3/12/06 Let Petty's be a park, U.S. urges A wildlife official said N.J. should protect the island.

Top N.J. official seeking Petty's Island compromise

By Elisa Ung

Inquirer Trenton Bureau

TRENTON - New Jersey's new environmental chief began her tenure by diving into one of the most politically charged disputes in the state:

Yahoo Map of Pettys Island and Surrounding Area

Petty's Island is a 292 acre island in the Delaware river between Camden and Philadelphia seeking development. It is approximately 2 miles from the Liberty Bell and other historic attractions.

Petty's, near Pennsauken, was once a place of piracy and passion.

By Will Van Sant

Inquirer Suburban Staff

PENNSAUKEN - No island is a man, but, as with men, isolation

sometimes breeds a wild and coarse character.

Take Petty's Island, 292 acres in the Delaware River, separated from

Camden and Pennsauken by roughly 1,200 feet of water.

The island's history is one of dueling and gambling.

The surviving lore is colorful. Even a spurned lover of a king's

daughter once sought revenge on the island's people.

Pennsauken has invested in a development study that includes the island. The project, though very much on the minds of officials, remains a distant goal - people have dreamed of developing Petty's in some way for decades.

"We have an island out in the river that could be a developer's dream," Mayor Jack Killion said, "a golf course, restaurants, whatever. We have very high hopes for it."

Killion said officials had been meeting in recent weeks with potential investors who see in Petty's the same gold mine that Pennsauken does. When an investor is found, the island's owner - Citgo Petroleum Corp. - can be approached.

Now uninhabited, Petty's is the Delaware River's fourth-largest island; the largest is 489-acre Newbold Island off Burlington County.

The last house burned down in 1964, and all relics of the island's past have been erased. Its present, too, is a mystery to most in the region.

You can't visit Petty's without Citgo's permission.

"The only people that know about Petty's Island are the people who work on it," said R.J. Smith, Citgo's terminal manager. "We're the best-kept secret around."

Smith estimates that there are 100 employees on the island. Citgo stores fuel that it pumps into ships for delivery worldwide. The company also rents tracts of the island to Crowley Maritime Corp., which ships goods to Puerto Rico, and Koch Industries Inc., an asphalt-products company that sells to the highway industry.

The rise of heavy industry after 1900, Smith said, tamed Petty's. It now is a quiet, windy and rather desolate place, nearly a third of it undeveloped and forested Local legends tell tales of pirates coming to the island's shores in early colonial times, and even of buried treasure.

"I have heard that there is treasure here, that Blackbeard was here," Smith said. "But I'm from Missouri; show me. I have been looking for it for 30 years and have not found it."

In 1678, Elizabeth Kinsey, a Quaker who had fled England, bought the island from four American Indian chiefs.

The next owner was William Penn, whose followers' reputation for rectitude was tested by the island's distance from scolding elders.

"Petty's Island was kind of a no-man's-land for straitlaced Quaker Philadelphia," said Paul W. Schopp, former executive director of the Camden County Historical Society.

In the 18th century, Quakers with a desire to gamble visited the island for lotteries, and enemies with pistols rowed there from Philadelphia to settle their differences.

The island's namesake, John Petty, purchased the two-mile-long strip of land in 1732.

Only fragments of some island stories survive; they hint at longer sagas.

In Schopp's collection is a letter that a man named Solomon Wardell wrote to his mother on June 23, 1800. Wardell describes rowing to the island on May 9 to see three men lynched, telling his mother that it was "a very [sic] sorrowful sight to be sure."

It is not known why the three were hanged or if there have been other executions on Petty's.

A host of ships, however, did end their days there. Timbers from some can still be seen at low tide.

Among the many now forgotten island stories is that of Ralston Laird, who arrived from Ireland in 1851 and became a farm manager on Petty's. He was to live on the island for more than 50 years and be christened its king.

On Oct. 14, 1911, a front-page obituary in the Camden Post-Telegram proclaimed "Death Takes King of Petty's Island." The obituary reported that Laird had "played fair and dealt squarely with his fellow men. It was they who proclaimed him king."

Laird, father of four daughters, considered Petty's an Eden, a "paradise" reminiscent of his native Ireland, according to newspaper reports. The blissful paradise was threatened in 1896 when island resident Ernest Schroeder came calling on the Lairds.

In an account published under the headline "Cupid on Petty's Island," readers of a local newspaper were told that "Schroeder fell in love with Kate Laird, it is said, and because she refused to accept his advances he threatened to kill her and everybody else on the island."

Schroeder, who it seems could have used a break from island living, was charged with carrying "concealed deadly weapons" and committed to the county jail.

"I have been at this facility here since '72," terminal manager Smith said. "It's a very interesting piece of property. Nobody bothers us, and that's the way we like it."

" Planning should not be an elitist process in which people "are told what's best for them," in his words; rather, it should be shaped by the people who will be living with its results."-

Tom Knoche