South Jersey man trying to reclaim the term ‘Piney’

CHATSWORTH — A mason jar stuffed with a bouquet of tawny cotton grass sat on a table in a historic general store in the heart of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.

William J. Lewis, 49, knows the plant by another name. It’s the name his father learned from his late grandfather, Joseph “Roy” Lewis, a lifelong plant gatherer and tinkerer educated in the Jersey woods.

“I’ve always known it as cat’s paw and there’s probably still a few people out there who call it that,” Lewis said on a recent morning in Buzby’s General Store. “I don’t want people to forget those words.”

Lewis, a lifelong resident of New Egypt, is a self-professed piney, a word that’s been used as both a put-down by outsiders and a badge of pride by locals over the last couple centuries. He spent childhood summers in Browns Mills and Chatsworth, deeper in the Pinelands.

He has spent the last couple of years trying to reclaim the word to expound on it in ways he feels John McPhee, author of the seminal The Pine Barrens didn’t in the 1960s. Like most others, Lewis feels McPhee’s book helped save the Pine Barrens from development, but it was the first time he’d seen piney used in a negative way.

Lewis feels most literature, film, and educational material about the Pinelands National Preserve focuses strictly on its unique flora and fauna: the loud green tree frogs, the carnivorous plants, and its miles of blueberry and cranberry crops. Industrialists who grew wealthy there, like Philadelphia’s Joseph Wharton, are often mentioned, he said, but the working people of the pines are forgotten.

“There’s a museum dedicated to New Jersey’s bay men in Tuckerton, not too far from here, but there’s no museum dedicated to pineys or Pine Barrens culture,” he pointed out. “We do a real good job at protecting the plants and animals here, but the people not so much.”

One well-known piney from McPhee’s book, Bill Wasiowich, is now in his 80s and still living in the same gun club he did when this reporter visited him in 2012.

“I guess a piney is something that gives a place identity. I guess it makes a place different from another place,” Wasiowich told me at the time. “The way I see it, I’m no different than the pines, or the animals and plants out here.”

Lewis, a former Marine, feels McPhee oversimplified Wasiowich’s vast, outdoor skill set. Wasiowich also isn’t the “last piney,” as the Daily News announced.

“I guess I feel like people from the pines should tell the story,” Lewis said.

So that’s what Lewis, a married father of two who works for the federal government, did. His book New Jersey’s Lost Piney Culture was published in 2021. Signed copies sit on the shelf at Buzby’s, which opened in 1865. Lewis also runs the Piney Tribe Facebook page, which has 9,000 followers. He recently began streaming his documentary, The Reluctant Piney, on YouTube. The film — made on a shoestring budget, he pointed out — focuses on Pinelands culture but specifically on the workers like Wasiowich, who supplied the dried flower industry by picking their way through the pines.

In the film, Lewis asked Wasiowich if he’d ever seen the legendary Jersey Devil, arguably New Jersey’s most famous piney.

“Only a fool would believe something like that,” he said.

Wasiowich said he did see the ghost of an old sea captain in an old-timer’s house in the woods.

Lewis, in his book, breaks pineys into nine categories, including tree hugger, woods, out-of-town piney, and educated. He’s a mix of them, having grown up pulling pine cones with his grandparents but also obtaining a business degree from Rider University.

“It isn’t derogatory to most people today but for some, it is,” he said. “Doing the research, it broadened my notion of who a piney is and what it could be. Bill is definitely a woods piney.”

Lewis considers his book a museum of its own, the movie an enhanced version of it. He’s even teaching an adult course on the book at Rowan College at Burlington County in the fall. When he’s not immersed in the writing or filmmaking, Lewis said he’s out in the woods looking for birds or plants.

At the simplest, Lewis says he’s a piney because he loves the area.

“I’ve been everywhere — Germany, Ireland, the Horn of Africa,” he said, “but I still think the Pine Barrens are the most magical place.”