L&L - Jacob Ong Traditional Cache
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Legends and Lore - South Jersey is an area rich with history that contains legendary characters and amazing stories. This series of caches is designed for you to learn some of the legends and stories of the area that we have grown to love. Some of the stories are true, some are just stories. Some are creepy, some funny, all are interesting. We hope you take the time to read the story that goes with each cache. Enjoy!
No "town"'s name has ever caused such a stir as Ongs Hat.
Ong’s Hat begins with the Ong family that lived in the Pinelands from around 1735 until sometime in the 1790s. The last of the family line was Jacob Ong, a happy-go-lucky dandy and womanizer. Jacob was known to wear a fancy and expensive silk hat wherever he went—unusual headgear in those parts no doubt. One story has it that Jacob, in his cups, danced himself silly one afternoon and tossed it up in the tree where it never came down. The other version is that he got a woman so angry she stomped on his hat and threw it in the tree.
Whichever is correct, the point is that this very distinctive hat stayed up in that tree for a very long time, so long in fact that it was used as a point of reference when giving directions through the woods: “Go left when you get to Ong’s hat.”
As a result, a crossroads was cut by the tree for those passing by, and eventually a town sprang up.
Some years ago, a couple of Jersey radio jokesters tried to hoax people into the idea that secret government experiments were happening there. To their credit, they kept the conspiracy theory going for a while until it was exposed. All very X-Files.
The true story? A 1968 letter published in the New York Times, written by an Ong family descendant, claims reports of an actual town are a misnomer. Instead, he says his descendants lived in Little Egg Harbor in the early 1600s and transported their grain to Burlington, New Jersey, for grinding. They built a hut midway through the route where they could rest overnight, and according to the letter the name Ong's Hut was added to maps and gradually corrupted to Ong's Hat.
No wonder they made up the more colorful versions.....
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