Wheaton Glass

New Jersey has a rich industrial heritage dating all the way back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Most historians will rightly point out the iron and copper mining and manufacturing that occurred up north, South Jersey had a blossoming industry of its own; glass manufacturing. The cheap, durable material was being used in products all throughout the American Industrial Revolution. One South Jersey pharmacist capitalized on the high quality sand deposits of Millville for a side venture of his own. 

Source

Dr. T.C. Wheaton established his glassmaking venture in 1888. His primary intent was to make bottles for his own products, but the business was so sucessful he ended up significantly expanding the operation.

Wheaton opened a second plant along the Vineland Secondary railroad to increase production and diversify his product line to collectable bottles and art glass.

The company embraced automation in favor of traditional manpower which allowed them to thrive in the following decades, even through the great depression. By the 1950s the company made another smart move, embracing a newly developed technology, plastic. The company acquired the old Woods Cotton Mill in nearby Mays Landing and retrofitted the property to accommodate the new line od products. 

American manufacturing shifted heavily in the coming years as other nations industrialized and the US embraced global trade. By 2006 the brand underwent a major restructuring. Despite returning to their roots, the newly incorporated Wheaton Science Products closed the third street plant.

The loss of the plant was devastating for the local economy. After more than ten years languishing in the fallout, city leaders took action. In a drastic and unprecedented move, the entire city of Millville was declared an "area in need of redevelopment".

That same year a tentative agreement was reached with the DeSantis group to redevelop the Third Street site as a plastic recycling facility. This plan actually involved the renovation and reuse of several Wheaton buildings. Due to the scope of the project the city had a list of deadlines the developer had to meet to show he wasn't going to continue to let the property languish. The DeSantis group failed to meet those deadlines, so the city took the property back. DeSantis didn't appreciate the move, so by 2021 they were embroiled in a heated legal battle with the city. 

Eventually the two parties found an amicable path forward. Instead of a plastic recycling facility, the group would build a massive refrigerated warehouse on the site. Unfortunately, the plan involved the total demolition of all the historic Wheaton buildings. 

By 2025 the site was cleared and ready for the warehouse. While I'm grateful to see the site put back to productive use I hope some homage is paid to it's history. The lanscape of Millville, and potentially all of South Jersey would look a lot different without Dr. T.C. Carson and his glassware. 

Holmes-Tallman House

New Jersey has always been packed with people, but that density was largely relegated to the cities and surrounding areas in its early history. However, the last few decades have seen an unprecedented level of residential and commercial development on once quiet farmlands. These changes have come at a tremendous ecological cost, and constant blows to our stock of historic buildings. One recent example comes to us from the small town of Jamesburg. 

The large home at the corner of Rhode Hall (formerly Browns Corners) and Cranbury-South River roads was built in 1860 by a man named Francis Holmes. Holmes purchased the property from Aaron Gulick, whose family are some of the earliest colonizers of New Jersey. 

The home was a gorgeous three story Carpenter Italianate presence. It boasted a corbel-studded wraparound porch on the first floor and was crowned by a large square cupula. From the moment it was finished, it stood as one of the finest examples of the architecture style in New Jersey. 

Francis Holmes sold the property with the home on it back to the Gulick family in 1869. James Gulick sold the property again just a year later, this time to a man named Jacob Tallman.

The construction of the NJ Turnpike in 1951 changed the landscape of Jamesburg forever. What was once a small, out of the way farm town was now the site of one of the busiest traffic corridors in the nation. The beautiful old home continued to defy time thanks to the meticulous care of the Tallman family. 

In 1979 the home was nominated to be on the National Register of Historic Places. It was an easy decision for the committee; the home was listed on the register that same year. 

The Tallman family loved and maintained the home for well over 100 years. During that time, the Turnpike continued to widen to accomidate the booming population it served. It didn't dramatically change things much in the small town of Jamesburg until 1991. That's when exit 8a was finished. The following decades saw massive warehouse and residential development. The population increased by roughly 150% between 1980 and 2000.

By the 2020's the lovely home had fallen into severe disrepair. I would drive past and look at the home whenever I was in the area, slowly watching it fall apart. One day I noticed the back door sitting open, so of course I had to pop inside. I didn't have my camera with me, just my cell phone and a light panel. The house was in remarkable shape inside. It seemed like the Tallman's took as much care to preserve the interior as possible. 

I shut the door behind me and vowed to return as soon as possible to document it property. I ended up driving right past the building on a productive morning of exploring, so I parked out back and walked through the still-open back door. What I found inside was devastating. The entire interior of the home had been ripped apart. This was beyond just scrapping metal; they sawed through the beautiful pine floors, ripped apart the fireplace mantels, and stole the entire wraparound staircase railing. The home had essentially been demolished inside. 

The home will inevitably be demolished since it is now "too far gone" to save. Demolition by neglect claims another one. 

Vineland Training School

As an avid explorer of old asylums, it's been a bit of a mission of mine since the mid 2000s to document as many institutions as I can. So many have been lost with little to no documentation, and as that happens the stories they hold begin to fade away. The story of the Vineland Training School is an important one, and one that I've wanted to tell for quite some time.

Source

The Vineland Training School was founded in 1887 in the Millville home of Steven Olin Garrison. Garrison, a Methodist minister, had two developmentally disabled siblings. His family had long been pushing to get the state to open an asylum to research and treat children who are born in such a way. Vineland philanthropist B.D. Maxham heard of his mission and donated the Scarborough mansion and 40 acres along Landis Ave. to Garrison the following year. 

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble Minded Children, later renamed the Training School at Vineland, was the very first instition for the developmentally disabled in the state. Those living at the school learned various vocations as well as farming, and lived in small cottages rather than the large, linear plan institutions like Trenton and Greystone state hospitals. The Training School at Vineland was one of the earliest "cottage plan" aslums in the country. It influenced different institutions all over the country including the seperately ran Vineland State School. That facility opened across the street from the training school one year later.

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

 

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

The campus continued to expand, with more cottages being built in 1892 onward. As the facilility grew, Steven Garrison began to fall ill. Recognizing the need for a contingency plan for the school, he began the search for his successor. The man he chose was Professor Edward Johnstone, who at the time was the Principal of Instruction at the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth. Steven Garrison passed away at the age of 46 on April 17th, 1900. 

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

One of the first major decisions Edward Johnstone made was choosing a new director of research. Henry H. Goddard was chosen for the position in 1906. Goddard was a professor working at the Pennsylvania State Normal School. Despite the somewhat jarring and institutional name, a normal school is essentially a university for teachers. This position gave Goddard a large amount of influence and credibility. Now, at the Vineland School, he was in charge of the first research laboratory for intellectual disability in the united states. 

Goddard was a fervent eugenecist, believing that those with developmental disabilities should be segregated from the general population and advised to not reproduce. In 1908 he introduced the IQ test to America, having translated and reformatted the Binet Intellegence Scale to English for the first time. This was done after thorough testing on the population at the training school. Two years later he would coin the term "Moron", and introduce it into clinical use to describe those with an IQ of 59 to 70. He dubbed those with an IQ of 26 to 50 as "imbeciles" and those who landed between 0 and 25 "idiots". All of these groups, as he believed, should be weeded out of the gene pool for the betterment of society as whole. 

In 1913 a seperate farm colony of the training school was formed on a acre plot of land southwest of the main campus, but still within city limits. The campus was constucted using the labor of those who would go on to live on the property. The new campus was dubbed "The Menantico Colony". 

At the same time, Henry Goddard began an "intellegence testing" program at the isolation hospital on Ellis Island. The end result of the testing determined that up to 80% of the steerage-class immigrants coming to this country were "feeble minded". Surprisingly this xenophobic arrogance didn't completely discredit him, it actually seems to have led to him getting a better job.

Goddard left Vineland in 1918, one year after his Ellis Island findings were published. He went on to become the Director of the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research. His work was eventually largely discredited, but not before his influence made significant and long lasting changes to the landscape of psychology, and the lives of millions.

Stanley Porteus, an Australian immigrant, took over Goddard's position as Director of Research. As much as I love the fact that an immigrant took over a xenophobe's job, Porteus was quite problematic himself. He held stong beliefs about caucasion people being intellectually superior to all other races. 

Porteus served for six years before moving on himself, which brought psychologist Edgar Arnold Doll to Vineland. Doll is best known for developing the Vineland Social Maturity Scale in 1935. The scale measures social function, and is still widely used by psychologists. 

Despite the hopeful and noble purpose with which the Training School was founded, conditions and care at the facility began to decline. Federal funding towards research was being shifted away from private institutions, removing one of the pillars that had held up the school. The cottages on the campus were deteriorating, and the exterior fire escapes mandated by new building codes left the students vulnerable to unauthorized entry. 

This came to a head in 1979 when a deaf child was mutilated and murdered inside his cottage. Police completely ignored reports of a tall blonde stranger who had been seen around and even inside the cottage on several occasions. Three fellow students were blamed for the murder, two 15 year olds and an 18 year old boy. The families and several staff members objected to the charges, as they were all harmless and not physically capable of causing the injuries to the deceased boy. The boys also said they saw the previously described tall blond man inside the cottage when they came upon the body. These reports went nowhere, and as far as many people are concerned the murder was never solved. The boys who were blamed never ended up facing any formal punishment. Two of them even continued to live at the training school. 

The following year, two reporters from the local newspaper "The Record" went undercover at the instition to try and see how things really operated. Valerie James and Henry Golman exposed multiple instances of physical and sexual assault on students, as well as a prevalent cover-up culture. Multiple members of the administration ended up being arrested after the exposé, including the president of the school at the time, William Smith. James and Goldman ended up winning well deserved awards for their work. The act likely influenced Governor Richard Cody to do a similar undercover investigation at Marlboro state hospital a few years later. 

The future was uncertain for the school at this point. The state of New Jersey was about to step in and and shut the facility down when a private organization named Elwyn announced they were going to take over 

in 1981. Elwyn's main mission was to depopulate these institutions and reintegrate their students into society through group homes. One of their first major missions was to clean up the decrepit Vineland facility. They began moving students out of the aging cottages and tearing them down. By the early 1990s they began building new group homes on the campus itself, the first construction the property had seen in nearly 100 years. The remaining cottages were vacated and kept around for storage.

The now depopulated Vineland Campus was put up for sale in 2022. By this point all of the remaining cottages were boarded up and in severe disrepair. They were all demolished, in an effort to make the campus easier to market. The only historic buildings that managed to survive were the old Scarborough mansion and the "New School", which became an apartment building. As sad as it is to see the important campus bare, the facility had become outdated, and simply was not able to offer the students the level of care and comfort that they deserved. Even though the buildings are mostly gone, the story of the Vineland Training School will go on to serve as an important reminder that providing the best care means learning and evolving over time. Who knows what the next big breakthough will be? All I know is I hope I can be there to help tell the story. 

 Thanks for learning with me everybody.

Campbells Pond Pumping Station

 

Source

Situated alongside Campbells Pond in the South Mountain Reservation, this old pumping station has sat empty for decades. It was built around 1895 when the park was founded. 

Famed architect Frederick Law Olmstead desighed every aspect of the park, including the pumphouse. Olmstead is best known for his contributions to the buildings and landscape of Central Park in New York City. 

The pumping stations main function was to supply drinking water to the city of Orange. It had a capacity of 2.5 million gallons per day. The station ran for a number of decades before a fire put it out of operation.

When the county acquired the property and made it a reservation, they dammed up the pond. But they left the pumping station sitting just over the old train bridge that used to carry the trains bringing coal to the building.

Numerous vandals have broken into the building over the years, and there is very little left of its past. Pieces of the old chimney are breaking off and falling down to the ground below, which prompted the county to put up a fence around the structure. 

As of 2024 the county has actually taken some serious strides to preserve the shell of the building. They filled in the basement with all the trail races and the large well in the main room, to ensure nobody would get hurt inside the ruin. They also removed what was left of the wooden roof, which by that point had been burned and thoroughly rotted. I think keeping the shell of the building around is a fanatic compromise, considering it serves no other practical purpose. Make sure to stop by and check it out next time you're in the area!

Kastner Mansion

The brewing of beer has long been ingrained in the history of Newark. The city was home to a number of breweries in the late 1800s, all of whom had wealthy owners who were trying to stand out on High Street. The Kastner mansion was once such home that stood out amongst the rest. 

The land on which the mansion was built was purchased in 1890 from the Frelinghuysen family, one of the most prolific early settlers of New Jersey. The home took two years to complete.

The home was designed by Henry Schultz for Franz Kastner, one of the city's legendary brewers. The name Henry Schulz should ring a bell to regular readers of this blog, as he designed Newarks most iconic residence, the Krueger-Scott Mansion. The homes actually shared several architectural flourishes, including the staircase ballisturs. 

In 1957 the home was purchased and used by a casket manufacturer for a short period of time. It was then sold to the Pride of Newark Elks Lodge No. 93. The Elks added a large meeting hall on the backside of the mansion, and appropriately enough they also added a bar on the first floor. Other than that they kept the interior more or less original.

Unfortunately the large home was quite expensive to maintain and had begun to fall into disrepair. Local resident Denise Colon stepped up and purchased the building from the Elks in 2007. Colon had a hopeful vision for the property, with dreams of restoring the mansion to its original glory and operating it as a community center. Such an undertaking required a massive financial investment, which Colon was up for. Unfortunately the projrct soon became unsustainable. Colon made several attempts to get a Tax Abatement to help ease the cost of the conversion. In the mean time she used the building as the headquarters of her income tax prep service.

Colon never ended up getting any help from the city. Five years and a few hundred thousand dollars later, the city ended up regaining possesion of the building. They threw up some plywood and never looked back. It wasn't long before some of the local unhoused population took up residence in the mansion.

A large fire severely damaged the building in October of 2019. The folks who were living inside the mansion when it burned ended up moving on to the nearby B'nai Jeshurun Synagague during that buildings brief period of disuse. We actually ran into them while we were documenting the synagague. The one gentleman explained to us they were using the vacant mansion as something of a boarding house. They all agreed to certain rules and made an effort to keep the digs as nice as possible. Unfortunately they ended up having to kick someone out of the squat, and that person returned later when nobody was around to burn the place down. 

After several more years sitting vacant with no roof, a second large fire tore through the building one October night in 2023. This one was far more destructive than the last fire, leaving the mansion nothing more than a shell. It was also too dangerous to leave the facade standing, so the city came in and tore down what was left of the building. 

The Kastner mansion is just one of thousands of historic, significant Newark buildings lost to neglect and arson. Hopefully this trend comes to an end soon; I shudder to think which building could be next.