Economic development To Dennis (New Jersey)

Economic development. The commission operates the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, five airports including Millville and Cape May County in New Jersey, and a business park in Carney’s Point Township, Salem County. During summer and fall, the authority also operates ferries between Fort Mott (New Jersey), Fort Delaware (Pea Patch Island), and Delaware City, Delaware. The headquarters for the Delaware River and Bay Authority is located at the Delaware Memorial Bridge toll plaza in New Castle, Delaware.

Delaware River Basin Commission. The Delaware River Basin Commission is an agency created by Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and the federal government in 1961. The state governors and an appointee of the president serve as commissioner and the agency has broad powers to manage and regulate the water resources of the Delaware River Basin on behalf of its members. It deals with such issues as water quality, wastewater treatment, water supplies, groundwater, water conservation, drought emergencies, flood control, reservoir releases, and river flow. The commission and its staff of more than forty are headquartered in Ewing Township.

The 2000 population of 4,478 was 98 percent white. Median household income in 2000 was $80,756.

Delaware Water Gap. The Delaware Water Gap is a spectacular gorge, about 1,100 feet deep. It was formed by the Delaware River eroding its bed into Kittatinny Ridge, which is part of the Valley and Ridge Physiographic Province. Visible for miles as a gap, it serves as a route through the Kittatinny Ridge for modern automobile traffic, as it did long ago for Lenape foot traffic. Today part of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, it has attracted sightseers and tourists for well over two hundred years.

Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Established in 1965, the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area flanks about forty miles of the Delaware River in Warren and Sussex counties. The park encompasses almost seventy thousand pristine acres, including a portion of the Appalachian Trail, the Flatbrook, all of Wal-pack Township, and the famous Delaware Water Gap in the Kittatinny Ridge. Most of the area was to be flooded in a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to erect a dam across the Delaware River near Tocks Island, initiating the controversial eviction of thousands of residents. Environmental concerns and political pressure prompted Congress to withdraw funding for the project in i975. Nevertheless, only a handful of residents remain.

Delbarton School. This boys’ college preparatory school is located in the hills of Morris County, adjacent to Jockey Hollow National Historic Park, on what was once the vacation estate of Luther Kountze. Established in i939 by the Benedictine monks of Saint Mary’s Abbey as a residential school for boys in grades seven through twelve, the school graduated its first class in i948. Today the school has a faculty of eighty and a student body of five hundred boys from diverse backgrounds. Although no longer a boarding school, it continues to maintain a Christian environment under the supervision of the Order of Saint

Delaware Township. 36.9-square-mile township in Hunterdon County. The earliest European settler was John Reading in 1704; he helped settle the town of Amwell in 1708. Original European settlers were English, German, and Dutch. Together with Raritan and Amwell townships, Delaware Township was created by a legislative act of 1838, which divided the original Amwell into three townships.

Delaware Township is bordered on the south and west by the Delaware River, the Delaware and Raritan Canal feeder built in 1834, and the Belvidere-Delaware Railroad built in 1851. Stockton, a commercial, quarrying, and manufacturing center, separated from Delaware in 1898. The first peach orchards were planted in Delaware in the 1850s, leading to a countywide peach industry that was wiped out in 1904 by the San Jose scale. Hatcheries were the next major agricultural industry, followed by dairy operations and creameries. Today farmers grow grain and painters, Paul-Henri-Georges DeLongpre was born in France in the city of Lyons. After a period of study with the famous French hor-ticulturalist M. Paillet at Chatenay, he began a successful career in Paris, where he exhibited in various venues including the Salons of 1877, 1879, and 1880. In 1890, after sailing to the United States, he lived for a short time in New York City, but soon was encouraged to move to Short Hills, New Jersey. There he found numerous nearby greenhouses filled with fine roses to serve as sources for his floral watercolors, which are marked by both an exuberance of design and a richness of color. In 1898, he and his family settled in Hollywood, California, where he built a Moorish-inspired home on a three-acre plot of land that he planted with several varieties of flowers. He has been referred to as an "artist-botanist" in the tradition of artist-naturalists such as John James Audubon. Today, his works are to be found in numerous public and private collections.

Delaware Water Gap.

Quakers who farmed the southern part of the township. The northern part, closest to the Delaware River, remained sparsely settled until the Camden and Amboy Railroad line was first built in the 1830s. Early settler John Hollins head operated a ferry across the Rancocas Creek as early as 1776. The earliest community was Bridgeboro, established along the creek, where one of the first bridges was erected in 1838. Delran also originally encompassed the now-independent township of Riverside. The community continued as mainly agrarian and residential until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when large-scale residential developments and apartment complexes began rising on former farmland along Route 130 and Haines Mill Road. The main commercial areas in the township include numerous retail centers along Route 130 and an industrial-commercial area on the Delaware River shore along River Road. Large-scale farming disappeared in the 1960s.

The 2000 population of 15,536 was 83 percent white and 9 percent black. The median household income was $58,526. For complete census figures, see chart, 131.

Old Main at Delbarton School, Morristown, c. 1997.

Paul DeLongpre, Flowers on a Ledge, n.d. Watercolor and gouache, 20 I/2 x 28 in.

Delran. 6.91-square-mile township in Burlington County. Located along the south bank of Rancocas Creek between the Delaware River and Moorestown, Delran was established as an independent township in 1880 after breaking off from neighboring Cinnaminson.

Demarest, David (b. 1620; d. Oct. 16, 1695). Pioneer. Born in Beauchamps, France, into a Huguenot family, David Demarest (originally des Marets) left France during religious upheavals and married Marie Sohier in Middelburg, the Netherlands, in 1643. They had seven children. The family immigrated to New Amsterdam in 1663. Demarest was a prominent citizen, supporter of the French Church, and magistrate under Dutch and English rule on Staten Island and in the village of Harlem. He led a group that in 1677 purchased the "French Patent" on the east bank of the Hackensack from the Tappan Indians with the assent of the proprietor, Sir George Carteret. Originally about two thousand acres, this land stretched from New Bridge east to the Palisades and several miles north along the Hackensack. The Demarests and other French Huguenot and Dutch families settled on this land as farmers, millers, and tradesmen. De-marest’s descendants played important roles in the Reformed Church and the Revolutionary War, and in economic development in Bergen County through the twentieth century. The Demarest House at Historic New Bridge Landing may date from the second or third generation on the Hackensack; it is owned by the Blauvelt Demarest Foundation, which supports educational, research, and restoration activities relating to Bergen County. Demarest, New Jersey, is named for a descendant.

Demarest. 2.7-square-mile borough in Bergen County. The name of Demarest dates from the 1667 homestead of David des Marets, a French settler who purchased land along the Hackensack River in present-day River Edge. David des Marets’s grandson Samuel established a home and gristmill within the present-day boundaries of Demarest. When the Northern Railroad of New Jersey arrived in 1859, the local stop was Demarest Station, named for Ralph Demarest, a director of the railroad, an assemblyman (1855-1856), and a state senator (1860-1862). A larger station, designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, was built in 1872 of stone quarried from the Palisades. Before the arrival of the railroad, Demarest had an agricultural economy. Afterward, the area boasted a distillery, an optical factory, a hotel, and a trotting track. Originally part of the township of Harrington, Demarest seceded in 1903 and organized as a borough. By then, the mills and factories had closed and the hotel had burned down. Residential development supplanted farming and many residents commuted to New York City.

In 2000 the population of 4,845 was 77 percent white and 20 percent Asian. The median household income in 2000 was $103,286. For complete census figures, see chart, 131.

Demography. In 2000, New Jersey’s population totaled 8,414,350 people, over four times greater than the 1.9 million persons of 1900. The growth has made New Jersey the most crowded state in America. New Jersey now ranks ninth among the fifty states in population size, but forty-sixth in land area (7,468 square miles). The resulting population density (1,127 people per square mile of land area) is the highest in America, a position the state has held since 1970. New Jersey is the only state with more than one thousand people per square mile, a level first reached in 1982. It is a density greater than India’s (872 people per square mile) and Japan’s (828 people per square mile).

But New Jersey is not a highly urban state; rather, it is a highly suburban one. At the start of the twentieth century, New Jersey’s population was concentrated in dense cities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, its population was concentrated in sprawling suburbs. In 2000, the "Big Six” cities of the state—Camden, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Newark, Paterson, and Trenton—accounted for only 11 percent of the state’s population, less than one-half of the level (25 percent) of 1950.

One hundred years ago New Jersey was a gateway for the immigration waves from Europe, which at the time brought new population diversity to the state. This historic role has been maintained into the twenty-first century. However, Hispanic and Asian immigrants have supplanted Europeans and yielded yet again a new diversity in New Jersey. In 2000, 17.8 percent of the state’s population was foreign born, the third highest among the states.

Between 1990 and 2000, New Jersey’s overall population increased by 8.9 percent. However, its white population grew by only 0.4 percent, while blacks (African Americans) grew by 10.1 percent, Hispanics by 51.0 percent, and Asians by 77.3 percent. In absolute terms, His-panics accounted for more than one-half of New Jersey’s population growth since 1990. Mexicans were the fastest growing Hispanic group (258 percent), while Asian Indians were the fastest growing Asian group (113 percent). Overall, this diversity is not just concentrated in urban areas, but has spread to suburbs throughout the state.

While this new diversity is changing the demographic tapestry of New Jersey, the state still reflects the European immigration of a century ago. The largest ancestry group in the state remains Italian (1,266,045 persons), followed by Irish (937,262 persons) and German (634,058 persons), according to the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey.

New Jersey’s population is extraordinarily affluent and well educated, reflecting the state’s leading-edge information-age economy. In 2000, New Jersey had the highest median household income in the nation ($55,146), with 21 percent of the state’s households having incomes above $100,000. Of the state’s adults, 31.1 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher (ranking fifth in the nation among the states), while 1.4 percent have doctorates (ranking third in the nation).

Dennis. 62.1-square-mile township in Cape May County. Settled by descendants of whaling families, Dennis Creek was an important shipping and shipbuilding center in the early nineteenth century. Ships sailed out of the creek loaded with wood and other cargo heading for Philadelphia. Shingle mining from the Great Cedar Swamp was a lucrative industry for early local residents. In the early 1800s local businessmen decided to build a causeway across the creek to connect the north and south sections of Dennis Creek and provide a vital link for commerce to the southern parts of the county, including Cold Spring and Cape Island. In 1826, the New Jersey State Assembly created Dennis Township from the southern portion of Upper Township, and the new township formally organized its government in March 1827, sending two representatives to the county’s Board of Chosen Freeholders. The first post office in the county was established in Dennis Creek in 1802, and in the late 1820s local residents lobbied, strongly but unsuccessfully, to have their community named as the county seat. Today it is a rural, residential area with only a few small, locally owned businesses, which provide limited job opportunities.

The 2000 population of 6,492 residents was 97 percent white. The median household income was $56,595.