Hard to believe, but a huge racetrack of international renown once sat on Moss Mill Road just east of Hammonton, NJ. The site is now indistinguishable forrest, with a typical Pine Barren sand trail that follows the old oval. I haven’t explored it yet but hope to soon. Just Google for Amatol Raceway and you’ll find lots of pictures and accounts.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Category Archives ⇒ South Jersey
Travels around the byways and swamps of South Jersey, with occasional forays to surrounding locales.
Future of Quaker media at Pendle Hill next month
April 27, 2012
I’m part of a discussion at the Pendle Hill conference center outside Philadelphia next month. Everyone’s invited. It’s a rare chance to really bring a lot of different readers and media producers (official and DIY) together into the same room to map out where Quaker media is headed. If you’re a passionate reader or think that Quaker publications are vital to our spiritual movement, then do try to make it out.
Youtube, Twitter, podcasts, blogs, books. Where’s it all going and who’s doing it? How does it tie back to Quakerism? What does it mean for Friends and our institutions? Join panelists Charles Martin, Gabriel Ehri and Martin Kelley, along with Quaker publishers and writers from around the world, and readers and media enthusiasts, for a wide-ranging discussion about the future of Quaker media.
We will begin with some worship at 7.00pm If you’d like a delicious Pendle Hill dinner beforehand please reply to the Facebook event wall (see http://on.fb.me/quakermedia). Dinner is at 6.00pm and will cost $12.50
This is part of this year’s Quakers Uniting in Publications conference. QUIP has been having to re-imagine its role over the last ten years as so many of its anchor publishers and bookstores have closed. I have a big concern that a lot of online Quaker material is being produced by non-Quakers and/or in ways that aren’t really rooted in typical Quaker processes. Maybe we can talk about that some at Pendle Hill.
Russian Old Believers in Millville NJ
March 13, 2012
A few weeks ago we were contacted by someone from the St Nicholas Center (http://www.stnicholascenter.org) asking if they could use some photos I had taken of the church my wife is attending, Millville N.J.‘s St Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic. Of course I said yes. But then my correspondent asked if I could take pictures of another church she had heard of: St Nicholas Old Believer’s Church. It’s on the other side of Millville from our St Nick’s, on an ancient road that dead ends in woods. We had to visit.
The Old Believers have a fascinating history. They were Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to comply with liturgical changes mandated by the Patriarch and Czar in the 1650s. As usual, there was a lot of politics involved, with the Czar wanting to cozy up with the Greek Orthodox to ally Russia against the Muslim Ottomans, etc., etc. The theological charge was that the Greek traditions were the standard and Russian differences latter-day innovations to be stamped out (more modern research has found the Russians actually were closer to the older forms, but no matter: what the Czar and Patriarch want, the Czar and Patriarch get). The old practices were banned, beginning hundreds of years of state-sponsored persecution for the “Old Believers.” The survivors scattered to the four corners of the Russian empire and beyond, keeping a low profile wherever they went.
The Old Believers have a fascinating fractured history. Because their priests were killed off in the seventeenth century, they lost their claims of apostolic succession – the idea that there’s an unbroken line of ordination from Jesus Christ himself. Some Old Believers found work-arounds or claimed a few priests were spared but the hardcore among them declared succession over, signaling the end times and the fall of the Church. They became priestless Old Believers – so defensive of the old liturgy that they were willing to lose most of the liturgy. They’ve scattered around the world, often wearing plain dress and living in isolated communities.
The Old Believers church in Millville has no signs, no website, no indication of what it is (a lifelong member of “our” St Nick’s called it mysterious and said he little about it of it). From a few internet references, they appear to be the priestless kind of Old Believers. But it has its own distinctions: apparently one of the greatest iconographers of the twentieth century lived and worshipped there, and when famed Russian political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn visited the U.S. he made a point of speaking at this signless church on a dead end road.
Links:
* Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
* Account of US Lithuanian Bespopovtsy communities: http://www.synaxis.info/old-rite/0_oldbelief/history_eng/nicoll.html
* OSU Library on iconographer Sofronv (PDF): http://cmrs.osu.edu/rcmss/CMH21color.pdf
* Solzhenitsyn’s 1976 visit: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f‑news/2057793/posts
In album St Nicholas Old Believers, Millville NJ (9 photos)
Another Saturday at St Nick’s
February 26, 2012
Most Saturday nights find me following my wife to St Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in Millville NJ. I’m often chasing kids and this Saturday was no exception. Tonight I snapped as I chased. Most of these shots have a tousled head just off camera. It’s a nice little church. You can learn more at their website at http://www.stnicholasmillville.com.
In album St Nicholas 2/25/12 (8 photos)
The interior from the balcony.
Save St Mary’s Malaga
May 6, 2008
On a Friday my wife Julie and older son attended a rally to save a favorite church in Malaga, Gloucester County, New Jersey threatened with closure by the Diocese of Camden. By Sunday we launched Savestmarys.net. It was a weekend where I was already swamped with deadlines, so it’s standard Movable Type but with all the tricks of mashed-up Web 2.0 sites to let Julie pour content in: Flickr, Youtube and Google Calendars.
For two years we also had a companion Ning-based social network for churches through the Diocese.
Visit: Savestmarys.net
Trip to the Blue Hole
September 12, 2005
A few days ago my two-year old Theo and I took a meandering bike trip that brought us to the charmingly-named Piney Hollow Road (alas, not quite as rustic as it sounds). We stopped on the unassuming bridge over the Great Egg Harbor River and I looked for a trail into the woods. We found one about a hundred feet north of the river, hiked in another hundred feet and picnicked along the river. When I got back home I started Googling around and discovered that our sand trail was the Blue Anchor Fireline Road and that we were on one of the main paths in to the famed Blue Hole.
The best stories on Winslow’s Blue Hole come from Henry Charlton Beck, whose folk histories of South Jersey are must-haves for any local’s library. He wrote newspaper columns profiling old-timey local characters on the back roads and deep woods of the area and his accounts have been collected in volumes such as Forgotten Towns of South Jersey and Jersey Genesis: The Story of the Mullica River. He wrote about the Blue Hole legends in More Forgotten Towns of South Jersey and one helpful fellow has broken copyright laws to scan in the relevant pages.
Today my two-year old and I set out again for the Blue Hole (well, I did: he actually napped half the way there). We started on Piney Hollow Road in Winslow Township. About 100 feet north of the very unassuming Great Egg Harbor River bridge is what the maps call the Blue Anchor Fireline Road. The picture on the left show the trailhead from Piney Hollow Road.
We went into the woods along this sandy road. It curves right, parallels Piney Hollow Road for awhile, then curves left back into the woods. There are weird metal bunker openings marked “confined space entry” in day-glow orange every so often: some water-related thing I suppose (though the conspiracy-minded might beg to differ). About a mile in there’s an intersection with the equally-sandy Inskeep Road (those wanting an alternative path could take Inskeep from Piney Hollow: it’s entry is about a half-mile north of the Great Egg Harbor River bridge).
Make a left onto Inskeep and go left when it forks. Within a quarter mile you’ll see a creek with the remains of a bridge. This is the Great Egg Harbor River. Some of the trip reports I’ve seen end here with the sad report that the washed-out bridge prevented the creek from being forded (“Since the stream was too deep and too fast moving to ford, we were forced to retreat. The Devil’s Hole was only 100 yards away, but it might as well have been 100 miles.”). Bah: it’s three feet deep in September, quit yapping and get your feet wet, okay? Just up the path on the other side is the famed Blue Hole itself.
It’s always fun to retrace Henry Charlton Beck’s footsteps but the Blue Hole itself isn’t all that exciting. Yes, the water is kind of blue, underneath the pond scum. It does look deep and it’s certainly not a normal geological feature. Some have wondered if it’s an asteroid hit, which is as good a theory as any other. Here’s a close-up of the hole in all its blue’ness:
No, I didn’t see the Jersey Devil (wasn’t really looking folks) but some sort of giant heron or crane did circle the hole overhead twice when I got there. One theory of the Jersey Devil legend is that it was inspired by sightings of the Sandhill Crane so our companion’s presence was appropriate. I didn’t swim into the hole to test out the Devil leg-pulling reports, bottomless depth or remarkable cold. I’ll leave that to more intrepid souls.
My Links:
Route Map:
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