York more than 140 miles away, or vice versa. I went west, fortunately not starting in Boston itself, but still slightly inside Route 128.

Once you leave the thickest of metro Boston headed westward, the route becomes more casually picturesque, mildly winding through mildly hilly territory, providing access to Massachusetts towns more and less pleasant, depending I suppose on the vagaries of their economic history. Not an epic drive of the kind you encounter high in some mountains or across wide bodies of water, but a satisfying one all the same.

Eventually you come to the western part of the state, as mountainous as it gets, and the road acquires appropriate twists and vistas. My favorite moment on the road was when I first drove it in 1989. I took one of those twists, and saw a suddenly appearing sign that said Entering Florida. Of course someone has posted a picture.

Florida, Massachusetts, that is, a town (pop. 671) in the Berkshires.

That was another drive. In April I traveled on Route 2 as far west as Shelburne Falls, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First I stopped at a rest stop on the way that reminds us that Johnny Appleseed hailed from these parts.

Indeed, John Chapman was born in Leominster, Massachusetts before the Revolution, though he came to fame in the wild-and-woolly Northwest Territory (and its spanking-new states) and now reposes in Fort Wayne, Indiana under some apple trees.

I was inspired to stop in Leominster (pop. 43,800). First stop, St. Cecelia’s Church, whose construction began in 1931 and which was restored in 1983.

Good to see a church of that name; reminds me of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a favorite part of Rome for me (40+ years ago), though the Massachusetts church itself is rather different.

Some fine stained glass, designed in Spain, created in New Jersey.

Leominster has the sort of long economic arc (for America) one finds in the Northeast: agriculture to manufacturing to services, though those first two economic activities are to some degree ongoing even now. The town is prosperous enough to support well-kept and still-used downtown buildings.

I liked the handsome former train station, now retail.

Another church.

Not as vaulting as the Catholic church down the road, but still a handsome brick structure. I had to look into it: this church is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal association in the U.S.

Manufacturing in the case of Leominster meant a remarkable specialty in the 19th century and into the 20th: combs. Even more remarkable, a history of American comb making, published in 1925, is posted online, namely Comb Making in America, “An Account of the Origin and Development of the Industry for which Leominster has Become Famous to which are added Pictures of Many of the Early Comb Makers and Views of the Old Time Comb Shops.”

That publication date puts it in the public domain. Ah, there’s another setting for a streaming service limited series costume drama — among the cutthroat world of comb making in 19th-century Leominster. I don’t know that “cutthroat” is accurate at all, but who cares. Maybe two brothers fighting for control of their dying father’s comb empire, and their love for the same upper-class woman (who is anachronistically feisty), amid a backdrop of bitter labor agitation, with two labor leaders pushing for unionization, and their love for the same woman (a different woman, that is, one of the comb makers, but also feisty.). See, that wasn’t hard at all. Who needs AI to come up with ridiculous ideas?

The Forward of Comb Making in America calls Leominster the “present seat” of the industry in America: “The industry has changed this thriving town, which is about fifteen miles from Worchester and forty-five miles from Boston, from a small agricultural hamlet into an industrial center of more than twenty thousand people whose products are known throughout the world.”

In the early days, of course, making combs from animal horn and the like was a labor-intensive effort. A more modern industry arose with the invention of celluloid. Later came more sophisticated plastics and molding tech, and the expansion of the industry into other molded items. Such as Foster Grants and Tupperware, both of which originated in Leominster. A simple Google search reveals that there is still a plastics industry in Leominster.

I didn’t spend a lot of time in Leominster, so maybe I missed it. But where’s the giant comb or Foster Grant or Tupperware container in a prominent public place? Leominster officials and private boosters, get on it. Or at least invite the Wall Dogs to town to whip up some local history murals.

Village Burying Ground, Bar Harbor

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A month from now, Main St. in Bar Harbor is going to be a busy place, sidewalks thick with shoppers and walkers with their coffee and ice cream cones. People will gather at the well-trimmed Village Green. The park at the end of Main, Agamont Park, named for a storied 19th-century hotel on the site that burned down long ago, will be alive with the pleasant sounds of people on vacation, taking in the view of the harbor. Boats will ply the harbor. Lobsters will die en masse to make their appearance on the menus of Bar Harbor restaurants.

One place in town that will not be busy come high season, just as it wasn’t busy a month ago when I visited — and was the only living person there — is the Village Burying Ground, which is a minute’s walk from Main St., tucked away on a small slice of land between two churches, Bar Harbor Congregational and St. Saviour’s Episcopal.

“Established before 1790, this cemetery holds in many unmarked and unknown graves the remains of those courageous men and women pioneers on the frontier of Downeast Maine,” says a sign on site, put there by the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association.

“Sea captains, fishermen, shipwrights and hotelmen, selectmen and legislators, their wives and children, and the occasional sailer [sic] dying far from home also rest here.”

One of those sea captains, Israel Higgins (d. 1823).

Capt. Higgins, son of Eden (later called Bar Harbor) founder Israel Higgins, was lost at sea. “Israel was considered a master mariner and served as an Eden selectman in 1802, 1803, and 1809,” notes the blog Adventures in Cemetery Hopping. “He was in command of the schooner Julia Ann (his son Seth was also aboard), thought to be the first ship built in Bar Harbor in 1809. Israel and Seth died at sea on March 29, 1823 about 25 miles south of Sandy Hook, N.J., which is about 600 miles south of Bar Harbor.”

His son Stephen seems to have escaped his father and brother’s fate. At least, no mention of perishing at sea.

Capt. James Hamor (d. 1873).

Lived to be 89. In those older days, an old sea dog who liked to hang out in the technically illegal bars in Bangor and tell harrowing and probably exaggerated stories about his seafaring youth? One of those old sea dogs who didn’t discuss the old days much? Did he regard steamships as unworthy of real seamen, or take positive joy in hearing about progress in seafaring?

Stones two by two. Maybe not coupled in life, but they are now.

Many stones are on their way to disintegration, as usual with a cemetery that goes back this far.

Dark rectangular slate, as seen in a lot of New England, though no others in this cemetery that I noticed, except for a handful of lighter-colored rectangles.

A memorial to Union soldiers from Eden, erected in 1897, ordered from a catalog. Attributed to Cook & Watkins of Boston, memorial makers.

The village paid for most of it, though the public at large donated. Their efforts were probably pushed along by the idea that we’d better get around to this now, what with all the graybeard vets.

Bar Harbor, Maine

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I might be wrong, but I don’t think this is canonical Popeye.

It is Maine Popeye. He’s a sailorman, after all, and has probably cracked open a few lobsters in his time. Or so we can imagine, free of ridiculous ideas about canon. Applying canon to Popeye only goes to show how silly the notion of pop culture canon is, but that’s a subject for another time. During the afternoon of April 16, I spent a few hours chilling in Bar Harbor, Maine, where I encountered the lobster eatin’ Popeye over a closed restaurant. Chilling had a literal component, too, since it was overcast and in the low- to mid-40s F.

Consider the lobster. Bar Harbor certainly does.

The standing lobster touts for an ice cream and coffee shop. It was open, unlike about two-thirds of the businesses on Main St. Ice cream wasn’t going to hit the spot that day, but the shop’s hot chocolate did.

Even Bar Harbor fire hydrants have that snappy lobster color, almost.

Near the water, a display of lobster trap buoys.

This structure is actually a few miles out of town, but I had to stop to look at the buoys.

As a resort town, Bar Harbor is only partly open in April. In some places on Main Street, workmen were getting stores ready for the summer.

At Cool as a Moose gift shop, note the leftover cardboard in the window. I’d have bought post cards there, just for the name, but it wasn’t open.

Streetviews.

The best thing about Main St. before high season is that parking is available and free. Municipal signs say that parking fees kick in on May 15 every year. By then, which is to say the day after tomorrow, I’ll bet parking isn’t much available any more either.

The harbor. Not very busy.

More detail.

Passersby have decided this is the place for stickers.

No Buc-ee’s that I noticed, but give it time.

Belfast, Maine

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You can’t call it an obituary exactly, but not many people get a writeup like Eric R. Overlock, who died at 17 in Belfast, Maine, in 1999. The entire thing is worth a read, as are the two other entries on a Substack by one Matthew Hurley.

Eric Overlock was the toughest kid in Belfast, Maine. He was also the coolest. We grew up skateboarding. He was talented and sponsored in the ’90s when that was a big deal. His nickname was Big Poppa, like The Notorious BIG. He could fight, smoked cigarettes, and was dropping acid at 15…

I learned a lot from Eric, but it was from him I first learned that anyone, and eventually everyone, can and does die.

When I arrived in Belfast on April 15, a sign directed me to a public parking lot off Main Street. Next to the parking lot is the Eric J. Overlock Memorial Skatepark, marked by Eric’s plaque.

No one else was around, so I spent a leisurely few minutes documenting the skatepark at that moment in time. Like the Cadillac Ranch, I figure it changes according to the whims of Belfast graffitists.

Whatever the paint job, a world as strange to me as parallel bars or luge or the flying trapeze. How again does anyone learn it without serious bone breaks?

The skatepark and parking lot are on a long slope to the Passagassawakeag River. According to the Piscataquis Observer, “The Voice of Rural Maine,” it’s pronounced puh-SAG-uh-suh-WAH-keg. Which is just fun to say, once you get the gist. Wonder whether there’s a clipped version locally.

Main Street retail wasn’t quite closed for the winter, but mostly so for the chilly shoulder season. I expect the Moody Dog is gearing up for the summer season even now.

Main Street was very much worth a look anyway.

A handsome edifice at Main and High Streets. Maine seems to have, or had, a way with bricks.

As a settlement, Belfast is old enough to have been burned by British forces during the Revolution. Afterward, revivals and declines have come and gone, as industries cycle through the decades: shipbuilding, seafood processing, railroading, shoe making, poultry, credit card processing, shipbuilding again and tourism.

The Cooper Collection of US Railroad History

The building at the five-street intersection of Main, Church and Beaver Streets.

Details. Is Belfast a hotbed of anarchism?

But you can mock a two-faction system without being an anarchist. But note, back at the skatepark.

How about nanny-statism? I don’t know that you can plausibly accuse Maine of that, but still. A crosswalk example.

In case you were wondering.

What do you know, Maine was my first ever Belfast, not counting the HMS Belfast.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

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Not long ago, I wondered how accurate the lyrics of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” were on one specific point. I had my reasons.

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
Walk right in, it’s around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track

Seems like a convenient rhyme, but that’s not all. Google Maps tells me that the site of Alice’s Restaurant is about a half a mile from a railroad track. I didn’t save the scale on this map, but the distance is correct. This is mildly amazing. Who expects geographical accuracy from a song lyric?

That morning, April 14, I’d extracted myself from Midtown Manhattan via various sorts of transport, retrieving my car at long-term parking at Newark International, and planned to spend the night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Though New England isn’t large, it is molasses when it comes to driving through its densely settled areas, and first I had to get out of New Jersey and New York, then cross Massachusetts. All that meant an all-day drive. Stockbridge, Massachusetts, former home of Alice’s Restaurant, was a stop along the way.

Near the eastern edge of New York state, I cruised north on the Taconic State Parkway.

That sounded good, I thought when I noted the name on a map. It was. Budding greenery, smooth driving, no trucks. Or that many other cars, the further north you go. Construction started about 100 years ago, at the urging of then private citizen Franklin D. Roosevelt. The parkway is in the same league as the Natchez Trace Parkway or the Blue Ridge Parkway, though only about a quarter as long as either.

Once I’d gone far enough north, I took connecting roads to the Massachusetts Turnpike. Stockbridge, which is slightly south of the turnpike, counted more-or-less as a midway point on my day’s drive. As I entered town via Massachusetts 102, I noticed a tower. A stone tower, exuding 19th-century New England sturdiness. Its clock was wrong.

The Children’s Chimes Tower, a 19th-century bell tower built on the site of the town’s original church. A 19th-century replacement for that church stands near the bell tower, looking as New England as can be.

The First Congregational Church UCC. Remarkably, it was open.

Musicians were practicing, or rather seemed to be wrapping up a practice. They paid no attention to me as I looked around.

Jonathan Edwards was the church’s second pastor. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards? Yes.

Across the road from the church and freestanding bell tower – which doesn’t chime, except in the summer – is the town cemetery.

“One of the earliest burials was the first minister, John Sergeant, who died in 1749,” says the Stockbridge Library. “Members of the Mohican tribe who joined the church also were buried here. Twenty years later, discussions began about ways to enclose the burial area to keep out cattle, horses, and pigs. It wasn’t until 1853, however, that a new organization in town, the Laurel Hill Association, took on the responsibility to clean and protect the area.”

Route 102 turns into Main Street, with its shops, hotels, and other establishiments.

And, around the back (off Main St., that is), just a half a mile from the railroad track, is Theresa’s Stockbridge Café.

Closed for the day.

US 1 New Jersey

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Driving the entire length of US 1 is more logistics that I want to take on at the moment, or maybe ever, but I figure I get a little of the same satisfaction doing it in sections. US 1 from Trenton to Newark, which I drove the afternoon of April 10, isn’t what anyone would call a scenic road, but that I’d say it’s better than the New Jersey Turnpike, whose main scenery is tail lights of other cars.

US 1 in New Jersey is four or six lanes most of the way through, generally is a divided highway, passing large cross streets, retail agglomerations, railroad tracks paralleling for a time, car dealerships, sporadic stretches of forested or other undeveloped land, thick traffic through New Brunswick especially, more than a few Jersey lefts and an uptick in spaghetti interchanges the closer you are to Newark. Stops were for traffic lights, but not too much for simple congestion. Take that, New Jersey Turnpike.

During the drive, I chanced on a radio call-in show that asked callers for stories about crashing wedding receptions, sneaking into off-limits places or other common enough rule infractions, such as taking food into movie theaters. One man claimed to have crashed a reception with a couple of friends, none dressed for the occasion; the father of the bride took a cotton to them and made sure they were well fed and good and drunk before long. One woman claimed to take entire meals to the movies and eat them there, and never being asked to leave. Now this was local radio, a real New Jersey thing to talk about.

Jan had told him many times, “It was you to me who taught:
In Jersey, anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.”

“Tweeter and the Monkey Man”, a group effort but clearly a Dylan song, is a brilliant example of a pseudo-ballad. A ballad tells a story, right? A pseudo-ballad seems to tell a story, but at some point near the end of the song, you wonder just what happened. Lyrically, not all of the pieces of the puzzle are available. “Crime and other weird behavior in New Jersey” is about a specific as you can get in this case.

In October, I’d spent a few hours wandering Yale’s stately lawns and buildings and the nearby cemetery. So it only stands to reason – if I’m the one doing the reasoning – that I also visit Princeton, a short way off US 1 not far from Trenton.

Stately buildings.

Early spring on the stately lawns.

Not the best collegiate manhole cover I’ve seen – that would be at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Illinois – but not bad.

Speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey.

A variation on, “Never hold discussion with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room,” which is widely attributed to Winston Churchill.

Princeton is west of US 1; Grovers Mill, New Jersey is to the east, also not far. I had to go there, too. Specifically, to a small park on a small lake in the unincorporated Grovers Mill. A short park trail includes information about Grovers Mills’ claim to fame: in Orson Welles’ version of War of the Worlds, it was the first place the Martians landed.

There’s a sizable plaque, a little bit hidden away, but I found it.

The township of West Windsor, in an unusual display of municipal imagination, erected the memorial in 1988, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the broadcast. Sculptor Thomas Jay Warren did the relief.

The entire script is on line.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey.

Pine Barrens Disorientation

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Down in South Jersey earlier this month, I didn’t see the Jersey Devil. I did see Mighty Joe.

He counted as my introduction to the Pine Barrens, standing at a convenience store on US 206 in Indian Mills, Shamong Township, New Jersey. His story, which Roadside America tells well, began in Spain – really? – though immigrant Mighty Joe apparently has spent most of his existence in New Jersey as a commercial mascot of one kind or another. He’s still that, but also a memorial to the son of the store’s owner, Larry Valenzano, according to the sign on the gorilla’s chest. The younger Valenzano, a body builder nicknamed Mighty Joe, died of cancer in 1999.

I didn’t stop for Joe heading south on US 206. Can’t stop for everything. I figured I wouldn’t see him on my return to Trenton either, since I was planning to return on smaller roads through the heart of the Pine Barrens, after visiting Atlantic City. All went according to plan, until I actually got into the heart of the Pine Barrens fairly late in the afternoon of April 9.

Considering how close you are to Philadelphia and New York, it’s remarkable how remote the Pine Barrens feel. The region, I understand, is the largest surviving forest on the Eastern Seaboard south of Maine’s North Woods, totaling over 800,000 acres.

The region is also called the Pinelands. It certainly fits.

Remote, maybe, but still plenty of signs of human habitation, past and present. I stopped to take my bearings at a wide place in the road, and noticed gravestones.

French Cemetery, named for a number of people buried named French, not for their nationality. “One of the oldest burial grounds in South Jersey,” the stone asserts. Could be, but I have no way to check that.

Interesting little spot anyway, northeast from Egg Harbor City and past the Mullica River and near the Wading River. Or was that the actual location? I was traveling on marked county roads, but pretty soon I started seeing county road signs covered with black plastic bags, next to newer signs. I can only guess, but I think that meant a recent change in the numbering of the county roads.

That further meant that both my paper and electronic maps were wrong – in as much detail as they had anyway, which wasn’t a lot. “Lost” is too strong a word, but I’d say I was disoriented in a web of meandering, ill-marked roads. I stopped more than once among the pines of the Pinelands to try to figure out a better course.

Then it occurred to me: I remembered seeing some of the exit numbers on highways near Trenton had been changed, too. I’m speculating, but I think that had something to do with my GPS going just a little funny in the head the night before. Damn it, New Jersey.

Eventually I worked my way back toward Egg Harbor City, a sizable town on US 30, which connects with US 280, which goes straight back to Trenton; the way I’d come. That’s how I was able to stop to see Mighty Joe.

Even so, I happened across a few places in the Pinelands to stop, especially Batsto Village, site of the former Batsto Iron Works.

Most of the open-air museum buildings are 19th century, but the Batsto Iron Works had roots that went back to Colonial times. Some enterprising early NJ settlers found bog iron in the area. By the 19th century, the iron smelting was doing well enough to support a company town, including of course the boss’s house.

The company store.

The company paid in script until the workers were organized enough to demand legal tender for their labor. Unlike at Fayette Historic State Park in Michigan, the actual industrial facility, the 19th-century blast furnace, is long gone. The place has a good-looking lake, however. Created by a small dam on Batsto River to harness the water for the sawmill.

A vista that says New Jersey? Yes, but not the New Jersey of song and story.

Back in Egg Harbor City (pop. 4,442), I chanced across the Egg Harbor City Cemetery – another reason to leave the GPS inactive most of the time. If the box tells you where to go, you’ll miss minor misdirections that take you to unexpected places.

I’ve come up with my next approach to traversing the Pine Barrens. There will be a next time, provided my health holds out. That’s always a contingency these days, but anyway the approach can’t be as rational as trying to plot oneself on a map, or even follow the directions from a machine.

The region isn’t that large. That is, provided your car is gassed and in good running condition, since walking out of the Pine Barrels, even following surfaced roads, seems like a bad idea unless you’ve prepared yourself to do so. Assuming you drive, pick a direction – say east, toward the morning sun – and head that way, hewing to the direction as much as possible. It won’t be too long before you come to a reliably numbered state or US highway. Or in that case, the Garden State Parkway.

Sounds doable. Unless you encounter the Jersey Devil.