Wharton traces the vivid history of New Jersey's hub of industry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Known as Port Oram until 1901, the town was the site of the richest mineral deposits in the state and of the famed Picatinny Arsenal, still active today. The Morris Canal and northern New Jersey railways were built specifically to accommodate the area's mining and iron-manufacturing industries. Wharton attracted immigrant workers who settled and stayed in the community alongside the original families, many of whose descendants still reside here.

A massive work--forty years in the making--there's never been a reference book like this for the state of New Jersey. The 100,000 biographies recorded by Mr. Sinclair, were extracted from no fewer than 2,000 volumes scattered among collective sources, not single-volume biographies. This fact alone establishes this book as the key reference work for New Jersey biography. It hardly needs to be said that Mr. Sinclair's book will prove to be an invaluable tool for genealogists given the obvious connection between biography and family history, as well as the fact that a number of the compiler's 237 sources contain not only biographies but genealogical sketches.