Whitesbog Preservation Trust
At Whitesbog’s historic Barrel Factory, storytellers, craftspeople, and musicians will gather to keep Pinelands traditions alive through shared, participatory oral history sessions.
At Whitesbog Historic Farm & Village in the New Jersey Pinelands, the Barrel Factory has long been a place where people come together to share music, stories, and craft traditions. Building on a longstanding oral history effort, which has been supported with prior NJCH grant funding, Whitesbog will host a series of public recording sessions that invite visitors into this living tradition. Local storytellers, musicians, and craftspeople, including basketweavers, carvers, fiber artists, woodworkers, candlemakers, and more, will demonstrate their work and reflect on how these practices connect them to the land, to history, and to one another.
Whitesbog has been documenting the traditional culture of the Pinelands since the 1980s. Its ongoing oral history program continues the voices of farmers, artists, teachers, and tradition bearers whose lives are rooted in this landscape. These new sessions will be intentionally participatory, bringing audiences, demonstrators, and collaborators into the same space to experience folklife as something actively practiced rather than passively observed.
The resulting recordings will be shared as short videos, photo essays, and digital stories, highlighting how both longtime residents and younger generations are sustaining and reinterpreting Pinelands traditions. In a place where cranberry and blueberry farming, craft, music, and storytelling have defined community life for generations, the project invites the public to witness how culture is passed down, adapted, and kept vibrant in the present day.
