New Burlco museum celebrates Rancocas Creek

There's a river flowing through Burlington County's new history museum, and it's populated by Lenni-Lenape Indians, escaped slaves, saber-toothed tigers, sawmill owners, steamboat captains - even mastodons.

It is the Rancocas Creek: the county's largest interior river, and the subject of a surprise-filled exhibit at the Lyceum of History and Natural Sciences in Mount Holly.

The county acquired and renamed the stately but struggling Mount Holly Library last year for just such free programming, co-curator Marisa Bozarth said on a tour last week.

"And this," she said, gesturing to seven brightly lighted display panels, a dugout canoe, some historical maps, a steering wheel from a barge, and a mastodon skull, "is our very first exhibit."

Called "Discovering Rancocas Creek," it opened in mid-October and will continue through March.

"Beginner's luck," is how her co-curator, Eric Orange, characterized the remarkably diverse trove of items on display. Both are museum attendants in the county Department of Resource Conservation, which now owns and operates the Georgian-style stucco mansion at 307 High St.

What Bozarth and Orange have assembled, with the help of many loans, is a series of tableaux telling the history of the creek, starting with its geologic formation.

Made up of three main and two minor tributaries of more than 50 miles, the Rancocas reaches from the Pinelands to the Delaware River. Tidal to Mount Holly, its watershed of 360 square miles comprises 33 towns in Burlington, Ocean, and Camden Counties.

"A lot of people think it's millions of years old," said Orange, "but it was formed less than 17,000 years ago, after the last ice age."

The museum's first display features remnants of the valley's prehistoric inhabitants, including the fossilized jawbones of a saber-toothed tiger, a giant beaver, and a walrus.

They sit alongside the vertebrae of a giant sloth, about five times the size of a human's, "found in 1950 by a 14-year-old boy," Orange said. The boy discovered it in excavations for Exit 4 of the New Jersey Turnpike in Mount Laurel.

But the star of the show is surely the massive, nearly black skull of a mastodon unearthed in 1887 from a stream bed in Pembertown Township.

"People were using it as a stepping stone before they realized what it was," Orange said.

Many visitors "have a very hard time wrapping their heads around it," Bozarth said. "They just can't imagine mastodons roaming around here.

Like most of the animal fossils, the skull is on loan from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, which invited the two to peruse its collection for pertinent items.

"We carried everything back in a Ford Focus," Bozarth said. "It was so crowded," Orange recalled, "the caribou antler was in my lap."

The next display panel is devoted to the Native Americans who first appeared in the valley about 11,000 years ago. Artifacts include pottery fragments, a mortar and pestle, and arrow, ax, and spear heads, along with a century-old dugout canoe on loan from the Red Dragon Canoe Club of Edgewater Park.

A section titled "Timbuctoo" tells the story of a community of free blacks and runaway slaves who lived along the creek around Westampton in the 19th century.

For its display, Bozarth and Orange photographed the court records of a trial brought by a Philadelphia slave-catcher claiming a woman and two brothers had fled to Timbuctoo from Kent County, Md.

It also features ceramics and glassware, including a jar of Dixie Peach hair pomade found at Timbuctoo.

Steamboats are central to the section on commerce, with photos of the 105-foot Barclay, which once traveled between Hainesport and Philadelphia, and the Independence, which carried passengers and freight to and from Mount Holly. The display includes a large wooden steering wheel from the abandoned barge Johnny, also on loan from the Red Dragon Canoe Club.

A display on the tidal main branch between Mount Holly and the Delaware River tells the story of an experimental "muscle-driven" submarine developed by a Frenchman before the Civil War, and thought to be scuttled somewhere near the River Line Bridge in Delanco.

It also celebrates the famously silky mud along the Rancocas and some neighboring creeks used to roughen hundreds of thousands of major and minor league baseballs each year.

Based on photos of the secretive mud collecting, "we're pretty sure they take it from the Rancocas," Orange said. "It's just too cool to leave out."

The exhibit winds up with images of some of the famous folk who have vacationed or owned homes along the Rancocas, including the Von Trapp family of The Sound of Music, and ends with a map of its county-maintained canoe trails and photos of great blue herons, kingfishers, and other fauna of South-central Jersey's largest river.

Frequent water testing shows that even the creek's tidal portion is surprisingly clean and oxygenated, Bozarth said, "and that's good news."