Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

McPhee reports that, in the twenties, a Philadelphia newspaper gave away lots in the Pines as premiums with new subscriptions, and that during the Depression movie houses passed out deeds to small tracts as door prizes, and that realty agents offered lots here for five dollars. McPhee writes: When prospective buyers actually came to see the land, promoters tied pears and apples to the limbs of pine trees and stationed fishermen in small boats in Pine Barrens lakes with dead pickerel on the ends of their lines and instructions to pull the fish out of the water every ten minutes. But no one cared for the giveaways, and, even now, although the margins of the Pines were shrinking from commercial encroachments, the heart of Burlington County—the middle of the pinelands—still belonged to the quiet and Pineys. Whenever that last foot of concrete is poured to complete the Boston-Washington megalopolis, it’s likely to be in the Pine Barrens.