History and mysteries · Bass River Township
Calico, the workers’ village upstream of Martha Furnace
Rests on one township planning history; no independent source located
A township planning history places a vanished village called Calico a mile up the Oswego River from Martha Furnace, home to charcoal burners, lumbermen, ore-raisers and teamsters, and still shown on an 1889 map.
A village for the furnace’s workforce
Martha Furnace was built on the Oswego River in 1793 and named, by the custom of the time, for the wife of its builder Isaac Potts. The history compiled for Bass River Township’s 1982 master plan describes a village called Calico about a mile upstream, where the people living there worked chiefly at the furnace: charcoal burners, lumbermen, ore-raisers, and teamsters to haul the wood, charcoal, and pig iron. Most of the ironworkers were Irish, the document says, with a small group of Black residents living there as well. The same document says an old map of 1889 still depicts Calico’s location along the Oswego. Martha itself was not a small place — the document credits the furnace village at its height with about four hundred people and fifty houses — so Calico was one settlement in a populated working landscape, not the only housing for the works.
Outlasting the furnace
After what the township history calls the demise of Martha Furnace in 1840, many of the workmen continued for a time to live in Calico, working chiefly at charcoal making. The document’s own dates for the furnace do not agree with one another: elsewhere it says the works ran from 1793 until about 1844, that Samuel Richards sold the property in 1841, that the furnace closed in 1850, and that the site was used for charcoal production until 1858. What the source consistently describes is a decline through the 1840s and a second life in charcoal, with Calico’s people following the same course. The surviving Martha Furnace diary, covering 1808 to 1815, is treated separately in this archive.
What is left
The same document reports almost no trace of the village, and says the ridge where it stood had by 1982 become a favored picnic and canoe stop on the Oswego River. Martha Furnace was excavated by the state archaeologist Budd Wilson in 1968, documented, and then covered with a mound of dirt behind a chain-link fence to protect it; no comparable excavation of Calico is recorded in the sources checked here. The name outlived the village: when searchers combed this country for a missing Tuckerton man in 1933, the places they covered were listed as Harrisia, Jenkins Neck, Sim Place, Martha Furnace and Calico.
Sources and research limits
- “History and Early Culture of Bass River Township, Burlington County, New Jersey,” Bass River Township Historical Society, drawn from the Bass River Township Master Plan (January 1982), Chapter 2 — Read in full. The “Calico Ridge” section supplies the 1889 map reference, the location, the workforce, and the post-1840 charcoal-making; the adjoining “Martha’s Furnace” section supplies the furnace dates, the village’s size, and the Budd Wilson excavation. The chapter’s furnace dates are internally inconsistent, as noted above.
- Carslake, Charles L. (1933) — This archive’s entry on the 1933 search, drawn from contemporary newspaper reports that list Calico among the localities searched.
No source independent of the 1982 master plan was found for Calico itself. Leah Blackman’s 1880 History of Little Egg Harbor Township, on which the master plan draws for the area’s settlement history, was read for this entry and does not name the village; neither does Woodward and Hageman’s 1883 History of Burlington and Mercer Counties. The 1889 map cited by the master plan was not identified or examined.