The unseen cultural landscape

Besides the three weeks of the Summer Field School in the Gaspesie, my main summer fun was canoeing the local waterways near my home in Salem County, New Jersey. My favorite trip was this one on the Salem River. I took this right after a sudden thunderstorm we could not outrun. As lightning got close, we pulled into this convenient cut in the bank under some overhanging trees, and waited it out, getting soaked and chilly as we prayed no lightning would hit close (with a fiberglass canoe, I had an illusion of safety as we sat in it). Nothing bad happened--it was actually a beautiful and welcome experience of wildness.

This looks like a natural landscape but it has a hidden cultural character. There was a day when this river, like most, served as an important transportation route for local farmers. Wooden boats carried farm produce down the river to market. Not far downstream from our canoe refuge, by a main road, are the skeletal remains of many sunken wooden boats we discovered in 2002 during a drought. But on this day, the water was high and our canoes glided over top of them (I could feel them with my paddle, though). These may be the crop-carrying boats of long ago. Click on the photo to see them lined up on the bank.

I don't know anything about these boats--how old they are or if they are some particular design. Any Delaware Valley maritime experts out there? Why are so many in one place? This spot is just upstream of a 19th century canal dug to the Delaware River that cut off miles of travel down to the natural outlet of the Salem river.















Also here are the remains of an early bridge that was probably wooden.

A road, a bridge, a river, a canal . . . a confluence of routes. A concentration of sunken wooden boats . . . material evidence of a cultural landscape and a historic economy that once thrived but is no more.