Mount Misery: a tavern, a saw mill, and four or five dwellings

What the nineteenth century actually records

Thomas Gordon’s Gazetteer of the State of New Jersey (1834) gives the place an entry of its own: “Mount Misery, hamlet of Northampton t-ship, Burlington co., 15 miles S. E. from Mount Holly, in the pine forest; contains a tavern, saw mill, and 4 or 5 dwellings.” That single sentence independently establishes the saw mill, adds a tavern, and fixes the settlement’s scale — a handful of houses, not a village of a hundred.

The mill was still a landmark a generation later. When the legislature created Woodland Township by an act of March 7, 1866, the boundary description quoted in Woodward and Hageman’s 1883 county history begins “at a point where the north branch of Misery mill-stream crosses the Ocean County line” and later runs to “the northwest corner of Misery mill-dam.” J. W. Otley and R. Whiteford’s 1849 Map of Burlington County labels both “Mount Misery” and “Mount Misery Branch” in the same country, north of Mary Ann and the Upper and Lower mills. Edwin Salter’s 1890 history mentions a road from Little Egg Harbor to Mount Misery in a 1779 land description, which places the name in use during the Revolution.

What a compiler reports, unverified

A local-history compilation page hosted on RootsWeb gathers what little else has surfaced, and says frankly that its author found very little information about the early years. It cites two eighteenth-century newspaper notices for the saw mill: an advertisement in the New Jersey Gazette of October 4, 1784, in which John Pope offered a house and hatter’s shop at Black Horse, Mansfield Township, along with a tract of pine land near the Mt. Misery saw mill; and a notice in the Burlington Advertiser of August 30, 1791, concerning Clayton Newbold’s application to divide his late father Michael Newbold’s cedar swamp on the branch of the Ancocas where the Mt. Misery sawmill stands. It further cites the New Jersey Courier of March 26, 1920 for the death of Charles W. Pitman of Mt. Misery at age 66. None of those three notices was independently located and opened for this entry; they are reported here as the compiler’s citations. The 1834 and 1866 records above are consistent with them but do not confirm them.

The place today, and the ghost story next door

Mount Misery lies on the border of Woodland and Pemberton Townships, reached by a side road off Route 70 that passes a Methodist retreat center before entering the state forest — Lebanon State Forest when the compiler wrote, renamed Brendan T. Byrne State Forest in 2002. A visitor’s account on the same page describes a clearing in the woods with a large hole and what appear to be old foundations off Pitman Road. That is the documentary situation: a name in use since at least the Revolution, a mill and tavern in the 1834 gazetteer, a mill stream and dam defining a township line in 1866, and very little else.

This entry concerns the working hamlet. The better-known Mount Misery story — Henry C. Beck’s golf-playing ghost, the ruins of the Mary Ann forge settlement, and the country-club venture that was never finished — is treated separately in the ghost story of Mary Ann Forge, which also reproduces the 1849 map detail cited above. Mary Ann and Mount Misery are neighboring places on that map, not the same settlement.