Howard Hulett Green's plane crash into a Kettle Run cranberry bog

The flight from Atlantic City

According to a Burlington County Library index summary of the New Jersey Mirror's September 21, 1938 report, Howard Hulett Green, 38, vice president of the Kendall Refining Company of Bradford, Pennsylvania, had been at the National Petroleum Association convention in Atlantic City since the Friday. He wired his wife and four children that he would fly home on the Sunday, and left the shore airport at 5:50 that afternoon in his Fairchild cabin monoplane in spite of the weather. At 7 p.m., the summary says, he radioed Central Airport in Camden that he was at 7,000 feet and meant to turn back to Atlantic City because conditions were so bad. Nothing further was heard from him. The record reports the day of the week rather than a calendar date; the Sunday before the paper's Wednesday, September 21 issue was September 18, 1938, but that is calendar arithmetic by this writer, not a date the record prints, and nothing else here depends on it.

The summary describes his plane going down in the Kettle Run cranberry bog, a 30-acre operation in Burlington County about two miles northeast of Berlin and roughly half a mile off Taunton Road. It is presumed, the record says, that Green became lost in rain and fog.

Found by the bog's caretaker

The wreck was not discovered until the next morning. Melvin Applegate, caretaker of the bog, was checking its spillways around 8 o'clock on the Monday when he saw the wreckage, and he notified John R. Brick, of Medford, who operated the bog on behalf of its owners, Bank Brothers of Atlantic City. Brick in turn alerted the Berlin state police. State Trooper Michael Harris worked his way across the marshy ground to the plane and brought out Green's body, which was strapped into the cockpit. Harris is quoted in the record as saying rigor mortis had set in, which he read as meaning Green had died many hours earlier, and as suggesting that fog and darkness were why Applegate had not spotted the wreck on a 10 o'clock inspection the previous night — an explanation offered by the trooper, not an established fact.

Harris is also reported as saying there had been no fire, and as believing that Green cut the plane's switch once he knew he was going down — a belief the trooper himself qualified, since the wreckage was too complete to tell. The debris field ran to a hundred-yard radius: by the account, a wing seems to have struck first and dragged some twenty-five feet along the bog, a heavier piece thought to be the motor gouged a furrow two feet deep and twenty feet long, and the bulk of the plane finished a further hundred feet on. Green's brief case lay nearby, apparently flung clear; a War Department letter inside it, about his appointment as a reserve officer in the army air corps, is described as the first clue to who he was. The record says Green had been flying for five years and was licensed both to carry passengers and to fly by instruments, and that the plane carried radio and blind-flying instruments. His body was taken to the morgue of Coroner N. Swartz of Palmyra, who issued a burial certificate.

A named operation, an unnamed bog site

The record is useful less for the crash itself than for what it incidentally documents about the working bog it fell into: a specific caretaker, a specific operating manager based in Medford, and absentee owners in Atlantic City, all attached to a 30-acre cranberry property in the Kettle Run area in 1938. Nothing else about the operation — how long the Bank Brothers had held it, what it produced, who picked it — is in this record, and no other source for it was found in this research. No newspaper page image was located; the account here rests on the library's summary of the article, not on the article's own wording, and no second source corroborates any of it.