Oldest Map Of EHC Now On Display

MICHELLE BRUNETTI POST, Staff Writer
EGG HARBOR CITY — Marjorie Gries-Garwood’s parents, publishers of a local weekly newspaper decades ago, never threw anything away.

And that’s a good thing.

After they died, Gries-Garwood found the oldest known map of the city, rolled up in the back of a drawer in furniture stored in their attic.

“When I brought it to the museum, literally their mouths fell open,” she said of historical society members.

Dated to between 1864 and 1866 because of a drawing of the Bullinger Real Estate building in the margin — only owned by that family a brief time — the large, old wall map shows how intensively developed early inhabitants expected the city to become.

The 23-by-35-inch map shows a grid of roads and small lots for homes, running from what is now downtown to the Mullica River about seven miles away. A ship

Most of that development never happened. Between the arrival of the first settlers in 1855 and the end of the Civil War, railroads eclipsed shipping. So the streets are mostly paper streets.

Gries-Garwood’s father, George Gries, came back from World War II and bought the weekly Egg Harbor News. He printed it in a small office attached to his home on Cincinnati Avenue, where Gries-Garwood grew up, she said.

It is now part of the Gannett company’s Atlantic County Newspaper Group, which includes the Atlantic County Record, Hammonton News and Mainland Journal.

“My dad was a historian in his own right,” said Gries-Garwood. “He was a councilman and an Atlantic County freeholder, and people would bring things to him to write about in the paper.”

Garwood-Gries graduated from Oakcrest High School in 1967, and lives in Egg Harbor Township. But she still owns her parents’ old home, now rented as two apartments.

Her grandfather was Henry Gries, owner of the Egg Harbor Pilot newspaper, published in German for the city’s predominantly German settlers. He later published the English-language Pilot Tribune, and also wrote news stories about Atlantic County for the New York Times, she said.

Gries-Garwood found the map several years ago and took it to the Egg Harbor City Historical Society’s Roundhouse Museum near City Hall on London Avenue, where it hung upstairs, Maxwell said.

Maxwell recently made a computerized version of it, painstakingly cobbling together 30 different images of the map, and filling in small holes with sections taken from later maps. Where the decorative edging was missing, he filled it in with images taken from other parts of the edging.

“It took me a thousand man-hours at least to clean it up and go from this, to that,” he said, pointing from the fragile yellowed original to the new copies.

A limited run of 25 copies printed on 13-by-19-inch archival paper will be sold for $35 each to raise money for the historical society. They will be available for sale from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. at a booth at the city’s Homecoming Celebration on Saturday, he said.

He also is trying to have prints made close to the original size available for sale soon, printed on lightweight paper for about $20.

Visit the historical society web site at www.ehchs.org.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/the-map-is-the-treasure-for-egg-harbor-city-historians/article_6d942964-264a-11e5-a2c8-73ea72e273a5.html

Contact: 609-272-7219

MPost@pressofac.com

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 EGG HARBOR CITY’S HISTORY

The city was first settled in 1855, as a refuge for German-Americans.

“The decade preceding the Civil War was a time of turmoil and unrest, of tension and prejudice. The biggest wave of anti-immigrant resentment in American history, a nativistic movement called Knownothingism, swept the country,” wrote Dieter Cunz in his 1956 essay “Egg Harbor City: New Germany in New Jersey” for the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland.

Knownothings targeted mostly Irish and German immigrants. So Germans from all over the Eastern U.S. moved to Egg Harbor to feel safe, wrote Cunz, a professor at the University of Maryland.