Blakelock, Ralph Albert (b. Oct. 15,1847; d. Aug. 9, 1919). Painter. Ralph Albert Blakelock was born to Caroline Olinarg Carry and Dr. Ralph B. Blakelock, a homeopathic physician, in New York City, where he attended the public schools. In 1863 he enrolled at the Free Academy of the City of New York, but withdrew after only three years. On February 22, 1875, he married Cora Rebecca Bailey, with whom he had nine children. For much of their lives, the family lived in various towns outside of Newark.
A sense of mysticism characterizes Blakelock’s work, especially his moonlit images painted mostly in the 1880s, which emphasize mood rather than the specifics of the landscape he depicts. In these landscapes, the details become obscured by the heavy application of paint, and the moon provides a sense of pulsating light, creating a supernatural world. Native Americans, whom he encountered during his various trips to the West, often inhabit this mystical world. Feeling a personal sympathy toward them, seeing them as a vanishing race, he often depicted them as if they were receding into the background.
Beginning in the early 1890s, Blakelock spent time in and out of asylums and eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He died in the Adirondacks in 1919.
Blauvelt House and Art Museum.An outstanding example of late nineteenth-century domestic architecture, the imposing Shingle style Atwood-Blauvelt mansion (1893) and its carriage house were built for Kimball C. Atwood, a New York businessman; Freed W. Wentworth was the architect. The house, on a slope west of Kinderkamack Road in Oradell, has exceptional views over the Hackensack to the Palisades beyond. Purchased in 1923 by Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Blauvelt and christened Bluefield (the English translation of the Dutch family name), it was bequeathed by Hiram Bellis Demarest Blauvelt to the Blauvelt Demarest Foundation. The foundation carried out a sensitive renovation of the carriage house, which is now the Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum, a leading center for wildlife art.
Blish, James (b. May 23, 1921; d. July 30, 1975). Science fiction writer and critic. Born in East Orange, Blish graduated from Rutgers University and studied zoology at Columbia University. While still a student, he published work in pulp magazines and developed a distinctively literary style. Blish was among the first to employ ideas from biology in science fiction and to apply principles of literary criticism to the field. Several of his works, such as A Case of Conscience (1958), "Surface Tension” (1952), and the Cities in Flight tetralogy, have achieved classic status. Author of more than thirty books, Blish gained popular renown only after he wrote novelizations of the Star Trek television episodes. He died in Harpsden, England.
Block Drug Company. started by Alexander Block as a small drugstore in Jersey City in 1907, this company became a drug wholesaler in 1915 and a drug manufacturer by 1925. In the 1930s the company made a number of acquisitions, including Pycopay toothbrushes and Romilar cough syrup, and developed a dental powder, the first Polident product. Polident denture cleanser and its offshoots, such as Smokers’ Polident, are among Block’s major sellers. The company produces a number of denture adhesives—including Poli-Grip and Super Poli-Grip—as well as the many varieties of Sensodyne toothpaste. Block Drug incorporated in 1970 and went public in 1971.
In 1981 Block acquired some of the assets of Mynol, which supplied dentists with gutta-percha, a latex substance usedin dental procedures. Block is now a leader in selling such professional items as dental instruments, X-ray film mounts, and sterilization systems directly to dentists. The acquisition of Flushco brought Block into the toilet cleanser industry, where it achieved a substantial portion of the market with the 2000 Flushes family of products, including 2000 Flushes Blue and 2000 Flushes Powder Foam. Block is also known for therapeutic shampoos such as Tegrin and Kwell as well as a range of dermatological products. In 2001 Block Drug was a $850 million company. GlaxoSmithKline acquired Block in January 2001.
Bloomfield, Joseph (b. Oct. 18, 1753; d. Oct. 3, 1823). Governor, politician, military officer, and lawyer. Born in Woodbridge to Sarah Ogden and Moses Bloomfield, Joseph Bloomfield was educated at the Rev. Enoch Green’s classical school in Deerfield and later studied law with Cortland T. Skinner, colonial attorney general in Perth Amboy. Just as he started practice as an attorney in Bridgeton in 1775 the Revolution broke out, and in February 1776 he obtained a commission as a captain in the New Jersey militia. He was stationed in New York’s Mohawk Valley and Fort Ticonderoga and saw action at Brandywine and Monmouth. Bloomfield was promoted to major and then judge advocate of the Army of the North. Illness forced his resignation in 1778, and in December of that year he married Mary McIlvane.
In 1783 he was elected attorney general of New Jersey, reelected in 1788, and resigned in 1792. In 1794 he commanded a brigade to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. Initially a Federalist, he became a Republican in the late 1790s out of opposition to the foreign and domestic policies of President John Adams.
Elected governor in 1801, he cemented Republican domination of New Jersey politics during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Bloomfield pushed for the passage of legislation in 1804 for the gradual abolition of slavery. Except during the deadlocked 1802 legislature, Bloomfield was reelected as governor until June 1812, when he resigned to become a brigadier general in the War of 1812.
After the war, he ran for Congress in 1816 and won a second term in 1818 before retiring in March 1821. While in Congress he led a campaign for benefits for Revolutionary War veterans. His first wife died in 1818, and he married Isabella Macomb in 1820. Three years later Bloomfield died in Burlington from injuries sustained in a carriage accident.
Bloomfield. 5.4-square-mile township in Essex County. European immigrants first settled the area in 1666 as Wardesson, one of the three wards of Newark. The waterpower provided by the Second River, Third River, and Toney’s Brook attracted settlers who built sawmills, gristmills, and later paper mills and tanneries. In addition, large deposits of sandstone led to quarry operations that provided building material for New York City brown-stones as early as 1765. The Revolutionary War affected the area mostly through foraging raids by British and Hessian troops. After the war the town was renamed for Revolutionary War general Joseph Bloomfield.
A major textile industry expansion centered on the production of cottons and fine woolens followed incorporation in 1812. Current industrial operations produce aluminum aerosol cans, collapsible tubes, flags, and pet supplies. In addition to the historic green, used as a parade and military training ground since 1775 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978, there are extensive outdoor recreation areas, including 70 acres of municipal parks, 140 acres of county parks, and three private golf courses.
In 2000, the population of 47,683 was 70 percent white, 8 percent Asian, 12 percent black, and 14 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median household income in 2000 was $53,289. For complete census figures, see chart, 130.
Bloomfield College. Throughout its history, Bloomfield College has focused, and refocused, its mission on students who were not from the American mainstream.
The college began in Bloomfield in 1872 as the German Theological School. Its mission was to train German immigrants for the Presbyterian ministry. Two of the initial four faculty taught in German, the others in English. When the number of German students declined, the college accepted other immigrants, especially Hungarians, and in 1913 became the Bloomfield Theological Seminary. When the seminary itself began to decline, the institution redefined itself as Bloomfield College and Seminary in 1931, then Bloomfield College in 1961.
Lacking a large endowment, the college periodically suffered financial crises. In 1973, claiming financial exigency, President Merle Allshouse abolished tenure. The faculty formed a union, which took the college to court and won. Forced to reestablish tenure, Allshouse declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The college overcame the crisis of the 1970s as it had overcome crises in the 1870s, 1930s, and 1950s.
Today the college is a four-year, private institution, enrolling approximately two thousand students, with a nonwhite majority and representing more than fifty nationalities. Under President John Noonan, Bloomfield College rediscovered its urban mission, winning national recognition in the 1990s for its embrace of diversity.
Taylor, Harry T. Bloomfield College: The First Century, 1868-1968. Bloomfield: Bloomfield College, 1970.
Bloomingdale. 8.8-square-mile borough on the north side of the Pequannock River in central Passaic County. Bloomingdale was set off from Pompton Township as a separate borough in 1918. Bloomingdale Furnace, built here circa 1765, relied on waterpower from the Pequannock. It was followed by Ryerson’s Forge, as well as a gristmill and a sawmill, which operated into the nineteenth century. In the winter of 1781, Continental troops quartered here protested their conditions in the Pompton Mutiny. In the nineteenth century the village continued to rely on industry, with paper, wood, and rubber mills operating through the early twentieth century. The New Jersey Midland Railroad arrived in 1871. There are a number of lake communities and older village centers in the southern portion of the borough, while the northern portion includes Norvin Green State Forest.
In 2000, the population of 7,610 was 96 percent white. The median household income was $67,885. For complete census figures, see chart, 130.
Bloomsbury. 0.8-square-mile borough in Hunterdon County. Bloomsbury was once part of Bethlehem Township; it became a separate political entity on March 30, 1905. The borough is surrounded on three sides by Bethlehem Township. The fourth and longest side lies along the Musconetcong River, which separates Hunterdon County from Warren County. Passing through the borough is the road once known as the New Jersey Turnpike, which was the main road from New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Easton, Pennsylvania. The borough name was derived from the prominent early settlers, the Bloom family. High schoolers attend school in Phillipsburg, Warren County, because it is considerably closer than the nearest high school in Hunterdon County.
According to the 2000 census, this residential community had a population of 886, of which 98 percent was white. The median household income in 2000 was $64,375. For complete census figures, see chart, 130.
Bloor, Ella Reeve "Mother" (b.July 8, 1862; d. Aug. 10, 1951). Political radical, labor organizer, and public speaker. Ella Bloor was raised in Bridgeton, where her father was a pharmacist. When she was nineteen, she married Lucien Ware and moved to Haddonfield, and later lived with her family in Woodstown and Woodbury. At first active locally in the woman’s suffrage and temperance movements, Bloor went on to become a labor organizer, a contributor to socialist newspapers, and a Socialist candidate for lieutenant governor of New York. Following the Russian Revolution, she was a founding member of the American Communist Party. During the 1920s and 1930s, Bloor acted as a Communist Party spokesperson, an advocate for labor and civil rights, and an outspoken opponent of fascism. Her autobiography, We Are Many, was published in 1940. She was married three times and had eight children.
Blueberries. Commercial blueberries belong to the Vaccinium genus. Of major economic importance are three species: the highbush blueberry, V. corymbosum L; the lowbush blueberry, V. angustifolium Aiton; and the rabbiteye blueberry, V. ashei Reade. Most of the worldwide blueberry production comes from the highbush blueberry, although lowbush and rabbiteye types are important in the northeastern and southwestern regions of North America.
The high bush blueberry was "invented” here in New Jersey. Though native Indians used the prolific fruit as a dye, enjoyed it in stew, combined it with venison in a dish they called pemmican, and dried it, it was a woman in Whitesbog, Burlington County, who domesticated the wild blueberry. Elizabeth White, after whose father the town of Whitesbog was named, recognized the potentially widespread commercial value of the fruit. In 1911 a botanist named Frederick V. Coville joined forces with White. Together they selected plants from the wild and made thousands of crosses between the plants they had in their collection. Many of the highbush blueberry varieties that we have today are either their selections or are direct descendants from their crosses.
The New Jersey high bush blueberry industry is thriving; eight thousand acres of cultivated blueberries are evenly divided between Atlantic and Burlington counties. New Jersey growers produce 35 million pounds of blueberries annually, worth in excess of $30 million. Current blueberry research is based at Chatsworth at the Phillip E. Marucci Center for Blueberry/Cranberry Research and Extension. United States Department of Agriculture and Rutgers University researchers continue plant breeding and selection for insect and disease control, fertility, and the beneficial medicinal components of blueberries.
Blue crab. Callinectes sapidus is a member of the family Portunidae, distinguished by having the ends of its fifth pair of legs modified into paddles; its scientific name means "beautiful swimmer.” Blue crabs have an olive or bluish green back, which tapers to a thick spine on the left and right sides, bright blue on the bottom and inside "elbow” of their claws, and mature females have red claw tips. They can grow to nine inches from spine to spine and are found in bays and estuaries from Uruguay to Cape Cod, but move into ocean and fresh water. All brackish water systems in New Jersey host populations, but the population size varies from year to year.
Bluefish. Pomatomus saltatrix is a migratory species of fish found in oceanic and Atlantic coastal waters from Nova Scotia to Argentina, and in the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas. Bluefish are aggressive and have a voracious appetite, making them a popular game fish. Schools of young bluefish or "snappers” enter tidal bays and estuaries, following schools of smaller fish, where they feed as long as food is present and will even regurgitate if full to continue feeding. Bluefish are greenish blue and have a sturdy, compressed body, a large head, and prominent canine teeth. Mature by two years of age, they have been known to bite bathers. They are one of the most common fish in the waters off New Jersey from May until early November.
Boardwalks. The world’s first permanent boardwalk, a structure of plank boards built on posts raised over the beach, is credited to Atlantic City in 1870. Other places claim antecedents, typically portable wood planks laid directly on the sand. The idea of the boardwalk has been attributed to a desire to reduce the amount of sand tracked into railroad cars and hotels.
Although conservative interests in Atlantic City opposed the boardwalk plan, its creation was the spark that turned the place into the nation’s premier coastal resort. The first boardwalk was a modest affair, only eight feet wide. The fifth boardwalk erected in 1896-1897 by the Phoenix Bridge Company stood twelve feet above the sand and was sixty feet wide near the big hotels. In time, it stretched for nearly ten miles from Absecon Inlet to Long-port. Also known by other names, including promenade and esplanade, the Atlantic City structure was officially designated Boardwalk with a capital "B” by municipal ordinance in 1896.
Males produce a chemical to attract females for mating; females carry eggs on their abdomens that appear as a yellow-orange mass called sponge. Females move toward the ocean to release tiny larvae that spend approximately thirty days swimming in the surface waters before settling down to the bottom as a "first crab.” Blue crabs must shed their shells (molt) in order to grow. During the time it takes for the new shell to harden (thirty-six to forty-eight hours), they are commercially prized as soft-shelled crabs. New Jersey has a commercial and a large recreational fishery for hard- and soft-shelled crabs.
Erected in other Shore communities, boardwalks developed individual characters that often became the focal point of the town. William Nelson in his 1902 The New Jersey Coast in Three Centuries described the Atlantic City Boardwalk as "the one great resort,”while Asbury Park’s was "the grand plaza for the entire populace, residential and visiting.” Boardwalks early assumed a raffish atmosphere, a quality inferred from the name of Cape May’s "Flirtation Walk.” Boardwalks permitted mingling of the sexes with an openness rare in nineteenth-century America. The presence or absence of business helped shape a boardwalk’s character. Some towns, such as Spring Lake, Sea Girt, and Avon, banned amusements. The best-remembered boardwalks, some of which have endured into the twenty-first century, are the fun places, which include Asbury Park, Point Pleasant Beach, Seaside Heights, and Wildwood. There, boardwalks, often with piers extending from them, became home to rides, games of chance and so-called skill, side shows, souvenir shops, popular entertainment of the moment, and food stands. One staple, saltwater taffy, became big business when marketed as a gift and take-home souvenir.
Boardwalks are vulnerable to the elements and require regular off-season maintenance through replacement of planks, accomplished at times with nonwood materials, including plastic, or the rebuilding of sections with macadamized pavement. Storms have caused regular destruction, notably in 1944 and 1962, while fire claimed boardwalks in Ocean City in 1927 and Seaside Heights in 1955. The social and lifestyle costs of a boardwalk’s presence resulted in some towns not rebuilding following destruction. Other towns have shortened their length, as in Long Branch, where the city’s character changed from resort to residential and the boardwalk from amusement to exercise.
Strollers on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, 1890.
A broken network of boardwalks exists from Raritan Bay to Cape May. Some pieces are mere short strips of planking by the shore, while others are now primarily physical fitness trails. However, amusements, supported substantially by day-tripping crowds, continue their century-long tradition at stalwart resorts such as Point Pleasant Beach, Seaside Heights, and Wildwood. The boardwalk as a state of mind exists in Keansburg, where street-level pavement lined with traditional amusements is still known as "the boardwalk” long after storms obliterated the elevated plank walkway.
