Southern exposure

New Jersey’s Delaware River region is claiming its place in the sun

By: Michael Redmond
   The fine folks at South Jersey Tourism — specifically representing the Delaware River counties of Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Mercer and Salem — have designs upon the rest of the known world. They have designs upon the millions of people who visit Philadelphia every year. They have designs upon those Jerseyans and Pennsylvanians who like to take day trips and week-enders and close-to-home vacations, too.
   Here’s the plan. It’s bold. It’s crafty. It’s beautiful.
   Instead of just allowing people to pass through the Delaware River Region en route to Philadelphia, New York, Atlantic City, wherever, the plan is to give them terrific reasons to stop and stay a while. For instance, the region has every bit as much Revolutionary War history as Philly does, and that’s a fact, and a significant Underground Railroad history, too. The region has the Pine Barrens, a unique piece of real estate, abounding in one-of-a-kind attractions. The region has award-winning wineries that offer memorable hospitality, with everything on the table being Jersey Fresh? That’s just for starters.
   The plan is to piggyback the Delaware River Region’s emerging tourism industry atop Philadelphia’s established tourism industry.
   For instance, if you’re doing Philadelphia, why pay the heavy freight for staying and dining in Center City when you can get equivalent value at considerable savings only 20 minutes east of the Delaware in, say, Mount Laurel, where Marriott has just opened its first full-service hotel in South Jersey? A hotel that means to tap the family market as aggressively as the corporate market by opening an on-site water park in 2008?
   For instance, if you’re doing Philadelphia, might you be enticed to cross the river to spend a day hanging out in Walt Whitman’s house and visiting the Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial and Adventure Aquarium on the Camden Waterfront?
   The plan is to package the entire deal by linking history to entertainment to nature to agriculture to accommodations to dining to shopping and serve it all up not only to tourists, but to anybody who resides within a manageable driving distance of Philadelphia. The package can include Philadelphia or it can be All Jersey, All the Time. Take your pick.
   Now, admittedly, Packet readers will experience some cognitive dissonance at finding Mercer County incorporated into a promotional package for South Jersey. Mercer is now, and has ever been, Central Jersey.
   But the emphasis on the Delaware River and proximity to Philadelphia makes Mercer an important player in this deal — and it surely can be only a very good thing that South Jersey Tourism is pushing the historic attractions of Trenton and Princeton, the ambiance of Lambertville and Stockton and the artistic excellence of McCarter Theatre and Grounds For Sculpture as hard as they’re pushing everything else.
   South Jersey Tourism’s Web site is truly a thing of beauty, and travelers thereto would have to have holes in their heads not to consult this site before planning an expedition or even setting out on a lark. They’ve got it all, it seems. Commit this to memory: www.visitsouthjersey.com. And while we’re swapping Web addresses, please note www.sjhotchefs.com, a portal site to some 40 outstanding South Jersey restaurants, including one my wife and I can vouch for with enthusiasm — Little Tuna in Haddonfield.
   Some memories, on the fly, of a long and lovely October weekend in South Jersey:
   • A campfire in the middle of the Pine Barrens at night, the Sugar Sand Ramblers performing "Piney" folk songs, and a guide doing his darndest to scare the pants off us with Jersey Devil lore. I cannot recall the last time I saw the night sky so brilliant with so many stars. This is Jersey, sure, but it sure feels like it’s somewhere else, somewhere very far from traffic jams.
   • The simplicity and dignity of Brenda Conner of Whitesbog, a fifth-generation cranberry farmer who claims descent from the Lenni Lenape, relating how oldtime Pineys would work the "cycle" of the region, picking blueberries, then cranberries, then hunting and trapping, then gathering and crafts-making, then doing it all over again, generation after generation. How it takes 10 acres of wetlands to support one acre of cranberries. How the biggest and sweetest blueberry of them all — the Elizabeth variety — is too perishable to travel, as Whole Foods discovered, and so it can be gotten only fresh, only in season, only in the Pines. The Cranberry Connection, tours and products: www.888cranbog.com.
   • At the Indian King Tavern in Haddonfield, where the legislature met in January 1777 to read the Declaration of Independence into New Jersey law, where the state seal was adopted in May, and where, in September, the words "colony" and "colonial" were stricken forever from New Jersey law, being replaced by the word "state." The legislature had 39 members, all of whom were running from the British. A quorum was 20 men. My family’s house had a bigger parlor than that plain chamber — which had doubled as a dance hall.