Whitesbog Village
Historic Whitesbog Village has its origins in 1857 when James A. Fenwick began cultivating cranberry bogs at this location. His son-in-law Joseph Josiah White took over management of the farm upon Fenwick's death in 1882, and not long after the company town for Joseph J. White, Inc. began to emerge. It was here in 1916 that the collaborative work of J. J. White's daughter Elizabeth Coleman White and Dr. Frederick V. Coville of the U. S. Department of Agriculture resulted in the development of the world's first cultivated high bush blueberry. At its peak, Whitesbog and the two satellite villages of Rome and Florence out in the bogs were home to 600 workers. Technological advances in cranberry harvesting reduced that number to a mere fraction by the 1960s when the state of New Jersey purchased the land and made it part of Lebanon (now Brendan T. Byrne) State Forest. All of the buildings here were constructed between 1890 and 1925.
Whitesbog Village was placed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places in 1988. The Whitesbog Preservation Trust, a private non-profit citizens group dedicated to the restoration and interpretation of Whitesbog, leases most of the village from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Parks and Forestry. Between 2004 and 2010, restoration and rehabilitation of 21 buildings was funded in part by a generous grant from the Garden State Historic Preservation Trust Fund administered by the New Historic Trust.
Marker is at the intersection of Whites Bog Road and West Whites Bog Road, on the right when traveling north on Whites Bog Road.
Courtesy hmdb.org
