Isaac Shockley, found dead at Black Run

Gone to the woods to chop

A Burlington County Library index summary of the New Jersey Mirror's January 5, 1887 "Local Briefs" column reports the death of Isaac Shockley, who lived near Milford and worked as a wood chopper. The record describes him in the language of the day as "a colored man"; that wording is the newspaper's, set down here because it is what the record says and because it is the only description of him it gives. It gives no age, no family names, and no further detail of his life.

By the record's account he left home on a Tuesday — the index reads that as December 28, 1886 — to work in the woods, and did not come home that night. His family were worried by his absence. When he was still missing on the Thursday, a party went out to look for him, and late that afternoon, which the index reads as December 30, they found his body at a little stream known as Black Run, in the woods about ten miles back of Berlin. The record does not say who made up the searching party or who organised it.

Frozen where he had been working

The body was found frozen. Beyond that, the record offers one explanation and marks it as a guess: that he had been taken by a fit of apoplexy while at work and died at once. That is the newspaper's supposition, not a doctor's or a coroner's conclusion. No physician, coroner, inquest or verdict appears anywhere in the record, and nothing indicates that the body was examined by anyone.

What the record does and does not establish

What the record supports is this: a man went out to a day's work he had evidently done before, did not return, was missed and looked for by people close enough to him to go into the woods after him in December, and was found dead where he had gone. Whether he died of the cold, of a sudden illness, or of an injury, the record does not establish, and the apoplexy line should not be read as a finding. Nothing in it suggests foul play, and nothing in it treats his death as anything other than one more hazard of solitary winter work in the pines. No exact spot on Black Run is given, and no obituary or follow-up notice for Shockley was found elsewhere in this index.