Wharton traces the vivid history of New Jersey's hub of industry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Known as Port Oram until 1901, the town was the site of the richest mineral deposits in the state and of the famed Picatinny Arsenal, still active today. The Morris Canal and northern New Jersey railways were built specifically to accommodate the area's mining and iron-manufacturing industries. Wharton attracted immigrant workers who settled and stayed in the community alongside the original families, many of whose descendants still reside here.

A massive work--forty years in the making--there's never been a reference book like this for the state of New Jersey. The 100,000 biographies recorded by Mr. Sinclair, were extracted from no fewer than 2,000 volumes scattered among collective sources, not single-volume biographies. This fact alone establishes this book as the key reference work for New Jersey biography. It hardly needs to be said that Mr. Sinclair's book will prove to be an invaluable tool for genealogists given the obvious connection between biography and family history, as well as the fact that a number of the compiler's 237 sources contain not only biographies but genealogical sketches.

When gold fever struck in 1849, John S. Darcy—prominent physician, general, and president of the New Jersey Railroad—assembled a company to travel overland to California. In Jersey Gold, Margaret Casterline Bowen and Gwendolyn Joslin Hiles tell the story of that colorful company of some thirty stalwarts and adventurers. Jersey Gold chronicles the experiences of the New Jersey argonauts from their lives before the gold rush to the widely varying fortunes each ultimately found. Animated by the trekkers’ own words and observations and illustrated with maps, photographs, and drawings by one of the company’s own men, Jersey Gold follows the Newark Overland Company’s journey by rail, stage, and riverboat to the Missouri frontier town of Independence, the group’s jumping-off point for the Oregon-California trail. There, the company splintered. Their divergent paths afford views of the westward journey from multiple perspectives as the companies faced the perils of the wilderness and the treachery of human nature. Once in gold country, many booked immediate passage home, but some remained with Darcy to work a successful mining operation before returning east with comfortable fortunes. A few, enchanted by the opportunities of the Golden Coast, took up permanent residence there—and in their stories we witness the emergence of California amid unprecedented lawlessness, the controversy of slavery, and diverse nationalities. The story of the Newark Overland Company—in many ways a panorama of the nineteenth century—ranges from the wildness of the frontier through the chaos of the Civil War to the throes of early industrialization, and features such notables as John Sutter, Brigham Young, and Henry Clay. In chronicling this journey, Jersey Gold vividly re-creates a defining chapter in American history.