ABOUT
This website has grown out of years of research and aha moments, and a desire to share both the findings and the serendipity with others, especially those who are also researching some aspects of the Deserted Village of Feltville. I anticipate a new posting about once a month. Because I expect to skip around in the history of the Village, following themes, more than adhering to chronological order, I am providing an overview of Feltville’s history that you, the readers, can always refer to in order to place a post in time. The Historic Overview of Feltville was co-written by Feltville Archaeologists Matt Tomaso and Carissa Scarpa and myself, and is meant to allow the reader to understand not only the entire arc of history of Feltville, but as means of providing historical reference points for the time period to which any individual post relates.
Feltville takes its name from its founder, David Felt, who spent years buying up family farm properties and building a mill village—consisting of the mill buildings, company housing for many of the workers and their families, a farm and orchard and all the necessary outbuildings—and, significantly, a school, and a combination church, store, and post office. In its first decade of existence, the little village of Feltville had gained enough prominence to merit its own post office—which spoke to its success in shipping and provided mail service to the residents at a time when there was no home mail delivery. Fifteen years after its bold start, Felt left to return to New York City. There has been much speculation as to why—one local resident told the author of the earliest book on the village that Felt had called himself King David, and said “King David is dead, and the village will go to hell.” If he wanted to prove the village could not survive without him, he got his wish; no subsequent manufacturing enterprise there was ever successful, and the place was sold in 1882 for a fraction of what Felt had received for it at his leaving.
Though never again a separate town, the village Felt started has remained stubbornly a unit, increasingly more and more removed from the rest of the suburban landscape that grew up around it. It acquired a stubborn identity as “the Deserted Village,” confirmed in a series of tourist photos being sold sixteen years later. As a deserted village, it was listed in travel guides as a destination—and websites like Weird New Jersey still celebrate it as a haunted and deserted place, see WeirdNJ.com. It survives today as a genuinely Deserted Village (with the exception of one occupied house, and several other buildings used by the County), owned by Union County. It often comes as a surprise discovery to those hiking through that county’s biggest green space, the Watchung Reservation, with no previous knowledge of its existence .
The people who lived there may have been locally famous in their own times, but their fame has not survived into the present. No battles were fought there, although a Revolutionary War soldier returned home to die of his battle wounds. No presidents stopped by.
Yet, diving into the history of the village reveals so much more than a group of forgotten people. It reveals the status of New Jersey as one of the last original English-settled colonies along the Atlantic Ocean. It reveals a move towards greater freedom of religion, rather than the enforced conformity by Puritans and others who wanted only freedom to impose their own religion. It reveals how a businessman who had made money from the “gum” (rubberized) blankets that, by being issued to Union soldiers on recruitment, massively reduced deaths in the Civil War could also respond to the desperate needs of a family whose only daughter had been infected with malaria, in the nation’s then “unhealthiest” city, Newark, New Jersey. It reveals how the “Enormous Vogue of all things Mexican” hit a tiny village, in the person of a flamboyant Nicaraguan expatriate artist who a leading critic predicted would be as big as Diego Rivera, but who ultimately left art behind for a comfortable government job in Mexico.
While the history of the Deserted Village may illuminate a host of small and large historic currents or trends, it is interesting not simply for what went on in the “village” proper, but for the colorful and unique characters that it attracted. People came into each of the village’s eras for such divergent reasons, all with aims to use the land for more than simply a living space.
The Limits of History
Two of my most desired historical research areas are two of the most unsettled. If you have read about my Introduction to the Village, you know that I was the kid who wanted to be an Indian when I grew up. It appears that the site occupied by the village was the subject of a land “purchase” by the Elizabethtown Associators from Lenape sachems in 1664, but it was not settled by any colonists of European origin until about 1736 or 1737. There is no real historic record of the Lenape who might have used the site at any time before or during this period. We don’t know how many were here in 1664, and whether that number had declined by 1736, although we know some factors which might have caused a decline—particularly deadly diseases the Europeans introduced, more than war or skirmishes.
Additionally, much of my recent work, both with the New Jersey Soil Conservation Partnership and as a school garden educator/volunteer naturalist has introduced me to the literature documenting past catastrophic landscape changes made by humans—especially settlers, of European descent, anxious to make their fortune extracting and stripping the unimaginable natural resources of a “new world.” The earliest European settlers had a sawmill and gristmill—suggesting they did significant land clearing. Does this mean that their changes fit the pattern suggested by the literature? I don’t know.
Accordingly, one of my early posts here will introduce some of the literature on the impacts of such clearing, and the hunting and agricultural practices that went along with it (including introduction of domestic animals, previously unknown in the New World). Among this literature are some studies of individual sites, where researchers painstakingly looked at indicators such seeds and pollen hidden for years in historic sediment in lakes, streams, and rivers. I cannot imagine the complexity of this. Such work has never been done at the Deserted Village—but I hope that soon, some researcher will find it interesting enough to initiate such work, and find the financial resources to support getting down into the muck like that.