The History of Harvey Cedars
by
Margaret Thomas Buchholz
For questions, comments or stories
about the history of Harvey Cedars
write lbipooch@aol.com
Over the years the original Harvey who gave
Harvey Cedars its name has lived in either a cave burrowed into a
hummock or in a shack under a grove of cedar trees near what is
now the Harvey Cedars Bible Conference. But from a 1751 deed we
now know that our Harvey is as ephemeral as Harvey the Rabbit. In
the deed, the locality was designated as "a hammock and
clump of cedars called Harvest Quarters." And if you say
"harvest cedars" often and fast enough, harvest will be
clipped to harves -- and it's only a brief skip of the mouth to
Harvey.
These men who crossed the bay from bustling
Colonial communities to pasture their cattle and harvest the salt
hay used for cattle feed and mulch were some of the first white
visitors to what is now the south end of Harvey Cedars. Whalers
were the other group who used the outer beach here. As early as
the mid-1600s men came north from Cape May and south from New
England to pursue the abundant North Atlantic Greenland whale.
They set up a lookout on the northern edge of Great Swamp, which
extended from Surf City to the southern boundary of present-day
Harvey Cedars. A 30-foot tower, nicknamed an "owl's
tree," projected above the highest dune, giving the whaler a
good vantage to spot the "right" whale, which migrated
in February and March. This industry died out in the 1830s when
the species had been so over-hunted a profit could no longer be
made.
Until the hurricane of 1821, which made a
direct hit on the New Jersey coast and destroyed the freshwater
swamp with sea water, a great forest covered the south end of
town on land that is now well out to sea. Stumps hacked by
hand-hewn axes were observed during a blowout tide about a
quarter mile offshore shortly after 1900 and again in the 1930s.
Reports of earliest travelers tell of rows of huge dunes on the
barrier beaches, and there is little doubt that Harvey Cedars had
the same topography. The earliest town photographs show high
dunes backed by a lush growth of bayberry, cedar, sumac, poison
ivy and holly, then wide salt marshes stretching to the bay.
(This type of dune formation still exists in a stretch of
beachfront in nearby Barnegat Light.)
In 1886 the Harvey Cedars Beach Co. purchased
and mapped the land from Sussex to Bergen avenues. That map shows
Harvest Point extending to include Wood's Island, but it's
probably not accurate, as a photograph taken just ten years later
shows a walking bridge from the island to the point across a
goodly expanse of water, although not as wide as today.
Most of the activity in the late 19th century centered
around the Lifesaving station, one of the first in the country,
and the Harvey Cedars Hotel, now the Bible Conference. First
opened about 1850, by 1870 the hotel was a sportsman's boarding
hotel known as "Kinsey's," run by Civil War veteran
John Warner Kinsey, whose family would figure in the town's
history until the present day.
William
Sayen, from Wayne, Pa, built an expansive summer home in 1892 on
the island off Harvest Point from the hotel, now called Wood's
Island. His granddaughter, Katharine Wood Leonard, later
remembered Harvey Cedars as a "thriving summer resort"
with the hotel (at that time still separated from town by a
stream), a boarding house containing the post office, Francis
Fenimore's oceanfront mansion, and a large, elaborate pavilion on
the ocean. (The Fenimore house was moved back from the sea twice,
but both it and the pavilion washed out in the 1944 hurricane.)
Vacationing children and adults alike swam, sailed, clammed and
crabbed, and in the evenings had marshmallow roasts on the beach
or played cards. They met the train to see who had come down or
waited for the fishing boats to land to buy the makings of an
inexpensive dinner.
The Borough of Harvey Cedars was formally
incorporated on December 11, 1894, when a group of men living
near the hotel seceded from Union Township (today's Barnegat
Township on the mainland). Capt. Isaac Jennings, owner of the
hotel, was named mayor. He died shortly thereafter. Jason
Fenimore, who lived on the bayfront at Burlington Avenue, soon
became borough clerk and his brother Francis became mayor in
1899.
Aggressive development with an eye to summer
visitors and profits started in 1884, when Josiah Busby Kinsey
(son of John Warner) and Isaac Lee each bought tracts in what was
called High Point (87th Street to Sussex Avenue). Kinsey owned
the land to about 78th Street and centered his development around
his general store on the northeast corner of 78th and the
Boulevard, and a yacht club on the bayfront at 78th -- both still
standing. He used his large expanse of bayfront property along
Bay Terrace as a field for drying eelgrass. This seaweed was used
for insulation, packing and mattresses, and was a well-developed
industry in many coastal areas during the early part of the
century. Kinsey's name remains in Kinsey Cove.
Lee operated another booming business at his
end of town: pound fishing. Lee had operated a fish restaurant
near New York's Fulton Fish Market, then became a wholesaler in
Philadelphia. By 1900 he had two fish pounds in operation off
High Point, two and four miles offshore. He employed 32 husky,
strong men and housed them on a seasonal basis in a row of tiny
cottages on 76th Street. The men topped 6 feet, 200 pounds,
necessary to power the boats through the surf and haul the heavy
nets, but the cottages were so small they got the nickname
"petrel's nests". The two remaining "petrel's
nests" were joined into one, which hugs the Boulevard just
across from the Borough Hall. Lee paid $25,000 for the land and
in 1887 built his home, still standing on the north side of what
is now Lee Avenue. Two of the cottages he built to rent for $50 a
season also survive on Lee Avenue.
The train was the key to this development:
Kinsey shipped tightly-packed bales of eelgrass and Lee barrels
of weakfish, croakers, butterfish, flounder and bass to
metropolitan markets. And the train brought the first tourists.
Ed Merchant, still living in town, remembers, "We quivered
in anticipation of that magic aroma that meant seashore: salt
breeze, new-cut marsh hay, sun-dried eelgrass and overripe clam
shells left too long in the sun. Not to everybody's taste, but
for us it was the perfume of summer." In 1886, the first
train into town was a one-car combination engine, passenger and
freight owned by the Lee and Fenimore Train Co., painted various
shades of yellow and dubbed the Yellow Jacket. By 1906 a longer
summer passenger train was brought in but the schedule was
erratic at best, and not a very rapid transit. Carlyle Stevens
told the story, "We were coming along between Surf City and
Harvey Cedars and there were no stops. My buddy and I were
playing football in the empty baggage car and the ball got tossed
off the train so he jumped off, picked up the ball and hopped
back in. He could run faster than the train". The small,
cedar shake-covered High Point station was located about where
the borough hall is today. It was moved and is now the second
floor of a house on Mallard Lane. The Harvey Cedars station,
little more than a covered platform, was near Atlantic Avenue.
As Lee and Kinsey sold off lots, and houses
were built, both men dedicated several streets to the borough and
in 1916, with 20 men registered to vote, Kinsey was elected
mayor. Meetings were moved from the hotel to his general store.
The center of activity shifted from Harvey Cedars to High Point.
The separate names were commonly used well beyond when the U.S.
Post Office requested the town drop "High Point" in the
early 1930s, and remains in the name of the fire company.
About three dozen cottages had been built from
Kinsey Cove to Lee Avenue and the town was a small, friendly
place where everyone knew everyone else.
Construction on the Boulevard started in 1914,
the year the automobile causeway was built parallel to the train
trestle, and High Point grew steadily in the 1920’s. Lumber
for cottages was trucked over from the mainland on the new
causeway, and with a few friends, or one of Kinsey's carpenters,
you could build a cottage for well under $1,000. Each house had
its own well and outhouse. Electricity replaced gaslight in 1927
and in 1929 a new yacht club was built on the bay at 76th Street.
Kinsey had sold the original yacht club to Dr. E. H. Smith for
$850 and he converted it into a summer home for his family. This
building, one of the town's first, has been restored and is in
its original location next to the public dock.
Eleanor Smith (no relation), a 1920’s
settler on Maiden Lane, recalled, "A huckster and butcher
came from Barnegat, we'd order one week and get it the next. And
we ate a lot of fish, usually we caught them ourselves. We could
get all we wanted from the bay." The bay was crawling with
crabs, and it was almost impossible to dig your toes into the
soft sand and not hit a clam. One year a brother and sister
caught so many crabs that they filled up the boat and had to swim
back pulling it.
By the mid-1930s, Harvey Cedars had a hotel, a
real estate office, a gas station, a general store, a tearoom
(formerly Kinsey's barn), a rowboat rental place, paved roads,
and a year-round population large enough to send about a dozen
children off to the one-room school in Barnegat Light and to the
high school in Barnegat on the mainland. In addition to the
cottages in town, Frederick Small had completed his multi-home
estate from ocean to bay (now Maris Stella) and
wealthy Philadelphians had bought boulevard to bay tracts. Six or
seven large, modern homes fronted the ocean between Sussex Avenue
and the Coast Guard station on Gloucester, and driveways wound
through the original vegetation to the homes built in the lee of
the dunes.
The town gained a reputation as a summer art
colony. Clinton and Hallie Beagary gave lessons in their bayfront
home; sculptor Alexander Portnoff worked in his oceanfront home;
Salvatore and Angelo Pinto, Gladys and Floyd Davis, Frederic and
Sue May Gill, Helen and Earl Horter, Boris Blai and Leon Kelly
all took inspiration from the sea, the light, and the solitude.
Architect George Daub built half a dozen "moderne"
homes before the Second World War put a halt to building.>
Harvey Cedars experienced the war as did all
coastal towns. By June 1942 the Battle of the Atlantic was being
fought just offshore. German submarines prowled the Eastern
Seaboard, attacking shipping, and the white, sandy beach was
frosted with a thick coat of black, gummy oil from torpedoed
tankers. Coast Guardsmen on horseback patrolled the beach with
Doberman pinschers and German shepherds, which wore booties to
protect their feet from the tar. All windows on the east side of
homes were covered with black oilcloth blinds, and car headlights
were painted with black eyelids for those times when the gas
ration was sufficient for a nighttime drive. Blimps patrolled
overhead, going back and forth to Lakehurst Naval Air Station
(one crashed a few miles north of Barnegat Inlet). Navy planes
flew just offshore, and once a training plane ran out of gas and
landed on the beach.
By the summer of 1944 the Allies had regained
control of the ocean and the beaches were again unrestricted.
Beachcombing yielded an abundance of artifacts: a deflated rubber
raft, life jackets stamped "USN," tins of pure water,
C-rations (biscuits), K-rations (biscuits and pithy, tasteless
chocolate), and "yellow-bombs," the name the local kids
gave to the three-inch, tubular sealed-glass vials containing a
yellow powder that purified water. The vials made a small but
satisfying explosion when thrown vigorously onto the street,
leaving a white smear on the black macadam. There were larger
finds as well. When the newly-installed radar on a blimp misread
a whale for a submarine, depth charges were dropped and huge
chunks of blubber washed onto the beach. Children used the
gelatinous chunks as trampolines; a lightweight child could
bounce up and down without breaking into the flesh.
Harvey Cedars was knocked off its foundations
in September 1944. A major hurricane struck with little advance
warning. Severe storms had done major damage in 1929, 1933 and
1938, causing serious beach erosion, leveling dunes between 73rd
and 81st streets and convincing several homeowners, including
Mayor Joseph Yearly, to buy bayfront lots and move their homes
away from the ocean. On September 14, 1944 they were
the lucky ones. Commissioner Reynold Thomas, the nephew of J.B.
Kinsey and the only town official living here year round,
evacuated his wife and two children and then returned to secure
his dredge, which had been towed to Harvest Cove to ride out the
storm. He watched the storm surge strike: "It lifted itself
25 feet above the dunes and advanced toward the boulevard in a
solid wall of water, no foam. Lloyd Good's huge, oceanfront home
broke in two, and the north and south wings rose up in the air
like a vee".
Twenty percent of the houses were destroyed and
many more damaged. Landmarks were destroyed, streets obliterated,
and debris from oceanfront homes piled up along the bayfront.
Mayor Yearly directed a total resurvey of the town north of the
Small estate and traveled to Washington to appeal for funds to
rebuild. Development quickened in the postwar boom years. Men who
had spent their childhood summers here before going off to war
returned to Harvey Cedars as permanent residents. Summer
residents and renters, no longer kept away by gas rationing,
returned. Families made rich by the war bought land for a second
home.
The Garden State Parkway was completed in 1955,
opening up the town to visitors from North Jersey. Empty lots
were being filled and graded and every summer when the
"old-timers" returned, they'd find a new Cape Cod or
raised rancher in their neighborhood. A double row of worn,
sculpturesque pilings projected from the sand parallel to the
beach, remnants of jetties built in the 1920s and '30s. For
bathers, a half-dozen young men guarded the beach at three locations.
The 80th Street beach might be crowded
with a hundred people on a big weekend. Teenagers gathered
driftwood and had beach parties with blazing fires at night. All
that was required was a permit from the police, issued if the
wind was blowing in any direction except east.
The Barnegat Light Yacht Club, named for the
lighthouse, organized an all-class handicapped sailboat race on
Saturday afternoons and a Saturday evening party for families. At
the south end of town, a row of small homes and some houseboats
perched on the meadow along Harvest Avenue. The Coast Guard
station had been decommissioned and the building was bought by
the Long Beach Island Fishing Club. The old Harvey Cedars Hotel,
which had stood empty for so long, became the active Bible
Conference under the guidance of Rev. Al Oldham, who had come
there summers when a student. Jason Fenimore's
bayfront home, with Harvey Cedars' original one-room schoolhouse
next to it, was still in the Fenimore family. Paul Troast, a
politician and contractor from North Jersey, bought an
ocean-to-bay tract near Bergen Avenue and built two large homes
for members of his family. The land surrounding Holly Avenue had
been filled in by Reynold Thomas' dredging company and the street
graded. Although several families whose oceanfront homes had been
destroyed or damaged during the 1944 hurricane had resettled
there, lots in what was then considered the "less
desirable" end of town were selling less slowly than hoped.
The Sayen home on Wood's Island had burned down in 1930 and the
foundation, overgrown with poison ivy and bayberry, provided a
picturesque view for residents and a destination point for
adventuring children and teenagers. Most of the bayfront between
Salem and Camden avenues remained marshland, with the exception
of George Otto's small bait, tackle and boatslip rental place.
Oceanside land south of the fishing club to Troast's oceanfront
home was also mostly undeveloped. A few small cottages nestled
irregularly between the dunes had been destroyed in 1944.
In 1962 Reynold Thomas had been mayor for seven
years. He had first come to High Point as a boy in 1906, and
settled here in 1934. Thomas had a vision of the town that did
not include extensive development. He wanted a town with a small
commercial center, single family homes and no hotels or motels.
(Two hotels had been built and burned down between 1900 and
1936.)
Thomas also wanted better beach protection.
Three hurricanes in the 1950s had further eroded Harvey Cedars'
beach, undermining several oceanfront homes. Thomas lobbied hard
for state and federal beach protection. In 1961 macadam groins
were constructed at intervals south of Maris Stella. Dredging
sand from the bay to the ocean replenished the beach. Oceanfront
homeowners guarded their fledgling dunes vigilantly, nurturing
them with beach grass. It looked as though the
beach, which never fully recovered from the 1944 hit, would
recover. And then came the March 1962 northeaster, a powerful
system of two storms which stalled over the Atlantic Ocean, which
would gain the reputation as "The Storm of the
Century".
Over a stretch of about 600 miles, the wind
pushed the water ahead of it in long swells that rose 30 feet
high in the open ocean. By the time these reached the shore they
were traveling at freight train speed. As the waves reached the
beaches, they mounted to the height of a three- or four-story
building. (Records are incomplete because the storm destroyed the
recording devices on Atlantic City's Steel Pier.) This
unfortunate conjunction happened close to the spring equinox and
coincided with a new moon. The Jersey Shore had never seen
anything like it and Harvey Cedars didn't stand a chance.
Mayor Thomas kept waiting for the wind to
shift. "It always does," he said. "As soon as it
backs around to the northwest, everyone starts to breath
easier." Nobody in Harvey Cedars breathed easily for three
days and six high tides. The high tide early Tuesday morning took
out the dunes and undercut bulkheads. The high tide that night
wiped out the beach. The high tide Wednesday morning floated
houses off their foundations, broke roads and dug new inlets
across town. The high tide Wednesday night pushed the debris into
whatever structures were still standing. The high tide Thursday
morning was remarked on because it wasn't quite as high as the
high tide the night before. By Thursday night the storm had begun
moving out, but the last high tide laid in yet more water which
washed through the new inlets, one at 79th Street and the other
at Bergen Avenue.
Friday morning was clear and sunny. Everything
was calm and sunny. Except there were no dunes, little beach and
few houses. Near Atlantic Avenue, a wave that broke gently on the
strand washed westward over the level, destroyed roadbed, to the
bay, with nothing to block its progress. When it was over what
was left of Harvey Cedars looked like a war zone.
Utility poles teetered at all angles; several
remaining oceanfront homes swayed precariously, spider-like, on
tall piling; ripped-open houses were scattered randomly, the bay
was filled with their debris.
All the large oceanfront homes that had
survived 1944 were gone. Small's oceanfront bulkhead, considered
indestructible, and two oceanfront homes were shredded.
Masonry chimneys poked from the sand like
ancient monoliths. At 79th Street a 40-foot wide, 20-foot deep
inlet divided the town. From the air the town looked like a
child's Lego setup knocked askew.
The 50-some people who had taken shelter at the
Bible Conference, built on higher ground, picked their way home;
some would find nothing but sand. Residents who had been
evacuated by helicopter slowly returned and summer homeowners
came down, all wondering if they still had a home. Harvey Cedars
lost some 350 homes, 50 percent of its ratables, and won the
unenviable distinction of being the most heavily-damaged town on
the New Jersey coast. Many homeowners had mortgages to pay but no
homes -- most insurance coverage did not include destruction by
water -- and to recoup their losses residents built boxy duplexes
where their homes had been. Owners of large tracts subdivided and
sold off lots. Bayside meadows were filled and developed;
Buckingham Avenue led to a new High Point. In the 1970s sewers
were installed and the Boulevard widened. Property values through
the 1980s escalated beyond the wildest imagination of longtime
residents. Harvey Cedars moved into the fast lane, no longer a
one-track town.
Margaret Thomas Buchholz
