The area was occupied by a branch of the Lenape tribe of Native Americans when the first European settlers arrived in the early 19th century. The Lenape left behind evidence of their passing in the form of shell middens from the shellfish they had consumed. A small village named Penn Place, consisting of just five buildings by the mid-1860s, was constructed by the settlers along the upper Oswego River. The village was named for a Penn family member who had, according to legend, previously resided in the area at some time in the 18th century; however, the first man named Penn to settle there was James Penn, who was the son of a sea captain named William Penn. James Penn's descendants may have remained in the area until about 1890. Edwin Pue and his wife acquired the land and sold it to the state in 1910—the state's fifth acquisition for its park system. In 1912, the state ran a telephone line across what was initially called Penn Reserve. A wooden fire lookout tower was constructed on Bear Swamp Hill in 1915. After the wooden tower burnt down, a modern fire lookout tower was built in 1960. That tower was destroyed when a plane crashed through it in 1971. An Air National Guard pilot named William F. Dimas, flying from McGuire Air Force Base, crashed during practice bombing runs in a supersonic F-105 Thunderchief over the Warren Grove Gunnery Range, which is adjacent to the state forest. The crash killed the pilot and destroyed about 1000 trees along a path about wide and long. The first Civilian Conservation Corps enlistees arrived in 1933 and worked on road construction. The CCC workers at Penn State Forest consisted solely of African Americans since construction crews were segregated during that era. The CCC camp area is located to the northeast of Oswego Lake. In the spring of 1941, prior to the US entry to World War II, a five-day military exercise involving 16,000 army troops from Fort Dix participated in a mock invasion that occurred near the coastal areas of the state. Penn State Forest served as the temporary division headquarters during the exercise. In the late 1950s, a large airport was proposed by Burlington County officials to be constructed in the Pine Barrens, mainly to serve New York and Philadelphia. The airport would have spanned from Penn State Forest to Vincentown, a distance of about, including parts of the Wharton and Brendan T. Byrne state forests. The plan included filling in Oswego Lake to make it a runway as just one small part of a supersonic jetport with four times the combined capacity of Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK airports. Eventually, environmental concerns about the project led to the federal protection of the Pine Barrens as a National Reserve in 1978, after airport proposals that had lasted for two decades.
The Pine Barren Plains
The park preserves an area known as the Pine Barren Plains—also called the Pine Plains or the Pygmy Forest—a globally rare stunted forest ecosystem that reaches a mature canopy height of only about. New Jersey contains the world's largest acreage of this type of dwarf forest, including areas both within and outside the Penn State Forest. The trees are mainly pitch pine and blackjack oak in the northeastern portion of Penn State Forest. Researchers have speculated that the trees evolved to their short statures due to a combination of droughts, nutrient deficiencies, relatively higher-speed winds due to higher elevations than their surroundings, and more than twice as many wildfires as other areas within the Pine Barrens.
Oswego Lake
Oswego Lake, a artificial lake created in 1942 by a dam on the Oswego River, provides opportunities for swimming, boating, and fishing. The lake functions as a reservoir for cranberry farms located downstream along the Oswego River. The upper stretches of the generally slow-flowing Oswego River, along the Papoose Branch at the east end of the lake, can be explored by canoe and kayak. Canoeists and kayakers can also head south out of the park along the Oswego River to Harrisville Lake by portaging around the dam.
