Maplewood. 3.85-square-mile township in Essex County. The arrival of the railroad in 1837 ended the isolation of hillside farms first settled in the early 1700s six miles from Newark. The community that would be named for the maple trees near its first train station saw its citizens follow the rails to nearby cities, and its future as a commuter town was established. Once part of Orange, then incorporated with South Orange for sixty-one years, present-day Maplewood was created in 1922 from Jefferson Village and Middleville (Hilton). Thirty founding families built most of the dwellings that survive from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the majority of the houses date from the decade of the 1920s, when the population grew from 5,000 to about 20,000. Today, they attract young families nostalgic for an authentic suburban environment of shade trees, front porches, and sidewalks, just a train ride from New York City. Illustrious past citizens included landscape painter Asher B. Durand, inventor Seth Boyden, and Theodore Roosevelt, who summered as a child at a cousin’s hillside estate. In 2000, the population of 23,868 was 59 percent white and 33 percent black. The median household income was $79,637 in 2000.
Maplewood’s first automobile was a 1907 White Model G steam touring car.
Marcal Paper Mills. Founded in Elm-wood Park by Nicholas Marcalus in 1932, the family-owned business reaped the benefits of recycling discarded paper from industry and households to process and resell as finished tissue products. Marcal’s innovative "harvesting” strategy served the company well during economic upheavals. In 1970, Robert Marcalus succeeded his father as president. Currently chairman of Marcal, Robert was succeeded by his son, Nicholas Marcalus, as president and CEO. Marcal currently employs more than eleven hundred people between its New Jersey and Chicago facilities and sells more than 140,000 tons of tissue products, principally in the eastern United States.
Marciante, Charles H. (b.July 17,1930). Labor leader. Charles H. Marciante is the son of Louis P. Marciante, president of the New Jersey State American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1934 to 1961. Born in Trenton, Charles completed a bachelor’s degree in history and political science at Rutgers University, in 1952. After briefly considering law school, he entered an apprenticeship program and became an electrician and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local 269, Trenton. During the 1950s, Marciante was a delegate to the Mercer County Labor Council. In 1961 he became secretary-treasurer of the newly formed New Jersey State AFL-CIO, and was elected president of this labor organization in 1969. As president, Marciante was instrumental in the formation of the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC), in the establishment of fair compensation benefits for workers injured on the job, and in the passage of safety legislation. Marciante retired from the presidency in 1997.
Marciante, Louis P. (b. Oct. 8, 1898; d. Mar. 30, 1961). Labor leader. Louis P. Marciante left school at age fifteen to become an electrical worker’s apprentice. He joined Local 269 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), AFL in Trenton. In 1917 he was elected business agent and then served successfully in all positions in the local. During World War I, Marciante enlisted in the Marine Corps. After he was discharged, he returned to Trenton and was elected secretary-treasurer of the Mercer County Building Trades Council. In 1932 Marciante was elected to the executive board of the New Jersey State AFL. In 1933 he was elected president of the County Central Trades Council, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the regional labor board. He was elected president of the New Jersey State AFL in 1934. In 1936 he became a member of the Board of Education in Trenton; however, the pressure of his duties as president of the New Jersey State AFL forced him to resign from the board in 1948. As a labor official, he exerted strong influence in Democratic politics and frequently was allied with the organization of Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City in state campaigns.
Marconi Station. A wireless telegraph (radio) transmitter facility built and operated by the American Marconi Wireless Corporation, the Marconi Station was located in Franklin Township (at JFK Boulevard and Easton Avenue, the present site of Marconi Park), and was generally referred to as the New Brunswick Station. Taken over by the U.S. Navy during World War I, the station served as the principal wartime communication link between the United States and Europe. President Woodrow Wilson’s "Fourteen Points” speech was transmitted from the site in 1918. After the war, ownership of the station (and Marconi’s other American assets) was transferred by the navy to RCA. The antenna masts were demolished in 1952.
Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital. Mayor Frank Hague conceived the Medical Center complex in Jersey City with a separate building devoted exclusively to maternity care, named in memory of Hague’s mother. The neoclassical structure was designed by the architect Christian H. Zeigler and constructed between 1928 and 1931. Designed to serve all of Hudson County, at its zenith it was the largest obstetric unit in the United States. The hospital’s first and last babies, both boys, were born on October 15, 1931, and July 28, 1979. Closed in 1979, Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital is currently in a state of decay, having been relinquished by the city to the county.
Margate. 1.4-square-mile-coastal city in Atlantic County. Founded in 1897, the city is named after Margate, England. It was founded around the same time as Longport (1898) and Ventnor (1903) as the population of adjacent Atlantic City grew in the late nineteenth century. The three communities share Absecon Island with Atlantic City. The area was formerly known as South Atlantic City and was little more than a desolate area of sand dunes, bayberry bushes, pine trees, and a handful of buildings. The city and Longport both began to be developed in 1882, when Longport promoters ran a special excursion train from Philadelphia and transported prospective customers to the sand dunes in carriages. In an effort to attract potential real estate buyers, James V. Lafferty in 1881 built Lucy, the wooden elephant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. During the twentieth century, Margate emerged as a prime vacation spot along the Shore, a distinction it retains today. The city also has become a bedroom community for people who work in the Atlantic City casinos, though its citizens have resisted any annexation attempts by this northern neighbor. Margate’s population in 2000 of 8,193 was 96 percent white. Margate’s median household income was $45,876 in 2000.
Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf. On March 31, 1882, the New Jersey legislature provided funding for a school on Hamilton and Chestnut avenues in Trenton that would provide instruction and maintenance for deaf mutes and would be known as the State Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. The school’s name changed in 1900 to the New Jersey School for the Deaf (NJSD). In 1917 the state purchased the Scudder Farm in West Trenton, and began construction of a new residential school for the deaf on Sullivan Way and Lower Ferry Road. The primary, middle, and upper units opened over several years, from 1923 to 1926. The school’s name changed again in 1965 to the Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf (MKSD), in honor of the forty-three years Mrs. Katzenbach served on the state board of education as a friend of and advocate for the deaf in New Jersey. With the establishment of a program for the handicapped in 1979, MKSD expanded its educational mandate to include hearing-impaired individuals with multiple handicaps. MKSD provides educational services to hearing-impaired individuals from birth through age twenty-one and is a major resource center on deafness.
Marin, John (b. Dec. 23, 1870; d. Oct. 1, 1953). Painter. One of America’s earliest and finest twentieth-century modernists, John Marin was born in Rutherford to John Cheri Marin and Annie Louise Currey. His mother died a few days after his birth, and Marin was raised in Weehawken by his grandparents and maiden aunts. He attended school in nearby Hoboken, first at Hoboken Academy and then at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He became a freelance architect, designing houses in New Jersey in the 1890s, but at the age of twenty-eight he turned to painting. From 1899 to 1901, Marin took classes with Thomas Anschutz and William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he won a prize for his Weehawken sketches.
Between 1902 and 1903 he studied at the Art Students League in New York, and from 1905 to 1910 he traveled extensively in Europe and exhibited his work at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, among other venues. Four years later, after meeting the well-known photographer and art dealer Alfred Steiglitz, he exhibited at Steiglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York. In 1910, Steiglitz mounted the first of several one-man shows of Marin’s paintings, and until his own death in 1946 served as Marin’s agent, patron, and dealer. In 1913 Marin participated with other early modernists in the landmark Armory Show in New York. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1942, and to associate membership in the National Academy of Design in 1944.
In 1912 Marin married Marie Jane Hughes, and two years later, the couple’s first and only child, John Currey Marin, Jr., was born. Beginning in 1920 the family lived in Cliffside Park, but spent their summers elsewhere. An initial trip to Maine in 1914 inspired Marin’s many paintings related to the natural environment of that state and of the surrounding New England landscape. In 1929 and 1930 he visited and painted in Taos, New Mexico, but by 1934 the family returned to Maine, where they bought a summer home at Cape Split.
Marin’s dominant themes include the city and nature; he often created several variations on the same motif—mainly through the medium of watercolor. The use of planes, lines, and dynamic as well as syncopated movement made his New York landmarks, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Wool-worth Building, pulsate with the excitement of the big city. His New Jersey scenes, such as Eastern Boulevard, Weehawken, New Jersey (1925) also convey his vibrant style. His expressive outdoor studies, filled with texture and light effects, evoke nature itself.
Marin died at Cape Split on October 1,1953, at the age of eighty-two. Retrospective exhibitions continue to be held in his honor, and today his work is found in important public and private collections throughout the United States.
Fine, Ruth E. John Marin. New York: Abbeville Press, 1990.
Marinas. New Jersey is home to hundreds of marinas, public and private, freshwater and saltwater. With 127 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline, the state is a saltwater boating and fishing mecca. Vessels can be bought, leased, stored, and maintained at marinas all along the coast.
There are more than four thousand lakes, ponds, rivers, and reservoirs sprinkled throughout the inland sections of the state, and marinas can be found on most of the larger ones.
New Jersey’s saltwater fishing attracts more than nine hundred thousand anglers each year, and party boats that offer deep-sea excursions can be found at numerous seaside marinas.
The state owns five public marinas and operates four. One state-owned facility, Liberty Landing Marina at Liberty State Park, is leased to a private company. Still being developed, Liberty Landing features two hundred berths that allow boats up to fifty feet long and eighteen feet wide. The marina is slated to include additional berths and dockside facilities, restaurants, marine-related shops, and a 250-boat storage building.
Leonardo State Marina is on the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Sandy Hook and east of the Earle Naval Pier. It is the closest marina to the Sandy Hook entrance. The marina can handle 179 vessels up to forty-five feet long and six feet in draft.
Forked River State Marina is on the north branch of Forked River and is accessible from Barnegat Bay. It accepts 125 boats up to fifty feet in length and six feet in draft.
Senator Frank S. Farley State Marina is on Clam Creek in Atlantic City, a short distance from the Atlantic Ocean via Absecon Inlet, or the Intracoastal Waterway. The marina has berths for 640 boats and can handle vessels up to three hundred feet long and twelve feet wide.
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Fortescue State Marina is on the Delaware Bay approximately twenty-three miles northwest of Cape May. It holds 125 boats up to fifty feet long and nine feet wide.
Marine Mammal Stranding Center. Established in 1978 by Robert Schoelkopf and Sheila Dean, this not-for-profit, private institute in Brigantine comes to the aid of beached and injured whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and other animals—the only agency in the state legally authorized to do so. The Marine Mammal Stranding Center rescues more than one hundred animals each year, with injured animals of a manageable size rehabilitated at the center and later, when well, released into the ocean or found a permanent home in an aquarium. Also on the premises is the Sea Life Education Center, a museum.
Marl. Marl is a mottled marine clay or shale often containing lime in the form of fossil shells. Greensand marl is a special type of marl primarily composed of the clay mineral glauconite. The mining of greensand marl was a common industry in southern New Jersey in the nineteenth century, when marl was used as a soil conditioner. Greensand marl contains the plant nutrient potash (potassium), along with some trace amounts of phosphate. It was regarded as being good for the long-term productivity of farm soil. During the zenith of the marl mining industry, numerous important fossil specimens were found in the marl pits of New Jersey’s Inner Coastal Plain.
Marlboro. 30.2-square-mile township located in the northwestern part of Monmouth County. Its name is derived from the discovery of marl (a natural fertilizer beneficial for agriculture) underlying most of the area in 1768. The first European settlers were Scots Quakers and Presbyterians who began to arrive after 1685. They were followed by English and Dutch settlers in the 1690s. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries immigrants began to come from Ireland and Italy. Currently, there is an influx of people from Asia.
From its first settlement until it was given independent township status by the state legislature on February 17, 1848, Marlboro had been part of Freehold Township. The township operated under a committee type of government until 1962 when, by a vote of its residents, Marlboro adopted a mayor-council type of government, under which it still operates. In 2000 Marlboro made history by being the first township in the state to pass an ordinance barring the use of hand-held cell phones while driving.
After World War II Marlboro began to change from a predominantly agricultural community to a suburban residential town of mostly single-family homes. Most of the town’s growth occurred after 1950. The 2000 census reported a population of 36,398 that was 84 percent white and 13 percent Asian. In 2000, the median household income was $101,322.
Marlboro State Psychiatric Hospital. Marlboro State Psychiatric Hospital opened in 1931 in Monmouth County to relieve crowding in existing state and county psychiatric facilities. Unlike Trenton State (1848) and Greystone Park (1876), with their imposing central buildings, Marlboro was built on the cottage plan, with smaller, freestanding dormitories and treatment buildings. In 1940, a specialized children’s unit was opened at Marlboro; in 1946, the care of emotionally disturbed children was transferred to the new Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center. Overcrowding, understaffing, and under-financing plagued the state’s psychiatric hospitals, particularly Marlboro. In the 1980s, the Mental Health Association of Monmouth County found disturbing deficiencies and the need for large-scale capital improvements. A state commission uncovered lax supervision, fraud, theft, and other abuses by hospital administration and staff. Between 1995 and 1998, the State Mental Health Redirection Plan restructured the state’s mental health system, expanded community mental health services, and planned for the closing of Marlboro. Funds previously used to operate Marlboro were channeled directly into the state mental health system. Despite protests from surrounding communities and patient advocates concerned about continuing care and other issues, Marlboro’s approximately eight hundred residents were relocated to other hospitals and to a variety of community programs. Marlboro closed its doors in 1998.
Marlpit Hall. Previously known as the Edward Taylor House, this eighteenth-century home in Middletown was built in two sections that have undergone extensive alterations through the years. The main section is believed to have been built in the 1750s for the Loyalist merchant and politician John Taylor. New Jersey Assemblyman Edward Taylor bought the house in 1771, and it remained in the Taylor family until 1930. In 1919 the house was moved fifty feet east to make way for the construction of Kings Highway. Marlpit Hall was the first of four historic house museums to be acquired and operated by the Monmouth County Historical Association. The restored house was presented to the association in June 1936 by Margaret Haskell, a major collector of American antiques. In 1993 the association began a restoration of Marlpit Hall, which was completed in 2001.
Marquand Park. A seventeen-acre park and arboretum located in Princeton, Marquand Park contains two hundred species of trees, eleven of them the largest of their kind in New Jersey. Judge Richard Field was responsible for the park’s creation, purchasing thirty acres of farmland in 1842. Field hired the famous English gardener, Petrey, and together, they brought trees from surrounding areas, the larger United States, and abroad. In 1871 Susan Brown became owner of the property and expanded the arboretum, as did Allan Marquand, a Princeton professor, in 1885. In 1953 seventeen acres were given to the Borough of Princeton for public use.
Marsh, Reginald (b. Mar. 14, 1898; d. July 3,1954). Painter and illustrator. Reginald Marsh was born in Paris to two independently wealthy American artists, Fredrick Dana Marsh, a notable mural painter, and Alice Randall Marsh, a painter of miniatures. Coming to the United States as a two-year-old, his privileged, art-saturated childhood was spent in Nutley after his parents took over the studio of the portraitist Frank Fowler. While attending Lawrenceville School, he was a drummer in the school band, wrote poems, and illustrated his Class of 1915 yearbook. Marsh left New Jersey to attend Yale University, where he illustrated the Yale Record. After graduating in 1920, Marsh became staff illustrator for Vanity Fair magazine and New York’s Daily News. He studied painting at the Art Students League under leading American realists Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan, and George Luks. In 1923, he married fellow art student Betty Burroughs, whose father was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They had one child, Caleb, in 1932.
Merging his tradition-steeped academic training with its devotion to the old masters and his growing fascination with Greenwich Village bohemia, Marsh would create lively portraits of New York’s hustling crowds and independent women, particularly at places of entertainment such as Coney Island and burlesque houses. After New York banned burlesque, Marsh would visit Union City’s Hudson Burlesk Theatre, where he sketched and in the process immortalized New Jersey’s bygone enjoyments. In Newark Museum’s Hudson Burlesk Chorus (1950), the primacy of line is shown through Marsh’s use of Chinese ink on paper, which in 1943 was a new medium for him. Working most often with egg tempura or watercolor, Marsh produced few oil paintings. Drawing remained the most important element in his art, as he wanted to capture the substance of life. In 1928 he acquired a studio on Fourteenth Street and learned print-making. By 1930 his reputation grew large, and he survived the ensuing years of the Depression in relative comfort as he made the unemployed and derelicts around the Bowery subjects of his art.
Divorcing Betty in 1933, Marsh married painter Felicia Meyer in 1934. Like his father, in 1936 he executed two mural panels for the Federal Building in Washington, D.C. In 1937 he painted sixteen dry-plaster ceiling panels in the great hall of architect Cass Gilbert’s Custom House in New York City. His fascination with anatomy led him to study dissection at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Marsh began to teach at the Art Students League in 1935, became a wartime artist-correspondent during World War II, and from 1949 taught in the Painting Department at the Moore Institute of Art and Industry in Philadelphia.
Reginald Marsh, Hudson Burlesque Chorus, 1950. Chinese ink drawing on paper, 22 x 30 1/2 in.
Reginald Marsh died in Dorset, Vermont. In 1955, one year after his death, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a major retrospective. He recorded his daily events with such consistency that upon his death, over two hundred notebooks were found. They are now housed at the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.
