The great forest has long since been lumbered to death.The pines were worked for tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine until for lack of material the industry passed southward through the Carolinas to Florida, exhausting the trees as it went.The Christmas demand for holly has almost stripped the Jersey woods of these trees once so numerous.Destructive fires and frequent cutting keep the pine and oak lands stunted.Thousands of dollars' worth of cedar springing up in the swamps are sometimes destroyed in a day.But efforts to control the fires so destructive not only to this standing timber but to the fertility of the soil, and attempts to reforest this country not only for the sake of timber but as an attraction to those who resort there in search of health or natural beauty, have not been vigorously pushed.The great forest has now, to be sure, been partially cultivated in spots, and the sand used for large glass-making industries.Small fruits and grapes flourish in some places.At the northern end of this forest tract the health resort known as Lakewood was established to take advantage of the pine air.A little to the southward is the secluded Brown's Mills, once so appealing to lovers of the simple life.Checked on the east by the great forest, the West Jersey Quakers spread southward from Salem until they came to the Cohansey, a large and beautiful stream flowing out of the forest and wandering through green meadows and marshes to the bay.So numerous were the wild geese along its shores and along the Maurice River farther south that the first settlers are said to have killed them for their feathers alone and to have thrown the carcasses away.At the head of navigation of the Cohansey was a village called Cohansey Bridge, and after 1765 Bridgeton, a name still borne by a flourishing modern town.Lower down near the marsh was the village of Greenwich, the principal place of business up to the year 1800, with a foreign trade.Some of the tea the East India Company tried to force on the colonists during the Revolution was sent there and was duly rejected.It is still an extremely pretty village, with its broad shaded streets like a New England town and its old Quaker meeting house.In fact, not a few New Englanders from Connecticut, still infatuated with southern Jersey in spite of the rebuffs received in ancient times from Dutch and Swedes, finally settled near the Cohansey after it came under control of the more amiable Quakers.There was also one place called after Fairfield in Connecticut and another called New England Town.
The first churches of this region were usually built near running streams so that the congregation could procure water for themselves and their horses.Of one old Presbyterian Church it used to be said that no one had ever ridden to it in a wheeled vehicle.Wagons and carriages were very scarce until after the Revolution.Carts for occasions of ceremony as well as utility were used before wagons and carriages.For a hundred and fifty years the horse's back was the best form of conveyance in the deep sand of the trails and roads.This was true of all southern Jersey.Pack horses and the backs of Indian and negro slaves were the principal means of transportation on land.The roads and trails, in fact, were so few and so heavy with sand that water travel was very much developed.The Indian dugout canoe was adopted and found faster and better than heavy English rowboats.
