Bastro
Batsto is about 9 miles east of Hammonton. I've been there many times since I was a kid, so I'll try to sum up the experience for you.
Going to Batsto is sort of like going to a museum. You know that feeling, where everything looks real and fake at the same time? The entire town, or what's left of it, has became a National Landmark in 1954. Now, this isn't a bad thing. I love to see the government taking interest in these places that have been left to rot. It's just that now, after restoration, they treat it as a novelty, not as something to be preserved and remembered. Of course I'm willing to pay the fee to get in, but it just makes it feel like going to an amusement park. What's more, a lot of the restoration process had obliterated some very important pieces of evidence. For a pointed example, most of the Batsto Town Hall's main chamber have been rebuilt with imported stone; not only is it historically innacurate, but the historic society has kept no record of what might have become of the original stones. In the section of the Town Hall that still contains original stone - the adjoining storage room - the walls have been plastered over and covered in wood paneling on the inside, and a door and window have been added to the outer walls. No records were kept as to which areas of the wall were kept original in that construction project, and more than likely large sections of the wall were scrapped. That structure now serves as the town manager's office.
The post-mortem on Batsto is easy to understand. The town was founded in 1766, 10 years before the end of the American Revolution. The booming trade in iron made the forges at Batsto the center of its economic prosperity, and the town continued to grow to over 1000 citizens - not bad for the Revolutionary time period. When the forges closed in 1848, the damage to the local economy drove nearly everyone to search for work in other places. The shifting of economic resources is the number one cause of city death in the world. 30 years after the closing of the forges, a fire broke out in the already near-empty village. The reduced populace were not able to corral the fire, and it destroyed the entire town. Those who survived the fire were now forced to move on.