The Obelisks of the Circus Maximus

The city of Rome is home to more obelisks than any other city in the world. This is the story of two of those obelisks, that once stood in the Circus Maximus.

Rome went through two periods of obsession with Egypt. The first was when the growing Roman Empire required huge amounts of grain to feed its population. No doubt Caesar fell in love with the beautiful and charming Cleopatra, but he first fell in love with the fertile Nile Delta.



As was the custom when conquering foreign lands, the Romans dragged several obelisks from Egypt back to Rome, just to prove how powerful they were. Actually, the dragging was the shorter part of the trip. To get across the Mediterranean, the Romans built some of the biggest ships of the ancient world – “obelisk ships” specially designed for this purpose.

For the largest obelisks, such as these destined for the Circus Maximus, they actually used 3 ships working together – two ships connected side-by-side with the obelisk suspended from them under water, and a third ship out front like a tug boat.

The smaller of the two obelisks in the spina (the central “median strip”) in the drawing above was taken from the Egyptian city of Heliopolis, in 10 BC. The larger one was taken much later, in 357 AD, from the temple of the chief Egyptian god Amun in the city of Thebes. Until 550 AD, these obelisks witnessed a lot of action.



Sometime after the sack of Rome by the barbarians, the obelisks in the Circus Maximus were either torn down or fell down due to an earthquake. No one seems to be sure, and the details are lost in the fog of the Middle Ages. The stadium was located in a flood plain, and with no one maintaining it, over the years the fallen obelisks became buried in the mud.

This is what the Circus Maximus looked like on our recent trip to Italy. The tall tree in the middle is where the obelisks would have been.



During the Renaissance, Rome tried to rebuild some of its former glory, including the spoils of its battles with Egypt. Pope Sixtus V had the obelisks excavated from the old stadium in 1587. Both of them were broken. He had the larger one repaired, topped with a Christian cross, and erected in the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. Here it is today, the largest obelisk surviving from antiquity. It is now known as the Lateran obelisk.



And here is the other obelisk from the Circus Maximus, also repaired and topped with a cross, this one installed in the Piazza del Popolo. It is known as the Flaminian obelisk, after the ancient Via Flaminia which began here at the Porta Flaminia (Flaminian Gate) in the ancient wall and ran to the north of Rome.

Museum at the Chemical Heritage Foundation

Who would have thought that my childhood chemistry set would wind up in a museum? And not 100 feet from a famous “chymistry” book by the father of modern chemistry Robert Boyle!


These wonders and more can be found at the Museum at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. That’s right, a museum about the history of chemistry!

If you ever find yourself in downtown Philly, as I did a few weeks ago, please stop by this museum. It’s only a few steps from Independence Hall, and some of the stuff here is a lot older than the Liberty Bell (book = 1668, Liberty Bell = 1752). Not to mention more interesting, depending on your inclinations.

And yes, I did actually have a Mr. Wizard Chemistry Set. The one in the museum is from 1973, which is right around my time. It was surreal to see something from my childhood mounted in a climate-controlled display case. I wanted to rip open the box, fire up that old alcohol burner, and start some chemicals fuming! Sort of like this guy, who looks a lot like me experimenting in my parent’s basement. Actually it’s Explosion in the Alchemist’s Laboratory, by Justus Gustav van Bentum (1670 – 1722).


But everything worked out OK with Mr. Wizard, and now I make a living as a safety engineer specializing in chemical safety. That prominent WARNING on the front of the Mr. Wizard box must have made a big impression on me as a child.

Here are a few more of my favorite things at this museum:

One of the first desktop electron microscopes – something I use today when I send asbestos samples to the lab for analysis. It looks like the RCA engineers cobbled this one together with mixing bowls from the company cafeteria.


And a couple of fun old advertisements that put the lie to “better living through chemistry”. Both of these chemicals were later banned – tetraethyl lead in gasoline, and “butter yellow” food dye. Of course when you are kneeling backwards in the rumble seat of an old jalopy with no seat belts, breathing lead fumes is the least of your worries. (1933)


At the time, it was illegal for margarine manufacturers to add yellow dye to their product, because the Congressional butter lobbyists didn’t want anyone confusing margarine and butter. Mom looks delighted to help pull one over on the family. (1947)


So get yourself over to this museum!

Galileo's Tomb

Welcome back to Kind of Curious! I hate to say, but it’s been almost a year since I last posted. So I have quite a backlog of curious things to write about.

One of the things I did during 2011 was to visit Italy with my wife. This was the first time either of us had been to Europe, so we were completely in awe of this entirely different environment and way of life. Of course we knew that a whole “old world” was out there, which had brought both of our families to the new world. But until we experienced it ourselves, no book or movie could explain it to us (although maybe a blog could) …

A great place to begin describing the wonderful things we saw in Italy is Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. There seems to be a church on every street corner in Italy (sometimes 3 or 4 on a corner), each with priceless art or religious relics of the kind that in the US can only be found in museums.

What is unique about Santa Croce is that it has become a monument to the famous sons and daughters of Italy. Because of this, it is sometimes called the “Pantheon of Italian Glories” (“pantheon” being Greek for “temple of the gods”). That’s sort of a sacrilegious nickname for a church, but not the only inconsistent thing going on here as you will see.


A church has been at this site since 1210. The caption for the above drawing on Santa Croce’s website begins “around 1252 it was felt necessary to construct a church that was larger…”. I would have to agree with that. The priests look a little worried about where the congregation is going to sit.

The present church began construction in 1294 and was mostly completed by 1442. We get excited in the US when we see something from the 1700’s! The marble façade that gives the church the look it has today was not completed until 1863. Who in the US would embark on a construction project that would take over 500 years to complete?

Santa Croce’s journey to become the “Pantheon of Italian Glories” began in 1570, when they decided to build a tomb for Renaissance artist Michelangelo, who lived much of his life in Florence.


Since that time they have added many more tombs of the rich and famous, including that of the “father of modern science” Galileo, which was completed in 1737. Renaissance author Machiavelli is also buried here. If you deceive and manipulate others for your personal gain you are “Machiavellian”, like the advice given to the title character in Machiavelli’s book The Prince.


Galileo’s tomb is shown at the beginning of this post. It is ironic that Galileo is buried here, considering his rocky relationship with the Catholic church. Galileo was placed under house arrest by the Inquisition in 1633 for his support of Copernicus’ heretical observation that the earth revolved around the sun (rather than the earth being the center of the universe as described in the bible). Galileo died in 1642.

The church allowed some of Galileo’s works to be reprinted in 1718, which would explain why a monument in his honor would be allowed in Santa Croce in 1737. But his book that was at the center of this controversy, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was not allowed to be reprinted in its uncensored version until 1835. And it wasn’t until 1992 that Pope John Paul II finally admitted that the church had made a mistake in condemning Galileo!

Incidentally, Machiavelli’s book The Prince was also banned by the Catholic church. But this was not until after his death, and he was not accused of heresy. Although his Machiavellian ideas do not seem Christ-like, the book was actually banned because French leaders who were following its advice were being accused of corruption.

Here is the exterior of the church. Note that the marble is only on the front. There was no word as to whether they are planning on finishing the sides and back with marble as well. Give them time, it’s only been 700 years. And note the blue Star of David just below the peak of the top roof. The architect for the façade was Jewish, and in an inspiring act of interfaith cooperation was allowed to include the Star of David. He is even buried on the church grounds.

Thomas Edison and the Dragon's Blood

Happy New Year!

No, this post (Thomas Edison and the Dragon's Blood) is not the newest installment of Harry Potter. As I promised in my previous post, I have tirelessly researched the question that was raised (by me) during my recent visit to Thomas Edison's laboratories - why the heck did Edison have a bottle of Dragon's Blood in his chemistry lab?

I emailed the National Park Service, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a reply. As I noted in my prior post, our tour guide was less than forthcoming about this odd possession of our country's most prolific inventor. I was prepared to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out what the Park Service was hiding. Happily I did not need to play hard ball.

Karen Sloat-Olsen, Chief of Interpretation and Education at Edison's labs, was kind enough to pose my question to the lab's Archivist, Sound Recording Curator and Collection Manager. The Archivist reported that he had not run across any references to Dragon's Blood in Edison's lab notebooks. That was not encouraging, because Edison was known to keep very detailed notebooks.

She then checked with the Sound Recording Curator to see if there had been any reference to Dragon's Blood in the production of Edison's phonograph records, as Dragon's Blood can be used to make a resin. No luck there either.

Next, she turned to the Collection Manager. The Collection Manager checked to see if Edison had Dragon's Blood on his desk, since another use for the plant is for stomach ailments. Edison did have Listerine and some Soda Mint pills for his stomach, but no Dragon's Blood. I found this almost as interesting as the Dragon's Blood question - the fact that our government has a record of the contents of Edison's desk the day he passed away. Better be careful what you keep on your desk!

The Listerine is noteworthy - Edison was known to take short catnaps throughout the day, rather than sleeping for a full 8 hours at night. He would probably take a swig of the Listerine to get rid of that morning breath after waking up. And in case you were wondering, Soda Mint is a common name for sodium bicarbonate, the active ingredient in Alka-Seltzer and similar antacids.

Finally, the Collection Manager came through, by locating a reference to Dragon's Blood Gum in the Pattern Shop. The Pattern Shop is essentially a woodworking shop, which was used for making patterns for shaping sheet metal as well as prototype wood cases for Edison's phonographs. Since Dragon's Blood can be used to make varnish and wood stain, it makes sense it would be found in a wood shop (although why someone moved it to the chemistry lab is still a mystery). Believe it or not, this is one of the reasons I had suggested in my prior post for why Edison might have the Dragon's Blood. Boy, I love this stuff! I should have been a curator!

To end your year, here are a couple of photos of Edison's Pattern Shop. Have a great 2011!

Thomas Edison the Botanist

This weekend we visited the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey. I used to love visiting there as a kid, and I hadn't been there in many years. They recently completed an extensive renovation of the laboratories, so I was anxious to see it again.

Edison built this lab later in his life. It was in this lab that he perfected the phonograph which he had previously invented, and invented the motion picture camera and the alkaline storage battery. He also built factories around the laboratories, to manufacture his various inventions.

Much of the equipment displayed in the Chemistry Laboratory is what Edison was using on his last project, which was incomplete at the time of his death. Edison was asked by his close friend Henry Ford to help find a plant that could be grown in the United States that could provide latex to make rubber. The plant that is commonly used to make natural rubber, the Para Rubber Tree, only grows in tropical climates. Ford needed a stable, inexpensive source of rubber to make tires for his growing automobile business.

Latex is a material produced by about 10% of flowering plant species, and it is believed to serve as a defense against insect infestation. The latex is stored in cells just underneath the outer layer of each part of the plant. If you have ever picked a dandelion and seen the milky white substance "bleeding" from the stem, that is latex. Tiny particles of a natural rubber polymer (polyisoprene) are suspended in this latex.

Edison tested thousands of different species of plants to try to find the ones that made the best quality rubber. He finally settled on a particular species of goldenrod, which he then cultivated to grow taller and with a greater rubber yield. This goldenrod was later named after him, Solidago edisoniana. The photo above is from the National Park Service collection showing Edison (on the left) with his namesake goldenrod.

And here is a piece of machinery in the Chemistry Lab that Edison used to crush the various plant fibers during his experiments and extract their latex.


This is what "crude" goldenrod rubber looks like after the polymer particles have been coagulated and separated out of the latex, which is mostly water.


This sample is dated 1933, which was two years after Edison's death. Edison's wife and employees continued the search for a while, but finally abandoned it when it became clear that synthetic rubber based on petroleum was going to be the material of choice for automobile tires.

Here is a strip of goldenrod rubber, compounded with carbon particles for strength, ready to be formed into a tire.


One of the most intriguing things our tour guide pointed out in the Chemistry Lab was this bottle on one of the shelves.


Here is a closeup of the label.


In case you have trouble reading it, it says "Sanguin Dragonis / Dragons Blood". The tour guide told us they didn't know what "Dragon's Blood" was, and we joked that maybe Edison was a Harry Potter fan. But when I got home I found out pretty quickly on Google that Dragon's Blood is the common name for the red resin produced from several different species of plants.

Maybe Edison had collected this Dragon's Blood to see if he could make rubber from it. Dragon's Blood has been put to various uses over the years, including a varnish and a wood stain. Many of Edison's phonographs came in beautiful wood cases, so this use would make sense as well. Dragon's Blood has also been used as an herbal cure for many ailments including stomach ailments, which Edison suffered from. Maybe someone gave this to him to take as a medicine.

Or maybe Edison just couldn't resist having a bottle of something called Dragon's Blood. He prided himself on having his stockroom filled with every type of material and substance that might possibly be needed for his far flung investigations. Dragon's Blood must surely have been useful for something.

You will be happy to know that I am kind of curious about this, and have emailed the National Park Service to find out. Either the NPS historians do not check Google when doing their research, or maybe our tour guide missed the memo. But I will get to the bottom of this and report back to you!

Cattails in Philadelphia

This picture was taken in Philadelphia. Not Philadelphia, Mississippi, where you might expect to find cattails, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More unusual, these cattails are growing in a moat around a fort.

I took this picture at Fort Mifflin. If you have flown into the Philadelphia airport and headed toward I-95 North, you may have seen a sign for Fort Mifflin. I have driven past this sign many times and wondered what was inside. My wife and I recently drove in to find out.

Fort Mifflin has been around for a long time. It was originally built by the British in 1771, and was used continuously by the military until 1952. It served a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War. It was occupied by Americans who held off the British Navy, so Washington and his troops could safely make their way to their winter encampment at Valley Forge. It was a prison for Confederate soldiers captured during the Civil War, and a munitions depot in World Wars I and II.

But back to that moat. It doesn't seem like much, only about 50 feet wide and a few feet deep. But I guess back in the day, that was enough to slow down an advancing army and buy you some time.

Today, the moat is home to all kinds of plants and animals. The cattails caught my eye because of an interpretive sign about their use by Native Americans. I knew that the fluffy seeds could be used as padding - we had played with these many times as kids. But I found out that the brown cylinder (the female part of the flower) could be eaten like corn-on-the-cob. In fact, every part of the plant including the roots and the pollen are edible. Who knew? And people still eat cattails - Google "cattail recipes" and see what you find.

If you are wondering what the fort looks like, here you go:


The unusual flag is a replica of the one flown during the Revolutionary War battle. It is one of the early flags of the Continental Navy or the Pennsylvania Navy (nobody seems to be sure). The photo above is one of the more flattering views of the fort. Much of it has fallen into decay over the years, like this cannon wheel:


But a dedicated group of volunteers is doing a great job bringing this key part of our American history back to life. Check out their website or visit the fort.

Real Life Cabinet of Curiosity

Earlier this month, our family took a vacation to Florida. One of the places we visited was the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine. Otto Lightner was a "collector of collections", especially collections of items from America's Gilded Age in the late 1800's.

The scene above is what greets you when you walk into the Science & Industry room. This is enough to surprise anyone, but especially me, since it was as if my blog had come to life! A while back I wrote a post on "cabinets of curiosities", and I included an old engraving of one these proto-museums:

You can't help but notice the similarity between these two pictures (hint: it is the alligator hanging from the ceiling).

I knew this could not be a coincidence. Since Mr. Lightner had passed away in 1950, I guessed he had not gotten the alligator idea from reading my blog. Maybe the present curators of the museum had read my blog and thought, "What a great idea - let's get that old stuffed alligator out of the basement and hang him on the ceiling". I knew I should have copyrighted my blog!

The truth was finally revealed when I found a copy of the above engraving on the wall of the Science & Industry room. Apparently Mr. Lightner had seen this engraving before I had, and decided to recreate it in his museum. Many of the items in this room, and even the beautiful woodworking of the display cases, was typical of cabinets of curiosities.

This got me wondering - how many other museums around the world also have stuffed alligators hanging from the ceiling? If you know of any, please tell me.

If you are ever in St. Augustine, be sure to visit the Lightner Museum. You will not be disappointed.

Here is my favorite item from Mr. Lightner's collection. What American home in the Gilded Age would be complete without a colorful ceramic mandrill?

Great Falls Challenge

I had some spare time on a business trip to Virginia last week, so I scanned the map for something worth visiting.

I was only a few miles from something billed as the "Great Falls of the Potomac River". I am well acquainted with the Great Falls of the Passaic River (aka the Great Falls of Paterson NJ). This seemed like a direct challenge from the Great Commonwealth of Virginia to the Great State of New Jersey regarding who possessed the greatest waterfall. I rushed to the scene to investigate.

As you can see from the photo above, the "Great Falls of the Potomac River" should be renamed the "Great Rapids of the Potomac River". But they were pretty impressive rapids, and it was a beautiful day, so I pressed on.

Downstream of the rapids, I found 3 kayakers surfing the standing waves. That qualified as great.

A little further downstream, I came across a "Great" Blue Heron. (No kidding. He obviously wanted to be in the company of other great things.)

Further downstream, the river cuts a deep and narrow gorge into the rock. Above the falls the river is 1000 feet wide, and below the falls it narrows to as little as 60 feet wide. This causes frequent and dramatic flooding when the gorge gets backed up with water. Unfortunately I missed one of these great events by only a month.

Running along the river from above the falls to below the gorge are the remnants of a canal, and a small town whose residents built and operated the canal. The Patowmack Canal was the brainchild of George Washington (a great President but not a great speller). My guess is that Washington threw his silver dollar across the Potomac at the Potomac Gorge, not in his namesake town where the river is much wider.

So what's the verdict? Which falls are greater? As a New Jersey native, I definitely vote for the Great Falls of Paterson. Below is a photo for your review, taken on a very cold winter day.

You might be curious to know that the Great Falls of Paterson fall 77 feet in one shot, as opposed to the Great Falls of the Potomac, which "fall" a measly 76 feet over a length of almost a mile. Their largest single drop is only about 20 feet. In the "famous founding father" department, the Great Falls of Paterson were industrialized by Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington.

Cabinets of Curiosities

When I was a kid, I wanted to own a museum when I grew up. Not the politically correct, corporate sponsored museums we have today, but the kind of museum in the drawing above. The kind with a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling and an eel skeleton tacked to the wall. My grandmother had a big old house with high ceilings that would have been perfect for this.

This type of museum is known as a Cabinet of Curiosities. These were popular when "cabinet" meant "small room", or "small cabin", like a "cigarette" is a "small cigar".

Cabinets of curiosities were built by the privileged class in Europe beginning in the 16th century. They were the predecessors of today's natural history museums, created during a time when nobody knew what to make of all the strange stuff they found outdoors. This was a time before Linnaeus, Darwin and others had enlightened us to how these seemingly unrelated oddities should be properly arranged in their cases.

In a previous post, I wrote about a trip to the Rutgers University Geology Museum. This museum began as a cabinet of curiosities late in the development of this type of collection, when colleges began to establish them for teaching purposes. This was in the 1840s, after Darwin had returned from the second voyage of the HMS Beagle but before he had published On the Origin of Species.

Before this mastodon joined Rutgers' cabinet of curiosities in 1870, it was on tour with a circus. Such indignities were common before widespread public awareness of fossils.

The man standing next to the mastodon is William S. Valiant, who discovered the first fossils of trilobites with their soft tissue preserved. His find led to a much greater understanding of trilobite anatomy.

Here is the mastodon 140 years later. If you compare these two photos, you will see that the mastodon's tusks have been rotated. Since they went through the trouble of doing this, I have to assume that the later, inward curving tusks are correctly mounted.

This makes sense since it is believed that the tusks were used in an upward thrusting motion during battles for mates. With inward curving tusks, a mastodon could impale an adversary with his head centered and engage both tusks. With outward curving tusks, he would have to turn his head to the side and could only use one tusk at a time.

Here are two Rutgers geologists in 1930, inspecting a dinosaur footprint that had recently been discovered in Woodbridge, NJ. It came from a trackway of footprints that are the only known Cretaceous age dinosaur prints east of the Mississippi River. It is from a carnivorous dinosaur known as Megalosauropus.

By this time, Rutgers' cabinet of curiosities had developed into a legitimate geological museum.

And here is that footprint 80 years later.

I never did build that museum in my grandmother's house. The last I heard, her house was being used as a convent by a local church. Maybe someday...

My Proboscid Is Bigger Than Your Proboscid

The gross-sounding statement in the title of this post was uttered by one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson (OK, I'm paraphrasing). It's not as bad as it sounds - proboscids are an order of animals that includes modern-day elephants, and extinct elephant-like creatures like mastodons and mammoths. Proboscid is short for Proboscidea, which is the actual name of the taxonomic order. As you can guess, these animals all have long proboscises (noses/trunks).

The photo above is from a visit to the Rutgers University Geology Museum. My wife and I visited their annual Open House last weekend. We met at Rutgers, so the trip was nostalgic as well as geologic. The photo is of a mastodon unearthed by a farmer in southern New Jersey in 1869.

But back to Thomas Jefferson ...

Jefferson's fit of proboscid envy was prompted by a man with the pretentious name of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. "Comte" is a French title of nobility, similar in rank to an English earl. He is generally referred to as Buffon, although that is the town he was comte of and not his name.

Buffon was a well-known naturalist in the late 18th century, and made many observations including some that presaged Darwin's theory of evolution. But his observation that got Jefferson's wig twisted was what became known as the Theory of American Degeneracy. The idea was that due to a colder, more humid climate in the New World, the animals there (including humans) were smaller and weaker than those in the Old World.

It's not hard to see that Americans would be upset by this theory, especially being a new country that would not benefit from being seen as weak in the eyes of European powers. Jefferson, being somewhat of a naturalist himself, took on the task of refuting Buffon.

It turned out this was not very difficult to do. Buffon had never been to the New World, and his theories were based on incomplete and misleading information provided by others. Jefferson put together a list of several species that are larger in the New World than in the Old. Exhibit A was the mastodon, which not only was larger than the elephant, but was the largest known terrestrial animal in the ENTIRE world!

Never mind that the mastodon was extinct. At the time, which was before the expedition of Lewis and Clark, many believed that mastodons might still be roaming the interior of the American continent.

To make a long story short, the Americans got over their inferiority complex.

The End (the back end, that is):

Wissahickon Valley Park

This weekend my wife and I took a hike in Wissahickon Valley Park in Philadelphia. Despite having driven past the park entrance many times, I had never been inside. As soon as you walk out of earshot of busy Lincoln Drive, you would think you were in the Pocono Mountains.

Since we didn't have a trail map, we stayed on Forbidden Drive, which is the main path through the park. Forbidden Drive used to be called the Wissahickon Turnpike, but they changed the name when those new-fangled horseless carriages were forbidden to drive on it. Here is a photo of the Blue Stone Bridge, which replaced the old Red Bridge in 1896. The little building to the right is the toll house. It is hard to imagine a time when this road was so busy with carriages that they would charge a toll to ride on it!

If you look in the window of the toll house, you can watch the elves baking Toll House Cookies. Or you can read the archaeological display, which includes a photo of a coin marked "Taylor's Hotel, Wissahickon, PA", which they believe was a bridge token.

To see a postcard of the bridge from the good old days, click here. Then click on the postcard to zoom in.

Here is an even more curious photo from our hike. I have no idea what those rectangular brown things are on this bush. They look like some type of shelf fungus, but I could not find them in any fungus books at the book store. Maybe they are part of the bush itself. In any case, it is odd that they are so rectangular. Well, that is a mystery for another day.

Roaring Run Iron Furnace

I was on a business trip near Roanoke, VA last week, and I had some free time to take a hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here is a photo of Roaring Run Furnace in Jefferson National Forest.

It's pretty wild to come across something like this just sitting out in the middle of the woods. But that's where furnaces needed to be in the good olde days, because they would cut down acres of trees for the charcoal to run the furnaces. Click here for a great and sad description of this process.

If you are more the archaeological type and want all the somnolent details, try this site. And if you love old maps like I do, check out this one on the Library of Congress website. I can't imagine that too many members of Congress need old maps of iron furnaces, but I guess they have to be ready just in case. If you love all old iron furnaces, go here.

Roaring Run Furnace is on the Roaring Run Trail, which runs along Roaring Run Creek to Roaring Run Falls. It is all very beautiful, as you can see by the smile on my face.

Pinelands Adventure #1 - Brooksbrae Brick Company

I am fortunate to live on the edge of the NJ Pinelands, which, depending on who you ask, is the largest expanse of open land between either Boston and Richmond, or northern Maine and the Everglades. It covers 22% of the state of NJ, which is welcome relief in the most densely populated state in the nation.

Last fall my wife and I went on a hike sponsored by the Pinelands Preservation Alliance. Led by local archaeologist Scott Wieczorek, we explored the ruins of an early 20th century brick factory. Here is my favorite picture. In the upper right you can see a family picnicking on top of what used to be the drying tunnels.

To see more photos, check out this site. For a description of the site by Mr. Wieczorek himself, click here.

The NJ Pinelands had a pretty colorful history before it became a National Reserve. To learn more, check out Ghost Towns and Other Quirky Places in the New Jersey Pine Barrens by Barbara Solem-Stull. It includes directions, maps and lots of info on many interesting sites in the Pinelands.