Happy Fourth of July!--Yes, we are WAY behind on writing blogs!

Every full-time RVer dreads the busy summer holidays when everyone in the country wants to go camping. It's tough to find an empty camping spot! So we have developed the plan of trying to be in a less-traveled place for the 4th of July. For 2022, that spot is in Newtonville, New Jersey. It was just perfect, and we're so appreciative of hosts like Rick that allow RVers to stay on their property through Boondockers Welcome. It was also Rick who talked us out of traveling to Atlantic City for the 4th of July. He told us that the traffic and crowds would be terrible! Instead, he suggested a small historical site that is just 16 miles away. So we drove to Batsto State Historic Park to learn a little New Jersey history.

The center of this state-owned park is the mansion, where the owner of the property lived. We took the mansion tour and learned that a couple different owners lived here. The first was the Richards family, who ran an iron ore plant right here. They needed men to do the labor, so they built a whole town and provided rows of houses that they rented to their workers and their families.

The men were paid in company scrip, a kind of fake money that could only be used at the company general store, and to pay rent to the company. This little town thrived for almost a hundred years from 1784 to 1876. 

When larger steel manufacturers made small operations like this unprofitable, the little town of Batsto was sold to the Whartons. Joseph Wharton decided to use the land as a farming operation. The iron workers became farm laborers as Mr. Wharton built state-of-the-art barns in the 1870s.

We took a ranger-led tour of the town and farm, and he explained that this was a piggery. We had never heard that term before. But you guessed it--it was used for raising (and butchering) pigs.

We also toured the corn crib, and the grist mill. It was a very interesting tour, and these buildings that are well over one hundred years old are surprisingly intact.

When Joseph Wharton died in 1909, this area of the pine barrens was frozen in time. The buildings were no longer used or updated, so they look like they did in 1909. While touring the row of company houses that are left, we found a list of statistics from that year. In 1909, the average life expectancy was 47 years, only 14 percent of homes had a bathtub (and people only took baths once a week), and the average wage was 22 cents per hour. Between the mansion and the rows of workers' residences was a nice-sized lake with a foot bridge.

As we looked around the edge of the lake, we saw lots of brown trees. We haven't seen any brown evergreens here in the northeast, so we wondered if these were the first sign of beetle-kill we have seen this summer. No, we found that they had a forest fire about a week before. The fire was heading right here to Batsto and these old wooden buildings, when fire fighters were able to turn it away.

Just a half-mile away, we saw where the fire had swept through Wharton State Forest just a week before. It burned trees and everything on the forest floor and cleared everything in its path. Whew! That was a close one!

As we left the trees of the state forest, we suddenly found ourselves in farmland. As far as we could see, we are surrounded by blueberry bushes!

We found that there are 56 different blueberry farms surrounding the town of Hammonton--the self-proclaimed Blueberry Capital of the World. Denisa is pretty excited about this information, so we went in search of the best blueberries in this blueberry capitol. Remembering that it is a holiday, we were surprised to find several blueberry farms open. But it's a little late in the day for self-picking, and another farm had a $30 minimum purchase.

Every year 6,000 migrant farm workers come to spend the eight-week harvest picking blueberries here in New Jersey. When we arrived at the next blueberry farm, Denisa watched as the owner paid the laborers that had just picked blueberries all day. The fruit of their labor had just been deposited into large yellow crates.

After getting everyone paid, the owner offered to sell us whatever quantity of blueberries we wanted--a ten pound box, or individual one pound packages. She poured those just-picked berries into our boxes. What a great Fourth of July snack!

After our successful blueberry shopping, we headed towards Vineland, New Jersey, for this little town's Fourth of July celebration. We danced to the live music provided from the band shell. A concrete dance floor was provided, and for once we weren't the only ones dancing. 

The setting sun was lighting up the sky while the local university band played a nice patriotic medley.

It was almost dark when the first Fourth of July fireworks took to the sky over the lake.

We noticed a family of ducks near the shore in front of us. Mother duck didn't seem to be alarmed at the boom of the pyrotechnics. Mark caught her silhouette near the pond as a big red firework burst in the sky.

We had planned a big-town fancy Fourth of July, but we are glad that our host suggested this small-town holiday instead. The traffic was minimal, and we had only 12 miles to drive back to the motor home after the fireworks. Even though we are WAY behind on writing blogs, we still wish everyone a Happy Fourth of July. Don't look at it as being a month late--think of it as being eleven months early for next year!