Duck Pond and a Better Way to Think About Land

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Let me introduce you to a 12,000-year-old feature of Roxbury, New Jersey, that has been off limits to the general public for more than 150 years.

This photo, courtesy of Ashland Chemical Corporation, is likely your first peek at the beautiful Duck Pond. It was mine as well. It is a 15-acre, spring-fed pond in the northeastern corner of the 1,000-acre Hercules property in Kenvil. 

Duck Pond appears on the earliest maps of the area. It has no natural inlet or outlet and apparently never did. Spring water vents up into the pond and then infiltrates back into the shallow, unconfined aquifer upon which it sits. This has likely been true since it was created when the Wisconsin Glacier receded thousands of years ago. 

Old historical documents I've read tell us that this whole tract of land was once the summer home of the Leni Lenape natives who undoubtedly fished and swam in this pond. It was these original people who referred to the southern wetland on the property as the Great Spring. They called the Black River, which flows from this wetland, “Alamatong.” The word means “gentle flowing.” It is a reference to the rapid, yet smooth flow of its water over a bed of glacier sand. 

The reason most of us have never seen Duck Pond is that it is situated within a polluted industrial tract of land that has been off-limits to residents and the public for well over one hundred and fifty years. The making of explosives stopped three decades ago, but there are still hot spots of pollution on the land. It isn’t a safe place to freely roam around. 

What motivates me to write this now is a PowerPoint slide presented by Hartz Mountain Corporation during this Wednesday’s Roxbury Planning Board hearing. For those who may not know, Hartz Mountain is seeking to build 54 acres of warehouses on a 200-acre parcel on the property. One of the PowerPoint slides labeled Duck Pond as a drainage area. 

I was struck by this sterile language. I've seen similar language in other Hercules-related documents. Indeed, Duck Pond is a drainage area, as is every freshwater lake in the world. However, the use of the term within the context of clean-up operations conveys how the pond was utilized while explosives were manufactured on the property. It is perhaps how the pond is still viewed by its present owners, their environmental contractors, and the prospective buyers giving the presentation. Duck Pond is yet another place to be dealt with;  A place that has been horribly abused for a century and a half. 

Just as groups of people can be marginalized and robbed of their personhood through word choices, so can it also happen to portions of the biosphere that we call “property.” Property is a lifeless term that allows our consciences to treat a piece of land as something other than habitat. 

My point is that viewing Hercules as a compromised, yet beautifully complex habitat should be the starting place for all considerations that follow. Whether taking active measures to clean up our mess or allowing nature time to renew the land on its own, the language we choose to describe it will influence our decisions and the outcomes that follow. We should always be respectful, even reverent, of biological spaces and how we use land. We should not treat the Hercules property with any less consideration because of its troubled past.

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An 1887 map of “Suckasunny” showing Duck Pond in the McCainsville District of Roxbury.