How Hainesport earned the score

Let’s Meet Hainesport, New Jersey

Hainesport does not announce itself. Drive Route 38 east out of the Philadelphia suburbs toward the Jersey Shore and you pass through it in about two minutes without a reason to slow down. There is no welcome arch, no restored main street with a coffee roaster and a mural, no brown highway sign pointing to an attraction. It is a township of 6.47 square miles and roughly 6,000 people, and by the 2020 census the population was 6,035, actually down 75 residents from the 6,110 counted in 2010. It is one of the smaller and quieter municipalities in Burlington County, a place that reads as residential first and everything else a distant second.

The town takes its name from Barclay Haines, who bought property here and built a pier on the Rancocas Creek around 1848. By 1850 the settlement had shortened its name from Haines’ Port to Hainesport, and the creek did the work that a highway does today: it carried pottery, produce, and passengers by steamboat down to the Delaware River and on to Philadelphia. The Lenape who lived along the same banks called the place Sandhickney. Hainesport incorporated as a township on March 12, 1924, carved out of Lumberton, and it has kept the shape of a bedroom community ever since, bordered by Mount Holly, Mount Laurel, Lumberton, and Westampton. A stretch of Rancocas State Park sits inside its lines, with hiking, equestrian trails, and canoe access to the creek, but the park is undeveloped by design and does little to concentrate visitors.

None of this is a criticism. Plenty of towns are content to be quiet. But Hainesport is not being scored as a bedroom community. It is being scored because something landed here that almost never lands in a township this size, and the question this file asks is simple: when a small town is handed a genuine, category-defining attraction, does it have the machinery to do anything with it?

The Thing That Landed: Big Rusty

In the summer of 2023, a Danish artist named Thomas Dambo and a crew of workers and volunteers built a 20 foot troll on the banks of the Rancocas Creek in Hainesport, at the intersection of the creek and Route 38. Dambo, born in 1979 in Odense and trained at Design School Kolding, is the most prolific public-art phenomenon most people have never heard of. He builds giant trolls out of scrap wood and salvage and hides them in forests and parks around the world, then publishes an online troll map and lets people hunt for them. By the time Big Rusty went up, Dambo had built well over 120 trolls across seventeen countries; by mid 2025 his studio counted more than 170.

Big Rusty is unusual even within that body of work. Most Dambo trolls are wood. This one is a patchwork of corrugated metal, rotting plywood, concrete, and old pallets, cobbled together from materials found on site at the abandoned Creek Turn Ceramic Supply factory, whose ruins still stand beside him. The commission was privately funded by a South Jersey couple who have chosen to stay anonymous. That detail matters more than it first appears, and we will come back to it, because it is the hinge the whole score turns on.

What Big Rusty proved, almost immediately, is that the appetite is real. Word spread through regional press, Atlas Obscura, and Roadside America, and cars started arriving off Route 38 to find a troll in the woods. The troll became the seed of something larger.

How the County, Not the Town, Built the Trek

Here is the part Hainesport should study closely, because it is a lesson in who captures value. Big Rusty was so popular that the entity that responded was not the township. It was Burlington County. Inspired by the reception, the Burlington County Commissioners and the county Parks System organized the Burlington County Troll Trek, a public-art exhibition of nineteen troll sculptures placed in parks and downtowns across the county. The trek launched in 2024, complete with a printed and online map giving the GPS location of every troll, explicitly framed as a scavenger hunt to pull visitors into county parks and business districts.

It worked well enough that the county made it permanent. On March 4, 2025, the Commissioners announced that the Troll Trek, originally slated to end on December 31, 2024, would remain in place indefinitely at the request of residents, municipalities, and sponsors. The county’s own language was that the trek’s success had well exceeded expectations, drawing visitors to Burlington County parks and downtowns and inspiring people to build their own trolls from recycled material.

Read that again from Hainesport’s seat. The township supplied the spark. The county built the campfire, the map, the marketing, and the downtown foot traffic, and the county is the entity whose parks and business districts now absorb the visitors. Hainesport has the original, the one that started it, and almost none of the apparatus that turns an original into local spending.

The Wrinkle: Private Land and a Suspicious Fire

Two facts complicate any tidy tourism story here, and an honest file has to name them.

The first is access. Big Rusty does not sit in a public park owned by Hainesport. He sits on the grounds of the former Creek Turn Ceramic Supply site off Route 38, private land, beside a genuinely abandoned factory. This is not the same as a sculpture on a town green with parking, a plaque, and a restroom. Visitors have found their way to it, but a small township cannot responsibly build a visitor economy on foot traffic to a decaying industrial parcel it does not control. Any real plan starts with a conversation about the land, the owners, liability, and safe access, not with a marketing campaign.

The second fact is starker. On the afternoon of Monday, November 18, 2024, at around 4:30 p.m., a wildfire broke out near Big Rusty off State Highway 38. Crews battled a blaze that burned more than 40 acres and at points crept close to homes, forcing a serious response. The troll itself was spared. Two days later, on November 20, the New Jersey State Police announced that their preliminary investigation had deemed the fire suspicious, and reporting from 6abc and other Philadelphia outlets carried the finding that it appeared to have been set intentionally. A destination anchored to an unstaffed art piece on an unimproved private site, in dry woods, next to houses, carries a real safety and stewardship burden. That is not a reason to give up on the asset. It is a reason to be sober about what activating it actually requires.

What Hainesport Has, and What It Is Missing

Set the emotion of a troll and a fire aside and look at the plain inventory. On the asset side, Hainesport has the single thing most towns spend decades and fortunes trying to manufacture: a distinctive, photogenic, nationally press-covered reason for a stranger to make a special trip. It has the Rancocas Creek and a slice of Rancocas State Park. And it sits inside one of the densest ready-made markets in the country. The Philadelphia metropolitan area holds about 6.25 million people, and roughly 7.4 million in the wider combined region, per the 2020 census, almost all of them within a comfortable day-trip radius of Route 38.

On the missing side is nearly everything that converts a visit into money that stays in town. There is no defined downtown or business district where a visitor could park, eat, and browse. Hainesport’s own web and brand presence as a destination is close to nonexistent; the troll’s fame lives on county pages, Atlas Obscura, and travel blogs, not on anything the township controls or optimizes. There is no meaningful lodging inventory, so even a visitor who wanted to make a weekend of it has no on-brand place to sleep. There is no signage, no wayfinding, no packaged itinerary, no merchandise, no return programming. In the scoring language of this file, the anchor is strong on paper and the entire conversion layer around it is thin to absent. That gap is exactly why the composite lands at 30.

It is worth being precise about what a low score means here, because it is not an insult. Hainesport is not failing at tourism. It is not trying to do tourism at all, and it happens to be sitting on an unusually good raw ingredient. The score measures the distance between the asset and the infrastructure, and in Hainesport that distance is close to its maximum.

What a Realistic Next Step Looks Like

The instructive comparison is not another New Jersey township. It is Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, a small city that leaned into its own Dambo troll and treated it as a genuine tourism and economic asset rather than a novelty, building the access, promotion, and local tie-ins around it. Creative City Developments documented that playbook in its Detroit Lakes flagship study, and the lesson travels: the troll is not the product, the experience around the troll is the product.

For Hainesport the honest first moves are unglamorous and mostly not about marketing. Resolve access and safety at the Creek Turn site with the private owners and the county, so a visit is legal, safe, and welcoming rather than an unofficial trespass to a burn scar. Lean on the partner that already has the audience: the Burlington County Troll Trek is proven, permanent, and mapped, and Hainesport should be its loudest and best-hosted stop rather than a footnote on a county PDF. Give visitors somewhere to land, even modestly, by pointing them from the troll to the creek, the state park trails, and whatever small businesses sit along Route 38. And build the thin digital layer the township can actually own: a single page that tells the Big Rusty story, sets expectations about access, and connects it to the trek and the creek.

None of that requires Hainesport to become a mega-resort town. It requires the township to notice that it was handed a spark most towns never get, and to build even a small amount of the campfire before the spark drifts entirely to the county line. A score of 30 is not a verdict that Hainesport failed. It is a measure of how much room is still on the table.

The one-line version

Hainesport has a genuinely rare anchor, a Dambo original that started a county-wide movement, sitting on private land next to a burn scar, in front of a seven-million-person market, with essentially none of the downtown, brand, or lodging needed to convert it. The opportunity is unusually large precisely because the current conversion is so close to zero.