by William Klimowicz
I am not a farmer. I am just a person that has been fortunate enough to have lived my life in a rural agricultural area of South Brunswick on Davidsons Mill Road.
Many of my neighbors were farmers. I was lucky to have witnessed the hard, back-breaking work of the farmers raising their crops and livestock. For the ones that remain, I have nothing but the highest respect for their lifelong struggle.
Friends of mine still run a farm market and their hard work produces some of the best sweet corn to found in this area. Another neighbor had his farm preserved and proudly displays the preservation sign. That family now works hard maintaining a horse farm. Two other farmer friends that are brothers have retired. One brother still lives on the family farm. I loved hearing their stories about their lives and our area. The decades of farm work have forged a couple of wise old men.
As I said, nothing but the highest respect for these hardworking citizens. As South Brunswick has changed along with this whole section of New Jersey, there is not much left of how it was not so long ago.
As with many places in South Brunswick, the eastern section of the township has also been changed. Instead of housing developments, a number of farms have been buried under the concrete, steel and asphalt of some of the most immense buildings imaginable. In addition to car traffic, monstrous trucks belch their filth and shake the roads under them. The entire village area of Rhode Hall, one of the first villages in South Brunswick with one of our first schools, lies under and within this area zoned “light industrial.”
With all of the change, other eastern residential areas are still basically intact, with traffic being an ominous warning of the lurking warehouse menace.
Much publicity has been generated about the Van Dyke farm in South Brunswick during the past four years. It is a life-and-death struggle for the farm’s very existence. An attempt was made to build warehouses on the land. Prudent South Brunswick officials negated a zoning change from residential to light industrial. Preservation efforts are being made. Will the farm be destroyed by some kind of development, or does preservation allow the 300-year-old farm to remain intact forever ? The struggle continues.
The farm’s history dates back to the 1600s with the same Dutch family in ownership until it was sold to the present owner in the 1950s. In colonial times, it was not the home of George Washington or another famous person. It was the home of an early American family that struggled to exist , not only during the colonial period and the chaos of the Revolutionary War, but throughout the whole time period of family ownership. The farm is also a story in history about the slaves that toiled on the land. The farm can be a place to visit , learn ,and develop an appreciation for what it was like then and what for it can be in the future.
The environmental aspects of the farm are of immense importance. The farm is right next to the Pigeon Swamp. Wooded parts of the farm are actually unprotected parts of the Pigeon Swamp, which is a water source with New Jersey’s highest priority for protection—one of only ten in the state. The swamp is also a National Natural Landmark, a natural underground water deposit filtered by sand and gravel ,formed during the Ice Age. To “develop” this land would certainly be detrimental to the swamp. Preservation is the most logical choice for the Van Dyke farm. Not to be built upon for a housing development (or a warehouse , as some suggest). It must be saved as a precious environmental resource.
Our group of citizens, the Eastern Villages Association, named our group in honor of the colonial villages that existed in eastern South Brunswick. The Van Dyke farm lies in the village area of Fresh Ponds, where a number of original village structures exist to this day. One house is among the oldest in South Brunswick, belonging to the one of the first settlers in the area. Another existing house belonged to the Fresh Ponds blacksmith. There is also the Fresh Ponds Chapel and the Fresh Ponds schoolhouse.
Some sarcastically say “good luck” in our quest to see the farm preserved. And yes, citizens do yearn for the nostalgia of times gone by in South Brunswick. Some say the farm is valuable land as a ratable in the vicinity of the Turnpike.
I agree that this land is valuable. Not as space for another empty mega- warehouse built on a speculator’s whim , not as another housing development, but for its importance.
It is important that we, as the people of present day New Jersey, put aside land of value — land of tremendous environmental and educational value. Present and future generations will judge the South Brunswick and Middlesex County officials, who began the initiative to preserve this farm, as those making a most wise decision.
Farms and farmers — they provided us with an appreciation of hard work, an appreciation that extends itself to saving a most special place.
William Klimowicz is a resident of the eastern villages. He can be e-mailed at [email protected].
