Rare tour of Petty's Island offered

PENNSAUKEN – A guard house sits alongside a bridge at the foot of 36th Street where it meets the Delaware River.

The bridge, which leads to 400-acre Petty's Island — private property of the Citgo petroleum corporation — is normally off-limits for the public.

While the northern end of the island has been developed industrially, the southern end maintains a more natural state, with marshlands, grasslands, woodland and wildlife.

The public will have a rare opportunity to access the island Saturday morning for a free 2.8-mile history hike, led by the Camden County Historical Society and NJ Audubon.

Hikers on the three-hour tour that begins at 9:30 a.m. may see a rookery of herons, box and snapping turtles, deer or an eagle, which has a nest nearby in Camden.

Kelly Wentz of NJ Audubon said the nonprofit wildlife organization conducts a few tours each year for the public in anticipation of opening the park. She said an opening will occur after Citgo completes an environmental cleanup of its former tank farm and the state takes possession of the entire island, with plans to turn it into a wildlife preserve with a visitors center.

Citgo has agreed to donate the land in 2020 to the New Jersey Natural Lands Trust, a nonprofit arm of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

"We are trying to introduce people to the island before the state takes possession," said Robert Shinn, leader of the tour as treasurer of the Camden County Historical Society and a Petty's Island historian.

"We are about to engage in a great, wonderful experiment to see to what extent an island that has been industrialized can be restored back to nature."

Citgo is treating groundwater for petroleum contamination and releasing the cleaned water into the river, said James Kearns, a scientist for the environmental cleanup firm Citgo hired.

He said there has been a barrier wall installed in the ground to prevent off-site migration of pollutants.

NJ Audubon, which has an agreement with the lands trust to handle educational programming on the island for the state, also takes an occasional school tour of students to the island and holds an annual cleanup of the island's coastline.

"We've cleaned up accumulated flotsam and jetsam like tires and soda bottles that beach along the shoreline after floating the tide in the river. And it has stayed surprisingly clean," Shinn said.

The focus of Saturday's tour will be its history, starting with the Indians who inhabited the island when Europeans arrived in the 1600s.
The lands trust has installed a dozen informational signs along the hiking path with text and photographs of island history. NJ Audubon has subcontracted the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and the Cooper River Watershed Association to assist in interpretive efforts and island programming.

The island was named for one of its early land owners, Indian trader John Petty. But the Indians leased the rights to occupy and farm on what was then called Shackamaxon to English Quaker settler Elizabeth Kinsey in 1678.

Petty bought the island in 1732.

A smallpox epidemic later wiped out most of the island Indians, who initially numbered an estimated 20,000 in the 1600s, but whose population had dropped by 1758 to 200 who relocated to a newly founded reservation in Evesham.

A predecessor to Citgo erected the first bridge, an oil tank farm, refinery, and tanker ship port beginning in 1927. By the mid-1930s the farm stored about 100 million gallons of oil.

In 2000 Citgo Petroleum began winding down its operation. IN 2009 Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announces his government, the owner of Citgo, will donate the Island to New Jersey.

The state rejected Chavez' first offer of the land in 2004. At that time Pennsauken was pushing housing and other development for the island. Those controversial plans were scrapped four years later after financial and other questions arose about the developers and the economy began to sour.

There is one business still operating on the island, the Crowley Marine Terminal.

In 1980 Crowley Marine Corporation erected its terminal on the western shore of the island to roll off containers for Caribbean trade to Puerto Rico, using a three-level floating dock to handle tri-level barges. Its operation will end when its lease with CITGO expires in 2017.

The land trust is exploring the feasibility of locating a visitor center at the marine terminal site after Crowley leaves.

Shinn said the varied industrial uses are the most interesting aspect of island history.

"The island was used by everyone from the Lenni Lenape Indians to William Penn and Camden's Cooper, from shipbuilders like Cramp Shipbuilding to coal storage and oil refiners," he said.

To make a tour reservation email bobshinn@gmail.com

Reach Carol Comegno at (856) 486-2473 or @carolcomegno@gannettnj.com or @carolcomegno