Transportation Helps Make New Jersey Resorts

TRANSPORTATION HELPS CREATE NEW JERSEY RESORTS

The railroads gave birth to Atlantic City in 1854.

Dominic Mazzagetti, author of The Jersey Shore: The Past, Present & Future of a National Treasure, opens the chapter entitled “1850-1900: Railroads, Atlantic City, and Long Branch” with these words. Railroads brought Philadelphians across the State of New Jersey to mob a place that shortly before had been a nearly unpopulated island of dunes and sea grass.¹

Railroads—and other means of transportation—were crucial not only to the development of Atlantic City, but to the rise and development of resorts all across New Jersey. A look at transportation and its impacts on resorts is essential to understanding the factors that allowed and promoted the growth of resorts such as Glenside Park (the name Feltville took as a resort). The development of railroads, in particular, and the increased ease of access to new places for leisure which was created, go hand in hand with changing views on the acceptability of leisure, which allowed people to visit resorts without guilt. Indeed, with the advent of better transportation, people were more eager to travel to resorts, and thus, social acceptance—more specifically, the stamp of approval by ministers and doctors and the press—was almost obliged to follow.

This post was originally meant to simply cover some of the transportation used to get to, promote, or spur development of resorts. Along the way, as is often the case with historic research, I ran across nuggets about transportation in general, and the role of New Jersey in transportation innovation, in particular. It was all too good not to share.

HISTORIC SNAPSHOTS FROM THE DESERTED VILLAGE AREA

We will start at the village and its local area, where history has afforded us some interesting snapshots on developing transportation. Sometime in the first few years of the twentieth century, D. W. Bogert, Proprietor of the small resort, Glenside Park, published a promotional brochure for the resort. Entitled Cottage Life in the Hills of New Jersey,² it listed the following as one of the resort’s many advantages:

Among the many advantages of this resort are its easy accessibility to New York, 24 miles away, and good train service on the D., L. & W. R. R. to Murray Hill station. Guests, by communicating with the proprietor of “Glenside,” will be met by carriage on arrival of any train at Murray Hill and taken to “Glenside” for 50c. each. Weekly commutation rates to and from trains will be made reasonable.

In an era before the advent of the family car, convenient transportation was key to attracting guests to a resort. Glenside Park was not directly on a train line, like resorts such as Lake Hopatcong and Atlantic City. Nevertheless, it clearly relied on railroads for guest access.

Going back nearly a century before the advent of the little promotional pamphlet, Betsey Mulford Crane, who offers us snapshots into local religious practices in last month’s post, also offers us snapshots into transportation. In 1809, more than a decade before starting the journal cited in last month’s post, Betsey wrote a letter to her brother Daniel Mulford.³ Daniel had gone far away from his original New Jersey home, first to college at Yale, before settling in Savannah, Georgia, where he practiced law, until his early death from tuberculosis in 1811.

In the 1809 letter, which took Betsey several days to write, Betsey tells her brother all the local gossip–marriages and illnesses and the progress on a Methodist Meeting House being built. Then she announces:

Turkey is getting quite a grand place, we have two Stages a week run along this road, one a fore [sic] horse stage runs past here on Tuesday morning from Easton to New York, back on Wednesday evening; two horse stage, Long Hill to New York on Friday morning back on Saturday evening. There is hard talk of two turnpikes, one from Baskinridge to Springfield and the other from Morris Town to Scotch Plains to cross by Turkey meeting house. If the latter takes place we shal [sic] soon have a town of Turkey.⁴

Later, in her journal entry for November 4^th, 1825, Betsey records the beginning of another transportation milestone, the canal, not yet local to New Jersey:

Clear and pleasant. Huldah here, warped a piece of woolen. Aunt Nancy here. Mary and Ruth went to Westfield. A great time in New York because the first canal boat came in from Lake Erie.⁵

The railroad—referenced in Bogert’s pamphlet—makes an appearance in another local snapshot, this time from Feltville itself, which was then a successful mill village, owned by David Felt. In 1850, Austin Craig, pastor of Feltville’s church, urged his friend Robert Wright to come visit Feltville:

Do come, Bob, and spend a few days with me here. Come to Elizabeth town; thence by the Central Railroad to Scotch Plains; thence here.⁶

Of course, Feltville was still a working mill village, not a resort. The railroad line which Austin suggests as a means of getting to Feltville, i.e., the Central Railroad, is not the same one which guests of Glenside were later directed to use to reach the resort by proprietor D. W. Bogert. That railroad, under various names, including the one used by Bogert, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (D., L. &. W. R. R.) ran somewhat to the north of the village. The Central Railroad, which Austin Craig directed his friend to use, ran to the south, placing the village in between the two lines, accessible from both, at least with a connecting carriage or other local transportation.

BEFORE THE RAILROAD—EARLY ROADS AND CONVEYANCES

From stagecoach to canal boat to railroad, the history of Glenside Park and other resorts in New Jersey is inextricably bound to the history of transportation developments. But, at least in terms of the major growth of resorts in the nineteenth century, when Glenside Park was being developed and operated, it was the railroad that had the greatest impact, as I will discuss later in the post.

In his book A Geography of New Jersey: The City in the Garden, Charles Stansfield employs his unique perspective as a professionally trained geographer, with Master’s Degrees and a Doctorate in the field of geography, and more than 40 years of teaching and publications as a professor of geography at Rowan University. He discusses two different arenas in which geography influenced New Jersey’s transportation from its earliest days: both its location between the rising urban centers of Philadelphia and New York, and its large amount of coastline and navigable river segments.⁷ Perhaps this was one of the reasons that, as pointed out by Stansfield, New Jersey was the site of many “early, novel experiments in transportation” in America.

One of the earliest examples of New Jersey’s transportation innovation is not referenced in Stansfield’s book, but instead described in the work of a group of historians who are engaged in creating transportation chronologies for the state. Included are various chronologies by time period or local area or both, but also included is a general statewide chronology, found at the website for Liberty Historic Railroad at https://www.lhry.org/nj-transportation-chronology. Like Stansfield, the authors of the chronology believe that readers will be pleasantly surprised at how many “firsts” and “bests” and “greatests” one can find for New Jersey among the transportation milestones. In the area of road building, for example, the transportation chronology indicates that the first wagon/wheeled-vehicle road in America was built in the 1650s by Dutch miners and settlers was built to connect what is present-day northwest New Jersey to a tidewater location in Kingston, New York; tradition says that the road was built to transport copper ore, but apparently this is somewhat disputed, due to the low quality of the ore and difficulty of transport along the rough road.

This, and other early roads generally followed Indian trails, which in the case of some towns, like Newark, determined the way later streets and roads were laid out⁸. Presaging the not quite hands-on approach government would take with later transportation developments, the Lords Proprietors of New Jersey, who controlled land in the colonies of East and West New Jersey made provisions in their “Concession and Agreement” which they hoped would spur road building, but Lane’s book suggests that local towns were mainly on their own to actually create systems of roads.⁹

Early roads were not known for their quality but were crucial to New Jersey’s economic development. Roads had to accommodate a variety of wheeled vehicles, including Conestoga wagons, used to transport trade goods, and stagecoaches such as those mentioned by Betsey in her letter to her brother, which ran along roads connecting her tiny town to New York City. Of course, roads were also meant for horseback travel or foot travel.

As I was completing my research for this post, I found an account from 1764 which made it seem that in one area of the state, roads were not quite so bad—at least for someone riding horseback, who was not dragging a wheeled conveyance. Reverand Carl Magnus Wrangel, dean of the Swedish Lutheran congregation in America, set out on horseback in October 1764 with Gloucester County Sheriff Robert Price on a ten-day cross state trip to visit Swedish Lutherans living at the Jersey shore (and those along the way), leaving us a charming journal report. He seems pleasantly surprised by the road, at least in one area, and has some other interesting observations:

After dinner we continued our journey and traveled ten miles over a barren land, which is uninhabited since the soil is very poor. The road is completely level without even the smallest hills. Nor are there any rocks or other stoneds, except small pebbles which lie among the sands. These are white and very fine. It seems very probable that all this land was once part of the sea; this is supported by the fact that when they dig wells here they often find oyster shells deep in the ground. In this land there are found more conclusive proofs of the theory that the water is still receding than anywhere in the world.¹⁰

Mazzagetti credits Pastor Wrangel with prescience as to the charms of the shore, which would later be discovered by hordes of resort goers:

The pastor enjoyed strolling the beach for several hours and eating wild grapes that grew in the sand. He extolled the virtues of saltwater bathing—and drinking: “it is considered healthful and therefore a great many people with illnesses come here in the spring and summer for two or three weeks to bathe in the water and drink it.” He considered the locals blessed.¹¹

Roads and various wheeled conveyances were an early way for Philadelphians to reach shore resorts.

TRAVEL BY WATER

From the beginning of colonization, water travel was one of the primary forms of transportation in New Jersey. The state’s long shoreline, with many navigable rivers flowing into the sea, allowed early settlements such as Elizabethtown, Newark, and New Brunswick to send and receive both goods and people both across the sea and inland, as far as boats could go. Where rivers separated the state from markets or destinations across a river or bay, ferries or other water conveyances were quickly developed, particularly where the width of the water body to be crossed exceeded the length the engineering knowledge of the day allowed for construction of a bridge.

For resorts, the availability of water passage naturally helped spur growth. New Jersey’s eastern shore had some of the earliest popular resorts of the nineteenth century, which particularly drew guests from New York and Philadelphia. Early resorts such as Long Branch, Tuckers Island, and Cape May could be accessed first by various sailing vessels, and later by steamboats, from these two large cities. Indeed, early transportation to the resorts seems to have focused more on out of state visitors, rather than in state ones.

Revisiting again Stansfield’s notion of transportation innovations which occurred in New Jersey, New Jersey was in the forefront in steamboat development, as it had been in vehicle roads. Inventor John Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey, started his career as a lawyer and then a captain in Washington’s army during the Revolutionary War, but turned his attention to invention. He successfully petitioned Congress for a bill to protect American inventors, which led to development of the patent law protections for inventors.¹²

Stevens was not the first person to develop a steamboat in America; John Fitch had already built one that was traveling from Philadelphia down the Delaware River to Burlington, New Jersey by 1788, capable of carrying 20 passengers. Undaunted by any earlier efforts, Stevens received various patents for his own designs starting in 1791. When he was stalled in his attempts to establish a ferry from Hoboken to New York City by Robert Fulton, who had already secured a monopoly on Hudson River crossings, Stevens took his best steamboat on an ocean ride from Hoboken down to Philadelphia, making his steamboat the first one anywhere to navigate on the open ocean.¹³

In 1811, one of Stevens steamboats was able to begin ferry service between New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey. Soon the resorts developing along the Jersey shore began to offer steamboat service to take guests at least part of the way to various resorts, perhaps with a land based final lap.

An anonymous New York Herald reporter, who apparently had to travel by stage to Long Branch in 1809 had the following recommendation for transportation improvements:

I could not then help thinking it a pity that this inviting place was not more well known and resorted to by the New Yorkers, being a little more than fifty miles from our city, whilst the Philadelphians have to travel nearly eighty miles to it. . . .

I also suggest a steamboat be started from this city to Long branch, or one or two packets built for this purpose, furnished with sweeps to row if becalmed in the creek. The price of passage in the present homely packets is three shillings. They stop at Red Bank, six miles from Long Branch, but might easily get within a mile of it, where there is a good landing.¹⁴

Given the date of this entry, the packet boats referred to here must still have been sailing ships of some sort. Steamboat service between Manhattan and Long Branch actually started in 1825.¹⁵

In 1850, Frederika Bremer experiences a delightful steamer trip from Philadelphia to Cape May:

August 1, 1850. I went from Philadelphia with Professor Hart and his wife, on a beautiful July day, to Cap May and beautiful was our journey upon the mirror-like Delaware, with its green, idyllian, beautiful shores. During the day I read Mr. Clay’s “Annals” of the Swedish Colony upon these shores, and experienced heartfelt delight in glancing from the historical idyll to those scenes, where it had existed in peace and piety.¹⁶

Another of the country’s developments in water travel, canals were a cause for wonder and celebration, as seen in Betsey’s journal post, above. New Jersey did not have the first canals in the nation, but definitely wanted to share in the transportation advantages that they offered. New Jersey’s two canals were the Delaware and Raritan Canal, and the Morris Canal. I will focus on the Morris Canal, partly because it is the one linked to an area which became a resort area, and thus, most likely a means of transporting guests, and partly because it was such an interesting engineering feat.

“Canal fever” partly grew out of the desire of prominent persons such as President George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to expand the country’s navigable waters beyond the rivers, lake and the ocean. This led to canals such as the very successful Erie Canal and Potomac Canal, the latter of which Stansfield describes as having been “judged the engineering masterpiece of the late eighteenth century.”¹⁷ Many of the canals developed in New York or in states south of New Jersey were meant to help open trade to the west as it developed, i.e. for taking goods being produced in the west to the Eastern cities where they were most marketable. Stansfield indicates that both the Morris Canal and the Delaware and Raritan Canal had a more narrow purpose—being primarily built to transport coal from Pennsylvania to New Jersey’s developing cities.

Stansfield, the geographer, has a particularly keen sense of the geographical hurdles the builders of the Morris Canal faced, and summarizes this along with his conclusions regarding the canal’s purpose as follows:

The 106-mile (170-kilometer) canal crossed some of the most difficult terrain available in New Jersey, cutting across the topographic “grain” to link the upper Delaware with the growing industrial cities of the piedmont, in particular Paterson and Newark, and ultimately with the Hudson.

Unlike other famous contemporary canals, the Morris Canal was not intended to open the west and channel its trade through a specific East Coast port. The canal was motivated by energy: it was the early nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s oil and gas pipelines from the Gulf Coast to the northeastern seaboard. Pennsylvania anthracite, or hard coal (nearly smokeless and with a high energy content), was the obvious replacement, or supplement, for waterpower for the industrial centers of northern New Jersey. As lunatic as it may seem now, the Morris Canal was an essential route, even though it had to overcome enormous vertical differences: from sea level at Newark to 914 feet at Lake Hopatcong, then back to 155 feet (47 meters) above sea level at Phillipsburg on the Delaware. The twenty-three locks and twenty three inclined planes proved too slow and expensive, but a later railroad (via a somewhat different route) proved the necessity of liking the anthracite fields with the burgeoning cities and the route was vindicated. The Morris Canal never generated big dividends owing to its cost of construction and operation, but it did generate regional economic growth for New Jersey. By 1832, between ninety and one hundred barges were going through Newark every week, and the city was entering a century-long industrial boom.¹⁸

Although canals, most notably the Morris Canal, reached areas which became resort areas, it is unlikely that they were a major force in the development of resorts. Canal history in New Jersey is inextricably tied up with railroads, because railroad companies purchased both of New Jersey’s canals, primarily to avoid the competition canals posed and to allow a single company to direct usage of the two to separate commercial purposes. As will be discussed below, Lake Hopatcong, one of the primary sources of water for the Morris Canal, and thus, clearly, directly on the canal, did not achieve its true prominence as a resort until railroads reached it. 

Even the canal’s role in transporting anthracite seems to have been supplanted by the railroad as shown here.

RAILROADS

Charles Stansfield goes on to describe New Jersey’s railroad innovations:

New Jersey has long capitalized on its position astride the transport backbone of the evolving megalopolis. The state’s corridor function between two great cities presented economic opportunities that New Jerseyans were quick to understand. It was here that the true potential for railroads as through connectors first was realized. Early railroads were seen as short links from specific points to the nearest navigable waterway, as links between navigable waterways, or as short routes from hinterland locations to a specific city. In New Jersey, the concept of rails as connecting two (or more) cities as part of a larger system evolved in the New York-Philadelphia corridor.

In 1812, New Jersey’s own invention enthusiast John Stevens, of Hoboken, who had already done so much pioneering in the area of steamboats, published a pamphlet entitled Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railway and Steam Carriages over Canal Navigation. At a time when the United States was about to enter the War of 1812 with England, and at a time when not one locomotive actually existed in the world, Stevens predicted that railroads would displace canal transportation, and would ultimately be able to reach speeds of 100 miles per hour (predicting that fifty miles per hour would be their regular speed). He hoped that the United States Congress would take heed of his opinions and that the federal government would enter the arena of railroad building for the nation. Congress took no action on his recommendations.¹⁹ In New Jersey, any proposed canals and railroads had to have the government imprimatur of a state charter but were largely required to raise all their own funding and acquire the land necessary for the route.

Stevens himself worked on developing a railroad in New Jersey, and in 1815 he and others received the first railroad charter from the New Jersey legislature. Stevens and his co-investors were unable to immediately raise funding for a working railroad, because no one in America really had a sense that a railroad using steam power would be successful.²⁰ Undaunted, in 1825, Stevens built a circular track on his estate in Hoboken, and used it to run the locomotive he constructed, the first one built in America.²¹ On May 12, the New York Evening Post reported on Stevens’ feat:

Mr. Stevens has at length put his steam carriage in motion. It travelled around the circle at the Hoboken Hotel yesterday, at the rate of about six miles an hour. . . .His engine and carriage weigh less than a ton, whereas those now in use in England weigh from eight to ten tons. His original intention was to five the carriage a motion of sixteen or twenty miles an hour: but he has deemed it more prudent to move, in the first instance, with a moder velocity, and has accordingly altered the gearing which renders it impracticable to move fast. It will be in motion again tomorrow from 3 o’clock till sundown.²²

RAILROADS AND NEW JERSEY RESORTS

With these efforts, the railroad was launched in New Jersey and charters and routes begin to multiply. And thus, we come back to the opening line of this post, to the railroad’s role in the creation of Atlantic City, and its role in the expansion of many other resorts, especially shore resorts.

Those of us who live in New Jersey accept the success and popularity of the resorts at the Jersey shore as a given, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century the shore was a sparsely populated region, known mostly for flies and mosquitos.

The last years of the eighteenth century marked the conversion of several beaches on the New Jersey shore into watering places. Two of the earliest were Tucker’s Beach, opposite Tuckerton, and Long Branch. . . . Philadelphians and others went to the coast in “shore wagons” used in hauling fish and oysters inland. Soon, however, the number of pleasure seekers was large enough to warrant a more regular and comfortable means of transportation. In 1800 semi-weekly stages ran from Trenton to Long Branch and Black Point by way of Allentown and Freehold; these set out at sunrise and made the trip in one day, charging six cents a mile.²³

As the century progressed, Long Branch and Cape May became two of the nation’s most popular resorts, a feat not possible without ever better means of transportation. One of the most popular of these was the steamboat, already discussed above. Early Long Branch visitors, whether arriving by steamship or sailboat, had to make “a difficult overland trip” from the docks at Red Bank or Sandy Hook, but direct steamship service from New York to Long Branch was soon established.²⁴ At about the same time, Cape May tourists were steaming or sailing from Philadelphia or perhaps taking a stagecoach from the ferry landing on the New Jersey side, across from Philadelphia. By sailing ship, the trip from Philadelphia was two days, and the ships would stop at Newcastle to pick up additional passengers, including many who had traveled there from Maryland and Virginia.²⁵

Other locations along the shore also welcomed visitors by sea or stagecoach. But, as Tatyana Resseter asserts, “there can be little protest that the railroad began to transform leisure.”²⁶

Dr. Jonathan Pitney is credited with being the visionary behind creation of a new rail line to connect Philadelphia to Absecon Island. He dreamed of transforming the island into a destination for both recreation and health purposes—renamed Atlantic City.²⁷ He was able to mobilize a group of investors to form the Camden and Atlantic Railroad Company. These investors were able to capitalize on their railroad investment quickly, since they also formed the Camden and Atlantic Land Company, which bought up the land reached by the new railroad for a pittance, allowing them to sell it at much higher prices once the railroad made Atlantic City a success. The United States Hotel was still only half-finished when 600 passengers descended on the newly created Atlantic City after the first train ride on July 1, 1854. Mazzagetti describes them as “still covered in soot after the harrowing four-hour train ride from Camden. Even so they were thrilled.”²⁸ By 1870, Atlantic City was a phenomenon, and soon additional train lines were built, competing with each other, and driving the cost of a train ride down, sometimes as low as 50 cents for a round trip.²⁹

A nineteenth century account by Olive Logan for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine suggests a similar trajectory for Long Branch, which had been a resort some years before the advent of Atlantic City:

Along the road from Sandy Hook to Long Branch lie beautiful little villages which have their yearly throng of summer patrons, but they are not “the Branch.” And their strongest recommendation as watering-places is that they are within easy driving distance of the summer capital. The glory and gain of transforming Long Branch from a deserted stretch of New Jersey coast into the sea-side city of to-day, and of familiarizing its name to the popular ear to such an extent that Chicago itself is not more celebrated, undoubtedly rest with a few capitalists who bought farms in Monmouth County for thirty or forty dollars an acre, and set about turning their corn fields into villa plots.

By one device and another, legitimate and illegitimate, buy building a new railroad, by improvements of various sorts, and divers plans for attracting public attention to their pet and pride, the capitalists forced the growth of the place in public appreciation, and achieved a veritable coup d’état when they induced President Grant to go and live there in the summer.³⁰

Long Branch was already on its way to being one of America’s popular resorts, but its popularity did indeed surge immensely after President Ulysses S. Grant adopted a home there as his “summer White House.” As reported in the National Republican, at least his first visit there took advantage of a rather quirky means of transportation:

DEMOCRATIC JOURNALS [Grant was a Republican] have had much to say about President Grant making use of the United States steamer Tallapoosa for his trip to Long Branch, and it has been stated that the vessel was ordered north [to Washington, DC] for this special purpose. This is like a good many other Democratic out-givings. The facts are, that the vessel was ordered here [Washington, DC] to take naval stores, &c., from the Washington navy yard to New York, and the President simply availed himself of the opportunity to go to Long Branch. But suppose it had been otherwise? Is there any reason for a howl? We are of those who believe that Ulysses S. Grant has fairly earned the right to use a Government vessel occasionally, whether for pleasure or business.³¹

A post at This Day in Monmouth County, a subpart of Monmouth Timeline, describes the Tallapoosa, as “a storied navy ship that was used occasionally by the president for recreational travel,”³² so it is possible that the National Republican may have had to fend off similarly Democratic criticism on other occasions.

But it was not just the shore resorts that enjoyed the push that railroads gave. Lake Hopatcong, was linked to Newark (and points along the way) early through the Morris Canal. One can imagine would-be tourists having to endure its twenty plus locks and inclined planes on their way to the four small hotels at the lake. It was only after two railroads built lines to the lake, one at the northeast, and one at the southern end that the tourist trade began to bloom. By 1900, over forty hotels and boarding houses served tourists at the lake, with the largest being the Hotel Breslin, built only after the railroad reached the lake.

WHAT COMES NEXT AND AN INVITATION TO JOIN ME AT THE VILLAGE

The transformation of Feltville, a “deserted” village, into Glenside Park, could not have happened had not the village been able to rely on railroads to get its patrons near enough for a short carriage ride. I will take a break from my current sequence, exploring the resort story next month to bring you pictures and descriptions of Four Centuries in a Weekend, an event I participate in every year at the present-day Deserted Village of Feltville.

Please come join me and many others there on either Saturday, October 21, or Sunday, October 22. The event runs from 12 noon to 5 p.m. each day. I will be speaking both days, introducing you to some of the many fascinating people involved in the Glenside Park resort days. Come hear about Warren Ackerman, who made his fortune selling lifesaving rubber blankets to the Union Army, and Ella King Adams, who dreamed a resort colony for herself and her friends—and for her children, including her eldest child, Constance, who would grow up to marry Cecil B. DeMille. Irish immigrants Annie and Thomas Molloy accepted a job offer from Warren Ackerman and brought their daughter Anna to the Village, so that she could recover from malaria and live to grow up. And there are more fascinating people to learn about. See you at the Village!