This area of New Jersey was a major industrial area about 175 years ago: there were iron furnaces, glass works, paper mills, etc. Harrisville was a major paper mill town (due to the abundant water), and was a thriving community as late as the 1880s. Ownership disputes and changes in the processes of making paper produced financial problems; the factory closed, and was sold in the 1890s; by then most of the residents had moved away. A major fire swept the town in 1910, and in subsequent years, vandals and thieves took most of the remains. Submitted by: Kurt Wenner

Harrisville, a once thriving paper mill town which made paper out of salt hay was a thriving community totally dependent on the operation of the mill. The town had white picket fences and even boasted of gas lighted laterns.As the railroad progressed, and the paper making techniques became more effecient, Harrisville soon went into disrepair and its inhabitants vanished. Submitted by: john c. spoulos

Harrisville is said to be the glamour exhibit for ruins of the Wharton tract. Nowhere have the Pine Barrens demonstrated more clearly their capacity to obliterate man's handiwork than at this ghost town. In less than a century Harrisville has been reduced from a prosperous, stoutly built industrial community to a cluster of vanishing ruins and scattered piles of rubble. Dominating the entire scene are towering skeletons of old stone buildings. The heart of this community was its paper factory, a vast structure with walls up to three feet in thickness. The main building was three hundred feet long and two and a half stories high. Harrisville is about eight miles northwest of New Gretna at a point where the modern highway to Chatsworth crosses the east brand of the Wading River. Submitted by Henry Chenoweth.

Paper Mill
Courtesy Patricia Ventre