Harrisville (also called Harrisia or McCartyville[1]) is an unincorporated community and ghost town located about 6 miles (9.7 km) northwest of New Gretna within Bass River Township in Burlington County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.[2][3]
Harrisville, New Jersey | |
|---|---|
  Harrisville Location in Burlington County (Inset: Burlington County in New Jersey)  Harrisville Harrisville (New Jersey)  Harrisville Harrisville (the United States) | |
| Coordinates: 39°39′41″N 74°31′19″W / 39.66139°N 74.52194°W | |
| Country |  United States |
| State |  New Jersey |
| County | Burlington |
| Township | Bass River |
| Established | 1795 |
| Destroyed | 1914[1] |
| Named for | John and Richard Harris[1] |
| Elevation | 16 ft (5 m) |
| Time zone | UTC−05:00 (Eastern (EST)) |
| • Summer (DST) | UTC−04:00 (EDT) |
| GNIS feature ID | 876972[2] |
The first industry at the site of Harrisville appears to have been a sawmill built by Evi Belangee no later than 1760. Near the mouth of the Oswego River, where its floodplain narrowed, he built a dam with 5 or 6 feet of head to run his mill.[4]: 1918 The dam was enlarged in 1795, when a slitting mill, for cutting iron sheet into strips for nailmaking, was built at the site by Isaac Potts.[4]: 1918 [5]: 71 Potts had recently built Martha Furnace upstream, and when he sold the latter in 1796, he noted that its pig iron would have a natural market at the slitting mill.[5]: 85 This business was not very successful, and about 1815 it was converted to a paper plant,[1] powered by water brought by a canal from a dam on the Oswego,[5] a tributary of the Wading River. The town which was built around the factory was originally called McCartyville after the factory owner; when the Harris family bought the factory in 1855, the name was changed to Harrisville. Under the Harris family, Harrisville was a company town, with a grist mill, post office, company store, and free tenant homes for the workers of the paper mill. In 1914, a fire started in Harrisville and destroyed the entire town, leaving only ruins. Only the decayed ruins of this town exist today.[1]
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Remains of Harrisville, early 1970s -
June 1939 WPA construction project on the Oswego River at the CR 679 overpass near Harrisville, just southwest of Harrisville Lake and Harrisville Dam -
View of the August 20, 1939, Oswego River flood at Harrisville, as seen from where Chatsworth Road/County Route 679 crosses the river. The 1939 flood occurred despite the Harrisville Dam being in place since 1932.
References
edit- ^ a b c d e Beck, Henry Charlton (1961) [first published 1936 by E. P. Dutton]. Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey (2 ed.). Rutgers University Press. Chapter 23.
- ^ a b c U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Harrisville
- ^ Locality Search, State of New Jersey. Accessed December 28, 2014.
- ^ a b Braddock-Rogers, K. (1931). "Fragments of early industries in South Jersey". Journal of Chemical Education. 8 (10): 1914–1823. doi:10.1021/ed008p1914.
- ^ a b c Pierce, Arthur D. (1957). Iron in the pines: The story of New Jersey's ghost towns and bog iron. Rutgers University Press. p. 67–83. ISBN 9780813505145.
Further reading
edit- Dellomo, Angelo. Harrisville. Angelo Publishing Company, 1977