Standing on Common Ground, No. 2: Waterloo Synonymous With History-Changing Defeat? Part I

Kevin Wright©2011

Have you been to Waterloo Village for a tour, a concert or a class trip? Born and raised in Sussex County—New Jersey’s scenic and secluded swath of Appalachia—I am descended of the colonial settlers of Byram Township, where this quaint backwater hamlet is located. Even so, my first experience of the place in 1977 felt like something akin to science fiction. To imagine my original surprise, just picture some hapless protagonist stumbling across a lost village in a fog-enshrouded valley where all the clocks have stopped. My wife and I returned this past September to speak with descendants of the Waterloo and Mountain Smiths, who have long and proudly inhabited these parts. Good God! What happened? 

Sadly, the clocks are ticking once more, sounding as ominous as a “time bomb.” The ruination of this endearing place reminds me of a warning from my first-grade teacher, Sister Noreen, who would wag her finger, saying sternly, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Sadly, as I have learned in later life, that road is also usually paved at public expense. After an investment of perhaps ten million dollars in taxpayer money, Waterloo Village now looks more like Desolation Row than a thriving heritage destination. And I am left to wonder: If a nonprofit foundation, so politically well connected and publicly financed could fail so spectacularly, what will happen if we trust the latest proposed privatization of services and amenities at state-owned parks and historic sites to DEP supervision and control? Is History bound to repeat itself? 

Waterloo embodies the largely untold story of the Jersey Highlands, an ice-shattered, mineral-laden, metamorphic hill country of unrelenting beauty. Below its fork with Lubbers Run, the Musconetcong River pours into a deep foreboding vale of limestone, falling 16 feet per mile to Hackettstown. The valley about Waterloo is remarkable for its scenic interplay of sky, hill and stream—for here, trapped by steep ridges of granite and gneiss, the river swells and tumbles over glacial drift and human obstructions, always seeking the path of least resistance. Allamuchy Mountain towers 593 feet overhead, its base embanked by a gravel terrace for nearly a mile. A dam strategically placed at a creek bend impounds Waterloo Pond, a storage reservoir covering 68 acres, creating an 18-foot fall of water for industrial purposes. Andover Forge, antecedent of the small manufacturing hamlet and canal way station of Waterloo, was built upon this natural advantage. Its refining fires brought a host of teamsters, woodcutters, charcoal burners, miners and smelters to the smiling woods.

For footsore travelers, teamsters and jolted rail-riders of ages past, Waterloo was conveniently situated at the southern end of a wind gap notching the Highlands between Andover and Ledgewood, which yet opens a rare corridor to the fertile Appalachian Valley beyond. At Stanhope and Waterloo, Lockwood Gap connects with the terminal moraine as it crosses between Waterloo and Wharton, providing a relatively level gradient for travel. Over time, engineers for the Morris Turnpike, the Morris Canal, the Morris & Essex Railroad, State Route 206 and Interstate Route 80 took advantage of this natural embankment.

Andover Forge was built in 1761 on the bank of the Musconetcong River, seven miles southwest of Andover Furnace, to refine pig iron into the malleable bar iron of commerce. Andover Furnace and Forge processed high-grade ore from the famous Andover Mine, considered the most extensive hematite deposit ever discovered in New Jersey. Even allowing for extravagant claims in advertising, there is sufficient contemporary testimony to conclude Andover ore was “esteemed of the best quality of any in America,” proven “from experiments, made both in England and America, to be proper for every use to which iron can be converted, and equal to the Swedish for making steel.” For this reason, the Board of War and Ordnance contracted in January 1778 with Whitehead Humphries, owner of the Philadelphia Steel Furnace, for making steel from Andover iron to supply Continental artificers. Recognizing “that the Andover iron is better suited to this business than any other in America,” Governor Livingston signed a law on June 20, 1778, establishing a three-man commission to control the Andover Ironworks for three years, removing it for the duration of the war from the hands of its Loyalist owners. In July 1781, Samuel Hodgdon, Commissary General of Military Stores, contracted with Stacy Potts & Samuel Downing, of Trenton, to make steel from government stockpiles of Andover pig iron, lying at Easton, Pennsylvania.

The typical Highland furnace consumed 6,000 bushes of charcoal weekly in the production of 20 tons of pig iron. By the dawn of American Independence, careless woodland management forced closure of many furnaces and forges along Highland streams. Last leased to Dr. Abraham Baily, Humphrey Hill and Cadwalader Evans, the Andover Ironworks closed in 1795. A local charcoal-burner, John Smith, of Roxbury, purchased the abandoned 282-acre Andover Forge Farm (Waterloo) on November 30, 1812, no doubt with an eye to its valuable waterpower. The War of 1812 demonstrated the danger of too great an American dependence upon foreign imports and exposed the need for a safe, cheap and reliable national system of inland transportation, using turnpikes and canals. Rising firewood prices encouraged entrepreneurs to figure a way to bring Pennsylvania anthracite into tidewater city markets as a substitute fuel.

Realizing the implications of reduced freight costs for farm products shipped along nearly 100 miles of the completed middle section of the Erie Canal, George McCulloch, of Morristown, a Scottish trader with the East India Company and President of the Morris County Agricultural Society, pondered whether a canal with Lake Hopatcong for its summit reservoir, following the valleys of the Rockaway and Musconetcong Rivers, would have sufficient water to connect Easton, Pennsylvania, to New York City? Since the ordinary method of lock navigation was infeasible in such mountainous country, engineers instead devised a bold plan to pass the Highlands using mechanical inclined planes to overcome 1,400 feet of ascent and descent along the route, whereon canal boats would ride timber-frame cars on rails to overcome the steepest changes in elevation. Opening the innovative, mountain-climbing Morris Canal across the Old Andover Forge Farm in 1831 presented General John Smith with a valuable opportunity—he not only owned the land, but he had two sons, Nathan and Peter, who had recently come of age and needed a start in life. Moving to the present site of Waterloo in 1832, Nathan Smith remade an old stone barn of the Andover Iron Company into a dwelling, later known as the Smith Homestead. At the same time, he supervised construction of a stone storehouse on the berm of the Morris Canal and a large stone gristmill upon the foundation of the old charcoal house. In 1837, John Smith converted the old Forge Master’s Dwelling into a Tavern House.

The Morris Canal required several tricks of engineering to cross the Musconetcong River at Waterloo. The company raised a dam across the river to create a short slack-water navigation called the Lock Pond, deep enough to pass boats. To preserve the waterpower, it was necessary to construct a tailrace under the guard lock, allowing water expended by the mills to discharge into the river below the new canal dam. Consequently, the canal builders constructed a combined guard lock and aqueduct to pass boats between the canal prism and Lock Pond. Across the river, engineers cut a slot into the mountainside and laid track for boats to ascend and descend on a water-driven railway. This combination of guard lock, slack-water navigation and plane created a potentially profitable bottleneck in traffic. A merchant setting up shop on the canal bank could trade with unavoidably detained boatmen and there was good waterpower close at hand for milling grain and lumber.

In June 1847, heirs of the original owners of the Andover Iron Works conveyed the famed Andover Mine to the Trenton Iron Company. Soon teamsters were hauling 500 to 800 tons of Andover ore monthly over the Morris Turnpike, a distance of six miles, to Waterloo at a cost of $1 per ton, for transshipment on the Morris Canal. To obviate the payment of turnpike tolls, the Trenton Iron Company spent $60,000 to build a mule railroad in 1851, allowing horsepower to haul between 200 and 300 tons of ore daily. Three or four mules pulled each loaded car from the mine to the summit of Lockwood Gap, whence two mules took it the rest of the way downhill to the canal bank at Waterloo, where ore was off-loaded onto boats.

Nathan Smith served as an Assemblyman, State Senator, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and Chosen Freeholder before he died in March 1852 at only 46 years of age. The death of his older brother left Peter Smith to manage the family empire. Peter’s eldest son, Samuel T. Smith, assumed management of commercial operations in 1854. On December 11, 1854, the first steam train traveled over the Sussex Railroad between Newton and Waterloo to a turntable junction with the Morris & Essex Railroad. The pulse of trade immediately shifted to the smooth track.

As the candidate best suited to reunite a fractured Democratic Party, Peter Smith was elected to the State Senate on November 5, 1861. He was named president of the Hackettstown Bank in June 1863. The Civil War gave great impetus to agriculture and manufactures, placing a profitable burden on all lines of transportation, including the Morris Canal. After an expensive program of enlargement and modernization, its total tonnage rose from 554,034 in 1859 to 723,927 in 1864.

Samuel T. Smith was elected to the State Senate in 1873. Consequently, his brothers, Peter D. and Seymour R. Smith bought his interest in the store and mills at Waterloo in 1874, changing the business name to Smith Brothers. Years after the fact, the Smiths boasted that their forge, store, mills and mines at Waterloo had once done “a business of $75,000 a year.” Peter Smith, “cheerful and clear headed to the last,” died at Waterloo on March 12, 1877, aged 68 years, leaving his children an estate valued at $131,923. In a natural progression, the Gilded Age sons of self-made men became the very moneyed aristocracy their forebears had so piously railed against. Following in the political footsteps of his uncle, father and brother, Peter D. Smith was elected State Senator from Sussex County in 1888. In 1890, Seymour R. Smith became president of the Hackettstown National Bank, a position formerly held by his father.

Edwin C. Swift, of Lowell, Massachusetts, head of Swift Brothers & Company, a national dressed-beef company, joined with Samuel T. Smith, Peter D. Smith and Seymour R. Smith, of Waterloo, and several Newark butchers and meat-packers, to incorporate the Waterloo Ice Company in 1890. With headquarters in Newark, the company built five adjacent icehouses at Waterloo, each under its own gabled roof and each divided into two rooms, measuring overall 150 by 200 feet, covering nearly three-quarters of an acre, with a capacity of storing 30,000 tons of natural ice. The North Jersey & Pocono Mountain Ice Company leased ice-cutting privileges and storage facilities on Waterloo Lake and Panther Pond in 1900, conducting operations until 1917.

When Samuel T. Smith died of heart failure on June 26, 1898, he bequeathed $20,000 to religious and philanthropic organizations, out of an estate valued at over $100,000. Changing the southern terminus of the Sussex Branch of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad to Stanhope in 1901 reduced Waterloo to a quiet backwater. By that time, the Morris Canal maintained only a ghostly presence, defended by a skeleton crew, until its final abandonment in 1924. The population of Waterloo hovered at 38 winter inhabitants, augmented by 25 regular summer residents, not counting transients.

Peter D. Smith died November 18, 1918, aged 73 years. The Smith family, owners of 2,300 acres, formed the Lake Waterloo Estates Land and Developing Company in 1929 with plans to develop their property into an exclusive lakeside community. Despite the Stock Market Crash of October 1929, the project inched forward. In March 1930, Seymour R. Smith, his nieces and nephews, consolidated various family lands in the Peter Smith Corporation, in order to facilitate the sale of building lots. Seymour R. Smith died on February 14, 1932, aged 86 years. His son, Peter Louis Smith, briefly followed his father as bank president, until the bank’s failure in February 1933. The Hackettstown Bank initiated foreclosure proceedings against P. Louis Smith in October 1935. Trustees for the reorganized bank sold the former Smith lands, comprising nearly 1,850 acres, to the Lake Waterloo Corporation on May 6, 1945. O.W. Caspersen, chief executive of Beneficial Management Corporation, became the principal owner. Retaining only his memories and a few family artifacts, such as General John Smith’s sword and epaulets and the coffee grinder from the Waterloo Store, Peter Louis Smith died at Stanhope on September 30, 1961.

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