Backwoods Town Considers Packing It In : New Jersey: With only six residents remaining, picturesque Pahaquarry Township considers merging with neighboring Hardwick.

On a recent afternoon the busiest spot in town was Van Campen Brook, where the water rushed through rocks, the wind swished maple trees and two hikers set off for a walk to the mountain ridge.

And that’s about as eventful as it gets in the least populated town in the most densely populated state--a town that may soon be forced out of business for lack of residents.

The population of this isolated, 160-year-old Warren County municipality has dwindled. In 1970, there were 70 residents; now there are six. Only two are eligible to serve as township officials--one short of the minimum for a municipal government.

Jean Zipser is a 48-year-old newspaper editor and part-time mayor and Harold Van Campen, 74, is a bachelor farmer and the only remaining township committee member. Committeeman and one-time mayor Donald von Hagen died in October.

Two National Park Service workers and their two children also live in the township. As federal employees, the couple cannot hold partisan office.

A sliver of hills and farms between Kittatinny Mountain and the Delaware River, Pahaquarry is 12 miles long and 2 miles wide. Worthington State Forest and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area take up nearly all the land.

The Appalachian Trail is about the most-traveled route through town--not counting Interstate 80 which skirts its western edge just before crossing into Pennsylvania.

“It takes an attitude of self-reliance to live here. We’re living on what was a frontier,” Zipser said.

Zipser and Van Campen have to go 11 miles to Blairstown for groceries, plumbers, doctors--anything.

“If my water freezes, I have to haul water. If the fuel oil company can’t get its truck over the mountain, I have to haul fuel oil. It becomes tedious,” Zipser said. “The concept of living alone or far away from other people or living with hardship is not a popular idea.”

But Pahaquarry’s last longtime residents rather like living away from other people. Van Campen, whose riverfront property is dotted with firewood and old tractors, refused to talk to a reporter and photographer, saying it would “only bring people around.”

And Zipser is committed to the place. She spent every summer as a girl here with her grandmother, and now lives in the 260-year-old farmhouse that belonged to her grandmother.

“I’ve traveled extensively, but there is something that moves my heart in a way I can’t describe when I begin the drive down the mountain into the valley and home. It’s an issue of the heart I think, much like love,” she said.

The township’s name is derived from the Indian “Pahoqualin”--which meant “end of the two mountains with stream between,” according to Roger Rector, superintendent of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

If the federal government’s original plans for the area came to pass, Pahaquarry would have disappeared years ago--by submersion.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned to build the Tocks Island Dam nearby and to flood the township. “My house would have been 14 feet under water,” Zipser said.

But because Congress declared the Delaware River a wild and scenic river in 1978, the dam plan was postponed and eventually scrapped.

Most of the property in the township still belongs to the federal government and is part of the national recreation area.

When the government bought the land from residents, it offered to let former homeowners stay in their houses as tenants. Zipser and Van Campen agreed. But Zipser said most of the other homeowners decided to leave rather than pay rent on what was their own property.

No new residents can move in because it’s federal land, said Randy Turner, chief of visitor services for recreation area.

“Being annexed would make life considerably easier,” Zipser said. “With the death of Mr. von Hagen, I think we can continue until the end of the year.”