Some farming was done by the inhabitants of Cape May; and many cattle, marked with brands but in a half wild state, were kept out on the uninhabited beaches which have now become seaside summer cities.Some of the cattle were still running wild on the beaches down to the time of the Civil War.The settlers "mined"the valuable white cedar from the swamps for shingles and boards, leaving great "pool holes" in the swamps which even today sometimes trap the unwary sportsman.The women knitted innumerable mittens and also made wampum or Indian money from the clam and oyster shells, an important means of exchange in the Indian trade all over the colonies, and even to some extent among the colonists themselves.The Cape May people built sloops for carrying the white cedar, the mittens, oysters, and wampum to the outside world.They sold a great deal of their cedar in Long Island, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.Philadelphia finally became their market for oysters and also for lumber, corn, and the whalebone and oil.Their sloops also traded to the southern colonies and even to the West Indies.
They were an interesting little community, these Cape May people, very isolated and dependent on the water and on their boats, for they were completely cut off by the Great Cedar Swamp which stretched across the point and separated them from the rest of the coast.This troublesome swamp was not bridged for many years;and even then the roads to it were long, slow, and too sandy for transporting anything of much bulk.
Next above Cape May on the coast was another isolated patch of civilization which, while not an island, was nevertheless cut off on the south by Great Egg Harbor with its river and marshes, and on the north by Little Egg Harbor with the Mullica River and its marshes extending far inland.The people in this district also lived somewhat to themselves.To the north lay the district which extended to Sandy Hook, also with its distinct set of people.
The people of the Cape became in colonial times clever traders in various pursuits.Although in one sense they were as isolated as islanders, their adventurous life on the sea gave them breadth of view.By their thrift and in innumerable shrewd and persistent ways they amassed competencies and estates for their families.
Aaron Leaming, for example, who died in 1780, left an estate of nearly $1,000,000.Some kept diaries which have become historically valuable in showing not only their history but their good education and the peculiar cast of their mind for keen trading as well as their rigid economy and integrity.
One character, Jacob Spicer, a prosperous colonial, insisted on having everything made at home by his sons and daughters--shoes, clothes, leather breeches, wampum, even shoe thread--calculating the cost of everything to a fraction and economizing to the last penny of money and the last second of time.Yet in the course of a year he used "fifty-two gallons of rum, ten of wine, and two barrels of cyder." Apparently in those days hard labor and hard drinking went well together.
