“Adventure with Piney Joe: Exploring the New Jersey Pine Barrens” is a new book by New Jersey Pinelands writer William J. Lewis, author of 2021 History Press publication “New Jersey’s Lost Piney Culture” (U.S. 1, March 3, 2021).
While this new book by the self-proclaimed “Piney” is targeted at young readers, it also continues Lewis’s efforts to bring the lore and life of the New Jersey Pinelands to a wider state audience.
In the following excerpted sample, Lewis — a New Egypt resident who studied business at Rider University and served in the United States Marines — lets the titular character lead readers into the book and the Pinelands:
“My name is Piney Joe and I come from a long line of families who have lived in southern New Jersey. You could call me a self-professed Pine Barrens Ambassador for I’ve taken thousands of people on adventures via social media.
Just a hundred years ago things were different than they are today. Pineys like me lived awfully close to mother nature, and we learned about flowers, trees, and animals. You say you never heard of Pineys? Other places in the United States that have mountains naturally have Mountain people.
In South Jersey, there are the Pinelands and, well, we naturally have Pineys. People living in the area are proud of where they live. Sometimes, you’ll hear locals say they live, ‘Deep down in the Pines.’ And there are all different types of Pineys too.”
“What are the Pinelands you ask?! Officially it’s a landmass of over 1 million acres declared by the US Congress in 1978 to be the nation’s first-ever National Reserve — the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve. Those 1 million acres also include all the towns and the people that live and work within the Pinelands National Reserve or Pinelands for short. Before it became the NJ Pinelands it was called the NJ Pine Barrens.
Let’s get the tour with Piney Joe on the road!
Hey, have you ever had a blueberry? You know that delicious little blue fruit that is packed full of juice and can be found in ice cream, drinks like blueberry lemonade, and especially blueberry pie? Well, there is a special place in the NJ Pine Barrens that is famous for inventing today’s blueberry.
Oh, I fibbed a little there. Elizabeth White didn’t invent the blueberry, as blueberries are a naturally occurring woody plant that grows up and down the East Coast from New Jersey to Maine and across the nation to Washington in a total of 26 states. But New Jersey is in the top 10 producers of commercial blueberries. She had help from botanist Frederick Coville way back when at her dad’s farm village called Whitesbog Village in Browns Mills, New Jersey.”
The year was 1916 when they sold their first cultivated highbush blueberry that was born out of a certain type of wild blueberry or huckleberry bush. Elizabeth White and Frederic Coville share the honor of developing the same blueberry bushes we eat from today.
Now I know some Pineys say that the sweetest blueberries are found growing wild in the Pines on a wild type of plant called huckleberry. A handful of berries popped into the mouth tastes like a mouthful of sugar! That’s how this lowbush blueberry plant got its Pineycraft nickname of SWEETHUCK or SUGARHUCK.
Sweet being the berries are the sweetest of all the other kinds of blueberries growing wild in New Jersey. Almost tasting like a mouth full of pure sugar. And Huck being an abbreviation for huckleberry. Isn’t that clever of them? Sweethuck home decorations in the shape of hearts and round wreaths that hang in families’ living rooms across the nation are made from the branches of the plant species Vaccinium pallidum.
Let me tell you that without the collective knowledge of the Piney people, Elizabeth White, queen of the blueberry, would not have been able to develop the modern blueberry, for she hired and paid many a Piney family to bring her the largest wild blueberries in South Jersey and to guide her to the bushes themselves. At the time, many different Pineys brought to Mrs. White blueberries, some the size of quarters. One hundred wild blueberry bushes were brought to the farm of Mrs. White, and the one that became the mother of all blueberries came from Piney Rube Leek. It was even named after him, “Rubel,” first name followed by the first letter of his last name.
Adventure with Piney Joe: Exploring the New Jersey Pine Barrens by William J. Lewis and illustrations by Shane Tomalinas, 188 pages, $19.99, South Jersey Culture & History Center.
