Ranked 47th in size with an area of 8,729 square miles, New Jersey is a small, yet muscular, state. The NJ economy is robust, resting on a base of agriculture, widely-varied businesses and industries, and tourism. New Jersey boasts a median household income of $55,146, the highest in the nation. Nine of New Jersey's counties are among the wealthiest 100 of the country. And, according to an article in the Newark Star-Ledger, women in New Jersey earn the highest per capita income in the US.
New Jersey's position at the center of the BosWash megalopolis, between Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, facilitated its rapid growth through the boom of the 1950s and beyond. This favored location also affords NJ a large and well-educated labor pool with which to staff its myriad enterprises.
Known as the Garden State, New Jersey's agricultural outputs are nursery stock, horses, vegetables, fruits and nuts, seafood and dairy products. Hammonton in the southern part of the state is recognized as the blueberry capital of the world.
New Jersey is home to numerous chemical plants and major pharmaceutical firms, including Merck, Wyeth, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, and Pfizer. Significantly, the largest petroleum containment system outside of the Middle East is located in New Jersey, which is well known for its abundance of oil refineries. In the business arena, nearly 100 companies on the Fortune 500 list have headquarters in or conduct business from New Jersey.
The New Jersey economy has also benefited greatly from its tourism industry. Chief among New Jersey's attractions is the Jersey Shore with its seaside resorts and beaches. Among them, Ocean City, rated by The Travel Channel as the best family beach of 2005; the reborn Atlantic City, with its casinos, amusement pier, beaches, and a 5.75 mile boardwalk, the longest in the world; and Cape May, well known for the charm of its Victorian gingerbread houses and for bird watching, which is capped off by the annual World Series of Birding.
The Pine Barrens of southern and central New Jersey are another major point of interest. Uncommon soil conditions have developed a unique and diverse spectrum of plant life, such as orchids, carnivorous plants, and the rare pygmy Pitch Pines that depend on fire to reproduce. The Pine Barrens gave rise to the legend of the Jersey Devil, said to have been born to a local woman named Mrs. Leeds in the 1700s. In western NJ, where it borders Pennsylvania, a more rural landscape features the Delaware Water Gap, a mountain pass where the Delaware River traverses a large ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. The Delaware Water Gap is the site of a National Recreation Area, where visitors may enjoy rafting, canoeing, swimming, fishing, hiking and rock climbing.
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