NJ Maurice River Bluffs Preserve

The Maurice (pronounced MAW-riss) River has a section declared a New Jersey Wild and Scenic River on which the Maurice River Bluffs Nature Preserve is located.  The river meanders back and forth once it leaves the pinelands town of Millville and flows past the preserve onwards through tidal marshes to its mouth on the Delaware Bay. 

Tidal guts filling with a flood tide

Named for the Prince Maurice, a Dutch trading ship that was attacked in port and sunk in the river by Lenni Lenape in 1657, this river - like many rivers in the Pine Barrens region - is recovering from centuries of industrialization and degradation. As we hiked nearly five miles of trails that looped through the preserve I was amazed at how hilly it was. For Southern New Jersey hills like this are rare! 

Hilly terrain! 

The Pits (an old sand quarry)

The hilly terrain combines ancient sand dunes and the pits and piles of the old sand quarry. I grew up near a great sand quarry we called "The Pits" that had also reverted to forest and grasslands so I was pretty excited to wander for hours through an almost familiar landscape from my childhood. The dappled and scented pine woods and old sand roads brought back lots of fond memories. "The Pits" made me a young naturalist and though its now sixty-four years later, I still found myself on hands and knees chasing Velvet Ants and lifting slabs of pine bark to check for Milksnakes and Corn Snakes.  

Sori - Ebony Spleenwort

The preserve protects an important ecological link between the pine barrens and the estuary.  It hosts abundant bird life which on a day like this in early fall with a north to south breeze, is filled to the brim with hundreds of small, nocturnal migratory birds who are spending their daylight hours resting, feeding, and preening. Resident eagles screeched and cackled from their perch trees near the river.  A Muskrat cruised along a sandy pebble beach while a Red Fox and her kit ducked into the cement ruins of the old Cargill granary complex. It was a very busy wildlife place for a day hike!

An understory of Ebony Spleenwort

My dog must have thought I was nuts with the number of times I dropped down to my knees to examine something small. Each time I did, Amos dropped his nose to the ground to sniff the place I found so interesting. I saved him from being stung by any number of wingless wasps, Velvet Ants, as he nosed into my attempts to get a close-up picture before one would scurry angrily away.  I dropped down to examine the filaments on patches of Powdered Ruffle Lichen and there was his nose. I squatted down to study the beautiful translucent pattern of Spotted Horsemint in early morning light and there was Amos looking at me from the opposite side of the flower. Such a helper. 

Powdered Curly Lichen

Virginia Pine

The old bluffs, ancient remnants of a Pleistocene landscape, dropped off at the river which was quickly filling with a King Tide made higher still with a wind that shifted onshore and and a surge of rising sea from the Atlantic. This King Tide, however, was forecast to cause extensive flooding along the marsh roads today with notable erosion inland along tidal rivers.  As I stood at the ruins of the old Cargill dock, a chunk of sandbank ker-plopped into the river sending a swirl of yellow sediment upstream with the rising tide. It seemed most of the small bluff, no more than fifteen to twenty feet at its highest above the river, was held in place by interwoven roots of American Holly, Virginia Pine, and Black Oak. In places where trees were scarce, the bluffs were actively eroding. 

Speckled Blister Lichen - common on American Holly

Velvet Ant 

We came upon a small spring, a natural artesian well squirting just a little water up through a pipe. This water comes directly from the large Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer lying just beneath the Pine Barrens region. It is recharged by rainfall and snowmelt but having little of either on this end-of-summer day, the water pressure was almost nil. Amos took a few sips from the burbling pipe and seemed quite satisfied. As far as the Eastern Coastal Plain extends in New Jersey, sixty eight miles in all, the water from this shallow but expansive aquifer is rated as the most pristine. The aquifer is stored above a large lens of Miocene-era filter sands and clay that extends from Sandy Hook NJ to inland of Cape May and Vineland, NJ. The same layer of sand is exposed along Maryland's Western Shore on the Chesapeake at Calvert Cliffs and the bluff system there (minus the aquifer) and is full of marine fossils. 

Spotted Horsemint

Not as old as the subterranean sands beneath our feet but much older than the 1950s-era sand quarry is the ruin of the Wheaton Manion along the old sand road on the main trail.  Built by the Wheaton family in the 1700s, the burnt out stone walls are all that remains of the Wheaton Estate which would have had a clear view of the river and the family's docks that serviced the transport of produce to markets and sand to their glass-making factories in town. The last Wheaton family member to own the mansion and estate donated the entire property of 500 acres to the Nature Conservancy in the 1980s and in the early 2000s the old place was torched by vandals. Stories are still shared of Mrs. Wheaton cooking homemade meals for invited troops stationed at the nearby Millville Army Airfield during WWII. 

The Wheaton Mansion

The Wheaton Family as well as other regional families of wealth no doubt took inspiration from the Carnegie and Rockefeller families who gifted estates, ranches, and forests to public management from the 1920s through the early 2000s. Acadia National Park, Katahdin Woods and Water National Monument  The Grand Teton National Park  and the National Park Foundation  have all been possible thanks to family legacy gifts and philanthropic funding. Its an important part of our national parks history. On regional and local levels generational properties are often gifted as local parks and to conservation organizations as legacy landscapes. Legacy-inspired conservation is instrumental in safeguarding many local natural areas for ecological protection and community green space, and this preserve is a prime example of that.

Spotted Knapweed

I imagine that the Wheaton family would approve of the old mansion ruin being used as it is these past several years as a roost for vultures and owls who build their stick nests (or no nest at all) in the open alcoves of the stacked brick fireplaces. A sign is posted on a split rail fence "Sensitive Wildlife Area - Do Not Enter" to keep us humans from bothering the big birds in their big, fancy birdhouse mansion. 

King Tide fills the river

Marsh Fleabane

Slender Goldenrod

Groundsel Tree

The Maurice River's lower half was settled in the mid-1600s with two small port towns, a sawmill, a bloomery forge and furnace, and a handful of farms. By the mid-1800s the river banks were lined with larger industries, fish and shellfish processing plants, produce docks, sand and lumber depots. Railroads connected industrial sites on both sides of the river by the early 1900s.  Millville was thriving as a small industrial center by the time WWII began. To stand on the highest bluff overlooking the river today there is scant evidence of its booming industrial past except at low tide when many old docks and bulkheads emerge from the muck. Some are centuries old. 

Cast-off Blue Crab molt

We finished our exploration of the preserve with one last look at the very full river then made a fast exit up the old sand road for a fifteen minute drive along the length of the Maurice to its mouth at the East Point Lighthouse on the Delaware. The roads were beginning to flood so I parked the truck on a high shoulder and Amos and I waded in for a quick visit just in time to witness the Delaware Bay pouring around and through the large sand-filled erosion socks that encircle the remote point of land on which the second-oldest lighthouse in New Jersey still stands. 

A main carriage road in its day.

We walked in from the flooding bridge

King Tide pours around the erosion barrier

At the lighthouse we met a state wildlife area manager who was checking the lock on a gate while a few fishermen called retreat from the rising waters. There's been a lot of ruckus over the management of the lighthouse and he wasn't in a mood to talk about it except to say he felt that unless the state did something to either raise the structure or move it, it could soon be lost. He pointed out how some of the residents nearby had been raising their homes but in the long run "there's nothing we can do to stop what is happening in front of us. It's out of our hands now." The water was pouring over the road by this time and he signaled to the fishermen it was time to go.  Amos and I walked quickly around the house as water began seeping through the barrier and into the yard. I could hear the two large sump pumps in the basement of the lighthouse cycling on and off. 

East Point Lighthouse, c. 1847

The state land manager hopped into his truck and looked back at the king tide now engulfing the sand berm at the end of the road. "We saw this coming years ago," he said. "Four-hundred yards of beach and dune meadows lost to rising seas, storm surges, nuisance tides, and sinking land. We pretended not to notice." 

The walk out

Amos and I walked back to the truck .The water had risen from ankle deep to half-calf in under thirty minutes and now a strong current was washing over the bridge. On our way up the road, safely back in the truck, we forded several other washed out sections while a state roads crew waited  with barricades ready to set up - signs of our times. 

Notes:

The Wheaton Family continues to promote the arts and nature through their philanthropic work in Milltown and the Pine Barrens region. I visited Maurice River Bluffs early on a Sunday and the WheatonArts Center was not yet open. I have to go back for another visit! 

Documenting King Tides is an important tool for monitoring the combined effect of sinking land, higher sea level, and the highest tides of the year. From North Carolina, to Maryland's Eastern Shore, to New Jersey, the impact of higher King Tides are proving the Mid-Atlantic to be one of the regions most vulnerable to sea level rise in the world. https://mycoast.org/nj/high-water