Above Image: Sandy Feddema works with Brianne, Ian, and Peggy Maier to lay down the first coat.
It's a crisp Fall Saturday--crunchy tulip-tree-leaves underfoot, sawhorses and fresh paint on the ready--as six stalwart activists with the Bridgeton preservation organization known as CHABA (the Center for Historic American Building Arts) go to work in the breezy November sunshine of City Park. They are applying primer to forty new clapboards to replace those damaged by many decades of weather on the sand-colored little City-owned building sitting at the park entrance, known simply as “The Nail House.”
“It has a pretty big history for such a little place,” says Maggie DeMarco, the restoration project manager. “You can count on one hand the surviving structures for South Jersey’s industrial history that go back as far as this one.”
She is referring to the year 1815, the Nail House’s starter date over two centuries ago. That’s when the Nail House was home to the first offices of South Jersey’s Cumberland Nail & Iron Works, a pioneer American industrial startup, producing nails, pipes and other metal components for local housing, but also for the bridges, roads, and the other structures that literally supported the new American experiment in the southern part of New Jersey.
DeMarco has been supervising both professionals and volunteers in the quality restoration of this over-200-year-old City-owned building, working with the City and CHABA on this project, which is also funded in part by the New Jersey Historic Trust as well as local contributions.
As the other volunteers take a break, stripping off their gloves, Flavia Alaya, another CHABA stalwart, pauses in the day’s work to explain. “The Nail House is such a humble yet important place, partly because what you see is just a tiny bit of what was once here. Imagine—giant industrial buildings, huge furnaces, belching fire and smoke, big barges floating down the Cohansey to Delaware Bay--exploiting the natural environment of the river, doing what industry always does.
“But it’s also great to talk about the ‘irony’ of the Iron Works,” she says. “Because they started so early, and had to be water-powered, they built a so-called ‘raceway’ system to bring water from the lakes north of us to the mills down here, a mile or so away, and make their waterwheels turn. Then, later on, when they switched from waterpower to other fuels, they actually preserved the whole upland watershed. It’s the thousand or so acres we now call City Park.
"We love that. We call it ‘Grunge to Green’ and a role model of sustainability.”
What’s also great, she says, is that probably most every building in Bridgeton’s huge historic district has nails or pipes or other piece of metalwork made by the CN&IW hidden away in it. Other cities used Bridgeton iron too. Some histories say even the metal underpinnings of the first Atlantic City Boardwalk were made right here in Bridgeton in the early 1850s.
And what happens next?
DeMarco chimes in: “The pandemic slowed things down a bit,” she says, “but we’ve given this little building the infrastructure it needs to last—who knows?—maybe another 200 years--and keep telling its big story.
"And once these clapboards are primed, they’ll be installed where they’re needed, and the whole thing painted fresh and the newly-restored dark-green shutters placed on the windows again.
“Then,” she says, "we’ll party! ”
Above Image: Brianne gets a refill from Maggie DeMarco
Above Image: All’s quiet in the Nail House’s newly-restored interior. CHABA hopes to work with the City to interpret the building and use it for public and semi-public small events.
Photographer: Flavia Alaya
Contact: Alaya 856 2213276 or 201-321-3813
CHABA 856 2213280
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