Joe Bennett, found frozen between Cookstown and Hanover

A trip for hay and feed, in the paper's own words

The Mount Holly News for Tuesday, January 10, 1893, page 3, carried a short item headlined "Frozen to Death": "Joseph Bennett, a colored man who lives between Cookstown and Hanover, went to the former place, on Thursday, to purchase some hay and feed. Bennett took delight in calling himself the 'wild man of the Pines,' and, as was his custom, started to drinking, and when he left for home was pretty well under the influence of liquor. He left Cookstown about four o'clock in the afternoon. On top of his hay was a bag of feed, Joe being seated on that. When within about a half a mile of his home it is supposed his horse got the best of him, throwing him from the wagon and running away."

This is a substantive correction to the Burlington County Library's index summary of the same story as it appears in the New Jersey Mirror's January 11, 1893 "Local Affairs / Local Briefs" column. The index reads the Mirror's "Friday" as January 6; the News, printed a day earlier, puts the Cookstown trip on Thursday, which on this evidence looks the more reliable of the two datings. More importantly, the News's own supposition is that the horse "got the best of him, throwing him from the wagon and running away" — not, as the index's paraphrase of the Mirror had it, that Bennett fell from drink and then wandered off on foot looking for the animal. Both papers frame the fall as a supposition rather than an eyewitness fact, but they suppose two different mechanisms for it.

Found in the snow, the horse found separately

The News continues: "Not seeing Bennett around as usual his neighbors thought there was something wrong and, on Sunday, went to investigate. They found the horse about 200 yards from the house, having got loose from the wagon, and eating the hay that was on it. A further search discovered the colored man lying on his bag of feed about a half mile from his home, partially covered with snow. He had evidently wandered around until tired out, when he dropped and went to sleep, and froze to death."

This supplies a search and a timeline the index summary lacked entirely: neighbors noticed his absence and went looking on Sunday — three days after the Thursday trip — found the horse loose near the house, and only then found Bennett half a mile away on the bag of feed he had been carrying. The index's detail that he was found near a cranberry bog called "Kean's" does not appear in this account; this entry cannot confirm or deny that detail from the News, and it is left as the index's alone.

The nickname, and what it is not

The Mount Holly News states plainly that Bennett "took delight in calling himself" the wild man of the Pines — his own adopted nickname, not merely a tag the papers hung on him, as this entry previously read the record. That correction matters: it changes the nickname from something imposed on Bennett by a newspaper into something he embraced himself, at least as the News chose to report it. Nothing in either paper's account describes Bennett living wild, being sighted, hunted, feared, or reported as a stranger in the woods; he was a local man with a house, a horse and a wagon, running an errand for feed. The description of him as "a colored man" is the paper's own language, quoted here rather than adopted, and is a reminder of how an 1893 Burlington County paper wrote about a Black neighbor even one it treated with a kind of affection.

This archive keeps a separate group of entries on reported "wild men" in and around New Jersey. Bennett is not one of them, no source connects him to any of those reports, and this entry should not be read as placing him among them.

What the record does and does not establish

Neither the Mount Holly News item nor the Mirror index entry records a coroner, an inquest, a physician, or a formally determined cause of death. What the News does establish, in its own printed words, is that Joseph Bennett died of exposure after apparently being thrown from his wagon on the road between Cookstown and Hanover on a Thursday in early January 1893, that his horse was found loose and feeding near the house, and that he was found by neighbors on the following Sunday half a mile from home, partly covered in snow. No obituary, follow-up notice, or correction for Bennett was located in either the Mirror index or this issue of the News.