After years in suburban housing, this couple opted for rural living in South Jersey

Bob Rosenberg was in the Boy Scouts, “but I never made Eagle.”

His parents sent him to summer camp (we’re talking lakes and ballfields, not a kibbutz variant where you grow stuff), but he didn’t find it a life-changing experience.

In fact, nothing in the first 60-plus years of his South Jersey existence made him seem like a candidate for his current rural lifestyle.

He grew up in Camden, starting as a laborer — “my mother said I used to dig ditches” — and eventually developing his own construction business, despite his mother’s desire that he become a lawyer.

Home for him and his wife, Kathy, a retired operating room nurse to whom he has been married for 49 years, had been a series of single-family homes in typical suburban developments, punctuated by a short stretch in Florida and another in Margate, N.J.

But somehow, even though he wasn’t ready to retire, he had this persistent desire to trade shopping malls, traffic, and congestion for farms, space and a slower pace. Three or four years ago, the urge started to get really strong.

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So in 2019, with age 70 approaching, he began driving around the area looking for a place to buy.

He settled on a plot of just under 12 acres in the agricultural flatlands of Winslow Township in Camden County, about 45 minutes east of Philadelphia.

It’s less than a quarter-mile up an unpaved road from the highway — if it’s big enough to call it a highway — and is barely visible from there.

There he’s building a 2,800-square-foot, two-bedroom home and a 3,000-square-foot barn to house his truck and tractor.

Not even the mild stroke he suffered in April has stopped him. He’s recovering nicely, and completion of the buildings is expected by fall. In the meantime, he and his wife are living in an apartment in Sicklerville.

“I was tired of being around old people even if we’re up in age ourselves,“ he says, jokingly, noting that seniors often tend to group together even if it’s not a dedicated community.

Oddly enough, he says he feels less isolated in his new surroundings. “It feels great, that’s all I can tell you.”

His new neighbors are Barbara Stella and her Stella Farms outlet of corn, tomatoes, zucchini, and strawberries with its surrounding cropland, and Leslie Auwarter, who owns the adjacent Little Timber Ranch.

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And he and Kathy still have their two dogs, a West Highland terrier, Ziggy, and a cairn, Tootsie.

“Fresh produce in season. Watching crops grow, walking out and snapping off a couple of ears of corns and having it for dinner,” he says, all enjoyable from his back porch.

“Barbara [Stella] takes care of the corn,” he says. “Leslie takes care of the horses.”

He finds a sort of neighborliness he didn’t find in suburbia. To cite one example, he recalls being on the barn roof putting down shingles when he noticed that a group of workers in the adjacent Stella Farms cornfield had stopped work and was looking up at him.

“They were concerned that I was up there by myself,” he says.

Down the road, he is looking at ways to become more involved with the community. Possibilities include a Christmas tree farm or subsidizing a local 4-H group.

“It feels great. That’s all I can tell you.”

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