Erik Larsen

@Erik_Larsen

There was a time when influential people looked out across the unspoiled vastness of the Pine Barrens and saw not a state treasure to be preserved but undeveloped real estate worth a potential fortune for people who had the vision to plan and invest.

In 1960, at the dawn of the commercial jet age, county planners in Ocean and Burlington made an ambitious pitch to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

With big Boeing jets on the way that could carry hundreds of people and a belief that supersonic passenger jets were inevitable by the late 20th century, local officials proposed the largest commercial airport in the world be built within an uninhabited area of the Pinelands in largely what is today Penn State Forest in Washington Township.

Read about New Jersey's earlier plan to sterilize "pineys".

At the time, an additional airport for New York was considered an eventual necessity and the Port Authority already had run into public opposition in its proposal to build it in what is today the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Morris County, according to the book, "Contested Lands: Conflict and Compromise in New Jersey's Pine Barrens," by author Robert J. Mason.

In 1960, the freeholder boards in Burlington and Ocean counties established a joint Pinelands Regional Planning Board, whose members were heavily biased toward maximizing the economic potential of the Pine Barrens, according to the book. At the time, there was no formal environmental movement.

"Although open space was seen as an almost unassailable virtue, only a small number of 'nature nuts,' bird watchers and scientists were seriously concerned with the Pine Barrens' ecological assets," Mason wrote.

The proposal came at a time when the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike were just a few years old, connecting the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas and everything in between and inaugurating a commuter culture that allowed the population not only to be mobile but also to spread out and set down roots in the new suburbs of the Jersey Shore.

To service the "jetport" and support all the people who would be employed there and the new businesses it would create, a new city was simultaneously planned west of the Parkway in Lacey, on land that today includes the Forked River Mountain Preserve. Mason writes in his book that the city was envisioned to be a "garden city," with "technological and quasi-utopian aspirations of a dawning supersonic jet age."

The build-out potential was estimated at 250,000, which was significant, given the whole population of Ocean County in 1960 was little more than 108,000.

The proposed "supersonic jetport" as it was informally called, was to be four times larger than Newark Liberty, John F. Kennedy (then Idlewild) and LaGuardia airports combined, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The private, nonprofit Pinelands Preservation Alliance notes in its educational guide, "The Pine Barrens: Up Close and Natural," that the jetport proposal would have covered 32,000 acres or 50 square miles, about the size of Stafford.

"When publicized in 1964, this project proposal united conservationists, blueberry and cranberry farmers, hunters and others who, realizing the threat to the Pinelands, began to work together on preservation efforts," the guide reads. "Those preservation efforts finally came to fruition in the late 1970s with the establishment of the federal Pinelands National Reserve and the corroborating state legislation, the Pinelands Protection Act."

Mason wrote that the airport proposal crashed as a result of opposition from conservationists, made up of mainly "old-stock, wealthy, conservative Republican Yankees," and the U.S. Department of Defense, which is still one of the biggest land owners of the Pine Barrens. The federal government was not keen on sharing the wilderness.