New Jersey · Historic site
Batsto Village
An iron and glass works in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, abandoned as industry moved west, kept whole inside a state forest.
Position Burlington County, New Jersey · 39.6417, -74.6478
Batsto sits on County Route 542 in Washington Township, Burlington County, inside Wharton State Forest in the south central Pine Barrens and within the Pinelands National Reserve. It is on both the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places and is run by the state parks division.
The village worked bog iron, the ore that forms in the wetlands of the Pine Barrens, and later glass. Both industries left the region when better sources opened up in Pennsylvania, and the settlement was abandoned rather than demolished.
The name comes from the Swedish bastu, meaning a bathing place, which is a reminder that this part of New Jersey had a Swedish colonial presence long before it had ironworks.
It is the counterweight to everything else on this site: an eastern ghost town in wet forest rather than a western one in desert, and a reminder that places empty for the same reasons everywhere.
Facts checked against the Wikipedia article Batsto Village, New Jersey. The words above are ours.