New Beginnings

Christmas 2012 Roebling Village House Tour 

The new fiscal year has begun, and with it the Perkins Folklife Project is active again, following the usual summer hiatus.  In picking up the fieldwork threads for this year, my plan was to take a dual path -- following up in areas where I’d already been working, as well as striking out into new territory.  

On the new territory side of the picture, I spent a few days in and around Roebling, talking to people who’d been associated with the Roebling Mill and are now involved in the museum that’s grown out of the ruins of that mill.  I also spent time in Camden County -- in and around Camden City, Lindenwold, Lawnside, Berlin, Collingswood, Pennsauken, and other towns.  These are complex and interesting places, and I'll have more to write about them in coming months as I extend folklife project fieldwork activity more fully into these and other places in Camden County. 

In Roebling, I attended the annual Christmas event, spent time walking around what was once the company town, and crossed the tracks to look around the unaffiliated town (which was where the ethnic churches and clubs were located).  These tracks once served an industrial function; today, they carry the New Jersey Transit RiverLine, which is part of a statewide commuter light rail system.  Anyway, I took photos, and spoke casually and at times more deeply with people I met, or arranged to meet, in that place.

While working in Roebling and Florence, I met and then interviewed Don Jones, an artist whose art is various and interesting, and includes depictions of life and work in the Roebling-Florence area, at Roebling mill and elsewhere.  Don classically has a foot in both worlds -- he grew up on a farm in Florence, but his father worked for Roebling.  Don himself took a different path at a time when so many of his contemporaries were graduating from high school and heading for work at the mill: he enrolled in the Tyler School at Temple University, earned a degree in art, and made a career in advertising and marketing.  I’ll report in more detail on my conversations with him, and take a closer look at his work, in a future post.

Returning to more familiar locales, I revisited people I know in the Floodgates area, south of Paulsboro, whom I’ve worked with over the past couple of years.  Some things have changed.  Last year I published a blog post about Boots Hughs, a member of the greater Repaupo community and an astute collector of old tools that were used on farms in the area.  Boots died several weeks ago.  He was cremated, and his ashes spread around a section of Repaupo Creek where he and his son owned property.  Calvin Fisler, remembering his friend Boots (I wrote about Calvin last year, too), told me that Boots had often helped a local landowner who owned land along the creek, and in gratitude for that help she offered a piece of property to him.  All she asked for that land, Calvin said, was one dollar – but she said it had to be a silver dollar.  Boots got hold of a silver dollar, and that property is now in Boots’s family.  I detect an eloquent symbolism in that transaction over the property, as Calvin told it, which says something important about community values and relationships along Repaupo Creek.  I’ll try to explore that “something” in future posts.        

Dick Toone with Tankard in Process

Following what has become the vitally important thread of wood and woodworking, I visited Dick Toone at his workshop in Arneys Mount.  Dick expertly reproduces historic artifacts, mainly from the Colonial period, based on meticulous research and painstaking experimentation.  I'm fascinated with Dick's work and deeply impressed by his knowledge and skill.  When I stopped by, he was working on a set of wooden tankards for a local customer.  I took some photos of a roughed-out tankard, and of the tankard components.  

Dick Toone Demonstrates Treadle Lathe

These tankards are closely based on a traditional model, and are put together using the "loose cooperage" method, though Dick applies glue to hold the pieces together when the tankard isn't in use, meaning, when it dries out (when wet, the wood swells out against the iron bands that wrap around the tankard; when dry, the wood shrinks and separates).  Later, Dick and I went up to the upper level of the barn, where he showed me a reproduction 18th century lathe he's built, based on a model he discovered at Old Salem, the historic Moravian settlement in North Carolina (the North Carolina settlement is an offshoot of the older Moravian settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania).  

Still following wood around the project region, I stopped by for a chat with Bill Robbins, another fine woodworker.  (I reported briefly on Bill's work in a recent blog post.)  By the way, I recorded an interview with Bill Robbins earlier this year, which I'll report more fully on at some other time, and if possible will provide audio clips from that interview at some point, featuring Bill discussing his work.    

But for now, I’ll conclude this post with some further brief notes and indications regarding Bill Lucas (I've reported on him briefly in previous posts).  As of this writing, however, I've only scratched the surface of what I believe is a fabulous story, which I can only hint at here.

Bill was a member of a large extended family, who lived in the Pemberton area and had deeply historic roots in that town and in nearby places (I'm thinking here of Birmingham and Juliustown among others).  One Lucas ancestor was an early settler of Pemberton, who established a grist mill just a few doors west from where Bill later lived.  

Bill was a woodworker, and many other members of the Lucas family have been woodworkers too.  However, most of the stories seem to have clustered around the person of Bill, probably because, by all accounts, he had a very special feeling for wood, and was a capable and competent craftsman.  And perhaps also because his life was so intensely focused on wood.  I’m eager to learn more of this story, and perhaps in the process, to discover ways to view local history and culture in Pemberton through the multiple lenses of wood, woodworking, and Bill Lucas.  This should prove to be exceptionally rich ground for ongoing exploration.  As of this writing, I’ve already had some small amount of luck talking with a number of people about Bill, family members as well as others.  As Bill Robbins told me, “Everybody has a story about Bill Lucas.” 

 

Most of Bill’s tools, much of his equipment (some of which was made locally, at the A.B. Smith Company), and most of the wood he sawed and stowed away in a giant shed over many years, were sold at auction last spring.  The property where Bill lived out his life is being tidied up and reorganized  by surviving family members.  That property has been in the Lucas family for many years, and adjacent properties are currently occupied, or were formerly occupied, by relatives.  

The house Bill lived in all his life had been built by his father.  Due to life’s many unexpected twists and turns, Bill himself never left home.  He worked alongside his father at first, in the older man’s shop, and at the sawmill his father had acquired.  Right out of high school Bill  established his own workshop on the family property.  Bill’s father died at the ripe old age of 100, and then Bill simply carried on, until December 2011, when he himself died. 

Successful Bidder at Lucas Auction with one of Bill's Rocking Horses and Child's Chair

Bill’s lifelong interest in wood, his activity as craftsman and as collector of wood, his relationships with with the community of artisans, craftsmen, and builders who knew or interacted with him, suggest interesting perspectives on the relationship between natural history, cultural history, and social history in the place we know as the Pine Barrens.  Bill lived his entire life in that culturally complex region, but it’s unclear whether he self-identified as a so-called “Piney”, or whether for that matter any of the Lucases have done so.  Some of Bill’s relatives have engaged in activities that are closely associated with the culture and economy of the Pine Barrens, such as gathering pine cones, sphagnum moss, grape vines, and other materials for sale to the floral industry, or working seasonally in the local blueberry patches and cranberry bogs, or dabbling in the local building trades.  Some Lucas family members are enthusiastic hunters too, but as far as I know, Bill Lucas focused most if not all of his life energy on wood, on his sawmill, and on his equipment and tools.  I’m hoping to learn more, and understand more about Bill’s life and work in coming months, and will report any progress here, at this blog site.

Woodworkers

Woodworkers

Bill Lucas at his Sawmill (date and photographer unknown)

As I’ve continued working on the Perkins Folklife Project, I’ve been able to pursue a longstanding interest in the various woodworking traditions of the South Jersey region.  I’ve already reported in this blog on the decoy carving traditions of South Jersey, and on various related traditions.  I’ve maintained an interest in wood (as natural resource) and woodworking (as cultural activity) for a number of years now, in South Jersey and elsewhere.   

Bill Lucas Storage Shed; photo by Tom Carroll

In recent months I’ve been working with individual woodworkers and artisans, in order to refine my knowledge and understanding of woodworking traditions in the project region.  In May, I recorded an interview with Bill Robbins, a furniture maker and designer in Southampton, in which we explored his development as a woodworker, the sources of his design ideas, the varied influences on his work, and the South Jersey area as context for that work, among other topics.  (Bill maintains a website at williamrobbinsfurniture.com, where you can see many examples of his fine woodworking.)  I also paid a visit to Tom Lederer at his shop in Columbus, to take another look at his work and continue what I hope will become an ongoing discussion with him.  (You can see more of his work at ledererstudiofurniture.com.)

Bill Robbins Working on Chair Components; photo by Tom Carroll

Tom Lederer and Bill Robbins are part of a larger community of artisans working in various modes and genres, who have adopted wood as their chosen material.  In addition to these two furniture makers, this group, broadly conceived, would also include the decoy carvers I've mentioned, and people like Dick Toone, who expertly reproduces Colonial era artifacts for museums and collectors in his Arneys Mount workshop (livinghistoryshop.com).  In future fieldwork I plan to continue investigating these and other woodworking traditions, within the wider framework of South Jersey artisan wood traditions per se.  I plan to look for linkages between the work of all of these individuals, and understand them as part of the ongoing dynamism and historical development of south Jersey culture.  

Bill Robbins Assembling a Chair; photo by Tom Carroll

While doing fieldwork in the Pemberton area, I met a man named Bill Lucas, and wrote about him somewhat obliquely in an earlier post on this blog.  Bill passed away in December of 2011, and some time later, items from his shop and other buildings on the property were put up for auction.  I  attended the auction where his wood, his woodworking equipment (including his sawmill), and other artifacts he’d collected over the years were rendered up for bidding. 

Bill was a longtime sawmill operator, craftsman, and above all, conservator of wood that he milled from trees harvested or salvaged throughout the Pine Barrens region.  I had a number of conversations with Bill Lucas in the past couple of years, and since the time of his death in December 2011, have spoken with a number of people in the region to explore and try to understand his legacy.  My plan for the coming year is to initiate an oral history project to document and record memories of Bill Lucas and link these with ongoing wood-related artisan activity in the project region. 

Bill Lucas’s work dovetails in interesting ways with that of the woodworkers mentioned in this post.  For example, Bill Robbins purchased wood from Lucas, and visited him occasionally over the years.  Dick Toone also bought wood from Lucas.  Both he and Robbins know of other woodworkers who bought wood -- or tried to buy wood -- from Bill Lucas (he didn’t readily let go of his wood in later years), or who had other sorts of business or personal dealings with him.  I’ll be reporting on the progress of this work in future posts as the new fiscal year gets underway.

Long Rifle by Dick Toone; photo by Tom Carroll

Field Day: A Day with Tom Carroll from a Guest's point of view

 This past spring, Perkins Center for the Arts held a fundraiser called A Toast to the Past: Celebrating Evergreen Lawn's Centennial. At this fundraiser, one of the items in the silent auction was A Day in the Life of a Folklorist. The following is a recounting of the experience of the winner of that auction item, 18 year old Zachery Finio.

October 25, 2011 - Field Day with Tom Carroll

We left Collingswood early in the morning and headed south to meet with two glassblowers; one had his studio within a shop where he sold his wares, the other’s studio was outside his home. Each showed us the furnaces and talked about the craft.

Our next stop was a Hindu Temple. We sat outside for awhile, unsure of whether it would be intrusive for us to enter. A teacher from the Temple invited us inside. We took off our shoes and talked with him for some time. A young man spoke to us as we were leaving, and gave us each an apple.

Then Tom took me to visit a collector who had old, unusual tools in his shed, and rare glass was displayed throughout his home.

As we drove along, Tom noticed an older man sitting in a field. Tom said, “I’ve never seen anyone here before, let’s go talk to him.” We stopped at the side of the road and approached the man. At first he seemed timid and unprepared for discussion. Tom asked some questions about the man’s farm and the surrounding community. He explained about his folk life interests and recognized the farmer’s Jamaican accent. At this point, the farmer relaxed, he and Tom began to talk about Jamaican food and cooking. In a short time the farmer was showing us his vegetables - banana-size Jamaican okra and some peppers that he warned us were “very hot” - we tasted an English star pepper that was tangy/sweet. As we left, Tom and the farmer planned to meet again to talk more about the farm.

Tom has an amazing way of putting people at ease and expressing his interest genuinely. It’s like seeing an artist take a blank piece of paper and draw an image - Tom starts up a conversation and a story emerges.

Our day ended at the edge of the Delaware River, talking with some local fishermen. I’ve lived in Southern New Jersey my whole life; in this one day I learned what folklore is and realized its significance in connecting us to one another.

-Zachary Finio

Boots

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've done a fair amount of fieldwork in and around the Repaupo area, Gloucester County.  This area lies along Repaupo Creek just south of Gibbstown, between Route 44 and the Delaware River and between Route 44 and the Repaupo town center, which is just a small crossroads.  I've found this area to be rich in history and culture, and interesting in terms of the people who live there.  Among those who come to mind, I've written about some in these pages, for example, Calvin Fisler, and I've mentioned others from the Flood Gates area of Repaupo, such as Joyce Vanneman.  When I visited Joyce this past summer, a friend of hers named Boots Hughs stopped by.  Boots and I talked a bit that day on Joyce's deck, beside Repaupo Creek, and later that very afternoon, I drove over to Boots's house and spoke with him some more.  I was interested in pursuing our conversation even further, and went there again the following day, to spend several more hours with him.  Though it's taken me a while to get around to it I first visited Boots this past June), I want to take some time here to focus on Boots and his work.

"Desperation Market" Sign in Front of Boots Hughs's Home

I believe that Boots was born and raised in the Repaupo area, near the crossroads east of Route 44, at a time when most of the land there was being farmed by local families.  The local farms have suffered an array of interconnected fates in the years since Boots was coming up, succumbing to flood and the vagaries of weather in some cases, but more generally to shifting economic conditions, and perhaps especially to government policies and politics that do not favor family farms.  When I first met Boots, he was eager to have me visit him at his place.  He wanted to show me his shop, his handiwork, his collection of tools.  He also wanted to talk to me about the place where he's lived all his life, and share with me his sense of how his work and his place, his sense of past, present, and future time, form a seamless whole.

I've been fortunate to meet a number of people over the years with just the sort of quiet enthusiasm that emanates from Boots.  In my experience, such people hit upon some sort of work that may at first simply please or interest them, but they soon discover that it has meaning beyond the activity itself.  They thus persist in doing such work, often against heavy odds.  Odds arising from the need to make a living, from family interests and demands, from neglect or disinterest of the wider community.  They persist despite these obstacles, and fortunately, they're often eager to share and explore the significance of their work with others, especially those interlocutors with enough time and interest to invest in the twin and deeply related processes of dialog and inquiry.  I can't say I know everything there is to know about Boot's work, nor do I fully understand why he does what he does.  In fact, my grasp is very slight, my knowledge admittedly slim.  But in speaking with him, and with others about him, I've caught intimations of the value of Boots's efforts, and I trust that these friendly ghosts will guide my hand as I write this post. 

Ostensibly, Boots's activity focuses on care of his property, and care of his collection of tools and other artifacts.  The tools, especially, reflect historical experience in the Repaupo farmer and forester communities, as well as the history of tools and the work that they do more generally.  Boots is an avid collector of old tools, and he has a special way of showing them off.  To do that, he leads you through the back door of his house, down a concrete path that leads toward the rear of his property, and on to the door of an old weather beaten shed, that's maybe fifty feet long.  He unlocks the door of the shed, finds a light switch on a cord by reaching into the darkness and feeling his way through an intricate web, a myriad of hanging appurtenances, electrical cords, spiderwebs, cobwebs.  A web somewhat more weighty and substantial than a spider's but by human standards, just as busy and as intricate.

Once the room is lit, Boots invites you to follow him inside.  As your eyes adjust to the light, you see that there are pieces of equipment everywhere, shelves loaded down and bent under the weight of materials -- paints, tools, artifacts and artifact fragments of various sorts --  and amidst the woodworking machinery, lying on every surface and covering nearly all available floor space, there are scraps of wood, sawdust, bits of leftover material from a recent or maybe even a long ago wood or metal working project. We pass through this area and into the rear of the shop, where there are still more power tools, looming out of the half darkness, mysterious shapes until Boots locates the cord of a drop light and presses the switch.  All these power tools are in good working order, of course, despite the clutter.  Boots climbs over some piled up material and dodges around a piece of equipment, scrabbles around in a corner, and produces and passes an old metal artifact along to me.  "Do you know what that is," he asks, handing one tool over, and then another, and another.  Soon, we're absorbed in talking about old tools, and the people who used them, for whatever task they were designed for. 

Like Calvin Fisler in Flood Gates -- another part of Repaupo -- and like a number of other people I've met in this area, Boots is a collector.  He wants to tell the story of industry, of farming, of timbering, in this part of the world, and he tells it through the vast assortment of tools he's gathered and collected.  Like Fisler, Boots is a historian of sorts, or perhaps even a historic preservationist.  He's a steward of this local history, told through the shapes and angles, the shafts and edges, the blades and heads of his seemingly vast tool collection.  As with Fisler's collection of river booty, Boot's collection rises, or so I believe, to the level of an original composition.

Stepping into Boot's shed and shop, I was reminded of a visit I made earlier this year to a woodworker in Burlington County, in the town of Pemberton.  That place was vastly more "open" than Boot's place, that is, had much more total space than Boots's shed, but was even more cluttered, and featured a much greater distance between floor and rafters.  The effect was a little bewildering, and a little disconcerting.  There was wood, and timber, and furniture piled everywhere, punctuated here and there by a standing power tool, with scraps of wood strewn all about the floor, and sheets of plywood along with stacked cut timber piled on either side of pathways that had been more or less kept open to allow for movement from one section of the shop to another.  But these had all overflowed and, despite all good intentions, had covered over those hoped for pathways, making stepping and proceeding in any direction a most difficult and dangerous preoccupation.

Power tools and woodworking equipment scattered everywhere through the main shop, an old sawmill in a shed adjoining that building, at the rear, and attached to the shop, to one side (east, I think) yet another building, a sheet metal shed formerly part of a local Agway facility, disassembled and hauled from that place and reconstructed at its current site.  At the owner's invitation, we crept along the overgrown pathways, wading through an ocean, it seemed, of fallen and overflowing wood, eventually made our destination.

We hauled open the door to the 100 foot long, fifty foot high shed, and were met with an extraordinary, even breathtaking sight.  There were huge slabs and boards stacked everywhere, rough cut on the old mill next door, and placed here, stood on end, stacked and piled on the floor to form vistas, it seemed, stacked high above our heads on a system of lofts, huge thick slabs from what must have been giant, ancient trees, cut into longish shapes with their bark still visible and running along the edges, some of them forty or more feet long, some four or five or more feet wide, some several inches thick.  They filled the shed.  Altogether a truly breathtaking sight.  It was a cathedral of wood.  Cathedral.  Really.  An act of love on the part of a Piney whose great passion, and overarching interest, is the pine and oak forest, a passion extending to each and every tree, apparently, of that native place.  Someone who can't let a fallen tree lie.  A salvage expert.  A historian and conservator of cut timber.  This is something to do justice to in a separate post, at some future time.  But for now, back to Boots.

It wasn't possible to take photographs of most spaces in Boots's work shed.  The light was much too dim, though I was able to get shots of some items in situ.  I carried other pieces outside and posed them for photographs.  Boots showed me a number of axes, hatchets, adzes, and related tools.  He often buys only the heads, because that's all that has survived, and in many cases will carve a new handle and affix it to the head.  I carried a number of these items outside, into the light.  The axe handles are interesting, not at all a casual piece of work, but shaped to the hand and arm, shaped for controlled flight.  There's that poem by Gary Snyder, "Axe Handles":

"...And I hear it again:/ It is in Lu Ji's We Fu,  fourth century/A.D. "Essay on Literature" -- in the/Preface: "In making the handle/Of an axe/By cutting wood with an axe/The model is indeed near at hand."" 

Snyder concludes:  'My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen/Translated that and taught it years ago/And I see: Pound was an axe,/Chen was an axe, I am an axe/And my son a handle, soon/To be shaping again, model/And tool, craft of culture/How we go on."

There is wisdom here, I think, which applies to Boots and his work, and which he in turn reflects back onto the world.  His tools, artfully gathered, extend arm and hand toward the production of new objects, which express his own culture and perception of that culture.  Farmers, foresters, builders.  Boots makes decoys among other things, which reflect the historical milieu of decoy carving and duck hunting in his area.  His decoys lie within the Delaware River carving tradition, featuring elaborately carved tail feathers, and with more detail carved into the body of the decoy.  I don't believe that Boots hunts ducks.  Instead, his decoys are part of an effort to impart some meaningful thing about the history and culture of Repaupo.  They express and preserve that history, and make homage to its traditions.

 

Unfinished Decoy by Boots Hughs

       
        

Boots has an inquiring mind, always seeking ways to provide an articulate response to the passage of time, and make sense of the shifting location of culture.  I mentioned that Boots is a collector, in the sense that collecting is a cultural and historical assertion of some sort.  Sitting inside his home, sipping coffee, I noticed a display cabinet against a wall of Boots's kitchen.  It's filled with historical glass artifacts he's collected over the years, some from local glass makers long out of business.  I asked about a special arrangement of some glass artifacts, all of different colors.  Boots went over to the cabinet and opened the door, handed out some pieces, explaining that they are his "chakras," in reference to the ancient Hindu system of seven colored prisms, arrayed from the base of the spine to the top of the head, which direct and harmonize the flow of cosmic energy through the physical and spiritual body.

Boots Hughs's "Chakras"

I'll note here that there's a Hindu ashram and temple just a few doors down from Boots's home, and that he's had numerous conversations with the spiritual head of the temple.  I asked Boots whether he learned about chakras from the Hindu priest, and he answered no, he hadn't.  He knew about chakras, he said, long before the temple was established here a couple of years ago.

The Hindu temple is yet another indication of the shifting nature of the place, of all places in the region and elsewhere, really, and of the ongoing and further enrichment of this particular locale.  Boots embraces "change," while operating within the deeper currents of "tradition."  Pass it along.  Keep it moving.

   

Random Notes

Margot Kohler Spinning Alpaca Wool

Mullica Hill Quilting Group

 Delia Dungan Quilt Detail

Delia Dungan Quilt Detail

Karen Dever with Quilt (Back)

Hand Made Quilt by Delia Dungan

Detail of Toone Long Rife

I've been traveling quite a bit recently, mainly out of state, and haven't had much time to review my notes and photographs and assemble a new post.  This post is therefore a place-holder of sorts, to provide a map of future entries while also attempting to address what has become a long gap between posts.

As my work in the project region has progressed, I've been able to make contact with a number of people working in the area of textile arts -- spinners, quilters, embroiderers, as well as people who raise animals for wool -- and I've visited many of those people, interviewed them, and taken photographs of their work.  There is an extraordinary range of such work, made mainly though not exclusively by women, and much of these pieces are of very high quality.  I've included some textile-related photos here.

I've also included a few of the photos I took when I visited Richard Toone in Burlington County near Pemberton.  Mr. Toone is a fine craftsman who makes reproductions of historic artifacts for museums and historical societies as well as for the community of historical reenactors.  I'll be exploring and reporting on his work in more detail in coming months.   Meanwhile, you can learn more about his work by visiting his website, which has many fine photographs and descriptions of Mr. Toone's work,.

As noted in previous posts, I've committed to working more intensively in selected places in the project region, which includes Gloucester, Camden, and Burlington Counties and parts of adjacent counties as well.  During 2010-2011, I've spent quite a bit of time in Gloucester County, but toward the close of that fiscal year, I branched out and did fieldwork in Burlington County, and in Camden County as well.

Richard Toone Maker's Mark

 

Long Rifle Hand Crafted by  Richard Toone

The fieldwork I was able to do in Camden County was a follow-up to work I'd been doing in Burlington and Cumberland Counties with the Nanticoke-Lenape tribal peoples.  I'd like to develop one or two blog posts on that community at some point, once I've had the chance to work more closely with individual members, and have begun to understand and become sufficiently sensitive to the details of their tribal history and culture.

In Camden County, there's a small but enduring community of Native Americans living in parts of Pennsauken Township, who are associated principally with the Powhatan Renape Nation.  This community has important historical and cultural ties to the Nanticoke-Lenape people further south, who are centered in Cumberland and Burlington Counties and parts of Delaware.  Each of these tribal communities is a significant part of the cultural history of our region, though their activity has been somewhat hidden from public view.  As a result, their preeminent contributions to regional history and culture has not been adequately grasped or understood by the broader public.

I'll report on my work with these Native American communities in future posts, as that work develops.  Meanwhile, you can read the full text of a Nanticoke-Lenape tribal history, written by tribal leader John Norwood, online at --www.NativeNewJersey.org  or www.Nanticoke-Lenape.info.  A separate publication focusing on the history of the Pennsauken community in Camden County is titled Morrisville, A Native Hidden Community, by Nemattanew (Chief Roy Crazy Horse).  That work was published in 2002 by Powhatan Press in Rancocas. 

As I began to explore the Native American communities of the project region, I continued working along the Delaware River and its tributary creeks, meeting and speaking with many individuals in and around the Flood Gates area.  I've reported on that community in this blog, and as I continue my work there, that story will continue to unfold.

As I worked in Flood Gates, however, I began to feel that I wanted to identify other communities along the river where I could dig in and explore their cultural history more fully.  In Gloucester County, there's such a community settled along Woodbury Creek, in the town of National Park.  The Woodbury Creek community is very different from the Flood Gates community, but there are similarities too.  Both communities are situated along creeks that feed into the Delaware River, and in both places, a special relationship to the river and creeks has evolved and been developed and maintained in both places.  I plan to explore these relationships in the different river communities more fully in coming weeks and months.

Further upriver, there is a tract of land owned and occupied by the Taylor family, a family of Quakers, who settled on the river near Riverside, and have occupied the site for several generations.  That family has made arrangements to keep the land open by participating in a farm preservation program.  They have developed public programs, and an organic farming operation which sells produce to the public.  As a result, their land has achieved new status as a community resource.

The community at Newton's Landing, a little further upriver near Delanco, provides an interesting and possibly important contrast.  The land in that area, which had been occupied by several important farming families for generations, was sold to a developer, who built a private residential community there.  Some of the old original farm buildings remain on the site, though they are not open to the public and their history is not interpreted in any way that I'm aware of.  There is also an Indian burial mound on that site, located near the river and now situated close to the swimming pool that now services the contemporary residential community.  It's marked off by a low white fence, but it too is not otherwise explained or interpreted in any meaningful way.

Sarah DiPietro Redrow's painting of a garvey built by her father, Winfield Scott Feldman, with wood he salvaged from the Delaware River

These four river communities present interesting contrasts, and possibly also interesting continuities, which I hope to explore further as fieldwork progresses in the next fiscal year.   Meanwhile, I'll pursue other leads in the region, with the community of spinners, embroiderers, rug makers, and quilters; with the Native American communities I've mentioned; with local artists whom I've discovered scattered throughout the project region; and as mentioned, I'll also continue my work in and among the four river communities I've alluded to here.  There are other project initiatives underway as well, which I'll be reporting on in future posts.

I've scattered various photos throughout this post, not always strictly related to the adjacent text, hoping to whet your appetite and rouse your interest in learning more.  I'll be back with another post soon.

Boardwalk to Music Cabin at Flood Gates

Vanneman Musicians

Vanneman Music Cabin at Flood Gates

Jersey Devil Junk Sculpture by Chris Giberson, near Pemberton

 

Fieldwork and Discovery

Google Earth Image of Flood Gates Area, Greenwich Township, NJ

...some preliminary notes on fieldwork...

As I look around and take stock of the contemporary state of fieldwork, my feeling is that "fieldwork" has become an overused term, probably because its applicability has been broadened, and it is employed in so many different settings, by so many different people, to so many different purposes and ends.  Political canvassers and pollsters who go door-to-door in neighborhoods, or set up in shopping malls, say they're doing fieldwork, as do oral history interviewers who visit people in their homes or places of business to conduct interviews.  Social workers also claim to do fieldwork, as they make the round of site visits in order to deliver needed services.  I think of fieldwork differently -- as a form of very deep engagement with a place and its people.  It takes a fair amount of effort to achieve depth of engagement, however; among other things, it requires a certain amount of "stick-to-it-iveness," and lots of patience.  But the results of such hard and persistent work can be rewarding, and may even prove to be significant  in some cases.     

When I first began working in Gloucester County, I made some initial guesses about the place in order to formulate a plan of work there.  Looking at a topographical map of the county, I saw that there are a number of small cities and towns – Woodbury, Paulsboro, Glassboro, Swedesboro – along with many smaller settlement areas too.  In some cases, the developed spaces were interspersed with sizable chunks of what appeared to be sparsely developed, relatively open territory.  I guessed that there would be an element of cultural diversity in the larger towns, though of course, these days, there’s a growing cultural diversity in suburban and rural areas too.  As I went over the map, I made a mental note to visit the towns, and take a look around.  

Repaupo Creek, June 2011

Still looking at the map, I noted that the Delaware River is a major geographic feature of the county, along with the system of creeks and streams that flow into the Delaware.  I guessed that when the area was first settled, the river and its drainage system were an important part of social and economic activity in the region, and that they played a role in the formation of local culture too.  I decided that I would spend some time puzzling out the interrelationships of history and culture in those places.

Studying local maps is an important part of planning for fieldwork.  Following that preliminary work with maps, my next step is to actually get out into the field.  Someone once described fieldwork as radically placed-based.  I embrace that definition.  The only way to do fieldwork is to physically go to the field site, and establish a temporary residence there, or establish a pattern of ongoing and regular visits.  Residency or return visits help establish a pattern of work that should lead to deep engagement.  I understand fieldwork to be a process of tuning into the hidden or undisclosed realities of a place, and its people.  Life in any given area is far richer than our assumptions would suggest, more so than our standard sources of information, accessed at a distance, would allow us to believe.  

Getting out and doing fieldwork involves loosening the ties that bind us to our own everyday lives, while striving to become open and connected to other people and places.   

I woke up early one day last week, thinking about fieldwork and especially about how to write about it effectively.  I struggled with that for a while.  Fieldwork is challenging.  If you read between the lines of this post you can probably see why.  You enter unknown territory, where you yourself are an unknown person.  You begin your work.  As you go, you find that there are good days and bad days.  There are days when you feel that it isn’t working, that you’re not “getting it.”  There are days when you can't "land" anywhere, or find anyone to talk to.  They’re either not available, or there are no "sparks."  Such days are mercifully few, but they happen.  Day by day, though, fieldworkers have to find ways to keep the process moving, even when the work seems to bog down. 

Persistence is usually rewarded, however.  At some point, the world seems to open up, and you may then find yourself in a luminous setting, in a truly shining place.  I often think of what it must have been like for the explorers who discovered the prehistoric cave paintings in places such as Lascaux or Chauvet, in France.  You enter a dark and unfamiliar space.  You traverse a narrow passageway, sometimes on your hands and knees, or on your belly.  It’s confining, and disorienting.  Then at some point there is a shift of conditions, and perception.  You feel a draft of air, and suddenly, you sense the openness.  You stand up, light your torch, and hold it aloft.  Hwaet!  The paintings leap and dance in front of you.  There all the time, but unknown until just that moment. 

Cave Painting at Chauvet, France

I think of fieldwork that way, though in less grandiose terms, of course.  As far as I know, there are no cave paintings to discover where I usually work.  But there are significant Native American sites throughout the region.  During a recent conversation at Newton’s Landing in Burlington County, standing poolside and talking to one of the residents of that development, he pointed out that I was standing beside an Indian burial mound.  The mound had been identified by developers, and was protected by a low white fence.  Such sites are common throughout the region, and they have great meaning and significance.  Which is to say that, there is a wealth of hidden-in-plain-view arts and artifacts throughout the region, along with related narratives and understandings, and deeply significant spaces and places, that nourish and enrich the lives of people and communities everywhere.  Every community possesses underground streams of meaning, repositories of  historical and cultural significance, wellsprings of beauty.  The fieldworker’s job is to get out there, establish a position of openness, and begin the process of exploration and discovery that will uncover and make sense of those resources.  There's more to it than that, but I'll let that discussion develop and take shape in the context of ongoing field reports via this blog.