Eighteen Miles of History on Long Beach Island

''...Years of writing and research have led me to one simple truth: Everyone who ever came to this island -- with the possible exception of the shipwrecked -- came out of pure enjoyment and returned year after year for the same reason. As you turn these pages you will soon discover how little difference there is between us and all the generations that have come before. We share a happiness that is rare, indeed. That is what Long Beach Island means. It always will.''
--John Bailey Lloyd, from the Preface

Eighteen Miles of History, Six Miles at Sea, and Two Centuries of History are three elegant companion books that explore much of the history of the Jersey Shore by focusing on the barrier island of Long Beach.

Both titles take us back to a unique place at the sea’s edge and the people who came to know and love it. The two books explore the same time and place but the topics differ. Together, they give us an opportunity to rediscover this beautiful, sometimes dangerous, more personal Shore of only a few generations ago. In two books rich with images and wonderful writing, we come to have a sense of place about the Shore that a summer vacation alone can never convey.

The Shore of today may be strikingly different from that of a century ago, but it is images of the past — an innocent and wilder Shore — that cement our present-day bond with this place. Modern-day shore lovers will find their long-ago counterparts here.

CONTENTS
The Shore Whalers
Tucker’s Island
Town on the Edge of Great Swamp
The Philadelphia Company House
The Mansion of Health
When Barnegat Light Was Barnegat City
The Powhatan, The Mansion, The Monument
The Red Houses of Long Beach
Dock Road: First Entrance to Beach Haven
The Harvey Cedars Hotel
Captain Bond's Long Beach House
The Parry House
The Engleside: 1876-1943
The Hotel Baldwin: 1883-1960
The Manahawkin and Long Beach Railroad
The Peahala Gunning Club
The Corinthian Yacht and Gun Club
The Automobile and “The Lure of Long Beach”
The Houseboat Colony at Beach Haven
The Boardwalk at Beach Haven
The Pound Fishermen
Camp Miquon
Harry Colmer of the Movies
Long Beach Township
The Island's Houses of Worship
The Beach Haven Free Public Library
Deep Sea Fishing Capital of the East
Sand and Water — Eighteen Miles of Beaches

"We have become an island of lost landmarks. Fire, storm, tide and general obsolescence have claimed nearly all of them. The big hotels, the boardwalk, the gunning clubs, the train, the old causeway and even Tucker’s Island itself have all vanished. All we have are photographs and the memories of those people who were here and who lived through these changing times...."
— from the Preface

TUCKER'S ISLAND
by John Bailey Lloyd
Excerpted from Chapter 2


On a 1769 survey map of the Jerseys, East and West — as the state was known in the Colonial period — Long Beach Island is identified as “Old Barnegat Beach.” Its northern tip is at the Barnegat Inlet, and from there it stretches southwestward eighteen miles to another inlet, a very wide and deep one. No name is given to this inlet, but it is clearly the only entrance into Little Egg Harbor Bay and to a small seaport village known today as Tuckerton.

South of this unnamed inlet there is another barrier beach on the chart. It is some seven or eight miles in length and is labeled “Mihannan Shoal,” obviously an Indian name whose meaning has been lost. Other maps of the period call it Short Beach. It was the custom then to name uninhabited barrier beaches after either the nearest inlet or some obvious physical feature; thus Barnegat Beach was also known locally as Long Beach or Eighteen Mile Beach, and its southerly neighbor, being about one-third the size, was called Short Beach.

Ephraim Morse was the first known settler on Short Beach. As early as the 1740s he was grazing cattle on its thousands of acres of salt hay and, to supplement his income, he used his dwelling on the edge of the bayside marshes as a grocery for stormbound mariners who often sought shelter inside the inlet in the deep channel behind his island. Short Beach was also, with its easy access to splendid ocean bathing, an ideal location for health- and pleasure-seekers, making it the first seashore resort on the New Jersey coast. Morse did well for several years until tragedy struck. One winter night his house began to wash away as the bay rose in a storm tide. He fled with his wife and five small children through waist-deep, ice-cold water to the high dunes. There was no cover, and exposure to sleet and rain over the next thirty-six hours caused the children to sicken and die. Morse and his wife survived, and when finally rescued they left for the mainland never to return, although accounts say they eventually had five more children.

Except for harvesting salt hay, barrier beaches were virtually useless for farming; in those days, they often sold for a few cents an acre. In 1765 Reuben Tucker, a Quaker from Orange County, New York, bought out Morse’s interest in Short Beach and settled down for much the same kind of livelihood as Morse, but Tucker took the precaution to build his house on the high north end of the island, where a lighthouse would one day be located. He enlarged the structure into a tavern and “place of entertainment.” Such was Tucker’s personality that his fame as a good host soon spread among watermen from Sandy Hook to the Carolinas. Tucker’s Beach or Tucker’s Island became a favored place to wait out an Atlantic storm.

In the years after the American Revolution, Tucker’s Island continued to be very popular with prosperous Philadelphia Quakers, many of whom had established the base of their fortunes during the war by smelting bog iron and shipping timber out of Egg Harbor before moving to Pennsylvania. They were well-acquainted with the area and with Tucker and used his island and facilities for their five-day camp meetings held every summer. These gatherings of Friends were religious in purpose, but during them the men found every excuse to hunt and fish while the ladies enjoyed the sun and surf. For the young it was a time of matchmaking and courting. Many returned at other times of the year to stay with the Tucker family.

Tucker had fathered two sons, Stephen, who took the Tory side in the Revolution and died an exile in Nova Scotia after the war, and Ebenezer, who took up the Colonies’ cause. At the end of the Revolution, Ebenezer entered the mercantile and shipping business, becoming so politically powerful in the area that the mainland village once known as Clamtown or Egg Harbor voted to change its name to Tuckerton in his honor.

Meanwhile, Reuben Tucker was finding that he could turn a nice profit on his island by making the big farmhouse available to Burlington County and Philadelphia sportsmen willing to make the long, horse-and-wagon journey through the pines to Tuckerton to book “safe ferry” to the beach. Most visitors to the seashore in those early years were in the habit of setting up tents or lean-tos on the dunes, but staying at Tucker’s comfortable place was the beginning of a trend which led to the development of other early boarding hotels like the Philadelphia Company House and the Mansion of Health on nearby Long Beach Island.

When Reuben died, his widow, who was known affectionately to all as Mother Tucker — not Mammy Tucker — kept the old place going for many more years. The original one-story house with its hipped roof and broad piazza became a cluster of three buildings joined together but obviously built at different times. Everywhere, the names of former guests had been cut into the boards or written on the backs of bleached clam shells and were nailed to every wall and post. The Tucker House with its three prominent cedar trees appeared on coastal charts as a navigator’s landmark as late as 1845, even though it burned to the ground that very year. It had been such a familiar reckoning point that the first Tucker’s Lighthouse was built on the site three years later.

Mother Tucker died around 1815 and was succeeded by her manager, Joseph Horner, who left within a few years to start his own place on the south end of Long Beach. Meanwhile, the Tucker House was run by the Rogers and Willits families right up until the time it was destroyed by fire. Tucker’s Island had by then been much reduced in size, a process that started in 1800 when a great winter storm cut a new inlet across its lower third. The portion below that inlet was forever afterward known as “Little Beach,” so now there was a Long Beach, a Short Beach and a Little Beach. This “New Inlet,” as it would be called for the next 125 years, became the best inlet on the coast of New Jersey. It is known today as the Little Egg Harbor Inlet.

After the New Inlet cut through on the south end of Tucker’s Beach, the one on the north at last got a name, “Old Inlet.” Within thirty years its entrance began to shoal up badly, and by the time a lighthouse was built on the site of the old Tucker place in 1848, it was navigable only at high tide. Old Inlet closed completely by 1874 as great quantities of sand formed a hook around Tucker’s Island, now separated from its beach by a slough or arm of the bay. The slough ran roughly northwest to southeast and was so wide on the bay or northwest side that hotel guests on the island had to cross it in a flat-bottomed boat when they went sea bathing; on the southeast or ocean end a mile away, the slough was narrow enough to have a small wooden bridge across it. A writer in 1866 noted that “the bathing ground at Short Beach is not as good as it was formerly, as sand bars have accumulated some distance from the main shore.” It had been a hundred years since Tucker had bought the island and given his name to it.

The first Tucker Beach Light, established in 1848, was discontinued after only a dozen years of operation, most likely because the Old Inlet that it guarded was now of limited usefulness while the New Inlet, several miles south of the lighthouse, was the one that provided the only safe passage between Little Egg Harbor Bay and the ocean. This was confusing to mariners, but it was also probable that funding for another lighthouse was unavailable because on the eve of the Civil War, Congress had more serious matters to consider.

Tucker’s or Little Egg Harbor Light was reestablished by an Act of Congress in 1865 without any provisions to have it moved because there really was no better location for a lighthouse anywhere for miles around: The high ground at the north end of Tucker’s Island provided security as well as greater visibility. For the next sixty-three years its signal — six red flashes and one long white — from the tower atop the keeper’s cottage could be seen twelve miles at sea on clear nights. This characteristic identified the light, 20.5 miles below Barnegat Light and twelve miles north of Absecon Light in Atlantic City. While the signal marked the entrance to the Little Egg Harbor Inlet, its red flashes cautioned mariners to study their charts because the inlet was not at all near the light. It was three miles away.

When the Little Egg Harbor Light was relit after the Civil War, it was also substantially rebuilt, with a black tower atop a white dwelling. The first officially appointed light keeper was Eber Rider, who was born at Tuckerton in 1827. He had married Mary Cranmer of Mayetta, and together they had twenty-one children, only six of whom survived to adulthood. In 1866 their eldest son, Jarvis, was appointed at the age of twenty to be the first master of the Little Egg Harbor Life Saving Station on Tucker’s Island. The next son, Anson J., became a game warden. Amanda, the only daughter, married George Penrod, who had a store at Beach Haven. There were three more sons: Eber Jr., Arthur and Hilliard.

Care of the light was a rigorous, time-consuming occupation, and each of the Rider children was pressed into it, including Amanda, but only Arthur took a liking to it; when his father retired on January 1, 1904, after thirty-nine years of service, Arthur succeeded him, staying on until the very end in 1927. Together father and son ran the Little Egg Harbor Light for sixty-three years, a remarkable record in the history of the Lighthouse Service. Arthur was assisted for awhile by Hilliard, who died in his twenties.

The Life Saving station had to be built more than a mile south of the lighthouse so the crews could get their equipment out onto the ocean beaches, where all the strandings and shipwrecks took place. A bridge was built across the slough at its narrowest point to accommodate the vehicles used to haul the lifeboat and the surf cannon. Over the next forty-six years, Jarvis Rider and his crews logged two hundred shipwrecks.

For nearly two decades after the burning of the Tucker boarding house in 1845, there is no record of any vacation activity on the island although there must surely have been campers. Local competition may have been a factor. Bond’s, across the Old Inlet on Long Beach, was flourishing. Since 1854 vacationers had been taking the Camden and Atlantic Railroad to Absecon and sailing up Great Bay to Bond’s place. Nor did ship’s crews come to the island anymore. Stormbound mariners purchased whiskey and groceries at Hatfield’s store on Tucker’s Neck, located along Shooting Thoroughfare less than a mile across the water from the lighthouse. Hatfield’s became well-known enough to be on the official navigation charts of those years.

It was the arrival of the Tuckerton Railroad that finally changed the whole history of the area. The completion of a twenty-nine-mile track from Whiting in north-central Ocean County to Tuckerton in 1871 promised to bring thousands of vacationers into the area. The Camden and Amboy line, which crossed the state, passed through Whiting, and would bring many to the seashore for the first time. The round trip from Camden to Tuckerton cost $2.50. These newcomers would need places to stay, and already there was a brand new resort starting up at Beach Haven with two hotels and many attractive summer cottages.

Inspired by this activity, Alfred Stevens, one of the Life Saving Service crew at Captain Jarvis Rider’s station, supervised the construction of a four-story hotel on Tucker’s Island with two outside decks or galleries. After a wing was added, there were twenty-eight rooms. It was near the Life Saving station and would provide additional income for Stevens and his wife and the men who had helped to build it. During the summer months they were idle and were not paid when the station was closed. Stevens had backing, but the hotel was not a huge investment because, with the exception of doors and windows, there was little expense for lumber. Thrown overboard in storms or washed off the decks of ships, it was gathered up from the beaches. Stevens named his hotel the Columbia and advertised in the Philadelphia papers. Its first season was 1875, one year after the Parry House opened at Beach Haven and a year before the Engleside Hotel.

The island had not seen such activity since the days of Reuben Tucker. The success of the Columbia inspired Eber Rider, now in his tenth year as keeper of the lighthouse, to build an even bigger hotel nearby on the slough where boatloads of happy guests could sail right up to the front door. It was finished in 1879, and it and the Columbia were filled to capacity every summer. Rider at first called it simply “The House of Entertainment,” but financial backers suggested “St. Albans” to give it a little more class. In those years when the railroad ran only into Tuckerton and had a spur track to Edge Cove for steamboat service, it was just as easy to go to Tucker’s Island as to Beach Haven. It was at this time that the name “Sea Haven” was given to the community to compete with Beach Haven.

It was more than just a name change. A company was formed to sell real estate. Tucker’s Island, where the lighthouse, the two hotels and the Life Saving Station were, would be called Sea Haven, and all the property across the slough would still be called Tucker’s Beach, which by now — since the Old Inlet had closed up in 1874 — had formed a huge hooklike beach with shoals nearly a half-mile wide around the eastern and southern edges of the island. Tucker’s Beach was now part of one continuous stretch of land that reached all the way to Barnegat Light.

In 1884 the two hotels at Sea Haven advertised access to telegraph facilities for vacationers because the Little Egg Life Saving Station had a unit of the U.S. Signal Service with a submarine cable to Tuckerton. No station on Long Beach Island had such access yet, and it was suggested that businessmen could relax a little more at Sea Haven knowing that they had instant contact with their offices in distant cities by means of telegraph. The resort was also served daily throughout the summer months by the small paddle-wheel steamer Mary with stops at Edge Cove and Absecon. Sea Haven had reached its zenith.

The Tuckerton Railroad, backed by the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was building a railroad bridge across Manahawkin Bay to Long Beach Island and laying tracks south to Beach Haven and north to Barnegat City. The project was completed in 1886. There were plans to take the train the additional four and a half miles to Sea Haven, but nothing ever came of it. The project, financed as it was by the Pennsylvania Railroad, may have been dropped because of friendly connections with Charles T. Parry of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, who was the principal stockholder in the land company developing Beach Haven. He had just finished building the Baldwin Hotel and may not have welcomed the competition from another resort. To be deprived of a railroad stop when one was so near at hand was, in those years, a serious setback, and by the 1890s Sea Haven was finished.

Besides the Riders at the lighthouse and the Life Saving station, there were in the 1890s always six or seven other families who were classified as winter residents because the men were all on duty at the Life Saving station ten months of the year. There were a dozen or so school-age children in these families, so in 1895 a school was built near the lighthouse out of the proceeds from several clambakes. Clambakes were traditional annual fund-raisers at Life Saving stations then, and they were usually well-attended by summer people, who contributed generously.

The new schoolhouse opened its doors December 9, 1895, with Lydia Wills of Tuckerton teaching nine students in six grades. Hitherto, classes had been taught at the Life Saving station, which was on the south side of the island. Since almost all the children lived near the station, they now had to walk a mile to and from school in all kinds of weather. The school doubled as a community center and also was used as a church on Sundays. It had only one big room with a dozen double desks, a potbellied stove and an organ. It was equipped with a belfry in the shape of a watchtower to match the architectural style of the lighthouse and the Life Saving station. The large bell could be used as a signal in fog.

By the turn of the century, fourteen years after the railroad had come to Beach Haven, tiny Sea Haven, its neighbor just five miles down the beach, was in slow decline. Only a handful of summer residents still kept cottages on Tucker’s Beach near the ocean, and some were still on the island at Sea Haven, but not for long. The Columbia and St. Albans hotels were in ruins. In 1907 the Sea Haven Company mortgaged the whole south end of the island, about a thousand acres, to the company that had originally financed Rider’s hotel. They planned an ambitious development called St. Albans-by-the-Sea with lots for sale on a grid of twenty streets, all named after American lakes and intersected by three wide avenues running north and south. They speculated that the railroad might some day be extended south from Beach Haven, but that was never to happen. Finally, by 1918, they were forced into bankruptcy, two years before a fierce storm carved out Beach Haven Inlet and made any further road contact with St. Albans impossible.

There was no gravel on Sea Haven to build streets. The only roads were made of hard-packed sand and crushed clam and oyster shells atop layers of salt hay. Weekly trips were made up the beach to Penrod’s General Store at the corner of Beach Avenue and Amber Street in Beach Haven, with Harry the Horse pulling the two-wheeled cart loaded with those children who wished to go along on the shopping expedition — and most of them wouldn’t have missed it no matter what the weather was like. They crossed the slough bridge at the south end of the island over onto Tucker’s Beach. From that point it was a six-mile walk up to Beach Haven. These trips were always great social occasions for the shoppers to visit with Amanda Rider Penrod. Once the cart was loaded, the older children had to walk back with the adults while Harry, lent for the trip by the Light Saving station, patiently pulled his load along the rutted sand road that led south out of Beach Haven.

The families of the surfmen lived in six little clapboard-sided bungalows, each painted a different color. Inside, one half of each house was heated with a three-burner kerosene stove where the family cooked and ate all their meals. The other half was divided into two bedrooms, one for the parents and the other for the children. The families of the Life Saving Service were there only from September until the last of May; then they went home to Tuckerton and Parkertown for the summer. There was a food allotment from the station for each man, but it purchased little except staples, so most people on the island caught and killed nearly all their food. It was unusual for them ever to see red meat or any meat other than duck or goose. They ate fish, clams and oysters nearly every day of their lives, and sickness of any kind was rare.

Life at Sea Haven in these last nostalgic years went on. The Atlantic winds howled across the shallow, wave-washed shoals, snapping the red and black storm signal flags on the high tower of the Life Saving station. The island children, when not sitting next to the big, warm stove in their classroom doing their lessons with hand-held slate boards and chalk, were out digging clams in the flats or fishing for eels from the rickety pier of the boathouse. They climbed all the enormous dunes, played in the hulls of old shipwrecks or cautiously entered the gloomy, echo-filled hotels, on the lookout for ghosts. When spring finally came and hard sunlight took the chill out of the ever-present wind, they would run through the twisting trails in the high reeds and bayberry. They looked for exotic bits of flotsam washed into the slough by storm tides. Across the slough bridge came the booming sound of the surf on stormy days.

Arthur H. T. Rider had been keeper of the light for only six years when there were demands for an acetylene-powered range light on the south end of the island to guide vessels into the New Inlet. Tucker’s Light was, after all, several miles away, guarding nothing but an inlet filled with sand; it had become a useless expense. Little was done, however, to make changes, and the daily task of running the light went on as before. In 1915 the U.S. Life Saving Service became the U.S. Coast Guard. There were few shipwrecks then and little rescue work, but Prohibition was only five years away and then there would be work aplenty. The Little Egg unit would have its hands full all through the 1920s chasing rumrunners. By then the unit would have two major inlets to patrol, Beach Haven and Little Egg Harbor.

Beach Haven Inlet was born on the night of February 4, 1920, in a fierce snowstorm. Mountainous waves driven by northeast winds opened it up a half mile north of where the Old Inlet had closed up in 1874. Within a month it was apparent that this “new inlet” would not threaten Tucker’s Island because its drift was northward toward Holgate. University of Pennsylvania professor Lewis Haupt, an expert in beach erosion, was called in to design and build two big timber jetties filled with rock and meadow sod at Cleveland Avenue and McKinley Avenue. When they were completed in 1924, they stopped the devastating erosion at Holgate and seem to have worked so well that the currents of the inlet began to wash in the other direction — toward Tucker’s Island. As the Beach Haven Inlet began to widen and move southward, Tucker’s Beach, Sea Haven’s buffer from the sea on the northeast, began to erode at an alarming rate.

In 1925, there was a half mile of beach between the island and the sea. The next year, sand from the big dunes of the sea beach, driven by pounding waves, washed into and filled the slough. Then a series of severe storms in the spring of 1927 washed out all of this loose sand, and the ocean swirled to within three hundred yards of the lighthouse. Tucker’s Island, edged only with fragile sod banks, was now completely defenseless.
On October 12, 1927, the historic house with its light tower fell dramatically into the sea while a photographer recorded the event. The Coast Guard station was a mile to the southwest and relatively safe for another several years, but plans were being made to abandon it.

At a meeting on the evening of November 8, 1932, the governing body of Long Beach Township ordered its tax assessor to remove from the books “that portion of the Township south of the new inlet at Beach Haven known as St. Albans-by-the-Sea as it has been practically washed away by the ocean.” Sea Haven was already gone; St. Albans was the last part of the island still remaining. Officially, now it had ceased to exist.

The Little Egg Coast Guard Station at Sea Haven was finally abandoned in February 1933. The crew was temporarily barracked at the Long Beach station on Maryland Avenue at Beach Haven Terrace until November, when they were moved into a big houseboat at Tucker’s Neck on Shooting Thoroughfare to await the building of new quarters nearby. Their former station on Tucker’s Island washed away the next year.

The last of the landmarks to go was the little Sea Haven schoolhouse, which Captain Rider had bought and moved to the extreme southwestern edge of the island so it could be used as a summer house for the old Sea Haven families coming over from Tuckerton. It was often visited but seldom used and lasted into the war years, when it ended its days ignominiously as a brig for hardened disciplinary cases among the troops stationed on Long Beach Island in 1942 and 1943. “Bad soldiers,” these prisoners were called by the local people. The historic old building, damaged and defaced beyond repair, finally vanished in a winter storm after the war. Little remained of the island itself anymore.

In the late forties, along the edge of the deep, new Beach Haven Inlet, flocks of seabirds stood at low tide on a long sand bar, all that was left of what had once been a five-mile island with trees, ponds, a lighthouse, a Coast Guard station, a school, two hotels and a proud little community. It had been New Jersey’s first seashore resort. By 1952 even the birds had no place to stand. Tucker’s Island had disappeared into history.

Copyright ©1994 Down The Shore Publishing Corp. and The SandPaper, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

CAPTAIN BOND'S LONG BEACH HOUSE
Excerpted from Chapter 11
by John Bailey Lloyd

Of the eight major hotels built on Long Beach Island before the coming of the railroad in 1886, all but one, the Harvey Cedars Hotel, are gone. The others — the Sunset, the Oceanic, the Mansion of Health, the Parry House, the Hotel Baldwin, the Engleside and the Long Beach House — were all torn down or destroyed by fire. Historically, the most significant of these old hotels was the famous Long Beach House of Thomas Bond. Out of it and the influential men who stayed there over the years came the genesis of Beach Haven.

The Long Beach House, on the island’s south end at what is now Holgate, became for a few dozen years before and after the Civil War the best-known hostelry on the New Jersey coast. It attracted men of wealth and influence from Philadelphia and New York. Railroad magnates, lawyers, judges and doctors came to Bond’s in the summer to relax with their families and in the winter months to hunt birds with their genial host.

Thomas Bond had not planned to be an innkeeper. Born in Boston in 1799, he had been, in the first half-century of his life, a successful owner of a New York jewelry firm that made expensive watchcases. Owning and managing the Long Beach House became one of his two second careers. The other was his interest in lifesaving, which had obsessed him ever since he witnessed the wreck of the brig Ayrshire in January 1850 off Squan Beach. The Francis Life Car was first used to rescue lives in that wreck, and all the crew and passengers but one were rescued. Bond was a close personal friend of the life car’s inventor, fellow Bostonian Joseph Francis, born in 1801, and the two corresponded all their long lives.

In the years Bond had his business in New York, his avocation was gunning. He hunted in the marshes east of Brooklyn and Flushing, and in New Jersey around Paterson and Jersey City, but he was always in search of better and more remote areas. He started sailing down to Squan and Toms River, and on a trip aboard the schooner Wissahickon in February 1846, Bond saw his future Long Beach House for the first time. He recorded in his diary that on his first outing he killed twenty-one ducks, but that had been a bad day, one without wind. The next day he shot fifty ducks and twelve geese and decided that he liked this island called Long Beach.

He became a regular guest of Lloyd Jones, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Company House, as it was then still called. By 1851, Bond had purchased for three thousand dollars several buildings and one hundred acres of dune and marshland from Jones, who had been improving the property for the previous five years. It was never really Bond’s intention to be an innkeeper. He simply wanted to have the place properly managed and make the main building a private hunting lodge for himself and his friends but, unable to find a competent manager for it, he decided to retire and take it over himself. He applied for a hotel service license, sold his business in New York and moved to Long Beach Island, where he would spend the next forty years.

Bond renamed the place Long Beach House when he opened as innkeeper on July 4, 1852. At the end of the season he purchased more land, one thousand acres south to the edge of the Old Inlet where Tucker’s Beach began. Included in his purchase was a very valuable ice pond which for many years supplied not only his own place but also the big hotels in Beach Haven. Since the early 1820s, when the Philadelphia Company House began, this area of Long Beach had had a good reputation and it was now up to Bond, using the strength of his personality and generous spirit, to build it up, and at this he succeeded.

For the next twenty years, until the coming of the railroad to Tuckerton, the only way to get to this remote area other than by a two-day stagecoach trip across the state was to take the Camden and Atlantic Railroad to Absecon and sail up from there by one of the “Long Beach packets,” thirty-one-foot cat yachts. Many a lasting friendship began on those two- to six-hour trips aboard Captain Billy Gaskill’s Eliza and Captain Morford Horner’s Mary Jane. The length of the journey depended on wind direction and tide, but Bond supplied the whiskey to ward off any possible chill. In time, these old packet boats were replaced by steamers, including the paddle wheeler Mary, which also went to Sea Haven on Tucker’s Island.

In keeping with his interest in lifesaving, Bond had, from his very first days as proprietor, a “Government House” near his property to aid shipwreck survivors. The federal government had set up these houses of refuge all along the Atlantic coast sometime in the 1850s, at least twenty years before there was an official lifesaving service. The government paid for the house and the equipment, but all the dangerous rescue work was done by volunteers, of whom Bond was one of the most dedicated. He kept the key to the Government House in the barroom of his hotel and often recruited his guests if there was a wreck. As often as not, he would bring the survivors into his place, where he would feed, clothe and entertain them, all without compensation. This was Bond’s way; he was generous to a fault. He wrote many letters to the government asking to be reimbursed, but for naught.

Thomas Bond never married and generally avoided the company of women, although it was said he had impeccable manners in their presence. He preferred to be with men in the thick of the action, shooting on a cold rainy morning on the bay or directing a rescue in a howling blizzard. He was also an inveterate cardplayer and a skilled musician. To spend an autumn evening in Bond’s bar and billiard room by a crackling fire with some of his fun-loving cronies was one of life’s great pleasures. The whiskey and cigars were the very best, and the food was always excellent. Bond would allow no stinting on these matters.

Today, some tend to think of the old nineteenth-century “sportsmen’s hotels” on Long Beach Island as being exclusively for men when, in fact, they were not. Certainly all that incredibly abundant fish and game drew plenty of “gentlemen fishers and fowlers” to places like the Mansion of Health, Double Jimmie’s, the Ashley House and Bond’s, just as the old accounts say, but most of them were well-established, married men. Along with their sons, they brought their wives and daughters with them or chances are they couldn’t have come at all.

Many of the women were adept at fishing and enjoyed shooting at small birds quite as much as the men. Some of them were remarkably fine shots and have left records of their scores in old hotel ledgers. Bond’s was very informal in those years before and after the Civil War, and if the men dressed like farmers, the ladies wore calico and gingham. They were taken to the beach in mule-drawn hay wagons, and Bond did everything he could to make them comfortable. He was astute enough to realize that if they weren’t happy, the men would never get back.

There was a cost to all of Bond’s marvelous hospitality, which could not last forever. As meticulous as Bond was about his account books and keeping his daily journal, he constantly allowed money to slip through his fingers. By the late 1860s, the place was in such a state of disrepair that newcomers were shocked. Once they registered at the desk, they were asked to go and pick out a room, and by default it became their responsibility to assign tasks to the domestic staff — what there were of them. All of this greatly amused Bond’s regulars, who were quite used to it. Bond often seemed to be a guest in his own place, where social pretensions were banished. Casualness was the order of the day. It was like a big, happy fraternity house.

From Bond’s well-preserved records it is interesting to see what was or what should have been available to his guests. Each room contained one carpet, an iron bedstead and mattress, two sheets, two pillows and two cases, one counterpane, a washstand with bowl and pitcher, a chamber pot, one soap dish, two quilts and two chairs. There was a lot of “borrowing” and rearranging as items vanished from one room and appeared in another. There were so many practical jokes going on all the time that no one could be sure of anything, but eventually everyone got settled and joined in the fun.

The years after the Civil War were the beginning of what has been called the Gilded Age in America, when the display of wealth was equated with social prestige. Bond failed to realize women’s needs and especially their power. As much fun as it was to go to Bond’s, the place was going out of style. Roughing it at the seashore belonged to the old days. Women wanted to dress up on vacation, and they wanted silver, crystal and elegant cuisine. All of this and more were soon to come to Long Beach Island.

Among Bond’s oldest regulars, going as far back as 1856, was Archelaus Pharo of the Tuckerton Railroad. In 1872, just after his railroad on the mainland had opened, Pharo started regular steamboat service across the bay in the summer months to pick up the crowds from Philadelphia. He brought them straight to the Long Beach House, and this was Bond’s most profitable year. The place was packed all summer, but it would not last. Unfortunately for Bond, his old friends, Pharo and Charles T. Parry, were planning a new resort on a grand scale just two miles up the beach at a place they had already named Beach Haven.

With his hotel free of debt for the first time in years, Bond was filled with enthusiasm and he began, at the age of seventy-two, to invest heavily in improvements. He added another wing, bringing the total to 102 rooms, and put in new carpets and furnishings throughout the hotel. He bought more livestock and trees for his orchard. By the winter of 1873, he had borrowed and spent fifteen thousand dollars. It should have been obvious to him what was going to happen at Beach Haven, but he had a stubborn streak.

The spring of 1874 saw the opening of the Parry House in the new resort of Beach Haven. All of Bond’s former loyal guests, including Pharo, Parry and Ashhurst, had moved there and were building cottages. They also took the steamboat service along with them, and Bond would go into debt to Charles Freeman of the Camden and Atlantic Railroad paying for steamboat service from the rail terminus at Absecon. But the times were against Bond, and the new arrangement did not work. He had a very poor season until August, when he recorded 178 guests.

Even Lloyd Jones, Bond’s old friend, who had sold the Long Beach House to him back in 1851, was building a new place of his own at Beach Haven called the Bay View. The Long Beach House would never recover from all this competition. Bond accepted it philosophically and began a third career, devoting all of his energies to the new U.S. Life Saving station that had been erected on the oceanfront near his property in December 1873. He was made master of the station at a salary of eighty-five dollars a month and took the title of Captain Bond, with a paid crew of six men under him.

At Beach Haven, the first manager of the Parry House, Robert Engle, left after two years and built an even bigger and grander hotel just two blocks south called the Engleside. Bond sank deeper into debt with each passing year as fewer and fewer vacationers wanted to stay at a place that had become old-fashioned and out-of-date. By 1883, Bond’s principal creditor, Charles Freeman, bought the buildings at foreclosure proceedings. He closed the Long Beach House for good three years later when the railroad arrived in Beach Haven. There was a big farewell party at the old place, and many former guests, some of whom had cottages in Beach Haven, came to talk about old times and take home a souvenir or two.

In 1883, an aging Bond retired from the Life Saving Service. He was eighty-four and was still taking his boat Fashion out to the islands for gunning or fishing. There was no pension for him. He spent his last days in a little cottage near the ruin of his old hotel. Cared for by the Holgate and Horter families who had bought up most of his former land holdings in the area, Bond was never in need. He had outlived all of his contemporaries, but many young people came to see him to talk about the old days, and he remained alert until his death in 1892 at the age of ninety-three.

One profoundly sad incident occurred in his last days that recalled an event nearly sixty-five years earlier. Bond, the confirmed bachelor, once had a sweetheart and planned to marry her until they had a quarrel. Bond’s stubborn streak prevailed over his usual jovial manner. He refused to reconcile with her and left. She apparently was the same sort and eventually married someone else. When Bond was ninety-two and she was eighty-seven, he received a letter from her. Alone and widowed, she was dying in a hospital in New York, and Bond was too ill at the time to travel.

He died in Mays Landing, and his remains were brought to Beach Haven for a viewing at the Ocean House Hotel on Centre Street, where on a rainy October day both young and old came to talk and hear about the old times on Long Beach before there were trains and telephones. Bond was buried in Tuckerton’s Greenwood Cemetery in a grave unmarked until 1938. It was through the unflagging efforts of Jessie Coole of The Beach Haven Times, who had transcribed his diary for that paper in the late thirties, that a marker was finally placed. The flat, gray stone bears the simple inscription “Thomas Bond — Pioneer. 1799-1892.”

Bond had a favorite poem, one he was so fond of quoting that many who heard him recite it thought he had written it himself. The poem was actually written by Hannah Flagg Gould, and it seemed to embody much of Bond’s philosophy about life, a darker side that few people ever saw in this outgoing and generous man.

A Name in the Sand
Alone I walked the ocean strand
A pearly shell was in my hand
I stopped and wrote upon the sand
My name, the year, the date.
As onward from the spot I passed
One lingering look behind I cast
A wave came rolling high and fast
And washed my lines away.
So shall it be, with every trace on earth of me.
A wave from dark oblivion’s sea
Will roll across the place where I have trod
And leave no track or trace.

The old hotel remained a picturesque ruin for another twenty years in the sand hills about a hundred yards south of today’s last street in Holgate. In 1909 it was torn down, and all the lumber was rafted over to West Creek for resale. Much of it found its way into old houses around the island and the mainland. Not even a foundation stone remains of the old place. In February 1920 a violent northeast storm cut a new inlet through the former site, acting out in a haunting fashion the last lines of Bond’s favorite poem.

Copyright © 1994 Down The Shore Publishing Corp. and The SandPaper, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

THE RED HOUSES OF LONG BEACH
Excerpted from Chapter 8
by John Bailey Lloyd

All through the nineteenth century, accounts of shipwrecks fill the pages of eastern newspapers. Big storms, fog and navigational error caused so many vessels to run aground each year off the uninhabited Atlantic barrier beaches that government intervention finally became necessary. The movement began in New Jersey with its 127-mile coastline, where a combination of heavy traffic on the way to and from the busy port of New York and frequent northeast storms had made it a highly dangerous lee shore. New Jersey also lay directly in the path of the sea lanes from Europe.

Low-lying, nearly invisible barrier beaches were a considerable hazard in themselves, but what posed the real danger to wayward sailing ships was the system of continuous, submerged sand bars which lay anywhere from one hundred to four hundred yards in front of the beaches along the coast from Sandy Hook to Cape May. It was on these sunken and sometimes shifting reefs that most ships grounded and then broke apart before anyone aboard could be saved. Except at the highest tides or in natural cuts near inlets, sand bars and shoals were a constant menace to mariners in the coastal trade.

Many a fine ship, its sails blown to shreds, its hull and masts leaning, was discovered in the first light of a winter dawn settling into the sandy ridges out beyond the breakers. The faint cries of doomed passengers and crew rose and fell on the howling wind. There seemed to be no well-conceived plan in those years to get people safely from ship to shore without a boat, and usually the right kind of boat was not available. Those on the beach had no choice but to stand by and watch the ship break up in the crashing waves of the next high tide. Then the bodies would wash ashore. Some means, it was agreed, must be provided to get wreck victims safely through a quarter mile of churning surf before they drowned or froze to death. Not even a strong swimmer could survive a distance of three hundred yards in forty-degree water.

Aside from better lighthouses, perhaps, there really was not much that could be done in those years to prevent ships from running aground in foul weather. There were, however, ways and means to save lives when a ship became stranded. Volunteers could operate surf boats, and there was no shortage of local men who knew how to use them. There were other devices, too. Around 1840, a small cannon called a line gun had been perfected to shoot a projectile with a thin line attached, from the beach out to the stranded vessel. If properly aimed, the line fell across the rigging where a crew member could seize and use it to pull toward him a much thicker “hauling” line. When this was secured to the ship, a block or pulley and a cork ring called a breeches buoy could then be hung from the line to travel back and forth between ship and shore until everyone was safe. There was also a cumbersome and new torpedo-shaped device called a “life car” that could bring in several people at one time in its nearly airtight compartment.

What was needed along the nearly deserted barrier beaches, then, was a way to store the surf boat and all the other heavy and complex equipment so that they could be gotten to by volunteers and dragged down the beach to a site opposite the ship in distress. Such a building could also be used to temporarily house survivors until they could be taken to the mainland. Early in the century, the state of Massachusetts had experimented with this concept with shelters provided by the Humane Society.

Shipwrecks went on each year with a mounting loss of life and property. The winter of 1847 was so bad that Congressman William A. Newell of New Jersey was able to push through the first federal appropriation for lifesaving. It was only ten thousand dollars, but it was a start. Newell took the money provided by a reluctant Congress and in 1850 was finally able to buy boats, rockets and other newly invented rescue apparatus to be stored in several so-called “houses of refuge” which were to be built all along the Atlantic coast.

The first such house went up at Sandy Hook, and in a very short time there were others built, usually at intervals of twenty miles as they were in New Jersey where there were more ship strandings. There were two on Long Beach Island, one at Harvey Cedars and the other at the south end near Bond’s Hotel. Each unit was placed in the charge of a responsible local person, and each small, wooden building was stocked with the best modern equipment for lifesaving. Volunteers turned out in the event of an emergency. There was no provision for salaried keepers or crew; that would not be for another twenty years.

In case of washout, each house of refuge was built atop sunken pilings, and the building’s frame was strong enough to withstand relocation in case the pounding surf altered the shape of the beachfront. These early houses were not painted and had to be fairly close to the water so that they could be seen. Each house was about fifteen feet high, covered with cedar shingles on the roof and sides, and had big, barnlike doors on the lee side of the building so that equipment could be taken out quickly. Inside each building was a fully equipped boat on a wagon, a mortar apparatus with its lines, powder and shot, and the life car.

When there were no volunteers present, these early houses of refuge were not easy for shipwreck survivors to find. Signboards were placed at intervals in the dunes to aid them and were printed in several languages. Those who managed to get ashore in foul weather might have perished had they not been able to find these houses. There was straw in the bunks, wood for the stove, matches in a tin case, a barrel of hard bread, coffee, a cask of fresh water, salted meats, blankets and warm clothing. All of this was in addition to the equipment used by the volunteers in rescue work.

After the wreck of the Powhatan off Long Beach Island in 1854 with the loss of more than three hundred lives, it was clear that the volunteer system was not always dependable. The closest house of refuge at Harvey Cedars had not been close enough for the volunteers to drag the heavy equipment through deep snow in time to get opposite the wreck, several miles to the south. But Congress, facing the coming Civil War, was unwilling to spend any money to build more houses of refuge and nothing was done until 1870. It was then that Sumner Kimball, a lawyer from Maine, became chief of the Revenue Marine Service of the United States Treasury Department.

Kimball was in charge of all the houses of refuge then in existence, and he ordered an immediate investigation of them. There were only twenty-four on the whole coast from Maine to Florida, and they had been in use for twenty years. Kimball made an inspection down the coast and found the buildings neglected and dilapidated and much too far apart to be useful. Apparatus was rusty or broken, and portable items had been carried off. He persuaded Congress to vote twenty thousand dollars to reequip them and to enroll permanent crews who, he said, “would sleep right beside the boats the way firemen sleep next to their engines.” This was the beginning of the United States Life Saving Service.

The newly formed Life Saving Service provided for each station to be manned by six men and a keeper who lived in the stations from September through April, when there was the most danger from storms. Each was paid forty dollars a month, which was a good wage then for a bayman whose income was seasonal. The keeper got sixty dollars. These men had fished, clammed and gunned in local waters all their lives, and they knew how to operate boats in the surf. Besides their skills, they were chosen for their resourcefulness, courage and integrity. It was a proud service.

Along the desolate barrier beaches from Sandy Hook to Cape May, forty-one units were placed approximately three miles apart. These new station houses were of uniform design, eighteen feet by forty feet and windowless on three sides. They were painted reddish brown and, devoid of any ornamentation save a cupola, lightning rod and large white numerals on their seaward walls, they resembled big barns or garages in the dunes. Locally they were called “red houses.”

Inside the two-story, cedar-shake buildings there were a boat room, a mess room and a bunk room. The doors of the boat room always faced southwest so they could be opened easily in a howling northeaster. The boat room contained the boat and gun carriages and other equipment used in rescue work. Behind it on the same floor was the mess room with a big iron stove. Here the crew cooked, ate and lounged. Upstairs under the eaves was the long bunk room with one end partitioned off for the keeper or commander of the station.

When the Life Saving Service was active, from 1871 until 1915, there were six stations on Long Beach Island. They were Barnegat Inlet, Loveladies Island, Harvey Cedars, Ship Bottom, Long Beach at what is now Beach Haven Terrace, and Bond’s at what is now Holgate. Three miles south of Bond’s there was a seventh station on Tucker’s Island, the Little Egg Harbor Station. Of these stations, Loveladies Island, Harvey Cedars and Long Beach Station still stand today in their original locations. All the rest have been moved or torn down.
The exact distance from the Long Beach Station at Maryland Avenue in Beach Haven Terrace to Bond’s in Holgate was determined in 1910 with a huge, twelve-foot measuring wheel and proved to be three and three-fourths miles. This was when Bond’s Life Saving Station was still on the oceanfront at Inlet Avenue in Holgate at a spot that is now underwater. It had had an artesian well since 1887 when the station was rebuilt, and today the cap for that well sometimes appears out near the sand bar at extremely low tides. The original station, built in 1871, was a hundred yards farther east of that bar before it had to be abandoned: There is no clearer evidence to show how much the beaches of the south end have eroded in the last hundred years. Bond’s Coast Guard Station east of Inlet Avenue was moved in the 1920s a quarter mile south to Janet Avenue on the bay. It is now a private dwelling.

In all but one of the forty-two stations along the coast the government was a squatter on beach land which was becoming increasingly more valuable, and owners were, with some justification, asking to be compensated. But many of these titles were cloudy. Releases had to be obtained from heirs who had moved to distant western states. The title to Loveladies Island was never obtained.

For most of the men in the Life Saving Service on Long Beach Island in the 1870s and 1880s, it was a lonely existence and often a very dangerous one. There was monotony, but the men were seldom idle. They had their nightly watches to perform. Every four hours two men left the station house. One would walk north on the beach and the other south, meet the patrols from the adjoining station houses, exchange a brass token and leave. Then there were routine drills and the maintenance of buildings and equipment as the crews waited and watched. Living at the stations was very much like living in a firehouse. And just as old-time firehouses traditionally kept a Dalmatian dog for a mascot, the Life Saving stations had their Newfoundland retrievers, who often accompanied the night watches on their lonely beach patrols. In the nineteenth century the Newfoundland became the symbol of the Life Saving Service.

In foul weather it was impossible to see the entire beach from the tower, and patrols sometimes had to be run throughout the day as well as the night. The meeting and exchange of tokens was required only on continuous beaches. In a snowstorm all that could be seen to guide the patrol might be the blurry edge of gray water or white, churning surf or the hard sand at low tide. Many an obstacle — a ship’s mast, lumber, an old wreck, a huge dead fish — caused a patrolman to stumble in the dark.

For nineteenth-century vacationers who watched crews practice, launching a surf boat in heavy seas was a stirring sight. The two-wheeled boat carriage was backed into the breakers as far as possible with two men already aboard, the coxswain and the bow man. As the carriage was tipped, the four oarsmen, in knee-deep water, gripped the sides and ran with the boat, bow first, straight into the surf, swinging themselves aboard the moment it began to glide. Then, seizing their long oars, they pulled furiously with all their strength as every wave threatened to roll the boat back onto the beach. They kept their eyes on the coxswain, who was steering and giving commands.
Communication among the six stations on the island was by telephone, a welcome improvement over the old wigwag semaphore used in the early years. The single cable was strung on iron poles which ran along the sand hills on the oceanfront. Each pole was about eight to ten feet high and was usually sunk about three feet into the sand. There were crosspieces on each pole and glass insulators. It was a party line, and each station had a certain number of rings on the bell to indicate who was to answer it.

There were many happy times. In calm weather, families and friends of the men at the stations would sail over to the island for a surprise party, bringing with them cakes and pastries and good things from home. On these occasions the boat room would be used for dancing, but the watch was never neglected, and the surfmen would make their rounds accompanied by their wife or sweetheart. Weather permitting, every holiday was celebrated, especially Christmas, when all of the children would show up. The men in the service at the island’s six stations in the 1890s were all from the oldest families in the region: Perrine, Soper, Ridgeway, Inman, Truex, Cranmer, Sprague, Rider, Rogers, Birdsall, Gaskill, Shinn, Parker, Hazelton, Crane, Falkinberg, Pharo, Rutter.

In the early years of the Service, the men wore civilian clothing, dressing much like the fishermen and baymen that they were. In 1899, right after the Spanish-American War, the Service adopted a naval uniform, largely as a consequence of the recent role they had played in coastal defense acting as sentinels looking for the Spanish fleet. It was not that the enemy fleet was ever much of a threat, but the public perceived it as such.
By the middle of the 1880s, the railroad had come to the island and with it more people. The simple “red houses” became more ornate. There were overhanging eaves, fancy scrollwork and observation decks, and the buildings were painted with popular colors to blend in with the summer cottages. New stations built in the 1890s were required to have a seventy-foot flagstaff and a four-story tower.

All of this was happening just as the need for the Service was declining. It was the age of the steamship, and the old barks, brigantines and schooners were being phased out and turned into unrigged barges. They occasionally parted their hawsers and drifted ashore, but there were seldom any lives to save. Yet many old surfmen refused to retire and stayed on at the station, full of honor and stirring tales of the old days of thudding surf cannons, sleety gales and grateful survivors. With the formation of the United States Coast Guard in 1915, they, like the sailing ships they once rescued, became reminders of a passing era.
Copyright © 1994 Down The Shore Publishing Corp. and The SandPaper, Inc. All Rights Reserved.