Chapter One
Pirates
Who Tom was, if he ever was, is the first unsolved mystery of Toms River. He may have been an adventurer named Captain William Tom who helped chase the Dutch out of New Amsterdam in 1664 and then prospered as the British Crown’s tax collector in the wildlands to the south, in the newly established province of New Jersey. Or he may have been an ancient Indian named Old Tom who lived on the cliffs near the mouth of the river and spied on merchant ships during the Revolutionary War on behalf of the British or the Americans, depending on which side paid the larger bribe.
The people of Toms River, in their infinite capacity for self- invention, prefer a different origin story, one that features neither taxes nor bribery. Despite some doubt about its veracity, the story is enshrined on park plaques, in local histories, and even in a bit of doggerel known grandly as the township’s “Old Epic Poem.”1 According to this version, a man named Thomas Luker came alone to the dense pine forests of central New Jersey in about 1700 and settled near the bay, on the northern side of a small river that would bear his name. He lived peacefully among the natives, took the name Tom Pumha (“white friend” in the Lenape language), and married the chief’s daughter, Princess Ann.
Today, just up Main Street from the spot where their wigwam supposedly stood, is a bank that used to be known as First National Bank of Toms River. For decades, First National fueled the town’s frenzied growth with easy credit before it finally imploded in 1991 under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars in bad real estate loans and a Depression-style run on its assets by frantic depositors. There was nothing apocryphal about its spectacular collapse, which was the largest bank failure in New Jersey history and a harbinger of even more jarring local crises to come, but no plaques or epic poems commemorate the event. In Toms River, history has always been a fungible commodity.
Before the chemical industry came to town in the 1950s and the supercharged growth began, the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Toms River was the American Revolution. In the years before the war, because of its quirky geography, the village had been a haven for small-time piracy. Cranberry Inlet, a narrow passage between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay, was one of the few places on the New Jersey coast where ships could safely wait out storms. But captains who brought their ships in through the inlet to seek shelter in the bay became sitting ducks for the local riffraff, who could slip out of Toms River in whaleboats, attack the ships, and steal their cargo before scurrying back to hide in the shoals. Scavenging shipwrecks was another lucrative pastime. If too few boats ran aground on their own, enterprising locals occasionally moved things along by posting lights in unfamiliar places on the beach to confuse ship pilots looking for the inlet.
With the coming of the Revolutionary War, such underhanded tactics suddenly were not only legal, they were regarded as acts of patriotism. The men of Toms River pursued British shipping with gusto and cooperated with American privateers who seized Loyalist ships and sold their contents at auction in the town square. The British struck back in 1781 by torching the town’s salt works. After losing still more supply ships, the Redcoats returned the following year to burn the entire town, including all fifteen houses, the rebuilt salt works, and the local tavern. Holed up in a small stockade in what is now Huddy Park in downtown Toms River, an outnumbered force of twenty-five rebel militiamen led by Captain Joshua Huddy tried unsuccessfully to hold off the attackers. An account of the raid in a Tory newspaper described the subsequent rout: “The Town, as it is called, consisting of about a dozen houses, in which none but a piratical set of banditti resided, together with a grist and saw-mill, were with the blockhouse burned to the ground, and an iron cannon spiked and thrown into the river.”2 Huddy was captured, held in irons on a prison ship for two months, and then hanged without a trial. His execution was a major diplomatic incident that enraged General George Washington; the uproar even led to a brief suspension of the Paris peace talks that ended the war.
In the thirty years that followed, the population of Dover Township (the town’s official name until 2006, though almost everyone called it Toms River) quadrupled and its “banditti” went straight, more or less.3 They prospered as merchants in a bustling port that featured two inns and was a busy stop on the coastal stagecoach route. Unfortunately for the town, a storm in 1812 sealed Cranberry Inlet, and with it the community’s chief source of income and main connection to the outside world. (Exactly 200 years later, Hurricane Sandy would devastate parts of Toms River and the shoreline communities, destroying more than 400 Ocean County homes and causing major damage to more than 1,100 others. Sandy came close to reopening Cranberry Inlet but did not quite succeed because so many hardened structures had been built in Ortley Beach during the real estate boom of the 1960s and 1970s.) With the closure of the inlet in 1812, Toms River was once again unimportant, and it would stay that way for the next 140 years. Its population stagnated at less than three thousand for a century before edging upward starting in the early 1900s with the arrival of the railroad and summer tourists from Philadelphia and New York. Toms River was the sleepy center of what was, literally and figuratively, a backwater county. The 1920 census of Ocean County recorded about twenty-two thousand people in a county of almost nine hundred square miles, a third of it under water. Most were still farmers or tradesmen, with a sprinkling of wealthier landowners.
Secure in their insularity, the town burghers hunted in the pinelands, fished in the bay, and sailed on the river. The same families lived in the same comfortable homes from generation to generation, perched comfortably atop a hierarchy that was as rigidly defined as it was unchanging. The most powerful family, the Mathises, lived in a white mansion on Main Street. A mariner turned automobile dealer, Thomas A. “Captain Tom” Mathis and his son William Steelman “Steets” Mathis ran the all-powerful Ocean County Republican Committee for fifty years, exercising iron control over patronage in town and county government from World War I to the mid-1960s. For much of that time, the father or the son (they took turns) represented Ocean County in the New Jersey State Senate.4
Everything in Toms River had its place, as did everyone. Anything that mattered had been settled long ago. The pirate days were over.
The very big idea that would transform Toms River and reshape the global economy was born in 1856 in the attic laboratory of a precocious eighteen-year-old chemistry student named William Henry Perkin, who lived with his family in London’s East End. It was Easter vacation, and Perkin was using the time off to work on some coal tar experiments suggested by his mentor at the Royal College of Chemistry, August Wilhelm von Hofmann.
No one in the world knew more about the chemical properties of coal tar than Hofmann, and coal tar was a very important compound to know about. It was, arguably, the first large-scale industrial waste. By the mid-1800s, coal gas and solid coke had replaced candles, animal oils, and wood as the most important sources of light, heat, and cooking fuel in many European and American cities. Both coal gas and coke were derived from burning coal at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen, a process that left behind a thick, smelly brown liquid that was called coal tar because it resembled the pine tar used to waterproof wooden ships. But undistilled coal tar was not a very good sealant and was noxious, too, and thus very difficult to get rid of. Burning it produced hazardous black smoke, and burying it killed any nearby vegetation. The two most common disposal practices for coal tar, dumping it into open pits or waterways, were obviously unsavory. But Hofmann, a Hessian expatriate who was an endlessly patient experimenter, was convinced that coal tar could be turned into something useful. He had already established a track record of doing so at the Royal College of Chemistry, where he was the founding director. Knowing that the various components of coal tar vaporized at different temperatures as it was heated, Hofmann spent years separating its many ingredients. In the 1840s, his work had helped to launch the timber “pickling” industry, in which railway ties and telegraph poles were protected from decay by dipping them in creosote, made from coal tar. But the timber picklers were not interested in the lighter and most volatile components of coal tar, which were still nothing but toxic waste—more toxic, in fact, than undistilled coal tar. So Hofmann and his students kept experimenting.
One of those students was young William Perkin. Hofmann had him working on a project that involved breaking down some key components of coal tar to their nitrogen bases, the amines.5 Hofmann knew that quinine, the only effective treatment for malaria and thus vital to the British Empire, was also an amine, with a chemical structure very similar to that of several coal tar components, including naphtha. He also knew that bark from Peruvian cinchona trees was the only source of quinine, which is why the medicine was costly and very difficult to obtain. But what if the miracle drug could be synthesized from naphtha or some other unwanted ingredient of coal tar? Hofmann did not think it could, but he considered it a suitable project for his promising teenage protégé.
Perkin eagerly accepted the challenge; like his mentor Hofmann, he was an obsessive experimenter. Perkin set to work during his Easter vacation, while Hofmann was in Germany. Laboring in a small, simple lab on the top floor of his family’s home, Perkin decided to experiment with toluene, a toxic component of coal tar that would later play a major role in Toms River. Perkin isolated a derivative called allyl-toluidine, then tried to transform it into quinine by oxidizing it in a mixture with potassium dichromate and sulfuric acid. When he was finished, his test tube contained a reddish-black powder, not the clear medicine he was hoping to see. So Perkin tried again, this time choosing a simpler amine called aniline, which was derived from benzene, another coal tar component that would become notorious later. Once again, he mixed it with potassium dichromate and sulfuric acid, and again the experiment flopped. This time, a black, gooey substance was at the bottom of his test tube, and it certainly was not quinine.
When Perkin washed the black goo out of the test tube, however, he saw something that intrigued him: a bright purple residue on the glass. The color was vivid, and it clung stubbornly to the glass. Even more interestingly, when he treated the gunk with alcohol, its purple color transferred flawlessly to a cotton cloth he used to clean his test tubes. Perkin had stumbled upon the molecular magic of aniline. Benzene, toluene, and other components of coal tar were colorless because they absorbed ultraviolet light undetectable by the human eye. But if those aromatic hydrocarbons were treated with an acid to create aniline or another amine, after some additional steps the newly synthesized molecules very efficiently absorbed light particles from specific wavelengths in the visible spectrum. The young chemist did not know why the resulting color was so vivid; the ability of molecules to absorb photons at specific wavelengths based on the structure of their shared electron bonds would not be worked out for another fifty years. He did not even know exactly what he had created; the precise molecular structure of his new chemical would not be deduced until the 1990s. But Perkin did not need anything more than his own eyes to know that what was at the bottom of his test tube might prove very useful, especially after its color transferred so flawlessly onto the cotton cloth. A few months earlier, Perkin and a fellow student had tried to synthesize a textile dye and failed; now he had somehow succeeded while trying to create a medicine for malaria. As Perkin knew, whoever created the first artificial dye capable of staining silk, cotton, and other fabrics with a beautiful color might get very rich. Perhaps, the teenager thought, his failed experiment might not be a failure after all.
Dyes were a very big business, and always had been. The human impulse to drape our bodies in color is primal; ancient cultures from India to the Americas colored their clothes and skin with dyes extracted from wood, animals, and flowering plants.6 The most celebrated hue of the ancient world, by far, was Tyrian purple. It could be produced only from the milky mucosal secretions of several species of sea snails, or whelks, especially one in the Eastern Mediterranean known as the spiny dye-murex. The reddish purple dye was prized because it was both dazzling in hue and vanishingly scarce. Each murex typically produced only a few drops of dye—and only when freshly caught. It was a color of legendary origin, supposedly discovered by Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans). According to Greek myth, the great hero saw that his dog’s mouth was stained purple after chewing shells on the Levantine shore. Heracles considered the hue to be so magnificent that he presented a purple robe to the king of Phoenicia, who promptly declared the color to be a symbol of royalty and made Tyre the ancient world’s center of murex dye production. And that is why, on the Ides of March in the year 44 b.c., Julius Caesar was wearing his ceremonial robe of Tyrian purple when he was slain by Brutus in the senate house of Rome. It is also why, thirteen years later at the Battle of Actium, the sails of Cleopatra’s royal barge were dyed vivid purple.