By 1876, the year Abraham Browning christened New Jersey the Garden State, South Jersey was already renowned as a leader in the farming industry, supplying the region with everything from apples to zucchini. It was here that Dr. T. B. Welch produced the grape juice that remains a favorite today, Elizabeth White first cultivated the blueberry, Seabrook Farms became the birthplace of frozen vegetables, Campbell Soup and others canned vegetable-fueled foods, and a colonel transformed the tomato's reputation from deadly to delectable. South Jersey Farming pays tribute to this rich agricultural past.

South Jersey is perhaps best known for its beachside boardwalks, glitzy Atlantic City hotels and blueberry farms, but behind these iconic symbols are the overlooked tales that are unique to New Jersey. While much of Harriet Tubman's life is well known, her time in Cape May is usually overlooked by biographers. Few know that the classic American drive-in movie theaters were born in South Jersey. Even the famous Wildwood, with its distinctive Doo-Wop architecture, hides forgotten stories: at the height of its popularity, this shore town was hosting some of the country's first rock-and-roll acts. Often overshadowed by its more urban northern counterpart, South Jersey nonetheless has a hidden past. In this collection, author Gordon Bond uncovers the most intriguing of these tales.

This history is mostly of the farming community of Farmingdale.

Composed, for the most part, from sketches that were published in the Courier-Post newspapers of Camden, New Jersey, Beck provides us with a series of stories of towns too tiny or uncertain for today's maps. Together, these sketches help to create a more complete picture of the history of New Jersey. A connecting skein of untold or little known wartime history--the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the conflict of North against South--runs through most of the sketches. Many of the sketches concern the pine towns and their people, "the pineys" who lived in the Jersey pine barrens.

Jared Sydney Torrance originally founded Torrance in 1912 as an industrial city. But the land and its surrounding South Bay region thrived through agricultural activities, beginning in 1784 on the Rancho San Pedro. Farming activities continued after Ben Weston became the first one to buy land from the Dominguez family's rancho in 1847. Farming remained an important part of city commerce in the transition to a thriving Los Angeles County suburb in the late 1950s. Throughout those early years, family farmers contributed to the city's economy by raising cattle, pigs, and turkeys, as well as sugar beets, alfalfa, beans, hay, oats, barley, and flowers, and operating dairy farms. Other South Bay cities also relied on agriculture for economic growth, including Carson, once home to a thriving cut-flower farm industry, and Gardena, the one-time berry capital of Southern California, as well as the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where dry farming was a successful industry.

Most of the synagogues are gone; a temple has been converted into a Baptist church. There is little indication to the passerby that the southern New Jersey’s Salem and Cumberland counties once contained active Jewish colonies—the largest and most successful in fact, of the settlement experiments undertaken by Russian-Jewish immigrants in America during the late nineteenth century. Ellen Eisenberg’s work focuses on the transformation of these colonies over a period of four decades, from agrarian, communal colonies to private mixed industrial-agricultural communities. The colonies grew out of the same “back to the land” sentiment that led to the development of the first modern Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Founded in 1882, the settlements survived for over thirty years. The community of Alliance’s population alone grew to nearly 1000 by 1908.Originally established as socialistic agrarian settlements by young idealists from the Russian Jewish Am Olam movement, the colonies eventually became dependent on industrial employment, based on private ownership. The early independent, ideological settlers ultimately clashed with the financial sponsors and the migrants they recruited, who did not share the settlers’ communitarian and agrarian goals.

The last thing Charles F. Seabrook wanted to be was a farmer, yet with keen insight and a driving determination, he cultivated his fathers small farm in Upper Deerfield into the largest vegetable farm and frozen vegetable processing operation in the world. Best known for its system of quick-freezing and packaging fresh vegetables, the Seabrook Farms Company was an innovator in farming technique and processing. But its fascinating past is as much a story about people as produce. At its peak, Seabrook employed 5,000 workers from 25 countries, speaking 30 different languages. Among the most predominant of these employees were the Japanese Americans, who were released from U.S. internment camps beginning in 1944 during World War II.