Evert Trail and Stop-the-Jade Run

Walk where two landscapes meet

New Jersey Conservation Foundation describes its 170-acre Evert Trail Preserve as a transition between the inner and outer coastal plains. Its 1.5-mile route enters a dense wetland forest, crosses elevated boardwalks, and follows portions of Stop-the-Jade Run, a tributary of the Rancocas. The manager says the trail can be wet and muddy. Its April 2015 map marks the parking area on Ongs Hat Road, the loop, an observation tower, and several named interpretive sections. The map is a planning guide, not a survey or a guarantee that every boardwalk or sign remains in the same condition.

What the name does and does not prove

The creek name is old: Barber and Howe’s Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey (1844), p. 126, calls Buddstown a settlement on “Stop-the-jade creek.” A later Federal Writers’ Project place-name list, reissued in 1945, p. 29, attributes the name to a notice concerning a woman who escaped enslavement. Other local accounts tell of a runaway or exhausted horse; a snippet of George DeCou’s 1949 The Historic Rancocas, p. 233, preserves a horse story. The Writers’ Project itself warned that its collected explanations included contradictory folklore and omitted individual authorities for most names. Neither an original escape notice nor a dated record of a particular horse incident was found in this research pass. Both are explanations people later told, not established accounts of how the stream was named.

A 2012 NJ Pine Barrens forum discussion shows how the stories continue to circulate. One participant reports having seen a Philadelphia advertisement; another cites a 1719 land survey using the creek name and asks for the advertisement itself. Those underlying documents were not inspected here, so the 1719 date and the advertisement remain research leads. The secure conclusion is narrower: the place-name was in print by 1844, and the competing origins need an earlier, verifiable record.

The people the trail remembers

The Foundation says the land was donated in 1984 and the preserve dedicated in 1995 to Dot and Brooks Evert for their work to protect the Pinelands. Brooks served as a Foundation trustee from 1974 to 1990. A 2014 account in Stockton Now by their grandchild describes Dot as a botanist and speaker and Brooks as a nature photographer. In the 1950s, they took a slide program about the bogs and barrens around the state; Brooks later chaired a committee campaigning for national recognition. The trail is therefore a memorial to advocacy as well as a place to watch birds and water. The family account dates the dedication to 1994, one year earlier than the manager’s current page. The dedication date is left unresolved here.

Go and look

Use the manager’s current preserve page and linked trail map before traveling. The map places parking on Ongs Hat Road near Stockton Bridge Road, while the page gives a 628 County Route 642 mailing or navigation address in Southampton Township; its map labels the preserve as Pemberton Township. The map pin on this site is an approximate parking-area reference corroborated by an OpenStreetMap parking feature and an independent hiker’s GPS, not a surveyed trail entrance. Follow the manager’s map and on-site signs rather than using the stream pin as a driving destination. The signed route offers a way to see the water and forest; it does not identify the site of either name-origin story. For another Pine Barrens conservation advocate, see Candace McKee Ashmun.