From the Asbury Park Press

October 23, 2008

Conservation group to buy Forked River Mountains tract

By KIRK MOORE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU

Think this is a slow real estate market? Ask Chris Jage how long he has worked on his latest deal, and he laughs.

"The oldest notes in my file are from 1993," says Jage, an assistant director for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, who finally has under way a $2.7 million acquisition to add 614 acres to the foundation's Forked River Mountain Preserve in western Ocean and Lacey townships.

When complete, the purchase of 13 parcels from a Bergen County real estate investment company will expand the conservation foundation's preserve to almost 4,000 acres, according to foundation officials.

It's the latest chapter in a 15-year effort to preserve the Forked River Mountains region, a 20,000-acre forest tract west of the Garden State Parkway, named for two 180-foot summits that are among the highest points in eastern Ocean County.

The area holds a special place in Pine Barrens lore, for its folk traditions of hunting, music and lost homesteads and for ambitious mid-20th-century urban development plans just before state government moved to preserve the forest. The properties under contract to be sold by Interboro Holding Co. of Hackensack are themselves artifacts of that late period. "The corporation acquired them in 1961," Jage said. Some are old "cedar allotments," timber-cutting parcels once owned and traded by local woodsmen, along the North Branch of the Forked River, he said.

Other parcels are on the south side of Route 532 in Ocean Township, Jage said, and "they're actually road frontage backing up to the county's Horner tract," the 877-acre farm that the Ocean County Natural Lands Trust is acquiring.

Encouraged since 1993 by a local group, the Forked River Mountain Coalition, state and Ocean County officials have been using open-space funding to buy land in the area. The Interboro deal would be financed with $1 million from a state Pinelands Commission conservation fund, $500,000 from the county Natural Lands Trust and $400,000 from the nonprofit Victoria Foundation. Another part of the funding still to be determined will come from state natural resource damages settlements from polluters, Jage said.

The county lands trust typically goes for these kinds of cooperative deals if the county can get sole ownership of some parcels, said Theresa Lettman, who chairs the trust fund advisory committee. The road frontage on Route 532 is attractive because "if we could get those pieces, we could add them to our holdings," she said.

The New Jersey Conservation Foundation started the core of its preserve with the 1996 purchase of 3,000 acres from Fort Wayne, Ind., developer Gary Probst for $1 million, a cost shared with the state Green Acres program. The foundation followed that up with buying 825 acres from the late Clifford Frazee, a Lacey tree farmer who grew Atlantic white cedar trees in a swamp along the North Branch.

Today public lands there are parts of a state wildlife management area, the foundation preserve and Ocean County's natural lands network. Amid the wild lands are places with cultural significance, including Wells Mills County Park and nearby Albert Place, a former homestead where musicians from across the Pine Barrens once met to play; its name lives on at the Albert Music Hall a few miles away in Waretown.

In the 1960s, the area's future looked quite different. Foundation officials note the Forked River Mountains were a scene in the closing pages of John McPhee's influential 1967 book "The Pine Barrens," when McPhee accompanied an urban planner to one summit and heard his plans for a new city in the forest.

That central tract of the highest sand and gravel hills is still privately held by Joseph J. Brunetti Construction of Old Bridge. The Interboro holdings are "one of the larger parcels that's left out there, save for the Brunetti tract," Jage said. One helpful factor in bringing the deal together was a change in state Green Acres open space rules that allowed Interboro to use more liberal pre-2004 zoning rules as a basis for calculating the value of its land, Jage said.

The Forked River Mountains conservation effort has marked some superlatives. The foundation's 1996 deal with Probst was, at the time, the biggest land preservation deal ever done by a New Jersey nonprofit, a record the foundation itself broke in 2003 when it bought the 9,400-acre DeMarco cranberry farm, now the Franklin Parker Preserve, near Chatsworth. This year the Ocean County Natural Lands Trust signed its biggest deal to date when it agreed to pay the Horner family $8 million for their 200-year-old family farm located on the upper Oyster Creek.
________________________________________

Return to News Coverage