PASADENA
Lebanon State Forest, Ocean County, NJ

The preserve touches the Burlington County line in the north and extends down Route 72 to Barnegat Township where Route 539 crosses it.

(For maps see: www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/wmaland.htm)

History:

Pasadena is now a deserted hamlet across the Ocean County line, near Whiting. Its modern name is Wheatlands.

1832 --  Theodore Conover buys the land from Thomas Foulks. Conover then conveys it to Andrew J. Steelman and George Giberson, who first start working the clay pits to make fire bricks and terra-cotta pipes.

1836  -- land sold to Ebenezer N. Townsend.  He named the area Wheatland.

1861  --  the Raritan and Delaware Bay Railroad cut through the tract and opens up the area to other markets.

1866  --  Captain Daniel Townsend, son of Ebenezer Townsend, buys the land and reworks the business into the Townsend Clay Manufacturing Company. 

1873  --  Townsend sells the works to the Wheatland Manufacturing and Improvement Company. The new company goes bankrupt.  Sold to Caleb and John Falkinburgh.  The Pasadena Hotel and Cottage Building Company buys about 100 lots and Pasadena Farms, Inc. buys the remaining acres. 

1894  -- foreclosure of both Pasadena companies.

1915  -- the E. I. Dupont de Nemours Power Company of Wilmington, Delaware takes over the Pasadena factory site and stores gunpowder and munitions.

1954  -- the New Jersey Department of Wild Life Management buys the Wheatland tract.  The only remaining structures were the foundations of the drying house used to dry clay bricks, the homestead, and a few other structures.

(Source: Miller 2000:329-331)

From: Beck, Henry Charlton. 1983. 1936 original. Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

It is a deserted hamlet nearer Whiting than Chatsworth, but on the Jersey Central, trail of the fast Blue Comet.

A fire swept the lone factory, the Pasadena Terra Cotta Company. It manufactured pottery and terra cotta materials. It was destroyed in the early 1900s. 103

Donkey engines ran to and from the clay pits.

After the destruction of the pottery plant, a fruit farm was begun. It used the Jersey Central for shipment. 104

Bill Olson field trip for the Philadelphia Botanical Society, December 13, 1997.  Olson mentions that the group traveled south on Route 539.  They stopped in Pasadena along the Pasadena-Woodmansie Road.  Here they saw:

Andropogon virginicus (brome grass)
Chimaphila umbellata (pipsessewa)
Helianthemum canadense (frostweed)
Hypericum gentianoides (orangegrass)
Lechea sp. (pinweed)
Lespedeza capitata (round-headed bush clover)
Polygonella articulata (jointweed)
Schizachyrium scoparium (little blue stem grass)

Source: Bartonia: Journal of the Philadelphia Botanical Club. June 2002. P. 162.