The Deserted Village and Some Ecological History Introduction

THE DESERTED VILLAGE AND SOME ECOLOGICAL HISTORY INTRODUCTION

Warren Ackerman, who had purchased the Deserted Village and converted it into the resort called Glenside Park, died unexpectedly in 1893, at age 66. When he died, Thomas and Annie Molloy had already gone from being simply his employees to a contractual relationship in which he let them take over the entire management of the resort. Warren still paid for bigger items–repairs and roofs and furniture–but presumably the Molloys took care of growing or procuring all food and other day to day supplies.

This change appears to have happened after Frank Hossinger died in 1888, leaving Warren without a superintendent for the Village. The Molloys’ first full resort season must have been that of 1889, since Hossinger drowned in the middle of the 1888 resort season. Anna remembers being told that Warren did not charge the Molloys anything for the use of the cottages the first year, and after that, rent was $350 a year for the entire resort. Given the jump in rent which occurred later, $350 does not seem to demonstrate any desire by Warren to make a substantial profit. He had already make two fortunes, first in rubber, and then in cement, and although still working at the latter, was perhaps now mostly indulging his hobby of buying land.

But on Warren’s death, things changed. Warren’s heirs, according to Anna, began charging the Molloys $1,200 per year to rent the Village. a more than three times increase. Anna herself characterized it as a “jump.” In my zeal for all things Deserted Village, I began to research those heirs, especially three of Warren’s nephews. But that propelled me back into some topics of ecological history that I had been aware of since the start of my research. This post will take a circuitous path first to establish how I got to those topics and their connections to the Village, and then, into what I can find on the topics themselves.

WARREN’S DEATH AND WILL

Warren had no children of his own. Warren’s will gave Lydia all real property he possessed at his death, and also “all my household articles, furniture, fixtures, portraits, works of art, books, plate, silver and table furniture.”¹ These bequests to Lydia were designated as being “for and during her natural life.”

Lydia is listed in a series of official notices published in the newspaper with four other individuals as executors for Warren’s estate. As part of being executors, the five individuals were to serve as trustees of all the property Warren owned, including the real and personal property specifically designated for Lydia. Specifically, these five individuals were charged with maintaining Warren’s property in trust for ultimate division among all of Warren’s heirs, who were his brothers and sisters, and nephews and nieces.

Lydia had never taken part in managing business affairs of her husband’s and her considerable ownings during Warren’s lifetime. It is not likely that she did so after his death, especially with four designated male heirs/trustees to do so. Three of these heirs were nephews, two of whom were already active in Warren’s Lawrence Cement Company.² Ernest and Marion Ackerman were sons of a brother who had predeceased Warren, James Hervey Ackerman (often called J. Hervey), who died in 1885, at age 44 or 45.

The third nephew was Jonathan Ackerman Coles, whose first name was also often reduced to an initial, as J. Ackerman Coles. J. Ackerman was the one of the two children of Warren’s older sister, Caroline. You may recall that Caroline had taken Warren with her from New Brunswick to Newark, New Jersey, when she married Abraham Coles, and moved into his Newark home. It is J. Ackerman who brings us to the ecological history connection, through his father, Abraham.

THE COLES ESTATE CONNECTIONS

I have already introduced Abraham, husband to Warren’s oldest sister Caroline, in a previous post, Introducing Warren. As noted there, Warren moved from New Brunswick with Caroline when she married and moved into Abraham’s Newark home. Abraham, born in 1813, was a fascinating person, and locally famous in his own time. Indeed, his son J. Ackerman was so taken with his father, Abraham, that he published a more than 300 page book about him upon his death, Abraham Coles: Biographical Sketch, Memorial Tributes, Selections from His Works (some hitherto unpublished).³ I am indebted to Roger Hatfield for the copy I have, which was apparently a gift from J. Ackerman and Emilie to the “Rt. Rev. John Williams, DS, LL.D, Bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut,” and is inscribed, probably by J. Ackerman.

As I noted, Abraham was famous in his own time and has one of the most prominent and lengthy biographies in F.W. Ricord’s 1897 History of Union County, New Jersey.⁴ The biography states that he “was of Scotch and Dutch descent,”: and his “ancestors were among the earliest settlers of New York and New Jersey.”⁵ His great grandfather, William, is listed among the early settlers identified in John Littell’s 1845 genealogy. Littell records William’s last name as “Cole,” and indicates that William “lived by Green Brook, on the north side, in Somerset County.”⁶ The place William settled is now part of Union County, which in 1857 was the last of New Jersey’s counties to be formed, from parts of Essex and Somerset Counties. All of the territory of Union County was apparently land from the original Elizabethtown Purchase. The place where William settled was already known as Scotch Plains, although it would not become an incorporated town in Union County until much later.

William’s grandson, Dennis, who was Abraham’s father, married a woman of Dutch origin from Newburgh, New York, and moved there to start a successful newspaper called The Recorder of the Times.⁷ But William’s son James, father to Dennis, was so wedded to continuing family life at Scotch Plains that he pressured his son to sell his Newburgh business and return to Scotch Plains. Thus, William’s great-grandson Abraham was born in Scotch Plains and grew up on the land which had been in the family for so many years.

Abraham may have been recognized early as a prodigy, because he was sent off at age 12 to an arranged position at a dry-goods store owned by a relative in New York City, where he “acquired a thorough business education, while at the same time devoting his spare time to reading and study.”⁸

But Abraham clearly found that his passions lay elsewhere than business and spent his young years exploring a number of interests. Starting at age 17, Abraham returned home to teach Latin and mathematics at an academy in Plainfield, New Jersey. He quickly went on to study law “in the office of Hon. Joseph C. Hornblower, of Newark.”⁹ He continued to read voraciously, and went on from his legal studies to pursue medicine, first attending a series of lectures at the University and College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, before going on to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, graduating in 1835. He opened his first medical office in Newark in 1836, presumably acquiring his Newark home at the same time, the one where Caroline and Warren Ackerman joined him in 1842.

Caroline died not long after having her second child, Emilie, in 1845. Abraham never remarried, and eventually moved from Newark back to part of the Coles family estate in Scotch Plains. There, he created his own estate, a place he named Deerhurst, complete with a captive herd of deer and a replica of a famous boxwood maze that he had seen near London. While he likely kept the Newark home for some time, to facilitate his practice there, he lived out the rest of his life with his also never married children at Deerhurst.

Abraham’s biography in Ricord indicates that he was a very skilled physician, one from whom other physicians frequently sought advice, especially in surgery. But that biography identifies his real contributions and fame as lying in his “literary and scholarly attainments.”¹⁰ Abraham wrote poems and hymns, but the biography suggest that one of his greatest achievements lay in translations, including his first, of a hymn originally written in Latin by a monk in the thirteenth century, “Dies Irae.” Abraham was apparently obsessed with this hymn—and the rest of the literary world with him. The original Latin version repeatedly moved Dr. Johnson—presumably Dr. Samuel Johnson, to tears, was quoted by Sir Walter Scott on his deathbed, and Goethe used parts of the hymn in his “Faust.” Abraham was the first to translate the hymn into English. He would not stop until he had produced a total of 18 different versions of the hymn. The Ricord biography contains 15 pages of excerpts from and praise for this and subsequent literary works.

Meanwhile, Warren purchased property adjoining that of Abraham and his children in 1860, but did not move to the Scotch Plains property until 1876, when, for the first time, at the age of 49, he married. His bride, Lydia, daughter of Isaac L. Platt, one of the founders of the Chemical National Bank of New York, had already buried an Ackerman husband, having been previously married to Warren’s brother George.

Clearly the bond between Warren and the Coles family was a close one. Over the years, I have continued to research the Coles family, seeking context for Warren and the Deserted Village, and here I have taken you the long way around to the connection between the Coles family and ecological history. That connection lies with the captive herd of deer that Abraham installed at Deerhurst. Spoiler alert—those deer were among the very few in New Jersey in the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, and, I believe, are one of the sources of the profusion of deer that our state enjoys—or suffers from–today

NO DEER IN NEW JERSEY?

My first introduction to the fate of deer in New Jersey was quite innocent. When each of my sons was a preschooler, I signed each of them and me up for a program at Howell Living History Farm in Hopewell Township, New Jersey. As its name suggests, Howell Living History Farm seeks to introduce visitors to the realities of farm life in New Jersey in the past, specifically around 1900. The program we signed up for involved one of the farm personnel leading the preschoolers on activities like egg gathering and grinding corn, while the parents served as volunteers to guide groups of visitors around the farm.

We parents received training so we could appropriately lead guided tours. I remember distinctly that one of the Howell Living Farm people who was training us mentioned that a past visitor had asked how a historically accurate living history farm could justify a modern deer fence to protect the corn and other crops. The person leading the training told us that there were literally no deer in New Jersey in the year 1900, the year they had chosen as the one they were demonstrating. So, a deer fence replicated the conditions of the time, by excluding present deer from the crops.

No deer! I was shocked, because even at that time, in the early 1990s, New Jersey seemed overpopulated with deer. Even more interesting was the explanation we were given of how the state had gotten from no deer to one where deer were everywhere. Deer were reintroduced, we were told, by wealthy individuals who brought them ornamentally to their estates. The specific estate that the Howell Living Farm personnel believed had brought deer back to the vicinity of the farm was identified as the Kuser estate.

At the time, I lived in Robbinsville, next door to Hamilton Township, where the Kuser Mansion, remnants of a Kuser estate, is a preserved public history museum. I did not then know of another Kuser estate, at Baldpate Mountain, much closer to Howell Living Farm, one of whose chief purposes was creating a game preserve for raising pheasants.¹¹ One can imagine that deer may also have been introduced at Baldpate.

When I first learned that deer kept ornamentally on the estates of the wealthy being a source of their return to the landscape of New Jersey, I imagined those wily deer escaping and spreading. It was equally easy to visualize some of Abraham’s captive herd of deer (one of which is in the attached picture), escaping and spreading across the landscape nearby, including to the not-too-distant Deserted Village, now overpopulated with deer, as is much of New Jersey.

This post will explore how we got from no deer to so many deer, and at the same time look at some of the other related ecological history changes that started with the period of European colonization. The discussion will mostly be about the whole state; but I will introduce the evidence I have for the impact of statewide trends specifically at the Deserted Village itself.

DEER AND NEW JERSEY

There is uniform agreement in every one of my research sources, including a recent paper by Dr. Jay Kelly to confirm that, as I was told at Howell Living Farm, deer were indeed “nearly extinct” in New Jersey as of 1900.¹² So two basic research questions emerged—how did this near extinction occur, and how have deer rebounded to be at the current level?

I will start by considering the conditions under which deer thrive, and how the state reflects those conditions currently, working backwards, a bit.

Deer are considered to be an “edge” species, often favoring spaces where forests and open areas occur together. One of their food sources is forest “mast”—a term that includes nuts, seeds and fruits of woody plants, specifically as food sources for animals.¹³ Additionally, they eat “virtually every part of many different plant species.”¹⁴ This includes many of the plants we humans grow on farms and in our home landscapes, as well as in our public preserved spaces. It is worth noting that in those public spaces there is a move to eradicate non-native invasive plant species such as multiflora rose and replace them with those which would have been found in New Jersey prior to colonization. The latter, the state’s native plants, include many which the deer especially favor, while many of the non-natives, especially multiflora rose, are among those deer do not eat. So, our good intentions are filling public spaces with deer food, which needs to be protected in order to survive.

Deer are thriving in the current landscape of New Jersey, because there is a mix of forest and meadow edge environments, along with lawns and suburban landscaping, where hunting is generally disallowed, and the deer can hang out undisturbed. The wolves and cougars and other predators that once threatened deer have been long since virtually eradicated. Even private hunting has declined. The main threat to deer now may be deer-automobile collisions.

One estimate of deer density prior to European colonization is approximately 10 per square mile; it should be noted that this is an estimate for North America in general.¹⁵ I have not yet found a New Jersey based pre-colonial estimate. Early European visitors or colonists who made observations about deer simply noted their abundance. There is even a suggestion that deer populations may have increased somewhat between 1500 and when colonization began in earnest in America, because diseases to which the native population had no resistance may have already reduced native populations, and thus, hunting pressures by those natives.

White-tailed deer were the large animals most commonly hunted by the Lenape of New Jersey.¹⁶ Autumn was the traditional hunting time, a time of the year when any plant foods grown or gathered by the natives would already have been preserved and stored, and coincidentally, deer would be at their most plump, having eaten heavily of mast and greenery in anticipation of the lean winter months. Hunting could be by an individual, which Kraft describes as a “feat of endurance:” the hunter had to either approach from downwind without spooking the deer, or sometimes, run the deer (and presumably himself) to exhaustion.¹⁷ If the latter, and the hunter was successful, he still had the jobs of gutting the deer and carrying the carcass, which might weigh as much as 100 pounds, back the many miles the hunt had taken him away from home. The Lenape had developed a “burden strap or woven girth” which at least helped support the deer on the hunter’s back. Kraft cites observations that the hunter, once home, could turn the deer over to his wife, leaving its further disposition (and sharing of the meat) to her.¹⁸ Kraft points out that sharing was practical for two main reasons—the Lenape had no refrigeration system, and any meat not consumed promptly would have to be preserved in some way, and also that sharing would help insure that the family which was sharing meat would be shared with at some other time. The Lenape normally killed only what they could consume or could preserve

At other times, groups of Lenape would together drive deer into smaller and smaller areas, where the animals could be easily hunted. The driving of the deer might involve burning in a circle to drive the deer or simply driving them with a group of people.

In addition to any burning during group hunts, the Lenape were also observed to do regular burnings of parcels of land, with multiple purposes in mind—making passage across an area easier, making space for crop plantings, and likely because they had observed such burning led to increased population of deer, by providing space for the animals’ favorite foods.¹⁹

Kraft says that groups of Lenape might move from one place to another based on the season; staying in one area for the growing season long enough to grow crops such as corn beans and squash, and then moving in fall or early winter to a location deemed to be especially good for hunting.²⁰ Interestingly, Kraft identifies the “foot of the Watchung Mountains” as one of the favored areas for the Lenape. Could this have included the valley between two ridges of the Watchungs, where David Felt later built his mill? Kraft, himself a renowned archaeologist, says that such winter hunting camps might easily elude archaeological investigation, more specifically indicating that “Fireplaces, possibly containing charred nut fragments, bones and antlers, lost or broken projectile points, potsherds from a smashed cooking vessel, and perhaps a scraper or knife might be the only evidence of a short-term stay.”

Deer were also one of the animals most hunted by the colonists, along with beavers. But unlike the natives, the colonists were not hunting only what they could personally use. In fact, colonists deemed natives lazy, which for the colonists translated into ungodly.

Hunting, especially of deer and beavers, was one of the colonial ways of “exploiting the natural environment,” which according to Land Use in Early New Jersey: A Historical Geography by Peter O. Wacker and Paul G. E. Clemens, ²¹ predated most colonial agricultural planting use of the land. In addition to hunting, such exploitative uses also included lumbering for various purposes, and grazing of cattle, hogs, and other domestic animals on the land. These animals ate the same mast the deer enjoyed along with other plant food. Pigs were especially damaging to the environment, truly exploitative in every sense.

Such exploitive use manifested rather quick results. By the early eighteenth century the beaver trade had “collapsed” because there were few beavers left to be found (although beavers, unlike deer, apparently never totally disappeared). The exploitive uses, including eradicating most beavers and cutting down trees rendered the land ready for agriculture. Eradication of most beavers from the landscape led to their dams deteriorating and the sediment-rich areas that the dams had created being clear for farming.

Deer continued to be hunted, even after the colonists turned to planting the land. Deer hunting from the colonial period through the nineteenth century included not only the sport hunting which exists today, but also commercial hunting. I find the latter especially interesting, because it suggests that venison was a much more common part of the New Jersey diet through at least 1900. This is a topic of food and foodways history that I intend to research further at some other time.

It is notable that concern about the rate at which deer were being hunted actually started very early. Wacker/Clemens notes that New Jersey passed an “Act to Preserve Deer” in 1769, which demonstrated concern even then about the decline in the state’s deer population. Among other provisions meant to slow down the pace of deer hunting, the Act created a set hunting season. Subsequent Acts followed, for example, a prohibition on deer hunting for five years, starting in 1862, and again from 1902 to 1908. ²² Along with many other states, New Jersey eventually made it illegal to sell venison, effectively banning commercial hunting. It is clear that impetus for this commercial hunting ban came not just from concern over deer population, but from increasing pressure by those who wanted to keep hunting for sports purposes.

How did New Jersey get the deer started again? On its “History of New Jersey Fish and Wildlife” page, in black and white, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection states: “1904-1913: Deer are obtained from private reserves and parks, and from other states (Pennsylvania and mIchigan) to restock New Jersey.” So, what I was told all those many years ago at Howell Living History Farm was accurate. I can easily imagine the donation-prone J. Ackerman Coles and Emilie Coles being happy to supply some deer from the private herd they had inherited from father Abraham.

TREES AND NEW JERSEY

Predictably, from the advent of New Jersey’s earliest colonists to 1900, humans had brought about other major changes in the landscape of New Jersey besides the near eradication of deer. Trees were being cleared as quickly as possible. Charles Stansfield’s An Ecological History of New Jersey indicates that the colonists’ “attack on forests amounted to a war in which trees were the enemy.”²³ Trees had a variety of uses, including construction and burning as firewood. Additionally, the iron industry in New Jersey required a hefty diet of charcoal made by roasting trees. When the trees ran out, the industry was largely left without a fuel source.²⁴ Johann David Schöpf in his book, Travels of Johann David Schöpf in the middle and southern United States of North America in 1777, made the following observations:

The mining and metallurgical industry in New Jersey, as everywhere in America, cannot be enduring in its present condition because no care is taken, as is done in most districts in Europe, to maintain the forests, and many works must stop without uninterrupted supplies of coal and timber, as is here and there already the case. . . . The Union, a blast furnace in Jersey, consumed in 12 to 15 years the wood from nearly 20,000 morgen [about 12,355 acres] and must be abandoned in consequence of the want of wood. ²⁵

Schöpf goes on to make the following interesting comment:

It is true that this cleared land was afterwards settled in farms, but it was not of much value because of the lack of wood.

I can only conclude that this comment on the devaluation of farmland left without tree stands probably relate to Schöpf’s discussion a page later of the importance of on-farm woodlots for a “home-supply of fuel and fencing-timber and heavier construction-work of the farm and neighborhood.”²⁶

Like deer, trees declined to a historical low, but it preceded 1900, occurring between 1850 and 1860. In Plant Communities of New Jersey: A Study in Landscape Diversity, Beryl Robichaud Collins and Karl H. Anderson indicate that until the middle of the nineteenth century, wood was the only source of heating.²⁷ Around 1850, there was a major switch to coal for heating, and the demand for wood decreased.

Like deer, trees have regenerated, to the point where those not familiar with the history of the long history of cutting would not imagine they had ever disappeared. From the vantage point of 40 plus years later, a 1899 Report on Forests for New Jersey, seems to give a bit of a rosy viewpoint, indicating that as a result of the reduced demand for firewood or charcoal, the overall amount of tree cover in New Jersey was about the same as in the mid nineteenth century.

Analyzing the changes in forest area, we find that there was progressive deforestation in all portions of the State up to 1860, although the rate was most rapid from about 1830 to 1850, and very slow in many counties after the latter date. . . . In all of the other northern counties [other than those in the Highlands and Kittatinny valley regions] the new clearing has not more than equaled the abandoned clearings which have grown up again. . . . Although the area of forest has not sensibly diminished in northern New Jersey, and has decreased only about 13 per cent in the southern counties since 1860, it may be thought that the proportion of brush, stump land and small timber is considerably greater than at the middle of the century.²⁸

The authors still considered the timber value to be quite good, in spite of the change in composition of the forest cover which had grown up to replace the original pre-colonial mix.

The Report on Forest indicates that Union County was a bit on the low side for tree cover at 23%. An animation by the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis will give the reader a sense of the changes in forest cover across New Jersey from 1600 to estimates for 2050, at https://crssa.rutgers.edu/projects/lc/1600to2050.html.

A quick note on the means of studying changes in vegetation over time, in the absence of detailed records of vegetation, especially at an individual location like the Village—none of them are methods I expect to be able to engage in personally. Plant Communities describes one of the time-tested methods, the study of layers of pollen remaining in bogs and lakes.²⁹ Other researchers, such as Dr. Jay Kelly, have analyzed vegetation and soil conditions to determine past conditions and usage of various tracts of land in Northern New Jersey.³⁰ So, I will rely, as always on research into written sources.

DEER AND TREES AT THE DESERTED VILLAGE

The discussion above outlines human impacts on deer and trees for the entire state of New Jersey. What have I learned about the status of deer and trees at the Deserted Village from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century?

I will start with deer. As noted in earlier posts, the Feltville Archaeology Project has made detailed analyses of the contents of two privies (outhouses) in the Deserted Village. One was a very well-maintained privy behind the first house at the top of the road, the one used as an office or command center during David Felt’s Feltville period, and transformed into a resort cottage by Warren Ackerman. Archaeologist Matt Tomaso indicates that this privy had a false bottom, which could be removed for cleaning, and had evidence of regular cleaning and maintenance. In addition to the things for which privies are designed, it contained discards. Archaeological investigation of the discards revealed use up to 1916, the date of a newspaper found in a tobacco tin in the privy.

The Feltville Archaeology Project also excavated the remains of a two-seater privy, behind the three small workers’ cottages just before Masker’s Barn. This was not as well built or maintained, lacking evidence of regular cleaning, and having been built into the water table. Among the differences in discards found in the two privies was the finding of wild animal bones in the workers’ cottage one. This suggests that residents of these cottages were eating locally available and small wild game and fish. The bones of hunted animals found in this privy from the hunted or fished animals outnumber those of “store bought” beef and pork, even into the Glenside period.

These bones included some from deer, so the residents of these cottages must have been eating venison, even into the Glenside period. So, there may be evidence of some population of deer in the local area through the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century. Tomaso takes the bones as evidence of a diet supplemented with hunted food as opposed to store bought food and as an indictor of social or wealth status, compared with those occupying the cottages, served by the first privy.³¹

I will note, that as established above, there was a commercial trade in venison at least through the beginning of the twentieth century, so the bones may have been from animals which were hunted somewhere else and sold to the occupants of these cottages. Again, part of a future investigation into food and foodways history.

More definitive evidence of the levels of deer in the Watchung Reservation, of which Feltville became part in the 1920s, comes from three other sources.

First, a 1935 article from the New York Herald details a five-year plan to stock the Watchung Reservation with game animals of various kinds, including deer.³²

Henry Bedlinger, game conservator of the New Jersey Fish and Game Commission, arrived here today to take charge of the five-year plan which is expected to make the 2000-acre Watchung Reservation of the Union County Park System the best stocked game preserve in the state. Mr. Bedlinger’s first concern will be to eliminate all predatory animals and vermin from the area.

L.G. McNamara, head of the commission’s wild-game management department, is making a survey of the reservation and will recommend the planting of shrubs and plants to afford food and cover for the wild life already there. . . . Mr. McNamara intends to fence off certain areas for the protection of young deer. . . . Mr. McNamara said that under proper conditions the present game in the sanctuary should increase tenfold within a few years. He will recommend that special crops be planted for each type of game, and will choose the most favorable sites for these crops.

Second, in James Baird’s 1956 report, The Ecology of the Watchung Reservation, Union County, New Jersey: A Description of the Biotic Communities and Recommendations for their Management, Baird indicates that there is a consensus regarding the number of deer in the Watchung Reservation, i.e. settling the estimated number of year-round deer there as 10 to 15, which swelled to a population of between 25 and 30 deer during the fall and winter. Baird notes that this “would seem to be about all that the Reservation Area can maintain during these seasons without doing damage to the vegetation and the deer.”³³ He goes on to warn: “If the population increases to a point where it is obviously detrimental to the interests of the Reservation, the State Fish and Game Department should be called and arrangements made with them to trap the deer and remove a number of them to other areas of the state less densely populated by deer.”

The most recent estimate of deer population and its impacts on the Watchung Reservation is provided in a draft report prepared by Mike Van Clef and Gemma Milly of Ecological Solutions.³⁴ The draft report indicates that levels across the state are down from a peak New Jersey deer population in 1995. The report concludes that population densities in Watchung Reservation are still too high to avoid “noticeable ecological, economic and human health impacts.” The report describes the current deer population density in the Reservation at 27 per square mile and recommends that measures be taken to reduce the deer density to between 5 and 20 per square mile. The negative impacts of too many deer can be seen in one of two ways, “Empty Forest Syndrome,” in which all native plant species and any other plants have been browsed out of the forest understory. This syndrome is generally seen in areas not previously subjected to past agricultural uses but perhaps lumbered over. Or the impacts of too many deer will be seen in “Infested Forest Syndrome,” which results in too much understory, consisting of dense cover by invasive plant species, including such species as multiflora rose, unpalatable to deer. Either of these syndromes generally accompanies a forest where new tree seedlings are not successful in establishing a next generation, either because of overbrowsing by deer, or over competition with invasives, leading to the possibility of a forest which will eventually age out and die because no replacement trees or shrubs are available to take the place of dying trees.

As to the trees at the Deserted Village, I have included three aerial photographs from the files of Edward Grassmann, who owned a number of cottages at the Village from 1919 through the 1920s. The photos probably date from the 1920s, and were supplied to me by Grassmann’s nephew, Edward Engel. Although they were taken later than the Glenside Park period, they are probably a good representation of the tree cover at the Village at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. For a current representation of the regenerated tree cover, I refer the reader to current Google aerials of the Watchung Reservation.

I also refer the reader to the two articles by Jay Kelly cited in this post for a sense of the long-term damage to the environment which has been caused by the human changes since early colonization.

Each of my posts on the topics for this website leave me with research questions that I must shelve for now, since otherwise, I might never complete a post. But that is actually part of the fun of the research.

NEXT MONTH

Next month, I will profile the nephews I introduced briefly in this post, possibly along with some of the prominent guests of the resort. Until then!