Bodine’s Tavern on the Tuckerton stage route

A landmark on the map before it was a story

Thomas Gordon’s Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey (1834) uses the tavern twice as a fixed point of reference, which is the best evidence that it was a well-known place: the west branch of the Wading River, he writes, flows about fifteen miles to unite with the east branch “near Bodine’s tavern,” and the Beaver Branch joins the Wading “about a mile below Bodine’s bridge and mill.” So by 1834 there was not only a tavern here but a bridge and a mill associated with the same name.

That location squares with the township history’s placement of the inn “at the Oswego River,” because the Oswego is the east branch of the Wading. Leah Blackman, describing Little Egg Harbor’s 1802 boundaries in her 1880 township history, gives the northern bound as “Oswego, or east branch of Wading river.” The tavern stood at or near the point where those two streams come together.

What the township history says

The history compiled for Bass River Township’s 1982 master plan describes Bodine’s Tavern as a major stopping place along the Tuckerton stage route, established by John Bodine shortly after the Revolution. It calls the inn a meeting place for the local militia and one of the few public drinking houses close to the company towns of Harrisville, Martha and Calico, and the final stop for a traveler going from Philadelphia to the shore at Tuckerton or New Gretna. Social life for isolated workers and travelers, the document says, centered on places like it, where meetings, military training and voting took place, and where — by its own frank account — fist fights and public drunkenness were common.

One caution about that framing: the company towns it names came later than the tavern. Martha Furnace dates from 1793, Calico housed Martha’s workers, and Harrisville’s paper mill belongs to the 1830s and after, while the inn is said to have been founded in the 1780s. The association with those settlements describes the tavern’s nineteenth-century heyday rather than its origins, and Harrisville was a paper town rather than an ironworking one.

From tavern yard to campsite

The township history gives no date or explanation for the tavern’s end. What it records is the field around the original site, used as a rustic camping area in Wharton State Forest. That field is still in use: a park directory listing for Wharton State Forest names Bodine Field among the forest’s primitive campsites, with hand pumps for water and pit toilets. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s own Wharton State Forest pages could not be read for this entry — they returned no readable text to repeated fetches — so the state’s own description of the site has not been consulted.