No region in the nation has a richer heritage than the eight counties of South Jersey--Cape May, Salem, Cumberland, Atlantic, Gloucester, Camden, Burlington, and Ocean. In this book William McMahon has collected an assortment of little-known information and historical anecdotes about the people and places of this area. "Mr. McMahon offers a chronicle that is full of storms and fires, shipbuilding and shipwrecks, privateers and pirates, taverns and publick houses, Indians and Liberty Boys, boom towns and ghost towns, moonshining and medicine shows, stagecoach lines and railroads, spies and betrayals, and--botanically--cranberries, eelgrass, and poison love apples (tomatoes)."--New York Times Book Review

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.

In the course of its extraordinary history, the Jersey Devil has been exorcised, shot, electrocuted, declared officially dead, and scoffed as foolishness--none of which has had any effect on it or the people who persist in seeing it!This mysterious creature is said to prowl the lonely sand trails and mist-shrouded marshes of the Pine Barrens, and emerge perioducally to rampage through the towns and cities of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, leaving many communities in near-hysteria.The authors show that while a few appearances have been out-right fraud and others have likely been the result of mass hysteria, this creature has been seen by enough sane, sober, and responsible citizens to keep the possiblity of its existence alive and tantalizing.Over 50,000 in print

Few would imagine that the land currently occupied by the Nature Conservancy's Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge, or "the Meadows, "? was once the picturesque Jersey Shore town of South Cape May. By the early twentieth century, a striking hotel and homes designed by renowned Victorian-era architects dotted the landscape. Residents and visitors alike spotted rumrunners racing across the beachfront during Prohibition and endured World War II with German submarines lurking just offshore. But by 1954, barely a trace of the town remained except for about twenty of the original houses, which were moved a mile away. Join one of the town's last residents, Joseph Burcher, as he chronicles life in South Cape May before the angry Atlantic swallowed this serene town.