ich have now become seaside summer cities. Some
of the cattle were still running wild on the beaches down to the time
of the Civil War. The settlers "mined" the valuable white cedar from the
swamps for shingles and boards, leaving great "pool holes" in the swamps
which even today sometimes trap the unwary sportsman. The women knitted
innumerable mittens and also made wampum or Indian money from the clam
and oyster shells, an important means of exchange in the Indian trade
all over the colonies, and even to some extent among the colonists
themselves. The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the white
cedar, the mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world. They
sold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut. Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters and
also for lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil. Their sloops also
traded to the southern colonies and even to the West Indies.

They were an interesting little community, these Cape May people, very
isolated and dependent on the water and on their boats, for they were
completely cut off by the Great Cedar Swamp which stretched across the
point and separated them from the rest of the coast. This troublesome
swamp was not bridged for many years; and even then the roads to it were
long, slow, and too sandy for transporting anything of much bulk.

Next above Cape May on the coast was another isolated patch of
civilization which, while not an island, was nevertheless cut off on the
south by Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and on the north
by Little Egg Harbor with the Mullica River and its marshes extending
far inland. The people in this district also lived somewhat to
themselves. To the north lay the district which extended to Sandy Hook,
also with its distinct set of people.

The people of the Cape became in colonial times clever traders in
various pursuits. Although in one sense they were as isolated as
islanders, their adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of view.
By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd and persistent ways they
amassed competencies and estates for their families. Aaron Leaming, for
example, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly $1,000,000. Some
kept diaries which have become historically valuable in showing not only
their history but their good education and the peculiar cast of their
mind for keen trading as well as their rigid economy and integrity.

One character, Jac