"Nestled in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, Whitesbog was established by James Fenwick in 1857 as a cranberry farm. During the 1890s... Whitesbog became the largest cranberry operation in the United States. ... In 1911, Elizabeth White worked to to domesticate the highbush blueberry... making Whitesbog the official birthplace of the blueberry industry... Into the 1960s, Whitesbog was more than just a mulitgenerational family farm and site of innovation -- it was a year-round community complex with housing, a post office, and even a school."--Back cover.
In 1865, industrialist/inventor Hezekiah Bradley Smith purchased Shreveville, later renamed Smithville, an abandoned textile mill and town located along the Rancocas Creek in Burlington County, for $20,000. He moved many workers from his Lowell, Massachusetts, plant to the new location, rebuilt the factory, and prepared it for the manufacture of his patented iron woodworking machinery. Smith began to improve the aging housing in the surrounding village. He opened a school and, later, constructed a new school building. Smith erected a boardinghouse for factory workers that contained shops and a concert hall. Through farming on land adjacent to his mansion, he made fresh produce and milk available to his workers. Smith's company also expanded into new industries by working with outside inventors, like George Washington Pressey, who needed a manufacturer for his American Star Bicycle. Later, Arthur Hotchkiss contacted the company to build the world's first bicycle railroad to transport workers from Mount Holly to the Smithville factory. This book captures life in the village and factory, memorializing the intertwining lives of the Smithville workers and H.B. Smith through photographs.
This book is experiences of the author aboard a destroyer on the Murmansk Arctic convoys of WWII. In spite of it being related to war, the content of the book is really to show what life was like for the ordinary ratings and their tasks, not the fighting. Many of the happenings are strangely amusing, depending on how they are read. Most of the occurrences were just everyday duties or chores that somehow went wrong or were the result of naivety of the crew, most of whom had never reached the age of 20 years and were thrown into doing things they had never contemplated before. So this book is really short yarns, mostly of amusing instances of life aboard a ship at war. These yarns are short, but the book as a whole is unique in as much as it is history as far as life was concerned on small RN ships in WWII, much of which few people have ever looked into or even heard about. The author's work dealt with intercepting messages from and locating German submarines by shortwave radio direction finding. This was specialised, little of which has ever been reported, although closely related to the work at Bletchley Park. Here it is dealt with extensively.
The book explores the historical development of Medford, established by Quakers in the late 1600s and evolving into a community by the mid-1800s. It highlights the significance of local industries like sawmills and schools, some of which remain today. Central to the narrative are the photographs of William Cooper from the early 20th century, capturing the essence of Medford's daily life, including workers, schoolchildren, sports, and community events, providing a vivid visual history of the town's heritage.
