The July 1922 lightning storm that burned Burlington County barns

"Record rain and electrical storm"

The New Jersey Mirror of July 19, 1922 (page 10, columns 5 and 6, "Local News"), under the headline "One Death and Much Damage Caused by Storm," reported that a "record rain and electrical storm" on the preceding Thursday flooded Mount Holly's streets — an automobile was carried down High Street by the water — and caused a string of lightning fires on outlying farms, per the Burlington County Library System's index.

Myrtle Stewart was fourteen, the daughter of Charles Stewart, a farmer who occupied the Dennis farm along the railroad between Smithville and Mount Holly. She had gone upstairs to lower the windows against the rain. The bolt struck the house while she stood at a window, cutting, the report says, "a two-inch hole in the side of the house." Her parents heard the crash, ran upstairs, and found her dead. Coroner Glover viewed the body and issued a burial permit. The same report notes that another Stewart daughter, about the same age, had been killed by a train near the farm about three years before.

Barns and a tenant house destroyed

The index describes lightning striking a tenant house on the Asher B. Parker farm near Pointville, occupied by the family of William Kelly, destroying the building and its contents, valued at $3,000; the family had "a narrow escape." A second bolt is reported to have struck "a big barn" on the same farm, which burned with a $10,000 loss; Camp Dix firemen are credited with saving the property's other buildings. A further $10,000 loss is reported on the Richard Rahilly farm near Wrightstown, where barns, outbuildings and their contents were destroyed; the report does not actually say fire there, only that the loss "occurred" in the same storm, and fire is an inference from the surrounding sentences rather than something the paper states. At the farm of John Nash, a barn "valued at $5,000" and filled with grain was lost to a lightning-caused fire. A separate strike is reported to have hit the home of the Rev. B. E. Eldridge, of the Florence Baptist Church, entering the kitchen and reportedly exploding inside the icebox, scattering food but causing no injury beyond fright. The index also records lightning striking a weathervane on a barn on the Ivins Wright farm, opposite the fair grounds, knocking off some shingles without igniting the grain-filled building, and further strikes on a large evergreen tree in the Mount Holly cemetery and a tree at Edward Hack's boat landing.

What the record does not establish

Everything above comes from one article. It gives no total damage figure for the storm, and does not place John Nash's farm — no town or road is stated, so the third barn fire cannot be mapped. The dollar figures are the report's own, given without saying who valued the buildings or on what basis. The strike at the Rev. B. E. Eldridge's house was at Florence; the barn and tenant-house fires were not, and this entry does not claim otherwise.

Nothing further was found: no follow-up Mirror item on the Stewart family, on any of the named farms, or on the storm; no inquest report beyond the burial permit; no independent record confirming Myrtle Stewart's age, her sister's death, or the family's presence on the Dennis farm. Her identification here rests on this single newspaper report and has not been checked against a death record, a census return, or a burial.

Why this is in a Pine Barrens index

These are farms, not woods. Mount Holly, Pointville and Wrightstown lie along the agricultural northern and western edge of the region this index covers, and the fires were lightning strikes on buildings rather than anything that ran in the pines. The entry is here as part of the county's fire record — the everyday, weather-driven sort of fire that the Mirror reported alongside the forest fires — and not as a Pine Barrens wildfire. A reader wanting fires in the pines themselves should treat this as regional context.