The Garden in Garden State, Agriculture, the Truck Farm, and the Tomato

New Jersey has been called the Garden State since at least eighteen seventy-six, when Abraham Browning of Camden used the phrase at a centennial celebration in Philadelphia. He was making a point that still surprises people who only know the state from the Turnpike: New Jersey has always grown things. The southern half of the state, below the Pine Barrens, on the loamy coastal-plain soils of Cumberland and Salem and Gloucester and Burlington counties, is serious farming country.

Blueberries, cranberries, peaches, sweet corn, tomatoes, asparagus, peppers, eggplant, squash. New Jersey ranks among the leading states in the country for blueberry and cranberry production. The cranberry bogs of the Burlington County Pinelands float a harvest every October, the flooded fields turning a vivid crimson, and those bogs represent a farming tradition that goes back well over a century.

The tomato has a particular hold on New Jersey identity. The Campbell Soup Company was founded in Camden in eighteen sixty-nine, and for decades the fields of Gloucester County supplied a significant fraction of the nation's canned tomatoes. The Jersey tomato became a regional obsession, warm from the vine in late August, eaten over a sink with salt, requiring no other preparation.

New Jerseyans who have moved away will tell you, sometimes at considerable length, that the tomatoes elsewhere are simply not the same. The truck farms that ringed the industrial cities of the late eighteen hundreds, family operations growing vegetables for the Newark and New York markets, were often worked by Italian and Polish immigrants who had come through Ellis Island and found in the coastal-plain soil something familiar enough to work with. The garden and the factory were, for much of the twentieth century, the same state seen from different angles.

They still are.