NOTES

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Unquestionably one of our biggest challenges to pin down, and a glimpse at the breadth of maps and guides Dave Van Ronk used to build the song.

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Mahalala is not a town, community, body of water, or even landmark that has wormed its way into recent maps of the state. The last shred of the name, the Mahalala District Boy Scouts, was dissolved years ago.

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To find this place, we scoured resources and found two in parallel to help us:

The first tells us that

the Indian name of a section where the Boy Scouts of Burlington County

have a camp, is close to a lake

 

Our second resource gave us much better focus on the location of the old Mahalala Camp, as detailed here:

The new camp [Camp Lenape, Medford] was needed as a result of it's predecessor, Camp Mahalala being needed by the Air Force. Camp Mahalala was located in what is now the housing area of McGuire AFB.

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These were our puzzle pieces, and together with a map of the greater McGuire-Dix Air Force base, we found a lake positioned quite near the housing area. Though the lake extends into the boundary of the base, for a relatively uninteresting location photo we were pretty excited to comb back through history to find this spot.