Fire and disasters
The 1893 forest fire between Toms River and Barnegat
Single contemporary brief; scope and named households, no casualty report
A May 1893 newspaper brief reported that forest fires raging since the preceding Tuesday between Toms River and Barnegat had destroyed a tollhouse and two other dwellings along the Toms River and Forked River turnpike, forcing residents to flee.
A tollhouse and two homes lost
The New Jersey Mirror for May 17, 1893, carried a local brief — indexed by the Burlington County Library System from page 3, column 1, under the running head "Local Affairs / Local Briefs" — stating that forest fires had "raged" between Toms River and Barnegat since the preceding Tuesday, "destroying large tracts of timber land." At the Quail Run tollgate, on the turnpike connecting Toms River and Forked River, the index reports that the tollhouse was destroyed and its keeper, named as Mrs. Abdel Imlay, was "forced to flee for her life." The fire is then said to have reached and destroyed a house owned by Henry Bird, and afterward a third house, owned by Mrs. Abbie Chamberlain and occupied by her son-in-law Nathan Moore and his family. According to the index, Moore was away from home at the time, fighting the fire elsewhere, and did not know his own house was threatened; his family had to flee.
The brief supplies no acreage figure, no dollar loss, and no report of injury or death. It gives no cause for the fire and no indication of how or when it was brought under control; its wording — fires that "have raged" since the previous Tuesday — leaves open whether they were still burning when the paper went to press. Everything this entry reports about the fire comes from those few sentences.
What the record leaves open
No source consulted this session establishes the turnpike's exact route between the two Ocean County towns, or fixes the Quail Run tollgate's position on it. The map pin for this entry marks the broad corridor between Toms River and Forked River, not a confirmed site; the fire as described ran further, south to Barnegat, over ground the pin does not attempt to cover. Nothing found this session identifies Mrs. Abdel Imlay, Henry Bird, Mrs. Abbie Chamberlain or Nathan Moore beyond their appearance in this one brief, and no obituary, land record, or later Mirror item connecting to this fire was found in the searches run this session. The 1893 fire is unrelated to, and roughly forty-three years earlier than, the much larger and better-documented Pine Barrens fire of May 1936, which burned in the same general Ocean–Burlington County pine belt and is covered elsewhere in this index.
Sources and research limits
- Burlington County Library System, index to the New Jersey Mirror, May 17, 1893, page 3, column 1, "LOCAL AFFAIRS. / LOCAL BRIEFS." — The one index record found describing this fire, read in full; the search was re-run and the row re-checked on September 13, 2026 (the narrower keyword "Quail Run" returns this same single row). This is a library-compiled index to the Mirror rather than the pages themselves, so it may omit or compress details — cause, extent, outcome — that appeared in the original brief, and only the phrases set off in quotation marks above are given by the index as the paper's own words.