The Pine Barrens

Second Edition.
There are five principal areas of New Jersey, but, to New Jersey’s misfortune, most people think of the whole state in the image of the sub-urban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Northwestern New Jersey, in contrast, is rocky and glaciated farm country, where there are many large lakes and upland hardwood forests. Just across the corridor is a swath of loamy farmland that widens out in a southwesterly direction until it occupies a large part of the state’s southernmost counties. A strip of oceanside communities runs down the coast.
And what remains, in the low center of the state, is a region that has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens. The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. Few people chose to settle there in the sixteen-hundreds, and a large part of the area has not significantly changed to this day. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the pines – as the Pine Barrens are often called – have no people in them at all, and the few towns in the central forest are extremely small. Technically-that is, by their geological and botanical dimensions-the Pine Barrens cover eighteen hundred and seventy-five square miles, or about a fourth of the state. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. This area is, nonetheless, much larger than most of the national parks in the United States, and is so vast that one almost has to go there and climb one of its fire towers in order to believe that so much wilderness exists where it does. The Pine Barrens are not only close to New York and to Philadelphia; they are exactly halfway and on a beeline between Boston and Richmond, and are thus at the absolute center of the great Eastern megalopolis that is now forming.