Since the location of where the mud is gathered is considered a secret, I imagine it's more about giving people a different reason as to why he's there.

Probably a bit of both.

Assuming the oft-cited Delaware River and Palmyra references are genuine, no, Blackburne Rubbing Mud does not own any public property in Palmyra. Blackburne's registered address is 60 miles away. There's about a mile of riverfront on a public park, an industrial warehouse, and some condos.

He's stealing the mud from public property. I'm sure that he'd be arrested if he showed up with an excavator and tried to start a gravel pit on a nature trail, but, it turns out, you can boast on national media about taking dirt from a public park if you only take a couple hundred pounds of it a year and do it sneakily, two bucketfuls at a time.

There are so many plausible arrangement for this to be legal without his main company owning the riverfront property that and it’s absurd for you to think you’ve uncovered a scam in plain sight of a beloved and well known process .

Palmyra NJ is a distraction. It comes from a South Jersey creek in the same county as Palmyra. I think that water is cleaner than the Delaware itself. That water runs through a forest type boundary between, I believe, three forest types, so that specific mud may actually be fairly unique.