When most people think about folklore, they think about some place other than New Jersey. Folklore is commonly identified with rural settings, and New Jersey is basically urban, suburban, and industrial. There are some rural areas in New Jersey- the truck farms of "the Garden State" and the Pine Barrens of South Jersey- but the former are fast disappearing and the latter survive only because they are preserved by the state. Most New Jerseyans live and work in the densely populated corridor that cuts across the mid-section of the state. But folklorists today recognize that there is also a folklore of the factory, a folklore of the city, and a folklore of ethnicity, and New Jersey provides a rich source for their study.

While New Jersey was one of the first states to industrialize, its earliest industries were rural, not urban. The colonial iron industry was located in the mountains in the north and the bogs in the south, and there are still some today who know the art of producing charcoal - the fuel used in these early iron furnaces. Glass blowing was another rural industry in South Jersey, although abandoned iron-mining and glass-blowing towns in the Pine Barrens are New Jersey's ghost towns of today.