Bog Water Press

THE LINE OF THE BLACK WATER

A novel in six books by Thomas Worrell

The Line of the Black Water follows one family across three centuries in America — from the hills of Wales in the 1680s to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in 2006.It begins with a Quaker farmer dragged from his home for refusing to swear an oath, and it ends with a grandmother in a hospital bed learning for the first time what her name means. Between them lie six generations: ironmongers and ironmasters, soldiers and pharmacists, pilots and widows — each inheriting a piece of land and a piece of silence, each carrying forward something they don't fully understand.The series spans the founding of Pennsylvania, the rise and collapse of the South Jersey iron industry, the Civil War, the Depression, two World Wars, and the slow forgetting that follows when a family's story goes untold. At its center is a tract of Pine Barrens wilderness that grew to more than 44,000 acres across two generations of the Jones family — and remained tied to the name over 200 years later, though by the end, no one alive remembers why.Built from over twenty years of archival research, original family documents, and real historical records, The Line of the Black Water is a work of fiction grounded in fact — a story about what gets carried forward, what gets lost, and what the land remembers when the people forget.

Book One — Where the Hills Let Go

Merionethshire, Wales, 1680s. Thomas ap Rhys is a magistrate who keeps the law, keeps the ledger, and keeps the peace. Then a directive arrives from the Crown: report the names of every Quaker in the valley. One of those names belongs to a man he has known since childhood.When soldiers drag Rees ap John and his children barefoot into the rain, Thomas must choose between the office he holds and the man he cannot condemn. Rees will die in a Crown garrison. His wife Catrin's hands will fail her before the year is out. And Thomas — who never wanted to be anything other than a magistrate in a Welsh valley — will gather the children, board a ship, and carry them across the Atlantic to a piece of Pennsylvania that Rees purchased sight unseen on the strength of a letter that said the creek sounded like home.Coming Soon

Book Two — The Iron and the Flame

Philadelphia, 1790s. Benjamin Jones arrives with sixty pounds in banknotes and his father's instructions: learn the ledger, learn the prices, learn the men. He learns all three. He marries Rebecca Moore. He builds a warehouse. And then Rebecca dies, and the architecture of his life collapses into a bed that holds only one person.What saves him is iron — not the iron of his Philadelphia warehouse, but a different iron, pulled from the black water of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. When Benjamin rides into the vast cedar forests of Burlington County and stands on the bank of the Rancocas for the first time, he finds the thing that will define the rest of his life: Hanover Furnace. He will build it into an empire. He will lose it. And he will get it back, because the Joneses do not stop.Coming Soon.

Book Three — Forging Ruin

New Jersey Pine Barrens, 1812. The furnace breathed. That was the first thing Richard Jones learned about Hanover — before the names of the workers, before the rhythm of the blast, before the smell of charcoal burning hot enough to turn bog ore into liquid iron.Richard inherits forty-four thousand acres of pine forest and a furnace his father built from nothing. He will expand it into an empire — iron works, a zinc patent, a town called Florence rising on the Delaware. But the patent courts will hand his process to another man. The creditors will circle. And a telegram will arrive that breaks something in him that iron cannot mend.Coming Soon.

Book Four — The Unfinished Letter

Hanover, New Jersey, 1849. Ivins Davis Jones grows up at the edge of a lake that holds the reflection of everything his family has built. He is the ironmaster's son — the boy who watches the moulders work, who stands at the frozen edge and pauses before crossing. At fourteen, his father presses a silver watch into his palm and sends him to Haverford. At twenty, the war takes him.Ivy's letters home are the best writing the family will ever produce — from the camps outside Washington, from the cavalry in Virginia, from a tropical colony on the coast of South America. But something in the voice changes. And when he comes home, the foundry yard is dark, the weeds are waist-high, and the war has left him with a promise he cannot keep.Coming Soon.

Book Five — Heir Unapparent

Hanover, New Jersey, 1865. William Carroll Jones is born in a house across the lake from the mansion his family built and lost. The furnace is already going cold. The empire his grandfather raised from bog iron is dissolving into trusts and tax notices and a house in Pemberton that belongs to someone else.He becomes a pharmacist. He buys a building on Main Street in New Egypt, stands behind a pine counter, and stays for forty-three years. The town calls him Doc. He fills prescriptions, reads the family papers Alice handed him in a parlor in Philadelphia, and holds together what the century keeps trying to pull apart — a son who dies too young, a swindle that puts his name in the headlines, and a granddaughter who will inherit everything he quietly kept without knowing what any of it means.Coming Soon.

Book Six — What the Water Held

New Egypt, New Jersey, 1925. A ten-year-old girl sits on a high stool in her grandfather's pharmacy and listens to stories about wizards and crows and pigs that turn to wood chips in a creek. She does not know the stories are about her own family. She does not know that her ancestors built the iron furnace in the pines. She does not know that the suitcase in the closet holds a map of forty-four thousand acres that were once hers.Vivien Jones Worth will marry a man made of motion — a vaudeville dancer, a pilot, a man who drives too fast and fills every room he enters. She will hold the war years and the flying years and the long silence after the flying stops. She will hold the bankruptcy and the beauty shop and the grandchildren and the sixty years without understanding what her name means. Until a grandson opens the suitcase, unfolds the map, and follows the lines all the way back to the beginning.Coming Soon.

Thomas Worrell is a descendant of the Jones ironmaster family of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The Line of the Black Water is drawn from over twenty years of archival research, original family documents, and a personal archive of over 300 items spanning two centuries.