History and mysteries · Bass River Township
Sim Place, a cranberry company village that emptied out
Rests on one township planning history; no independent source located
A township planning history describes Sim Place, a cranberry hamlet of about twenty houses and sixty residents in the northeast corner of Bass River Township, reduced by 1982 to a few working buildings.
Named for an early resident
Sim Place sits in the northeast corner of Bass River Township, against the Ocean County line. The history compiled for the township’s 1982 master plan says the place was named for an old Indian man who came there first about a hundred years earlier — which would put his arrival in the 1880s — and who lived in a cabin near where a large red homestead later stood. His name, the document says, was Sim, sometimes spelled Simm or Simms. It cites no source for the story, and the dating sits awkwardly with the same document’s statement that cranberry harvesting at Sim Place began in 1850, three decades before the arrival it describes.
A working cranberry village
Cranberry harvesting began at Sim Place in 1850. The Satterwaite family — the spelling used in the township history — ran the operation until 1899, when it was sold to the Penn Producing Company, a firm that at one time held more than five thousand acres in cranberries, including tracts at Howardsville and Cedar Bridge. The document recalls about twenty houses with picket fences, lilacs and apple trees, and some sixty residents, most of them employed in the cranberry business. Some households kept garden plots, but most grocery shopping was done from a truck that came weekly from the West Creek Market. Electricity reached the village sometime in the mid-1930s, with telephone service following later. Abandoned barracks were moved in from Fort Dix to house migrant workers but, according to the same history, were never used.
What is left
By 1982 most of the houses and residents were gone and some of the cranberry harvesting buildings remained. The property, then about three thousand acres, belonged to a Trenton furrier the document names as George Kudra. Several groups had shown recurring interest in buying the tract, the history notes, because the country near the head of the Oswego River forms an important part of the Wading River watershed and an integral link in the Pine Barrens drainage system. The name stayed on the landscape after the village thinned out: searchers looking for a missing Tuckerton man in 1933 covered Harrisia, Jenkins Neck, Sim Place, Martha Furnace and Calico.
Sources and research limits
- “History and Early Culture of Bass River Township, Burlington County, New Jersey,” Bass River Township Historical Society, drawn from the Bass River Township Master Plan (January 1982), Chapter 2 — Read in full. The “Sim Place” section supplies the name origin, the cranberry history, the population and housing figures, the Fort Dix barracks, the utilities, and the ownership and acreage as of 1982.
- Carslake, Charles L. (1933) — This archive’s entry on the 1933 search, drawn from contemporary newspaper reports that list Sim Place among the localities searched.
No source independent of the 1982 master plan was found for Sim Place itself, its name origin, or its population and acreage figures. Leah Blackman’s 1880 History of Little Egg Harbor Township and Woodward and Hageman’s 1883 History of Burlington and Mercer Counties were both read for this entry: each confirms that cranberry growing was already a leading industry in this corner of the county — Blackman notes the cultivation and the extent of good cranberry soil in Bass River Township, and Woodward and Hageman call the bogs the chief industry of neighboring Woodland Township — but neither names Sim Place, the Satterwaite operation, or the Penn Producing Company.