Albert Burchell's disappearance and death on a Georgetown-area cranberry bog

A picker who did not come back

A Burlington County Library index summary of the New Jersey Mirror's September 25, 1907 "Local Briefs" column records the disappearance of Albert N. Burchell, of Trenton, who was employed on a cranberry bog the paper places only as not far from Georgetown, in Burlington County. The paper gave a relative day rather than a date; the index supplies Monday, September 9, 1907 as its own reading of it. The record says it was supposed at the time that Burchell had been overcome by the heat that day — a supposition, in the account's own framing, and not a finding.

The rest is the record's account, and is worth marking as such, because it is the part that has the shape of a story. On the night he disappeared, by that account, Burchell was sitting in one of the sleeping houses on the bog, talking with the other men, when he cried out and ran from the building. He was not seen alive again. The record adds that the other workers said afterwards that they had heard him calling somewhere in the distance during the night, and that when he did not turn up the next morning they took it that he had tired of the work and gone. Those are reported recollections of the other pickers, gathered at least a fortnight later; no one is described as following him, and nothing in the record explains why he ran.

Found by his fellow pickers

Nothing more was heard of Burchell, the summary says, until the following Sunday, which the index reads as September 15, when other men working the bog came upon his body, badly decomposed, in a clump of bushes in a lonely part of it. The record describes the men as happening upon him rather than searching, and does not say whether any search had been made. It gives no autopsy, no coroner, no inquest and no cause of death. The heat explanation stands in the account as something supposed before he was found, not as anything established after. The one other fact it supplies is that Burchell had previously worked for the Trenton Brewing Company.

What the record does and doesn't establish

What survives is a picker's death on an unnamed Burlington County bog during the 1907 harvest, reported a fortnight after the fact in a column of short local items. It shows something of the seasonal camp around the bog — men sleeping in shared houses, a week passing between a worker's disappearance and anyone finding him, and the finding done by other pickers. It does not name the bog's owner or operator, give a cause of death, or record that any official took an interest. The only place-name is Georgetown, and the bog's position relative to it is not given; Georgetown is used here as an approximate anchor and nothing more. A man died and the reason was not written down, which is the whole of what this record establishes.