Water To Wayne (New Jersey)

Water. Although New Jersey is one of the smaller states in the nation, it has an unusually complicated network of water supply systems. Enormous differences in ground and surface water availability in conjunction with 566 municipalities and the highest Hackensack Water Company (e.g., Woodcliff Lake in Bergen County in 1905), other governmental bodies such as the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission (e.g., Wanaque in Passaic County in 1927), and more recently by the state itself (e.g., Round Valley in Hunterdon County in 1966 and Manasquan in Monmouth County in 1990).

The delivery of water is handled by 616 community water systems using forty-five surface water intakes and more than 2,400 wells. These systems serve about 85 percent of the state’s population. The largest twenty of these systems serve about half the state’s population, which means that most of the remaining 596 systems are relatively small. A community water system is defined as a purveyor that serves at least twenty-five year-round residents or has fifteen or more service connections used by year-round residents.

There are 4,423 non-community water systems in New Jersey that serve nonresidential customers, such as schools, office buildings, and restaurants. Almost all (99.93 percent) of these noncommunity systems use groundwa-ter from 5,500 wells as their source. It is estimated that there are approximately 400,000 private wells in New Jersey that serve over one million people (about 15 percent of the total population).

The water purveyors are either municipalities (e.g., Ridgewood in Bergen County), municipal water utilities that are semi-autonomous (e.g., Washington Township in Morris County), or private companies (e.g., Elizabethtown Water Company). Most of the municipalities (242, or 43 percent) are total sinks, that is, they are totally dependent on imported water (e.g., Highland Park in Middlesex County). Another group of municipalities is partial sinks (73, or 13 percent) that have some supplies of their own but also need imported water (e.g., South Brunswick Township in Middlesex County). Another large group of municipalities (178, or 31 percent) are independent and have their own sources of water (e.g., Ridgewood in Bergen County). Still others (73, or 13 percent) meet all of their needs from domestic wells and have no public water infrastructure (e.g., Mullica Township in Atlantic County).

New Jersey’s per capita consumption of water, which includes residential, commercial, industrial, and public use (e.g., fire fighting), averages about 150 gallons per day. Per capita water use in New Jersey increased slightly from the 1960s but has leveled off in recent years.

New Jersey diverts an average of over one billion gallons of water per day, with surface water accounting for 62 percent and groundwater for the remaining 38 percent. The earliest major reservoirs in the state were constructed by the cities of Newark (e.g., Oak Ridge in Passaic County during 1880-1892) and Jersey City (e.g., Boonton in Morris County in 1904), private water purveyors such as the population density in the United States result in a bewildering mosaic of public-private, groundwater-surface water, and source-sink mix of water supply purveyors and interconnections.

Waterbird Society. Originally incorporated in New Jersey as the Colonial Water-bird Group, this international ornithological society became the Colonial Waterbird Society and in 1999 the Waterbird Society. It is composed of persons interested in the biology, conservation, and management of aquatic birds throughout the world. It promotes scientific investigations into the ecology and behavior of waterbirds, particularly in developing nations, and emphasizes the use of sound scientific principles in their conservation. It has published a peer-reviewed scientific journal Waterbirds (formerly Colonial Waterbirds) since 1977.

Waterford. 36.2-square-mile township in lower Camden County. Boundaries have been altered and other municipalities formed since its original founding in 1695, but currently Waterford is the county’s second largest municipality in area. At one time it included all the lands between the Cooper River and the Pennsauken Creek, from the Delaware River to the current Atlantic County boundary. The township originated with the Waterford Glass Works, established circa 1822 by Jonathan Haines. In 1863 two factories produced window glass and a third manufactured hollowware. The industry faded, and by 1900 a fruit farm existed on the site. Atco, the largest district in the township, was laid out and development begun twelve years after the Camden and Atlantic City Railroad came through town in 1854. Atco had its origins in the Jackson Glass Works, established by Thomas H. Richards in 1827 and closed in 1876. At its height, the company, named for Andrew Jackson, provided glass for the walls and dome of the Crystal Palace at the 1851 World’s Fair in London.

Waterford had its peak growth in the 1970s, and is today largely residential and semi-rural. The 2000 population of 10,494 was 93 percent white. The median household income was $59,075.

Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. Port Newark-Elizabeth and the Hudson County waterfront are included within the Port of New York, legally defined as the 1,500-square-mile port district lying within a twenty-five-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty. The port district was traditionally the site of extensive criminal activity, most obviously the pilferage of cargoes by longshoremen. Malachy McCourt’s memoirs recalled that a shipment of alcohol resulted in "a day of accidents involving forklifts being drunkenly driven over the side of the pier, men falling into holds, fisticuffs, arguments, and much simple rejoicing.” Less obvious, but more lucrative, forms of corruption included hiring bosses’ demands for kickbacks from the workers’ wages, and labor leaders’ extortion of funds from shipping lines in exchange for preventing wildcat strikes and work slowdowns. Organized crime figures infiltrated, and eventually headed, most of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) locals, using threats, violence, and murder to intimidate critics.

In 1951 a series of articles in the New York Sun (which formed the basis for Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront) detailed waterfront corruption and prompted New York governor Thomas E. Dewey to create a New York Crime Commission to investigate the waterfront’s connections with organized crime. The commission’s well-publicized hearings led to the enactment of laws in New York and New Jersey in 1953 which created the bistate Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor to monitor, license, and regulate various waterfront activities.

The agency is headed by two commissioners, appointed by the governors of New York and New Jersey (with the advice and consent of their respective state senates) for three-year terms, while its day-to-day operations are run by a permanent executive director. The commission has a staff of over ninety employees, and its headquarters are located in New York City. The commission’s budget is funded by assessments on waterfront employers.

The commission initially focused on reforming waterfront hiring practices and removing criminals from waterfront jobs and union offices. It set up a system of centralized hiring halls, which eliminated many arbitrary powers of the hiring bosses. Mandatory registration of longshoremen and watchmen, and an ongoing series of commission investigations, helped to identify convicted criminals and remove them from the workforce and from official union positions.

The legislators creating the commission expected it to be a temporary agency, which would be abolished once it had cleaned up the waterfront. The longstanding connections between criminals and the waterfront, however, proved to be more durable than anticipated and, in 1986, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime reported that the ILA was still "virtually a synonym for organized crime in the labor movement.” Criminals removed from the longshoremen’s union relocated into nonlicensed jobs (such as trucking or lighterage) on the fringes of the waterfront. Although outright extortion of shipping lines apparently decreased, some ILA leaders developed sophisticated schemes of rigging payrolls and defrauding union medical and welfare plans. In response, the commission became a permanent agency whose activities are occasionally supplemented by criminal investigations and prosecutions initiated by other state and federal enforcement officials.

Waterloo Village. For more than twelve thousand years, the area of Waterloo in Byram Township, Sussex County, was home to Lenape Indians and their ancestors, until eighteenth-century European settlers pushed them westward. The discovery of iron ore led to the construction of an iron forge in 1760 in what is now the village of Waterloo. During the Revolutionary War the forge was confiscated from its Loyalist owners by the state’s Board of War. The village’s heyday came during the canal era. The Morris Canal, opened in 1831, ran through the small village, bringing commerce and prosperity. By the twentieth century, the canal had been dismantled, and Waterloo was quiet and sparsely populated.

After World War II, Percival H. E. Leach and Louis Gualandi initiated a gradual and ongoing restoration of Waterloo. The historic village was opened to the public in 1964 and later listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Today Waterloo operates as a tourist attraction and receives thousands of visitors each year. Its historic features include the restored canal town, a re-created Lenape Indian village, and a farm site with a restored log cabin, as well as artisans demonstrating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trades and crafts. Waterloo’s annual calendar offers a host of special events, festivals, and concerts.

Waters, Susan Catherine (b. May 18, 1823; d. July 7, 1900). Painter. Born in Binghamton, New York, Susan Catherine Waters was one of the six children of Lark Moore, a farmer and cooper, and his wife, Sally. After the family moved to Friendsville, Pennsylvania, Susan attended a girls’ seminary with her only sister, Amelia, where she reportedly paid their tuition by painting natural history specimens. She was largely self-taught; there appears to be no record of any formal artistic training.

On June 27, 1841, Susan married William Church Waters, who encouraged her talent as an itinerant portrait painter. For several years, she painted in New York State and in Pennsylvania, but with the continuing declining health of William, the couple turned to the production of ambrotypes and daguerreotypes to make a basic living.

Susan C. Waters, Mischief, c. 1870. Oil on canvas, 26 1/2 x 211/2 in. 

In 1852, the Waterses moved to Borden-town, New Jersey, but soon left for Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and subsequently for Friends-ville, Pennsylvania. In 1866, they again settled in Bordentown, where Susan established a studio on Mary Street. There she became a successful still-life and animal painter, sometimes combining the two genres, as in Mischief (c. 1870), a work depicting squirrels eating a nearby still life of potted plants. Her favorite animal subjects, however, were sheep, and she kept several in a pen behind her house for sketching purposes. Bordentown was known for its strong Quaker ties, and so she was able to nourish her devotion to spiritualism and religion there. In addition, she became interested in feminist issues, particularly woman suffrage. Painting, however, remained her major occupation and pastime, and she is reported to have exhibited and sold at least two works at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

After William’s death in 1893, Susan remained in Bordentown. By 1899, in failing health, she moved to a Quaker nursing home in Trenton, where she died on July 7,1900.

Watson, John (b. July 28, 1685; d. Aug. 22, 1768). Painter. John Watson was born in Scotland, probably near Dumfries. He began as a house painter before turning to portraiture.

By 1714 he had settled in Perth Amboy. His works, both oils and plumb ago drawings, include portraits of William Burnet and Lewis Morris (1726), both colonial governors of New Jersey. Watson was also a merchant, moneylender, and real estate speculator, acquiring extensive property in Perth Amboy. In 1730, he visited Scotland and returned with a collection of paintings that he exhibited in a gallery at his house. Watson never married. He died in Perth Amboy and is buried at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church.

Watts, Robert (b. June 14, 1923; d. Sept. 2, 1988). Artist. Born in Burlington, Iowa, Robert Watts was hired in 1952 to teach engineering at Rutgers College in New Brunswick, and the following year transferred to the Art Department at Douglass College, the associated women’s school. Influenced by radical preaching of Allan Kaprow in the Rutgers Art Department and his experience sitting in on John Cage’s music composition course at the New School for Social Research in New York, Watts abandoned his conservative abstract expressionist style by the late 1950s and began making environmental art, kinetic art, and mixed-media assemblages, which often included electrical components. His use of popular imagery anticipated the Pop art movement of 1962. By i960, he produced his first art stamps; he became known as the "Father of Stamp Art.” Working closely with George Brecht, he played a key role in the evolution of conceptual art, and alongside Brecht, he made Event Cards and Performances and conceived the May i963 Yam Festival, a month-long event that took place in both New York City and New Brunswick. Like Brecht, Watts was a seminal force in molding Fluxus art (an art movement founded by George Maciunas in i962 and dedicated to deemphasizing art as a fine object and making it more conceptual and a function of everyday living).

Waugh, Frederick Judd (b. Sept. 13, 1861; d. Sept. 10, 1940). Painter. Frederick J. Waugh was born in Bordentown, the son of Samuel Bell Waugh, an artist, and Mary Elizabeth Young Waugh, a miniaturist. He received his first artistic training from his father. In i880, he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, studying with Thomas Eakins. He continued his studies at the Academie Julian in Paris in i883. Waugh returned to Philadelphia and began painting portraits and doing commercial work. In i892 he married Clara Eugenie Bunn, with whom he had two children, and returned to Europe. From 1899 to 1902 Waugh did illustrations of the Boer War for The Graphic in London.

Waugh is most famous for his strong seascapes depicting powerful waves crashing on a rocky coast. Returning to America in 1907, he stayed in Elizabeth, New Jersey, while working in his New York City studio on one of his most acclaimed pieces, Roaring Forties, which depicts the raging sea in the mid-Atlantic. In i908, he moved to Montclair, taking the studio previously owned by George Inness, Jr. He summered along the Maine coast and returned to Montclair to paint seascapes, working both from memory and sketches done on site. During World War I he worked on camouflage painting for the U.S. Navy. In 1915, Waugh moved to Connecticut and, eventually, to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he died.

Wawayanda State Park. Located in northeast Sussex County and western Pas-saic County along the New York State border, the Wawayanda State Park encompasses 17,541 acres surrounding 255-acre Lake Wawayanda. A twenty-mile-long section of the famous Appalachian Trail cuts through the mountainous territory. The park was purchased with state Green Acres funds and opened to the public in i963. Situated on the northern shore of Wawayanda Lake are the remains of a blast furnace used in the nineteenth-century iron-smelting town of Double Pond. Much of the area’s timber was harvested during the 1940s by the New Jersey Zinc Company, and Wawayanda is crisscrossed by former logging roads.

Wayne. 23.82-square-mile township in Passaic County, incorporated in February 1847, and named for Gen. Anthony Wayne. Originally within Essex County, Wayne later became part of Bergen County’s Saddle River Township. When Passaic County was formed, Wayne was part of Manchester.

American Indian artifacts found within Wayne date from the last ice age to European contact. Wayne’s first European settlements were established along the Pompton River and Singac Brook during the late 1690s and early 1700s. The Dey Mansion served as Gen. George Washington’s headquarters in 1780; it is now a museum. In the 1800s, Wayne’s now-defunct heavy industries, brickmaking and explosives manufacturing, developed near the Pompton River where the Morris Canal, Pompton Feeder Canal, Newark-Pompton Turnpike, Montclair and Greenwood Lake Railroad, and Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad all converged. Until the 1950s and 1960s the town was predominantly agricultural.

In 1990, 88 percent of land use was residential, and 13 percent of total land area was parkland. There are small manufacturing, warehousing, and office clusters, but no defined downtown area. Institutions include William Paterson University, three hospitals, three colonial-era house museums, and thirteen public schools. Government is by mayor and nine-member council. In 2000 the population of 54,069 was 90 percent white. The median household income was $83,651.