At historic Batsto Village in the Pinelands, the hope is the internet will bring the crowds back

BATSTO, N.J. — More than 40,000 visitors show up to the Country Living Fair here each October, the most for any state-hosted one-day park event. And a couple of years ago, when a park superintendent posted video online of the view of snow-clad Wharton State Forest from the tower of historic Batsto Mansion, 9,000 people viewed it within a couple of hours.

Much of the rest of the time, however, the historic village is nearly as hushed as the Pinelands surrounding it.

The volunteer group that helps the state manage it is trying to change that.

"I was astounded by the response" to the internet video, recalls Wes Hughes, who heads the state-appointed volunteer Batsto Citizens Committee. "I knew we really had something that we needed to exploit."

A small first step: Hughes' committee is in the midst of a $4,500 project to get state approval to stream real-time views on Batsto's website from two webcams that have been mounted on the mansion tower.

Accessible only by a winding wooden staircase built in the mid-1800s, the tower was closed to the public nearly a decade ago because of safety concerns, Hughes said.

"But so many people in the region still connect with the mansion and that tower from family or school trips over the last 50 years and they really miss being able to climb up into it," he said.

Hughes, 65, is well-aware that the off-the-beaten-path, restored 18th-century iron works village northeast of Hammonton has seen better days. It does not attract visitors the way it did soon after it was opened to the public as a designated historical site in 1964.

About 167,000 people visited Batsto in 2016, about the same as in recent years.

The primitive Burlington County village was established in 1766 when an ironworks was built upon the bog of the ore-rich Batsto River that eventually manufactured supplies for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

More recently, until 1954, the Batsto property was a gentleman-farm estate for descendants of Joseph Wharton, the Philadelphia industrialist who founded the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founded the Bethlehem Steel Corp., and was one of the founders of Swarthmore College.

Born into a Quaker family in 1826, Wharton began purchasing land in southern New Jersey in 1876, eventually acquiring 150 square miles of the Pinelands, a vast, ecologically sensitive wilderness slicing through the southern half of the state.

It wasn't so much what was on the land that intrigued Wharton. It was what was beneath it: a pristine water source known as the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer that he envisioned could supply clean drinking water to thirsty Philadelphians and beyond. But late 1800s legislation that made it illegal to pump the water out of New Jersey put a damper on Wharton's plans.

Batsto was part of Wharton's Pinelands acquisitions, when the mostly abandoned village had fallen into receivership. He spent more than $40,000 — about $890,000 converted to today's dollars — renovating and adding to what had been the ironmaster's mansion. Wharton and his family utilized the property as a getaway from their homes in Philadelphia and Rhode Island. After Wharton's death in 1909, his family retained the property until 1954, when they sold it to the state.

Interest in the village has waned since the typical summer days in the 1960s and 1970s when thousands of people would converge on the 1,200-acre Pinelands site to tour the mansion, see craftsmen working in the ironworks and in other village trades, take a stagecoach ride, or just have a picnic in the small grove that used to be near the visitors center.

"It was once one of the biggest attractions in the region, but these days it is a challenge for us to get people," said Hughes.

But "when I saw the numbers on the website that snowy day," he said, "I knew we had something. People really are still very interested in this place."

Hughes' committee, a 36-member body appointed by the governor, lends assistance to the state Park Service and the state Department of Environmental Protection to promote the restoration and interpretation of the historic and natural aspects of Batsto Village.

It also lends whatever assistance it can to the administration of Wharton State Forest, which surrounds the village, and works with a citizen-based volunteer coalition called the Friends of Batsto, to raise funds to help pay for special projects and activities at the historic site. Most of the money being used for the new live tower feed was provided by the committee.

"We know that we'll never be able to go back to what it was once like. … Historic sites these days are competing with things they didn't have back in the `60s and `70s to draw people away, like the internet, kids' sports, places like Disney World and Great Adventure," said Janet Worrell, 79, who has been a member of the Batsto Citizens Committee since age 40 and just recently resigned as its treasurer.

"But the outreach to the public — essentially the marketing and public relations that lets people know that Batsto even exists — has fallen on our lap because the state just doesn't have the money to do it," she said.

Batsto, Wharton, and all other state historic sites, including parks and forests, have been funded by a state budget allocation of about $6 million a year over the last decade. Precise amounts spent at individual locales, such as Batsto for example, aren't available and vary from year to year based on staffing needs, required repairs, and other needs in a particular fiscal year, according to Caryn Shinske, a spokeswoman for the DEP.

Annette Fusco, 42, of Hammonton, has been bringing her two teenage daughters to Batsto since they were babies.

"Whenever the state talks about closing parks because of a lack of funding, we get scared," said Fusco on a recent weekday she came to jog around the picturesque lake. "It's our favorite place."

IF YOU GO: Batsto Village & Wharton State Forest is located at 31 Batsto Road, Hammonton, NJ 08037. Park is open from dawn until dusk, although times for tours of Batsto Mansion and other activities vary by day and by season. For more information, call 609-561-0024 or go to www.batstovillage.org