I am glad you know the history of this important technology!!! New Jersey must have been full of trees same as Pennsylvania which as you know means William Penn’s forest.
Penn’s Woods = Penn’s Sylvania
Sylvania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvania
Sylvania literally means “forest land” in Latin. The term can be used in a variety of contexts: Contents 1 Astronomy 2 Companies 3 Education 4 Places 4.1 Australia 4
*****The whole NE was and is full of trees due to natural rainfall
I can believe the whole NE was covered in trees; I live on the edge of the Meadowlands here in NJ, and at one time it was woods. The forest was burned to deal with highwaymen robbing travelers on the plank roads (corduroy roads, built with felled trees) as they headed west from Jersey City and NYC (during colonial times). The trees recovered, and the site really was meadows (instead of the swamp there today) until the 1950s. At that time, a hurricane broke the dike walls holding back the Hackensack River, and we were left with the brackish marsh you see today. You can still see segments of the dike wall, and at low tide you can see thousands of tree stumps exposed on the mud flats.
BTW, the little town to the north of me (North Arlington, NJ) was home to the first steam engine ever used in the colonies; it de-watered a copper mine that pre-dated the Revolution. When I bought my home I went over there and retrieved some copper ore for a nice ring on my lawn (the stones are oxidized; light green like the Statue of Liberty). Just as Pennsylvania people had issues with underground coal mines screwing with their properties, that little town had problems when old air shafts that had been filled with rubbish decades ago started to collapse. Peoples’ foundations were damaged, sinkholes opened in their yards, and despite two remediation efforts there are still problems. People in that area can’t put in in-ground pools, and they have no storm drains on the streets.