Exploring my own home town.

To truly appreciate your roots, you need a fresh set of eyes. That’s why I like bringing Rosie back to my hometown.

I haven’t walked the woods near my house in Haskell, N.J. for years. As a kid, we’d tromp up the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains and screw around in the trash-strewn woods beneath the I-287 overpass, blowing up little chlorine bombs and riding our bikes up dirt jumps built by the older kids.

By high school, I’d been skateboarding religiously for a few years, and swore off the woods, turning my attention to greasing the curbs along Ringwood Avenue, giving the cops a hard time when they tried to shoo us out of parking lots. I’d only venture into the woods for games of manhunt, or to climb onto the roof of the old candle factory.

I was always aware of the barely-visible foundations of the Du Pont Powder Mill buildings in the woods stretching from Back Beach Park to the 287 overpass. I just never cared that much. There had been an explosion, I’d heard. The plant closed down after World War I. My family showed up in the 1980s, part of the white flight from the cities – Paterson, specifically. I didn’t care.

Taking a quick hike with Rosie up the trails near the 287 overpass, I was playing tour guide in woods I hadn’t walked myself since before I was licensed to drive. As soon as we entered the trail on the corner of Whistler Place and Jefferson Street, we noticed ceramic sherds on the ground, mixed in with the remains of a plaster lawn ornament that looked like a deer and beer cans. Lots of beer cans.

I spent last summer in a series of holes in the ground in Deerfield, Massachusetts, as part of an archaeological excavation. Ceramics on the ground make me school-girl giddy. I picked up a fragment and stuck my tongue on it. It stuck. Earthenware. This is a highly effective way to identify earthenware, as long as you don’t mind the taste of dirt. My interest was piqued.

Rosie and I set out trying to date the debris. Context is key is archaeology, and this site will never be the location of a fruitful excavation. Based on what we saw, I’d wager we were looking at a trash heap – a 20th century version of the middens I explored a while back in Florida. Still, I wanted to know: How old was this crap?

Although it’s possible that buildings from the Du Pont plant were built in the area, most of the stuff we found was household ephemera – decorated earthenwares, glass bottles stamped “Salad Dressing – New York” and some shoe leather. A photograph taken on Whistler Place and dated October 1917 shows the treeline pretty much where it is now. So it’s doubtful, even though a few stone blocks hinted at a foundation, that there’s anything more telling than some broken pottery.

Rosie found the sherd from an earthenware dish pictured above. Amazingly, the maker’s mark was almost intact; maker’s marks are a huge help in dating a site, since they can usually be hunted down in big books, giving a range of dates from which the piece was manufactured. This mark read “John Maddock & Sons – England.” According to a resource compiled by the department of archaeology at Drew University, the John Maddock ceramic company added “& Son” to its name in the 1850s, and made it plural in 1870, giving the site a terminus post quem, or earliest possible date, of 1870.

A few glass bottles, marked “Paterson, NJ” and “New York, NY” were strewn about. One had the date 1890 stamped on it, putting our terminus post quem a little later.

According to a timeline created by the Department of Health & Human Services, the plant was built in the late 1880s, fitting in with the loose date I’ve figured so far.

Reading up on its history, I dug into the New York Times Historical Archive and found this report of the 1907 explosion at the plant. It reads:

HASKELL, N.J., April 27 — In an explosion which could be heard for miles, the nitrate plant of the Du Pont Powder Works was blown up yesterday afternoon at 4:30 o’clock. Foreman Andrew Larson of Pompton Lake and Nicola Gurello, an Italian assistant, were blown to pieces. Nothing remains of the nitrate mill, and only a ten-foot hole in the ground, fifty feet square, marks its former location.

The H&HS timeline said there was also an explosion in 1898, leaving the plant “[sic] severly damaged.” Oddly that timeline doesn’t include the 1907 explosion.

True to New Jersey form, years after Du Pont ceased operations in Haskell (and, later, nearby Pompton Lakes), concerns were raised about the environmental and health impact of the plant, which manufactured, among other things, tons upon tons of gunpowder. Further up the road, the Ford Motor Company – with help from the mafia – dumped paint sludge in the woods of Ringwood, N.J.

But there is a beauty – or, maybe more accurately, a character – to this valley in the Ramapo mountains, one that gets obscured by stories of superfund sites and a recent, bizarre boom in Jersey-based reality television.

Hearsay says Wanaque, the name of the borough that includes Haskell, is a Lenapé word meaning “rest and repose.” Bringing pieces of my life in Massachusetts back home with me – forcing myself to defend this valley, this state, to outsiders who will never understand why the so-called armpit of America is loved by none but those who live there – is somehow invigorating.

To see more images of the stuff we found on our hike, visit my Flickr page. Historical material from this post, linked where directly referenced, came from a few online resources, including this collection of historical photos and captions, some of which are unattributed, and the New York Times Historical Archive. If any of the above doesn’t reflect your own knowledge, or you’d like to share more, please join in.