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To carry on these enterprises, skilled workmen, as well as laborers were imported. Record and tradition show that from one to two hundred men or even twice that number were employed at the different centers. Some of the landowners, as at Weymouth, built for their men convenient dwellings, grouping them into a village, with a church, store and school house. Others again allowed them to live in more or less crude huts or employed the people living in isolated cabins throughout the Pines. Generally a mansion house stood on a rise of ground overlooking the furnace or saw mill and here the owner lived with his family for a whole or part of the year. Traces of the ancient colonial elegance of these mansion houses can be seen today in the ruins scattered here and there.

Charming Weymouth, sleeping like a lizard in the sun, is the best preserved of these, but the rushing torrent of the great Egg Harbor river where it sweeps its black current madly over the dam amid the ruins of huge walls of solid masonry is all of Weymouth that today shows any signs of life. During the last half century, all these earlier industries of the Pines have been steadily on the decline, for the forests once cut down, renewed themselves slowly, while the cost of transportation over the sandy roads together with the lessening supply of bog ore made competition with the developing iron industry of Pennsylvania impossible.

A Yankee and the Cranberry Bogs

It was the Yankee agent of one of the owners of the furnace at Hanover who in 1850, as tradition has it, first conceived the idea of improving the wild cranberry through cultivation. Up to this time, the fruit had been gathered and sold much as the huckleberry is at present. As an old wood-chopper of the district put it: "Used to be, cranberries was everybody's -- you could go or I could go or anybody." To keep this "anybody," namely the Piney of Brown Mills, from trespassing on the bog adjoining the Hanover Furnace, this shrewd Yankee, while making his first experiments, put up warning signs bidding the natives keep off, which signs they very naturally ignored, since none were able to read. Not discouraged by this failure, the pioneer in cranberry growing hit upon the ghastly expedient of killing a cat, smearing an old coat with its blood and leaving the latter along with scattered fragments of the cat's brain on the path that led from the wilderness to the bog. A terrible time ensued, for it was soon noised about that a man had been murdered. Although they could not find that any one was missing, the Pineys were terribly frightened and thereafter gave the experimenter and his bog a wide margin. From that day to this, there has been a steady development of the cranberry industry which today ranks as one of the most lucrative of the state and forms the chief outlook for speculators of the pines as well as for the inhabitants who have any desire or ability to work.

But the real Piney has no inclination to labor, submitting to every privation in order to avoid it. Lazy, lustful and cunning, he is a degenerate creature who has learned to provide for himself the bare necessities of life without entering into life's stimulating struggle. Like the degenerate relative of the crab that ages ago gave up a free roving life and, gluing its head to a rock, built a wall of defence around itself, spending the rest of its life kicking food into its mouth and enjoying the functionings of reproduction, the Piney and all the rest of his type have become barnacles upon our civilization, all the higher functions of whose manhood have been atrophied through disuse. This comparison, however, serves only as an illustration and must not be carried too far, for into the degenerate human problem enters an element which has no force, where it is a question of mere physical degeneracy. It is this moral element which entering in makes the human degenerate such a profound menace to social order as to demand the careful consideration of those interested in the preservation of the high standards of our commonwealth.

From the beginning of the existence of the Piney type, and especially with the development of industry and prosperity in the Pines, there have been men of leisure, young men of good families, foot-loose men of no character, adventurers of every sort, who for shorter or longer periods have delighted in losing themselves in the pleasures of the Pines. There has always been hunting and fishing, the wine of the air, the tonic of the pine breath, and always the unhindered possibilities of sensual enjoyment. Not every one who has come under the fascination of the Pines has succumbed to its illicit pleasures. Far from it, as such a book as Van Dyke's Days Off abundantly testifies. But the way is open to those who seek it and many indeed are they that have succumbed as well as they who have deliberately gone for that purpose. In the gay days when Prince Joseph Bonaparte held his miniature court at Bordentown, many were the revels and hunting parties in the Pines which were indulged in by the members of his suite. All these revelers came back, leaving a train of nameless offspring to complicate still further the mixed social problem of the Pines, so that today, in tracing the ancestry of any particular group, one runs up continually against the impossibility of proving exact ancestry.