Proceedings of Seventh Annual Meeting 



with a combined cross-section of 255 feet; of a mile and a half of 

 dikes and about three-quarters of a million feet of ditching inland. 



We have the confidence of the people of the county and their 

 cooperation and that of the various organizations of the county, and 

 we have an ample appropriation for this year, so that the work will 

 progress as fast as possible for the gradual elimination of all of the 

 mosquitoes in the county. 



Middlesex County 



Thomas J. Headlee, New Brunswick 



Mr. Chairman, Mr. Cathcart w^as taken with the influenza the day 

 before our meeting here and could not report. 1 will report for 

 Middlesex County if I may. 



Middlesex County has been one of the counties with a small ap- 

 propriation, $6,500 last year. She has a salt marsh of about 8,300 

 acres. She has devoted practically her entire attention to the salt 

 marsh. She has over half the necessary drainage now in the salt 

 marsh. With the outbreak of the w^ar the government took over 

 1,500 acres of salt marsh for the Raritan Arsenal and has drained 

 that area very thoroughly. At the same time the T. A. Gillespie 

 Loading Company, at Morgan, undertook the necessary additional 

 drainage of the Cheesequake marsh, a 1,700-acre marsh, and com- 

 pleted fully 60 per cent of the work on that marsh. So Middlesex 

 County has gotten a very large amount of salt-marsh drainage done 

 at a very low cost to the county itself. I should say in a single year, 

 the appropriation of the county being $6,500, there was an actual ex- 

 penditure of over $12,000 to $15,000 in the county and on the county 

 salt marshes ; the extra money coming from the T. A. Gillespie con- 

 cern and from the Government Arsenal at Camp Raritan. 



This year the Board of Freeholders recognized that due to in- 

 creased cost of labor we should not be able to make any adequate 

 progress in new work unless additional appropriations were granted, 

 and raised the appropriation to $8,000. We do not expect to obtain 

 the help from outside agencies this year that we obtained last, al- 

 though we do expect that the drainage of the 1,500 acres in connec- 

 tion with the Raritan Arsenal will be taken care of by the govern- 

 ment. 



We have had to meet some difficult and interesting problems. 



