The South Jersey Culture & History Center

South Jersey Surrounds Us

Providing Opportunities to Study Your Own Backyard

(or, at least, somewhere nearby)

You are here

What We Offer

• Working with South Jersey materials in Stockton’s Archives & Special Collections

• Working on special projects with community partners

• Internships with South Jersey museums and historical societies

• Library exhibitions

• Publications

• Cultural and Historical research projects (which can lead to . . .)

• The opportunity to write for or edit Sandy Shorts newsletter

• Leap Collection• Buzby Collection• Chew Collection• Pop Lloyd Committee Collection• Munn Collection

Speci

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The Rancocas Nature Center is situated on a 210-acre piece of the Rancocas State Park in Burlington County and features 3 miles of hiking trails through varied habitats including meadows, forest, and wetlands.

The Nature Center has been operating for 35 years, providing environmental education for the surrounding community during that time, presenting programs both on and off-site for groups including schools, scouts, libraries, senior citizens, as well as the general public.

Community PartnerRancocas Nature Center

The Rancocas Nature Center is always interested in having students research its environmental history and develop interpretive aids.

In addition, it would like to develop aids that suggest its rich cultural history:

• The Quaker connection to Rancocas. The Quaker presence in this area reaches back to the late seventeenth century and stretches throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as farmers on the land. Members of the Religious Society of Friends exercised influence in many social spheres including the abolition movement and the women’s movement.

• RNC would also like to partner with Stockton students interested in researching Timbuctoo, the nearby settlement of fugitive slaves founded around 1825 with the support of local Quakers.

Research might result in pamphlets, exhibitions, essays, or lectures on these and other topics.

Rancocas: Possible Projects

With a history stretching back to the 1860s in the heart of the Jersey Pine Barrens, Whitesbog promoted the cranberry’s potential as a viable crop in New Jersey. In the early twentieth century, Elizabeth White of Whitesbog developed the modern cultivated blueberry.

Today, Whitesbog Village, maintained by the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, is a destination for environmentalists, historians, and the New Jersey community as a whole. Its early twentieth-century farm village and miles of trails are a major, though underutilized cultural resource in the heart of the Pines.

Community PartnerWhitesbog: Innovations that You Eat Today

Whitesbog Opportunities

Whitesbog and all blueberry growers will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first commercial blueberry cultivars in 2016. In preparation for that tasty event, Whitesbog would like to partner with Stockton for projects such as the following:

• The updating of “giveaway” pamphlets describing environmental walking & driving tours through the Whitesbog holdings: “Old Bog Nature Trail Guide,” a “Tree Trail Guide,” and a “Driving the Sugar Sand Trails Guide.”

• There are opportunities for other history and culture guides to be written, such as “Elizabeth White and the Pineys,” “The Rise and Demise of Hanover Furnace” (where Fort Dix is now situated), “Charcoal Making in the Pines,” and “Storytelling in the Pines.” Such guides would be made available to the public at large.

• We are in discussions that may lead to a documentary film of Elizabeth White’s life in time for the 100th anniversary. If this comes about we’ll need help from student researchers, writers, and film students.

We help interested students undertake internships (unpaid, for college credit) at area Museums and Historical Societies. Here are four, but your local or county historical society almost certainly needs your help and would be happy to enter into an internship agreement with Stockton.

• Atlantic County Historical Society• Hammonton Historical Society• African American Museum of Southern New Jersey• Vineland Historical & Antiquarian Society

If you are interested in museum studies, want a taste of library curating, hope to sharpen your skills handling primary research materials – or simply want to strengthen your knowledge of the local community – internships might be for you.

Internships

Library Exhibitions

Come See For Yourself: Special Selections from Special Collections. The on-line version of an exhibition held during the Summer of 2014. It describes representative samples from The Bjork Library’s Archives & Special Collections.

The Boling Settlement. The on-line version of an exhibition held during the Spring term of 2013 at the Stockton College Library. It tells the story of the Boling Settlement as gleaned from archival documents and images.

Surveying South Jersey. The on-line site for Surveying South Jersey: Maps and South Jersey in the Nineteenth Century, on exhibit at the Richard E. Bjork Library, November 27, 2012 – January 20, 2013.

Contemplating Place. The on-line site for the exhibition Contemplating Place: The Poetic Landscape of South Jersey, on exhibit at the Library of The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. November 30, 2011 – January 31, 2012.

Consider the images below. What do you see?

Stairwell Exhibitions

The Central and North East stairwells of the library are blank canvases. We have permission to create rotating exhibitions on a range of South Jersey topics. Here are some possibilities:

• Cedar Swamps in the Pinelands

• New Jersey Orchids in the Wild

• Pictorial History of Tom’s River

• The Geology of New Jersey’s Outer Coastal Plain

5 to 8 images enlarged to half poster size and placed in the stairwells once or twice a semester with explanatory blurbs. Consider the calculations you might make as curator. The NE stairwell even has a skylight!

Publications

The SJCHC has two publications available on Amazon so far with more to come. We welcome students who want to help with future publications.

Sandy Shorts

So far Stockton students have written, edited, and published five Sandy Shorts newsletters describing a wide range of South Jersey topics. Here are the titles of some of the short articles:

• Peace Pilgrim

• The Gloucester City Shamrock Festival

• The Woodsman of Jake’s Landing

• An Ol’ Fashioned Bluegrass Jamboree at Albert Music Hall

• A Lighthouse Misplaced

• When a Grave Becomes a Movie Theatre

• The Bridge to Nowhere

• Lucy in the Sky with Tourists

What cultural event in your hometown is upcoming? What little-known site sits in your own back yard? Research it; write about it.

If any of this interests you, contact me:Tom Kinsella

Thomas.Kinsella@stockton.edu

https://blogs.stockton.edu/sjchc/