The Village
Whitesbog Village is also the former home of many laborers who worked
in the cranberry bogs and blueberry fields. It was the quite essential,
"company
town." Forty-one workers and their families lived in Whitesbog
Village in rented houses provided by the company. The Village had a
general store, a post office, a school house, and a pay office. The
cranberry production facilities were also located in the Village. These
buildings included an innovative packing and sorting house, where the
cranberries were processed and stored; a barrel factory, where the
barrels used to store the cranberries were made; and a barrel storage
house, where the cranberry barrels were stored until needed. A water
tower provided fire protection and served as a look-out to spot forest
fires and observe the surrounding system of bogs. With few exceptions
the buildings of Whitesbog Village still stand today. In addition to the permanent workers who lived
at Whitesbog, Italian immigrants were hired from the neighborhoods of
near-by South Philadelphia to work during the harvest season. These
"seasonal" workers were employed from the beginning of September to
mid-October. Seasonal workers lived on the bogs during their employment
and were housed in neighboring villages called Florence and Rome.
Neither of these villages stand today. The historic Village of Whitesbog served as the
main settlement and service center for J.J. White's operation through
the 1940s. As advances were made in the technology of cranberry and
blueberry harvesting, the need for large numbers of laborers declined.
The introduction of "wet" harvesting, reduced the number of employees
needed to a minimum. However, up until the early 1960s Whitesbog
continued to house some of the employees of the J.J. White company,
currently owned and managed by J.J. White's grandson, Tom Darlington.
The Company owns modern bogs on acreage south of Whitesbog and also
leases and has modernized some of the bogs at the
original site.
In 1967, the State of New Jersey, Department of Environmental
Protection, brought many of the farms in the Pinelands under the Green
Acres Land Acquisition Act and created the Pinelands National Reserve.
Included in that purchase was the small village of Whitesbog. The
Village and its surrounding 3,000-acre tract of land then became part
of Brendan T. Byrne (formerly Lebanon) State Forest where it remains
today.