4/22/2024 0 Comments War house long beach![]() ![]() The federal government had set up these houses of refuge all along the Atlantic coast sometime in the 1850s, at least twenty years before there was an official lifesaving service. In keeping with his interest in lifesaving, Bond had, from his very first days as proprietor, a Government House near his property to aid shipwreck survivors. In time, these old packet boats were replaced by steamers, including the paddle wheeler Mary, which also went to Sea Haven on Tuckers Island. ![]() The length of the journey depended on wind direction and tide, but Bond supplied the whiskey to ward off any possible chill. Many a lasting friendship began on those two- to six-hour trips aboard Captain Billy Gaskills Eliza and Captain Morford Horners Mary Jane. Since the early 1820s, when the Philadelphia Company House began, this area of Long Beach had had a good reputation and it was now up to Bond, using the strength of his personality and generous spirit, to build it up, and at this he succeeded.įor the next twenty years, until the coming of the railroad to Tuckerton, the only way to get to this remote area other than by a two-day stagecoach trip across the state was to take the Camden and Atlantic Railroad to Absecon and sail up from there by one of the Long Beach packets, thirty-one-foot cat yachts. Included in his purchase was a very valuable ice pond which for many years supplied not only his own place but also the big hotels in Beach Haven. At the end of the season he purchased more land, one thousand acres south to the edge of the Old Inlet where Tuckers Beach began. He applied for a hotel service license, sold his business in New York and moved to Long Beach Island, where he would spend the next forty years.īond renamed the place Long Beach House when he opened as innkeeper on July 4, 1852. He simply wanted to have the place properly managed and make the main building a private hunting lodge for himself and his friends but, unable to find a competent manager for it, he decided to retire and take it over himself. It was never really Bonds intention to be an innkeeper. By 1851, Bond had purchased for three thousand dollars several buildings and one hundred acres of dune and marshland from Jones, who had been improving the property for the previous five years. He became a regular guest of Lloyd Jones, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Company House, as it was then still called. The next day he shot fifty ducks and twelve geese and decided that he liked this island called Long Beach. He recorded in his diary that on his first outing he killed twenty-one ducks, but that had been a bad day, one without wind. He started sailing down to Squan and Toms River, and on a trip aboard the schooner Wissahickon in February 1846, Bond saw his future Long Beach House for the first time. He hunted in the marshes east of Brooklyn and Flushing, and in New Jersey around Paterson and Jersey City, but he was always in search of better and more remote areas. In the years Bond had his business in New York, his avocation was gunning. Bond was a close personal friend of the life cars inventor, fellow Bostonian Joseph Francis, born in 1801, and the two corresponded all their long lives. The Francis Life Car was first used to rescue lives in that wreck, and all the crew and passengers but one were rescued. The other was his interest in lifesaving, which had obsessed him ever since he witnessed the wreck of the brig Ayrshire in January 1850 off Squan Beach. Owning and managing the Long Beach House became one of his two second careers. Born in Boston in 1799, he had been, in the first half-century of his life, a successful owner of a New York jewelry firm that made expensive watchcases. ![]() Thomas Bond had not planned to be an innkeeper. Railroad magnates, lawyers, judges and doctors came to Bonds in the summer to relax with their families and in the winter months to hunt birds with their genial host. It attracted men of wealth and influence from Philadelphia and New York. The Long Beach House, on the islands south end at what is now Holgate, became for a few dozen years before and after the Civil War the best-known hostelry on the New Jersey coast. Out of it and the influential men who stayed there over the years came the genesis of Beach Haven. Historically, the most significant of these old hotels was the famous Long Beach House of Thomas Bond. The others the Sunset, the Oceanic, the Mansion of Health, the Parry House, the Hotel Baldwin, the Engleside and the Long Beach House were all torn down or destroyed by fire. ![]() Of the eight major hotels built on Long Beach Island before the coming of the railroad in 1886, all but one, the Harvey Cedars Hotel, are gone. Excerpted from Chapter 11 of Eighteen Miles of History on Long Beach Island by John Bailey Lloyd. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |