Now the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is eyeing the southern tip of the 400-acre island as a place to dump a mountain of river dredge spoils.
That is what it was used for more than 20 years ago during previous dredging operations. But those spoils have sprouted trees and shrubs around a nearly 100-acre lake, and a competing business plan envisages a multimillion-dollar historical theme park on the island.
The problem is, the theme-park proposal has been discussed for three years and still lacks financing.
Money apparently was not a problem in 1624, when the Dutch West India Company financed the first European settlement in New Jersey - on the island - according to the late Burlington County historian Henry H. Bisbee.
"Here is an unspoiled island, nestling between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, hardly used by man, yet the site of the first European settlement on the river," he writes in his book, Burlington Island, The Best and Largest on the South River.
The company dispatched a group of French-speaking Walloons from the Netherlands to settle in the Delaware Valley. They chose the island for their new home, Bisbee writes. Back then, the Delaware was known as the South River and the Hudson as the North River.
"Why was Burlington Island, nearly 100 miles from the sea, selected?" Bisbee asks at the beginning of his book, in an edition sponsored by the Burlington Rotary. The answer is unclear.
Bisbee describes the first settlement as having three or four Walloon families and eight single men who lived in bark huts that were surrounded by a palisaded fort. The island then was called Matinicunk, or "Island of the Pines."
