Enjoy, if you're into that sort of thing!

Big thanks to Devin Heitmueller for giving me a hand with some of the Javascript. Also thanks to Google for making their excellent maps API available.

According to the imagery at historicaerials.com, the building disappeared sometime between 1972 and 1995. Today there's not a trace of this once substantial building. Assuming it was built at least partially of stone, someone must have carted it away. Knowing the state, if they acquired this part of the woods for Lebanon Brendan Byrne State Forest, they tore it down themselves. It's odd, though, for somone to do so thorough a job as to leave nothing remaining.

Found a few ticks -- got them all before I got bit. Thankfully the chiggers aren't out yet.

Check out the thread on NJPineBarrens.com for photos and a more detailed trip report.

On the George Cook Topo Map of 1887 you can plainly see the canal, and the darkened area where it crossed Mount Misery Brook.

The lake down by Lower Mill does not exist anymore. When Henry Beck visited in the late 1920's he found the canal emptying out into the lake right in front of a dam. Looking at the NJDEP i-MapNJ aerial photography of 1931, you can see the lake is gone. Today Bisphams Mill Creek flows through normally, and the only thing that betrays the existence of that lake is a cedar swamp and a deep depression.

I won't re-write what I wrote on my site, so if you're curious to read about the days adventure, you should mash your mouse button on this link. Everyone that is, except for Jae. He's not allowed.

Those who read my blog and don't check the other site may want to click this link if they're so inclined.

If there was a water wheel, how was it situated? If it needed to be dipped in the water, then it must have been at least 30′ in diameter. That’s far larger than any wheel I know of. If the wheel was just pushed by the rush of water spilling over/through the dam, how high was the dam and the water level back in the day?

Why is there no evidence of any sort of mount for this wheel? The last time I saw a water wheel I remember it mounted on a metal sleeve embedded in concrete on either side.

I remember being really young and traveling up to Colts Neck with my father to visit a friend of his who had a tiger. During one of our journeys up there, I remember us stopping to look at a water wheel. Well, the years go by and time goes on and I sort of forget how impressive these old water wheels were, until I did some research.

Photo from the Ohio Barns website.

Photo from the Colts Neck, NJ township website.

It seems I was mistaken about the size of these things. The one they have on display at Allaire State Park seems much smaller in comparison. Maybe the sawmill at Lower Mill really did have a wheel that was that big.

You have to hand it to our forefathers - the level of engineering on a lot of things was pretty impressive given the tools and technology available.

The last time I was out there, I stopped at the bridge crossing the Bisphams Mill Branch. It turns out I was looking somewhat out of the way -- cellar holes for the mill site are along either side of Greenwood Bridge Road. Scouting around, we found three cellar holes and the remains of what was most likely the dam near the mill site. There's nothing to be seen there now, except for a relatively recent bottle dump and some scattered bricks.

What's odd is that the site is on a ridge overlooking the Bisphams Mill Branch, which at one point was dammed to form a lake. The sawmill site today is about 15' higher than the surface of the water today. It's a fair assumption that the sawmill - at least during it's operation in the mid 19th century - was water powered. This leaves me with some questions:

1. If there was a water wheel, how was it situated? If it needed to be dipped in the water, then it must have been at least 30' in diameter. That's far larger than any wheel I know of. If the wheel was just pushed by the rush of water spilling over/through the dam, how high was the dam and the water level back in the day?

2. Why is there no evidence of any sort of mount for this wheel? The last time I saw a water wheel I remember it mounted on a metal sleeve embedded in concrete on either side.

Unfortunately sites like there are very poorly documented. Any thoughts of how the mill was run are speculation, and it'd be an undertaking of original research to figure it out. That's the joy of the Pine Barrens explorer who is looking into way out of the way places.

As an aside, Jeff also showed me the canal "found" by Beck in the chapter "Lost in the Woods: One Railroad" in More Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey. The canal North of Mount Misery Brook is in good shape, and a lot of the pilings, etc. are still visible. Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera so I'll have to go back soon to get more shots. Jeff thinks the canal may have actually been a narrow gauge rail road. Me, I'm not sure what it was, except that if it was a canal, it was a poorly engineered one as water does not flow uphill.

What's left to do? I'd like to get Geotagging support added to my posts. I also need to figure out how I can leverage the book module for the site. There's a lot of really cool things that I can do with Drupal to make the site an even better resource. Plus, the fact that it integrates seamlessly with vBulletin is pretty cool too. The only drawback is that Google will have to reindex the site from scratch - all of my old URL's are dead. Still, the SEO of Drupal is really good - I imagine it won't be too big of a hit to take. Even then, I'm not designing the site for Google's crawler, I'm designing it for people who are interested in the Pine Barrens. They'll find me.

Since I didn't want to spend my entire Thanksgiving holiday behind my laptop, I did a bit of light exploring. A user on my forums posted a question about a supposed former campground near Deep Hollow. There's a paved road that makes a ring around Deep Hollow Lake. Bob chimed in that there had in fact been a campground there, with individual campsites lining the road, but the State had abandoned it sometime in the 1970's. Since it wasn't too far, and was close to another place I wanted to explore - Lower Mill - I drove out there.

Deep Hollow is located in one of my favorite spots in the Pine Barrens. It's right near Presidential Lakes, off of Rt. 70. It's on the edge of Byrne State Forest, which means that exploring there is legal. There's a number of enigmatic ghost towns in the area - Mary Ann Forge, the mystery forge that refined pig iron made at Hanover Furnace, Lower Mill, an old sawmill site, the sawmill site near Mary Ann with it's giant sized ruins and cement mounting base for a steam engine, Reevestown Bogs, Lebanon Glass Works, and Mount Misery. Despite the housing developments at Presidential Lakes, you still feel like you're far away from people. It's very calming.

I found the camp site much as it had been described. The road itself was in serious neglect. In some spots the pavement gave way to sand. In others, large puddles spanned the width of the road. The lake, which once was a swimming hole for campers, was reduced to a mere puddle, with the smell of rotting vegetation permeating the air. Trash abounded - the ease of access makes dumping here easy. Still, you could get a sense of how nice this area must have been at one point in time.

The exploring here was easy. Even when I had to walk through the woods, the trees were not dense, and there was not an abundance of briers. Along the banks of what used to be the lake, there were occasional cinder block foundations. I'm not sure if they were foundations for some sort of bathroom or outhouse, but they were approximately the footprint of a portable toilet. I have a feeling that there may be more on the opposite side of the lake as well.

Oddly, it looks like someone had cut a number of trees down throughout the site in the last five years or so. All over you'd see pine stumps sticking out of the ground - even in the more remote spots of the campground.

There's more exploring to be done here. You can see the entire gallery here.

The side effect of all of this exploration is that I really want to take NJPineBarrens.com to the next level. In a previous post here I mentioned that every time I redesign the site it ends up being way more trouble than it's worth, but the reality is that I haven't been satisfied with the site running WordPress, I haven't been satisfied with the design, and I haven't been satisfied with the presentation of the content.

I've decided that I'm going back to Joomla. I want to go with Joomla 1.5 RC3, although maybe by the time I'm ready it will be released in final version. I tried Drupal, more specifically vBDrupal, which is designed to be integrated with vBulletin forums. A lot of people rail on Drupal for being complicated, and for sure it is, but by far the biggest drawback - at least in my opinion - is that it's delivered to the webmaster too spartan. To build your site, you're left having to load various plugins to do nearly everything - and a lot of them don't work 100%. Important items like a WYSIWYG editor for articles are available as plugins, not as part of the core Drupal distribution. TinyMCE, which is what Joomla as well as WordPress use, is a plugin for Drupal, but has some serious problems with Firefox. (Specifically <b> tags being generated for bold text, instead of <strong>) I'm going back to Joomla because - while Joomla's content organization and SEO is not on par with Drupal, the core components to publish articles are all there, and I can just integrate Joomla with vBulletin by using the plugin that I paid for at BBPixel.

So, this leads me to the visual design. I've been using the current design at NJPB for about two years now. There's a somewhat fluid center column that is either a max of 1050 pixels, or a minimum of 760 (or thereabouts.) There's a bit of Javascript that loads in a random image on the top of the screen with the site logo, and a navigation bar below it. My users like the random image, so I'll figure out some way of including that in the new design, but I really need to clean it up and make it way more interesting.

I found some interesting links tonight - 60 Elegant and Appealing Designs, Current Web Site (ironically enough served in ColdFusion), Liquid Web Design, and Don't Decorate - Communicate. I'm going to be scouring those over for inspiration. I want to go with a "less-is-more" theme, with lots of easy to find and read content.

I swear, once I get the site looking how I want, I'll be adding more content to it!