Shore Chronicles

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"Dozens of fascinating accounts.... Glimpses of 'everyday life,' as manners and mores evolve over the decades, make Shore Chronicles a real eye-opener." — Booklist

"Things have changed enormously along the Jersey Shore…. Charting the vastness of change over two and a half centuries is the signal achievement of Shore Chronicles…. Resonates with the minute details of our shared past." — The Star-Ledger

"A captivating history of the shore and the people who made it."— The Bergen Record

"A fascinating collection." — New Jersey Monthly

"For most tourists and year-round residents, the post-Parkway Jersey Shore is all we know. It takes a remarkable book like Shore Chronicles to make past incarnations of our favorite places real." — The Beach Haven Times

"A glorious romp along the Jersey Shore…. A magic carpet to a simpler time." — from US1 (Princeton)

"Readers can now take a look at the original magic that hooked Shore visitors and see how it has continued to lure them back year after year…. Unique and intriguing." — The Ocean Star

"It is fascinating." — Atlantic City Press

"Buchholz, coauthor of Great Storms of the Jersey Shore, has collected reflections on the New Jersey shoreline from diaries, letters, and magazine and newspaper articles. The 50 entries span 1764 through 1955, the year the Garden State Parkway opened. While the coastline has changed both geographically and demographically, the lure of the shore has not. The chroniclers include the famous (e.g., Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John James Audubon), unknown wide-eyed vacationers, and writers on assignment from newspapers.

It is particularly interesting to read different accounts of the same place, such as Walt Whitman's and Arthur Conan Doyle's descriptions of Atlantic City. Throughout, the entries remain as fresh as a sea breeze.

This book is a fine chronicle of the development and discovery of the pleasures of the shore. A wonderful resource for regional collections; recommended for both public and academic libraries."
— Thomas O'Connell, Murray State Univ. Lib., KY Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. — Library Journal

200 Years of the Way We Were
:
Tales of the Shore Before

By Marie Scandale (published in The SandPaper, Long Beach Island)

We’ve all gone down the long, bumpy road to the shore, craning our necks out the window, “Are we there yet?” We’ve all piled out and run headlong for the waves, to feel that first rush of salty foam surround us with all its sensations. Some episodes of the shore experience are timeless. But if we could turn around to face the beach in another era, what would we see in 1828? In 1936?

Imagine traveling in time to be a guest at the home of Ebenezer Tucker in his namesake Tuckerton in 1809, just 18 years after George Washington appointed him tariff collector of the port. Or wouldn’t it be compelling to know the last waking thoughts of a working teenager as he drifted to sleep in a rented room above a Ship Bottom restaurant at the ebb of the Depression? What were the fishermen catching in Little Egg Harbor inlet in 1917? What were young men’s devices for catching young women back then ... and the other way around? What were they talking about around the tables of the lantern-lit tavern stops on the way to the 19th-century shore, or at a Harvey Cedars summer home as World War II heated up?

Until now it was up to our imaginations to color in such details between the black-and-white lines of a history book. But in Shore Chronicles, just released by Down the Shore Publishing, we are there, in the lives of some ordinary people as well as some celebrated writers of the day. Edited by Margaret Thomas Buchholz, the book is for those who can’t get enough of the shore and want to soak it up for 10 generations back. Because the writers took the time to pen their impressions, we can almost see things we wouldn’t have dreamed of, such as the “lighted torch looming large and blazing from the bow of a boat anchored off bobbing for eels” (Long Beach Island, 1828).

The fascination lies both in how different and how much the same were these chronicled times from 1764 to 1955. New Jersey historian John Cunningham, who wrote the foreword, noted that the stories have several common threads with today — “the need for a place where a person can get away from daily life, the belief that the sea air is good for you ... and an awareness that no matter how antiquated or tiresome the modes of travel, the trip is worth the effort.”

It’s History As It Happened.
What is it about diaries that captures all this so well? For one thing, the thoughts are unfiltered. They roam freely from the inspiration the seaside provided to their permanent home on paper. As Buchholz says, “They show us history as it happened.” The editor summed it up best when she said in the introduction, “journals have an immediacy not equaled by reminiscence.”

“I argued for women’s Suffrage for all I was worth,” wrote Eleanor Browning Price at the end of a day in 1915. The comment was among more mundane notations about going to Manahawkin to order winter vegetable plants. And among the book’s 50 photos, there is a snapshot of her in a sailor-style bathing dress.

A so-called “day in the life of ...” says as much about entire ways of life. Take this scene (today’s fishermen would love to) recorded by Field and Stream editor Van Campen Heilner of a 1917 fishing excursion at present-day Holgate: “A figure loomed up out of the ghostly dunes and Hal came into the light of the fire, dragging behind him a beautiful bass. ... We crowded close as he held the great copper warrior up in the flickering light, and watched the needle on the scales quiver at forty-eight pounds.” When he and a buddy put into the Coast Guard station to get a hot shave, they found this: “It was a bluff and rugged station we found, peopled by keen, rough, blue-eyed men — men who at any moment must be ready, if necessity called, in the dark of night, to put a boat through a wild northeast surf and make it live.”

We can also learn what authors such as Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson noted about the Jersey Shore. Arthur Conan Doyle’s view differed vastly from naturalist John James Audubon’s. Here’s how Sherlock Holmes’ creator chronicled an Atlantic City visit in 1922. “One of the famous amusements of Atlantic City when you are not moving along the Boardwalk in the huge invalid chairs is to go down to Young’s million-dollar pier and see the fish net being drawn. They are very numerous and very varied, it is rather a horrible sight, that mass of pullulating life, flapping and beating in its vain struggle against extinction.”

The Humorous Side Of Hurricanes.
Whether other diarists had an inkling that their words would someday be read is an interesting question. An author only known as “E” probably didn’t. His or her (we can’t be sure) 1933 letter from Atlantic City was addressed to “Mom.” The words are perhaps unintentionally comedic, considering the grimness of the situation. “Don’t worry about the reports of our hurricane,” it starts. “E” goes on to say that the ocean is “rampaging around the streets every high tide.” At the Claridge, “they couldn’t run the elevator without danger of drowning,” and the 75-mph winds threw a jitney bus across the street. When the electric wires on Pacific Avenue started to “explode,” they made quite a gorgeous fireworks display, and “for an hour or so, anyone going out was in danger of being electrocuted.”

Another storm anecdote proves that boys will be boys, no matter what the generation. In this true tale, as the hurricane of 1944 bore down on Atlantic City, we find young Ray Hansen in a dory with his pal, Buddy. “We didn’t notice the sky getting blacker by the minute,” he later wrote. They were plucked from their pitching boat by a passing fishing boat just before they capsized, and Hansen lived to tell the tale of getting the scare of his life.

Buchholz’s sources were libraries, historical societies, respondees to a newspaper ad, researchers such as Deb Whitcraft, Steve Dodson and Carroll Sheppard, and her own curiosity. Editor of The Beachcomber newsmagazine, author of Seasons in the Sun and coauthor with Larry Savadove of Great Storms of the Jersey Shore (Down the Shore Publishing), Buchholz began the book as an offshoot of editing her mother’s World War I diary. She began looking for “well-written diaries with a striking sense of time and place” but in the two-year quest broadened the scope to other manuscripts.

Her personal favorite is artist and sailor Will Lathrop’s log. “I had read the New England portion of it in Yankee magazine in the early 1980s and reasoned that if Widge had been launched in the Delaware River, Lathrop had to sail along the Jersey coast to get to Long Island.” Through friends in New Hope, Pa., and Florida, she located his grandson in New Hampshire. “It took more than a year, but I finally got to read his log.”

There is something for everyone in these varying views, and everything to some who love all of the shore. “I like history, and if you have any love of the shore, I think it’s fascinating to see how others have connected,” Buchholz said. Beach activities like jumping up and down in the water and flirting on the beach, “it’s all very similar in feeling and experience, except that they’re wearing different clothes and have a different culture.”

The editor said the book could have included even more than the 360 pages by the 49 writers. She stopped at 1955 for a reason — that’s the year the Garden State Parkway opened a road that was to alter “the unhurried, measured development of the shore.”

Readers craving more images — maybe more contemporary ones — will be glad to know the book is part of a trilogy capturing the essence of the shore. Down the Shore Publishing previously released Shore Stories: An Anthology of the Jersey Shore (Rich Youmans, ed., 1998) and Under a Gull’s Wing (Youmans and Frank Finale, eds., 1996). Today come the shore-bound automobiles, as Cunningham wrote, “filled with happy-faced people who believe today is the acme of Jersey Shore summertime.” This book shows that every age was its own acme.
(This review appeared in The SandPaper and is reprinted with permission. © 2000 Jersey Shore Newsmagazines.)

“While the coastline has changed both geographically and demographically, the lure of the shore has not. Throughout, the entries remain as fresh as a sea breeze. .. A wonderful resource.” — Library Journal

For millions of people, summer means traveling to the New Jersey Shore. Every generation brings a new perspective and a new sense of discovery to this beloved region. Every visitor returns home with tales of their experience along this 127 mile long sandy coastline of boardwalks and beaches.

“Shore Chronicles: Diaries and Traveler's Tales From the Jersey Shore 1764-1955” enlightens contemporary shore-lovers with fascinating historical perspective. Illustrated with 50 historic photographs, etchings and fine art images, this comprehensive collection begins with adventure travel in 1764 when the Shore (and much of South Jersey) was still a wild frontier. The book concludes in 1955 with the opening of the Garden State Parkway, which brought exponentially more visitors — and rapid development — to the Jersey Shore.

A total of 50 accounts include writing by such well-known figures as John J. Audubon, Walt Whitman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen Crane and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is included. But, perhaps most interesting are the selections from private journals, letters, and diaries from unknowns vacationing or visiting the shore.

As fresh as their experiences are to Shore visitors each year, most activities here are timeless — the fundamental attractions of the seashore resonate throughout time. Yet it is stunning to read how different the landscape and environment was before development.

The book includes a foreword from renowned New Jersey historian John T. Cunningham.

Excerpts from chapter-length accounts:


1764, Peck’s Beach [Ocean City]: We came to the great ocean and drank of its salt water; it is considered healthful and therefore a great many people, with various illnesses, come here in the spring and summer for two or three weeks to bathe in the water and to drink it. — Rev. Carl Magnus Wrangel

1809, Long Beach Island: On August 12 it was too cold to swim so Sarah Thomson and her brother went riding on the beach in the ox cart and hunted birds eggs. She wrote in her diary, “Charley got a handkerchief full, fetched them home to make egg nog, found them all full of young ones. Ha, Ha. Joke on Charley.”

1828, Long Beach Island: A British barque went aground and a wreck sale was held on the beach. A dense crowd of bidders gathered in the shadow of the high and dry hulk, ready to bid on copper sheathing, casks, cargo, masts and sails.
1829, Great Egg Harbor: To such naturalists as are qualified to observe many different objects at the same time, Great Egg Harbor would probably afford as ample a field as any part of our coast.... Birds of many kinds are abundant, as are testaceous animals. — John James Audubon

1848, Cape May: Rebecca Sharp and Henrietta Roberts came by steamship from Philadelphia for a two-week stay at the drafty, barn-like Ocean House. Back in her room after a night of dancing, Henrietta wrote in her diary, “A startling knock at the door to inform us of the intoxicated state of the poet, owing to an overdose of opium and mint juleps — Our nerves were quite unhinged.”

1850, Cape May: Carriages and horses drive out into the waves, gentlemen ride into them, dogs swim about; more than a thousand white and black people, horses and carriages and dogs — all are there, one among another, and just before them porpoises lift up their heads and sometimes take a huge leap.
— Frederika Bremer

1864, Barnegat Bay: I sat on the beach near Barnegat Inlet on a soft balmy day in November from early morning until night and scarcely saw a break in the continuous line of ducks, geese and brant bound south. — T. Robinson Warren

1870, Ocean Grove: James A. Bradley, founder of Asbury Park and a member of the Methodist Camp Meeting Association, pitched a tent near a grove of pine, cedar and hickory on his lot in the newly formed community of Ocean Grove.
1875: Sea bathing was an unknown and somewhat scary activity for most people. A guide book offered much advice: “Where persons go to the shore alone, or with only their families or intimate friends, they may use their own everyday clothes with which to go into the water. If practicable, as to weather and those present, they may go in naked. The latter may be a better way. But where there is mixed company and strangers, a suit specially designed for the purpose should be used.”

1878, Point Pleasant: A bluefish blitz is reported: “I stood on a sand bank at the mouth of the Manasquan River and watched... There was a strange sort of boiling appearance in the water, and then a whole host of moss bunkers flung themselves wildly on the sand beach, flopped about, gasped hysterically, and then, after a few more fruitless leaps, lay still, choked by the hot air and burning sun. The men and boys were meanwhile swinging as fast as they could their squids, and sending them, some of the best throwers, fifty yards into the surf. No sooner did the squid touch and disappear beneath the water than they ran up the sand-hills, and lo! A large blue-fish came leaping and tumbling out of the sea.”
1879, Atlantic City: I have a fine and bracing drive along the smooth sand (the carriage wheels hardly made a dent in it). The bright sun, the sparkling waves, the foam, the view - Brigantine beach, a sail here and there in the distance - the ragged wreck-timbers of the stranded Rockaway- the vital, vast monotonous sea - all the fascination of simple, uninterrupted space, shore, salt atmosphere, sky, were the items of my drive. — Walt Whitman

1880, Ocean City: The bay was populous with wild fowl, geese, ducks, brant, loon and others of their kin and it was no uncommon sight to see flocks of “blue bills,” acres in extent, moving up and down with the tide, and at evening the homecoming of the geese from their day on the ocean, was as regular as the sunset. The woods were filled and thrilled with music, song birds everywhere, from the thrush and robin down to the incisive and persistent mosquito. — Robert Fisher

1881, Sea Isle City: The Atwater family lived in Millville and wanted a house where their nine children could experience a “free life on the beautiful beach.” Abby Atwater wrote to her sister, “We are talking now of taking all the family to a place just stared on the Jersey coast called Sea Isle City. While it is getting under way to be the grand watering place the developer intends it to be, we might spend July there for a year or two quietly and pleasantly. There are no mosquitoes, and still-water bathing inside, and surf outside the island.”
1892, Wildwood: That I am at last in a bit of Jersey’s primeval forest there is little doubt. Everywhere towering trees bearing evidence of great age, and early in the day I found myself face to face with a huge cedar, dating back at least to the Norsemen. Here was a tree that for centuries the Indians had known as a landmark. — Charles Abbott

1907, Atlantic City: A young woman may walk the beach in the full light of day in the most abbreviated of costumes and no one thinks any the worse of her... Atlantic City is free and easy, unceremonious and undignified, good-naturedly boisterous and unnecessarily loud, but it is respectable. — Sir Alfred Low

1914, Atlantic City: The hotels in Atlantic City are as fantastic in appearance as the place itself. I imagine that the architects have been kept for weeks on the seafront and were probably fed on crab and given gin rickeys to drink. Then, when allowed to drop to sleep in the early morning, they would dream. At the end of a fortnight or so of this treatment their dreams would be imprinted on their memories and they would draw plans of suitable hotels. The Atlantic City hotel is less stately than fantastic. It is a building which any one would declare to be impossible if he did not see it in actual existence. — James Hannay

1917, Little Egg Harbor Inlet: It was mating time, too, and from every dune and marshy place the plaintive cries of the nesting plover came to us, punctuated at times by the sharp bark of a fox of which the dunes held quite a few. And how wild and lonely it all was! During the two weeks we spent there we saw not a living soul. We might have been so many Robinson Crusoes, so far as the outside world was concerned. We were cut off from everything save our own thoughts. — Van Campen Heilner

1919, Wildwood: In September the bathing is at its best. The beach itself, colored in the first flush of the level sun, is still faintly warm to the naked foot, after the long shining of the day; but it cools rapidly. The tide is coming in with long seething ridges of foam, each flake and clot of crumbled water tinged with a rose-petal pink by the red sunset. All this glory of color, of movement, of unspeakable exhilaration and serenity is utterly lonely. — Christopher Morley

1922, Atlantic City: One of the famous amusements of Atlantic City when you are not moving along the Boardwalk in the huge invalid-chairs is to go down to Young’s million dollar pier and see the fish net being drawn. They are very numerous and very varied, it is rather a horrible sight, that mass of pullulating life, flapping and beating in its vain struggle against extinction. — Arthur Conan Doyle

1936, Brigantine: There were no breakers anywhere, no breakers as far as the eye could reach, not a whitecap on the sea. All the ocean was so quiet that when it came up on the beach it just rippled in. There was no small of salt, for the wind was offshore. There was a wall of snow perhaps three feet high at high water mark at the foot of where the dunes once were. The leveling of the dunes has unquestionably brought about many of the inroads of the sea. In many places up and down the coast we saw cottages that had been undermined and toppled into ruins, or thrown about in confusion, or carried in and left stranded quite a distance back from the ocean. — Cornelius Weygandt

More Excerpts:

1947, Atlantic City: More and more, there seems to be doubt in the minds of the people who run the resort as to whether the Atlantic Ocean, which, after all, was the boardwalk’s original raison d’etre, constitutes as much of a spectacle as the boardwalk itself. The clusters of benches that have been thoughtfully placed at intervals along the ocean side of the boardwalk for tired pedestrians to rest upon, free of charge, face not the soothing expanse of water but the bustling promenade, with its stream of rolling wicker chairs propelled by stooped Negroes, and the long row of hotels, penny arcades, Oriental-rug bazaars, neon signs, skeeball parlors, soda fountains, bars, bathhouses, hot-dog-and-cold-drink stands, handwriting-analysis booths, restaurants, and shops of all kinds that flank its landward edge. — E.J. Kahn, Jr.

1952, Ocean City: I was assigned to Twenty-sixth Street, known as the Kelly’s Beach because that notable family’s summer house was just in back of it. Here we didn’t have to worry about importuning passing girls for lunch since one of the traditions of the Twenty-sixth street station was that the Kelly’s kitchen maid sent lunch up to the stand each day, a practice probably begun when Jack Jr. was a stalwart of the Ocean City Beach Patrol. — Edward Brown