The jetport that almost destroyed the New Jersey Pine Barrens

My family has been in the Pine Barrens longer than New Jersey has been a state. My father did the genealogy. We had ancestors making cannonballs in the pines during the Revolution — the ironworks at places like Batsto and Atsion were supplying the Continental Army while the British were still occupying Philadelphia. When I say the Pine Barrens are in my DNA, I mean it more literally than most people can.

So when I first read John McPhee's 1968 book The Pine Barrens — I came to it in the 1990s, long after the events he described — there was a passage that stopped me in a way few things I have ever read have. McPhee mentioned, almost in passing, that there had been a proposal to build a supersonic jetport in the heart of the Pine Barrens. I read it and thought — well, I am glad that did not happen — and moved on.

I did not look into it further at the time. I should have. Because the full story of what almost happened to this place — and who stopped it — is one of the great untold civic victories in New Jersey history.

What they proposed

In 1964 the Pinelands Regional Planning Board, working from a study largely paid for by the federal government, proposed building a supersonic jetport in Ocean County, just west of Stafford Township. This was not a small regional airport. The proposed jetport would have covered 32,500 acres — four times the combined size of Newark Airport, LaGuardia and Kennedy put together. It would have been the largest airport on Earth.

And that was only part of it. The same plan called for a brand new city of 250,000 people built eleven miles away in the Forked River area, connected to the jetport by high-speed rail. Trains from the terminals would reach Philadelphia in 20 minutes and New York City in half an hour. Supersonic flights from Paris would land in 90 minutes.

The price tag in 1964 dollars was $106 million. In today's dollars that is close to a billion dollars.

What it would have destroyed is harder to put a number on. The Upper and Lower Plains. Several ponds and a lake. A vast stretch of land running from what is now Brendan Byrne State Forest east and south toward Manahawkin. The ancient pitch pine and scrub oak forest that has been growing in that sand since the last ice age. The cedar water streams. The Batsto River. The silence.

All of it. Gone.

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Who fought back

When the proposal became public in 1964 something unusual happened. People who almost never agreed on anything found themselves in the same room.

Conservationists. Blueberry farmers. Cranberry growers. Hunters. Local residents who had lived in the pines their whole lives and never thought much about politics. They all understood immediately what the jetport would mean and they all showed up.

At a packed armory meeting in the pines, local Assemblyman John Brown told the crowd the only way to fight this was letters. Write to your legislators. Tell your friends to write letters. As they filed out, each person collected a sheet of paper with the contact information for eight officials.

They wrote the letters. They kept writing them. For years.

In 1968 John McPhee published The Pine Barrens. McPhee was a writer for The New Yorker and his book brought the story of the pines — the people, the cedar water, the history, the ecological importance of one of the largest areas of open space on the entire East Coast — to an audience far beyond South Jersey. Ironically, McPhee predicted in his closing pages that the Pines were probably headed for extinction. The book he wrote to document what might be lost became part of the reason it was not.

In 1970 Governor William Cahill was elected. He wanted nothing to do with a jetport anywhere in New Jersey. The proposal died.

How the protection was built

Defeating the jetport was the beginning, not the end. Development pressure on the Pine Barrens did not stop because one project was rejected. Through the 1970s the fight continued — not against a single proposal but against the slow creep of sprawl from every direction.

Governor Brendan Byrne became the man who finished what the letter writers started. In 1977 he created the Pinelands Review Committee. In February 1979 he issued Executive Order 71, halting all development in the Pinelands until a permanent protection plan could be passed. Legal scholars have described it as one of the farthest reaches of executive power ever exercised by an American governor. All development stopped.

In June 1979 the New Jersey Pinelands Protection Act was signed into law. The Pine Barrens — one million acres covering portions of seven counties — became the first National Reserve in the United States. Lebanon State Forest was later renamed Brendan T. Byrne State Forest in recognition of what he had done.

Congressman Jim Florio led the federal effort that made the National Reserve designation possible. Without Florio in Washington and Byrne in Trenton, the story ends differently.

What was saved

I have camped in these woods. I have kayaked the Batsto and the Mullica. I have run trails through the pitch pine and scrub oak in the early morning when the light comes in sideways and the whole forest smells like something ancient and permanent. I have spent time with my family in the pines the way my ancestors did, in a place that has not fundamentally changed in centuries.

None of that exists if the people in that armory in 1964 go home and do nothing. None of it exists if John McPhee writes about something else. None of it exists if Brendan Byrne decides protecting a forest is someone else's problem.

The Pine Barrens cover nearly 25 percent of the total land mass of New Jersey. They sit on top of the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer — seventeen trillion gallons of some of the purest water on the Eastern Seaboard. They are home to plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth. They are the reason that flying over New Jersey at night, from Atlantic City to the suburbs of Philadelphia and New York, you can still see a vast dark space in the middle of one of the most densely developed corridors in the world.

That dark space almost had runway lights in it.

I am glad it does not. And I am glad the people who stopped it did not go home and do nothing.