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NEW JERSEY
A Guide To Its Present And Past
Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of New Jersey
American Guide Series

Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.

Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003

Tour 35A
Ship Bottom-Harvey Cedars-Barnegat City; unnumbered road.

Ship Bottom-Harvey Cedars-Barnegat City; unnumbered road.
Ship Bottom to Barnegat City, 8.5 m.
Two-lane macadamized roadbed.
Numerous boarding houses and small hotels, some open all year.

The road runs to the northern end of narrow Long Beach Island. Wave-worn timbers of wrecked sailing ships protrude from the sand of the lonely beach, which in the northern section is unsurpassed for beauty by any other part of the New Jersey Coast. During heavy winter storms much of the island is flooded.

The route branches N. from State S40 (see Tour 35) at SHIP BOTTOM, 0 m. (10 alt., 277 pop.) (see Tour 35).

Northward at 0.8 m. is the widest part of Long Beach Island, nearly 1 mile broad, with the white sand beach (R) hidden from the road by a long chain of low dunes with a few patches of wiry grass, half buried by the shifting sand. The dunes shelter the villages from winter storms. In the poor soil holly trees, wild roses, and mallows have a root-hold.

SURF CITY, 1.1 m. (1 5 alt.), is a small village with a few blocks of boardwalk, some small hotels, and modern cottages. This resort was built in 1873 around the site of the former Mansion of Health, oldest of the island hotels.

Old-time sailing masters and pilots lived here when Surf City was a port and a lumbering center. The earliest settlers on the island were whalers, who came to this spot after obtaining a grant of land in 1690. Two hundred years ago a whale watch pole, a post about 15 feet high topped with a railed platform, stood on the beach. When a whale was sighted the boats put out to make the capture. The mammals were beached, stripped, and their blubber rendered on the sand.

HARVEY CEDARS, 3.7 m. (10 alt.), the island's oldest settlement, drew whalers from Long Island and New England soon after the war of 1812. The jaw bone of a whale and fragments of the spine serve here as a border for rose beds. Few of the old cedar trees are left. A large NURSERY (L), where gladiolus and other flowers are grown under the shelter of glass frames, is the brightest spot in town. For a quarter-century a group of Philadelphia artists has maintained a summer colony in Harvey Cedars. Their methods are business-like, yielding none of the arty atmos- phere that characterizes similar colonies.

North of Harvey Cedars the route passes small clumps of stunted trees, bent by ocean winds.

HIGH POINT, 4.5 m. (24 alt.), is a small village clinging to the sheltered, sunset side of the low dunes. Gill nets are dried on stakes driven into the sand.

Along the road are a few chicken coops containing specimens of one of the peculiarities of Long Beach Island, the tailless rooster. The bitter experience of Long Beach housewives has taught them the need for scissors: many a good Sunday dinner has been blown out to sea on a gusty day when a vain cockerel, fancying himself an eagle in flight, has soared too high. Tailless, this aviator is grounded.

LOVELADY, 6.4 m. (10 alt.), is chiefly a Coast Guard station. The name, a source of discomfort to the Coast Guardsmen, derives from the original owner, Thomas Lovelady, a well-to-do Englishman of the early 18th century.

BARNEGAT CITY, 8.5 m. (10 alt., 144 pop.), is a salty, individualistic Scandinavian fishing village adjoining a famous old lighthouse. Norse names and features, blond, blue-eyed children, and leather-skinned seafarers, give the impression of a transplanted bit of Viking land. With medieval simplicity the village manages to do without drug store, doctor, police station, court, and motion-picture houses, centering its life around a small church, a school, and a few taverns. Unruffled bartenders reassure visitors during the fiercest gale, calling it "yoost a little blow."

The painter, F. Hopkinson Smith, caught the charm and independence of these hardy people in his pictures and in his book, The Tides of Barnegat. Smith's father's firm built Barnegat Lighthouse (see below), and the painter himself helped construct it. Annually hundreds of amateur deep-sea fishermen come here for the game tuna that swim in schools far off-shore. Neither they nor casual visitors can disturb the mild Scandinavian tenor of life, which includes the substitution of spiritus frumenti for coffee before the early morning trip across the dangerous bar to bring in the fish. The ocean sometimes conspires with the natives to preserve the atmosphere of the town. When some Philadelphia businessmen sought to convert it into a resort, the waves destroyed the hotel and the railroad.

Barnegat shelters a race of tailless sea-going cats that eat the surplus catch of the fishermen. The cats are descended from some Manx bob-tails shipped as ratters on a bark that went ashore near the Coast Guard Station.

BARNEGAT LIGHTHOUSE (closed), 9.1 m. at the end of the road, was several hundred feet from the beach when built in 18 S5, but the inlet has cut a channel to its base. The 168-foot tower, painted red on the upper half and white below, marks the shoals where the lives of many Barnegat fishermen and of passengers on ocean vessels have been lost. Storms have so menaced the lighthouse's foundations that the Federal Government abandoned it in 1930, and replaced it with a lightship 8 miles off-shore. The State of New Jersey then took over the tower and has attempted to save it by a semi-circle of steel sheet piling. The townspeople have dumped old automobiles, brush, and other refuse into the channel, to check erosion of the sandy bank.

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