Estellville Glassworks & Bethlehem Loading Co.
Remnants of South Jersey’s Industrial Past in the Pine Barrens
Deep within the quiet pine barrens of South Jersey are, somewhat surprisingly and incongruently, sites containing the remnants of vast industrial ventures of human endeavor, each with their own unique history. One such remnant is Estellville, New Jersey, on Route 50, a little over three miles from Mays Landing. Here you’ll find the stone ruins of the Estellville Glassworks, a glass factory which operated from 1825–1877 now slowly being reclaimed by the forest.
The ruins are located in an Atlantic County park near other related historic sites of the town, including the Old Estell Manor House and a Methodist Church. At the Glassworks site, once presumably a beehive of noise and activity, there are now serene paths with signage explaining the different steps in early American glassmaking. Each ruined foundation is evidence of a different step in the process towards the finished products which were hollowware (glass bottles) and windowpane glass. The sites include the melting pot furnace, the pot house site, the flattening house site, cutting house and lime kiln sites, and the workers houses site.
In an adjacent locale within the same park, you can also check out ruins of an entirely different sort, but with no less of a fascinating industrial history. In the early 20th century, situated on some 10,000 acres, the Bethlehem Loading Company, a subsidiary of the Bethlehem Steel Company, opened a massive but short-lived shell loading operation towards the end of the fighting in the first World War.
The Bethlehem Loading Company Historic District comprises what’s left of the 75mm, 155mm and 8-inch shell loading company, as well as officers’ quarters, a power plant, administration buildings, barracks, change houses and stables. This plant and the related town of Belcoville just north of it on Route 50, where thousands of plant workers lived, were erected simultaneously. While only in operation for a short time (1917–19), the breathtakingly massive scale of both the plant ruins as well as the town is a reminder of the kind of monumental construction that was accomplished by that generation of American people on a war footing.
