Island Album

An Oral and Pictorial History of a Sliver of Sand
© The New York Times
By Christopher Hann

HARVEY CEDARS, N.J. - Margaret Thomas Buchholz had long entertained the notion of compiling a picture book of Long Beach Island. But the idea didn't gain traction until two years ago, when she came across a dozen poster-size black-and-white photographs of the island displayed at a local banquet hall. The rather desolate island she had known as a young girl in the 1930's and 40's was evoked by some of the images -- depictions of hardy people leading a rugged existence on an untamed sliver of sand set precariously between broad bays and pounding surf.

For Ms. Buchholz, the display crystallized in her mind the type of picture book she then set out to produce. She started poking around for more such photos, asking friends to sort through their dusty old shoeboxes. She scoured archives from Lynn Photo, a photography shop in Ship Bottom, and from The Beachcomber, the local newspaper she had owned for 32 years before selling it in 1987. (She now works there as an editor.)

When her collection surpassed 300 photographs, taken from 1880 to the 1970's, Ms. Buchholz decided to arrange them in a sort of family scrapbook. The result is "Island Album: Photographs and Memories of Long Beach Island," published this spring by Down the Shore Publishing in West Creek. It is both an oral and pictorial history of the 18-mile sandbar at the center of the Jersey Shore and an ode to a pioneering way of life long vanished.

"It was in my mind to show what it used to be like here," Ms. Buchholz said. "There's a real continuity here, and I'm trying to show some of that."

Ms. Buchholz, 73 and deeply tanned, lives in the house she grew up in, a bayfront ranch in Harvey Cedars that has been enlarged more than once since her father, Reynold Thomas, built it in the Depression. A longtime mayor of Harvey Cedars, Mr. Thomas founded the Barnegat Bay Dredging Company, which contributed mightily to the island's ferocious mid-century growth by depositing countless tons of sand, dredged from the bay, along the island's western edge, a common practice in those environmentally insensitive days. "A lot of people who come down now don't realize that all the homes on the bay side are built on manmade land," Ms. Buchholz said.

Her book is arranged according to the significant trends and events -- cultural, commercial, meteorological -- that have steered the island's evolution ever since the first luxury hotels were built in the 1880's. Photographs recall the laying of the first railroad tracks spanning Barnegat Bay later that decade, the completion of the original wooden causeway in 1923, and the building of the modern causeway that replaced it 30 years later.

One photograph shows a gathering of islanders watching the Hindenburg pass overhead on May 6, 1937, just minutes from its disastrous landing at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst. Chapters recall "Early Cottages," "Guarding the Coast," "Barnegat Lighthouse," "Yacht Clubs" and "Rough Weather."

Ms. Buchholz was not convinced that pictures alone could tell the island's story. She remembered that in the 1980's, Eleanor Smith, a retired schoolteacher, had recorded her conversations with elderly islanders on the porch of the Long Beach Island Museum in Beach Haven. Throughout the book Ms. Buchholz sprinkles nuggets of these "rocking porch talks," like this memory from Effie Griggs: "When we first came it was all open and the children could run over the dunes, and wild roses and bayberry were rampant."
Read today, these recollections serve as a wistful lament for the passing of those days, which seem in these pages to have vanished in methodical, inexorable fashion, like a sand castle built too close to a rising tide.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 20, 2006, Section NJ, Page 14 of the National edition with the headline: An Oral and Pictorial History of a Sliver of Sand.




Read less

“A coffee table book to be savored — not only by those who love Long Beach Island, but by anyone interested in the history of American seaside resorts.”
— The Times, Trenton

“Both an oral and pictorial history of the 18-mile sandbar at the center of the Jersey Shore and an ode to a pioneering way of life long vanished.”
— The New York Times

Read less

“Each picture is fascinatingly worth the proverbial thousand words. Monstrous fish; death-defying Scandinavian fishermen; rough tents and clotheslines pitched on the dunes; grand old hotels; young people in a Ford truck forging across the beach in 1939, passing the remains of a wrecked ship. But as time fades facts, pictures alone couldn’t tell the story…. Island natives narrated tales of rum-running, raging storms, and the good life back when.”
— The SandPaper

“The 207-page book shows the island and its people from the late 1800s to the present, including many images that disappeared into attics generations ago and have never been seen in public before.”
— Asbury Park Press

Read less

“There was a special smell to the cottage at Beach Haven, indigenous, I think, to the Jersey Shore. The minute we opened the front door we met it — a combination of dampness, beach sand, old wicker furniture, oil from the guns that stood racked with the fishing rods... whatever the mixture, to my nostrils it was very sweet.”
— Catherine Drinker Bowen (circa 1920s)

Read less

From the Inside Flap:
ISLANDS ARE MYTHIC PLACES. Crossing water to reach them, it is easy to feel that we're leaving the complexities of everyday life for an elemental world governed by the natural rhythms of sun and wind and tide. Albums, in contrast, root us in our past, preserving the everyday life of childhood, of animals, people and places we have loved. 

Island Album presents us with both the idea and the reality of one New Jersey barrier island. Here is Long Beach Island in the days of pound fishing and great hotels, but here, too, are fishermen showing off their catches and a gaggle of summer waitresses posing for a group picture in their brief spare time. Children of every decade personify summer as they romp on beaches and mess about in boats. Teenagers are teenagers, recognizable at work and play, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Houses evolve from simple shanties into Victorian “cottages” and finally modern structures with walls of glass. But all are home to the families gathered for the camera on porch and dock.

The text is drawn from interviews recorded by the LBI Historical Association over a ten-year period. It combines descriptions of island life with what the Island represents to those who have known it well. There are stories of sailing and fishing, of long-ago treks by car, train and foot, of beach camping, life guarding and coastal rescue, of violent storms and the endless struggle to resist a hungry sea.

And of course there is some regret for wilderness lost and the slower pace of much of the previous century. Yet something quintessential about Long Beach Island remains. This fragile strip of land between bay and ocean captures the imagination today as much as ever, and this loving evocation of its past can only enhance its present.

Read less

From the Introduction by Larry Savadove:

Somewhere in the bottom drawer of your bedroom bureau is a photograph album, half full of family pictures, carefully labeled and properly enticing. It is only half full because whoever was doing the pasting and labeling got tired of the job, or overwhelmed. So on the top shelf of the hall closet sits a box of unsorted photographs, still in the envelopes from the drugstore, waiting for a place on a page.

This is a family album, the Island family. Chock full of memories. Margaret Thomas Buchholz has done the gathering and sorting and arranging. There is no narrative as such, just the comments of those who were and are part of the Island. There are some that run a paragraph or two but mostly they are snippets snatched from the past, a kind of haiku floating on the wings of memory.

There is, wisely, no attempt to order the pictures chronologically, but rather by subject, so we can see the stages of the causeway bridge, the great hotels, Barnegat Lighthouse, the Lucy Evelyn and Islander's homes. The pictures will be nostalgia to some, quaint to some, sad to some, whether you regard the Island as the place where summer lives, or home.

Margaret is one of the latter, living in the house by the bay she grew up in, still fascinated by storms and the leave-behinds of wrecks and the diaries of ancient mariners and the letters of her predecessors. You see pictures like these occasionally - in the old post office in Ship Bottom, on some restaurant walls or perhaps in somebody's album, but she has cast a wide net and caught the Island in its many phases in nearly 340 photographs, some more than 100 years old.

She is also intrigued, as all of us who live under the sea wind must be, by the constant struggle between the sea and the engineers, and some of the pictures are reminders of how that contest hasn't been settled yet.

Everybody calls Long Beach Island "my island," and everybody is right, for it belongs uniquely to each of us. But you might have trouble recognizing it in some photographs - the wide open expanse of dunes south, the lonely road north, the railway locomotive so huge and seemingly out of place on the sand. My favorite shot is of a man holding a shotgun, standing in a bare tree, one of the last of the Harvey Cedars' cedar trees.

You might find yourself in here, frolicking on the beach in a bathing suit you can't believe you wore, or as one of the lifeguards in a 1952 lineup, or rocking on the porch of the elegant Engleside Hotel, or you may find your parents or grandparents. I'm in here in a photograph I'd completely forgotten about.

And if you don't see yourself you're likely to see your house in one of many aerial views. I found the first house we ever rented, the house my father finally bought after years of renting, and the house I now live in. Sound familiar? It's a pattern many of us followed.

Beach parties, fishing parties, grand views, intimate peeks, a mini-history of beach fashions, whispers from a now never-to-be-forgotten past, they're all here, plus the family members who made them.

Put this next to your own family album. It's our island and this is its record.

© Down The Shore Publlishing. All rights reserved.

Read less