It’s a proud 15th birthday for the once-little Pine Barrens arts festival that could

Inside their spacious home in Mullica Township, Linda and Jim Stanton sat at their kitchen table early last month. Their focus was on food, but no plates or silverware were in sight.

Before them were the ingredients for a cookbook – thousands of pages, front, and back covers. They were assembling them for sale at the annual Lines on the Pines, a celebration of the South Jersey Pinelands and its culture, set for March 15 at Stockton University in Galloway Township.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the event, which was founded by Linda. So she knows this home stretch well.

“This is our crunch time,” she said, as Jim used a binder and binding combs to assemble the books while she checked that the pages were in the right order. The end result will be Bounty of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens: Recipes, Short Stories, and Tall Tales, a 258-page volume.

The Stantons know not to rush.

“We had some books the first year where whole sections were in backward,” Jim recalled.

The idea for Lines on the Pines came to Linda during a visit to Sweetwater Casino in Mullica Township in 2005, where she discovered an interesting book in the restaurant gift shop: Heart of the Pines by John Pearce. She stumbled upon a several more locally authored tomes about the Pines while visiting historic Batsto Village, prompting her to organize a meet-and-greet book signing with some of the authors in March 2006, at Sweetwater Casino.

The event featured not just six authors, but a photographer and archaeologist, too. She dubbed it “Lines on the Pines.”

If she worried that the public might not be as intrigued as she was to learn more about the region’s history and culture, the event taught her otherwise, said Jim.

“It started at 1 p.m., and people started coming at 12,” he marveled.

Since then, Lines on the Pines has evolved into an annual social highlight of the region, with the addition of dozens of artists, crafters, videographers, and musicians.

“We’re going to have over 80, if not 90, vendors this year,” Linda predicts, with an expected turnout of about 1,500 attendees at the event, which will be at Stockton’s Campus Center. “We call ourselves the AHHA event – Authors and History, Humanities and the Arts.”

Carleton Montgomery credits Lines with keeping the area’s arts alive and thriving.

“It provides a unique opportunity to expose the public to this globally rare ecosystem through photography, painting, music, traditional crafts, and writing,” said Montgomery, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance.

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Linda credits her relationship with Jim with kick-starting her interest in the Pine Barrens. The couple met online in 2001.

“She was wearing a plaid shirt and work boots,” said Jim, 76, a retired civil engineer. “My type of woman.”

On their second date, as they kayaked on the Mullica River through the Pine Barrens, Linda became more enamored with the area through every pull of the paddles. She and Jim married in 2002 — and moved into a home they had passed on that kayaking trip.

Linda, a longtime educator, said her classroom skills have transferred well to her work with Lines on the Pines for Kids, a program that introduces young ones to the scope of the Pinelands National Reserve. Not everyone knows that the expanse is a vast, 1.1-million acre tract of farms, forests, and wetlands containing 56 communities of 700,000 permanent residents in portions of Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Ocean counties.

“Kids are our future historians,” she said. “If we don’t teach the kids, what good is it just keeping the adults informed?”

When she’s not organizing the arts extravaganza, Stanton donates her time at the AtlantiCare Medical Center’s Mainland Campus, where she has logged more than 30,000 volunteer hours since 1974. For the last five years, she has managed its gift shop, gratis.

“Volunteering was a way to serve our local hospital, which serves our local community,” she said. She has clearly embraced that philosophy as the founder and president Sign of the Pines, the nonprofit parent organization that oversees the Lines extravaganza.

In addition to the annual festival, the organization has produced books, most recently Owls of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, featuring sketches by Mullica Township artist Shannon Askins.

Longevity aside, Lines has survived the occasional setback. In June 2008, fire destroyed the Sweetwater Casino, the festival’s annual site. Lines was then held at various Pine Barrens venues before finding its current home at Stockton in 2018. The plan is for the university to one day take the Lines reins from the Stantons.

“Jim and I are not getting any younger and we need to prepare an exit strategy,” said Linda.

Thomas Kinsella, director of the South Jersey Culture & History Center at Stockton, believes the school will be an excellent steward of the organization the Stantons have nurtured for so long.

“They've made thousands of people more aware of the Pine Barrens,” he said.

They’ve been glad to do it, said Linda Stanton, given how the area’s beauty and culture has sustained them all these years.

“This is our thank you to the Pine Barrens,” she said.

For more information, go to linesonthepines.org.