Portraits Under the Lighthouse: Part I

An Archer Remembers Old Barnegat Light

By Reilly Platten Sharp

Thirty-two years ago, Long Beach Island was a simpler place. It was the end of the era that began after World War II that many of us were intimately familiar with because we had grown up, built careers, and started our own families during that time. Thinking back on it now, we did not know how good we had it. But so, says every generation when their day passes into memory, and they find the Island they once knew intimately is not the same. One can imagine then how an Islander who grew up in the early days of the 20th century may have felt thinking back on his own simpler, more familiar day from the vantage point of 1982.

In the earliest days of Barnegat City, a town built by 1870s developers dreaming of a second Atlantic City atop the mostly empty sands of the sleepy old town of Barnegat Beach and its storied lighthouse, life was little changed from the rustic ways of 18th century America. Baymen and fishermen were still the trades of most men. Seasonal lifesaving and wreck salvage were jobs for men young and old. Railroads were the only link to the outside world. And for those living seasonally or year-round on the Island, it was a very small world where everyone knew each other. This wide-open yet intimate life of freedom was both attractive and stifling. It was such a novel way of life for those who were introduced to the area as tourists that it brought them back again and again. For those who spent their lives between a mainland homestead and an Island cottage during fishing seasons, the close confines brought their share of camaraderie and disputes as personalities bumped up against one another. On the whole, the Island of old was a heavenly place that shaped those who grew up there and stayed with those who fell in love with it. The magic of Barnegat Light in particular endures through its unique features as a city by the sea and in the people whose hearts it captivates.

On a hot sunny day in the summer of 1982, Ron Spisso of Barnegat Light’s Inlet Deli, touched by the Island he came to love as a child, sat with Franklin Morse Archer Jr. to hear stories about a town and its people so similar to the Barnegat Light many have known in recent memory yet so different, like something out of a fairy tale. Archer’s grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Archer of Camden, New Jersey, was one of the developers of the 1870s who harbored dreams of a shining city beneath the protective gaze of the old lighthouse and is almost singularly responsible for the Barnegat Light generations have treasured. And like his grandfather, grandson Morse shared the same love for Barnegat Light and spoke of it fondly.

This continuing series will share some of the stories told that day by Morse of his times as a boy from the 1900s-1920s, preserved and curated along with other such oral histories by the Barnegat Light Historical Society.

Since the days of discovery over four hundred years ago, wrecked ships have been a constant around Barnegat Inlet. Just because the calendar years started to begin with nineteen did not mean the perils of the antiquated days of sail and horseback were over. In fact, some of the most memorable, tragic, and fateful maritime disasters came as navigation technology and ship construction greatly improved. In the end, for all mankind’s ingenuity we are still at the mercy of nature, and Barnegat Inlet has seen many humbling reminders of the power of the sea.

One such reminder came on a foggy night in December 1916 when the Sumner, a 350-foot, 3500-ton United States Army transport vessel with over 350 soldiers, crew and families aboard ran into trouble on Barnegat Inlet’s infamous shoals. Fortunately, all passengers and crew were rescued safely, and losses were material only. The Sumner, though, would have a long and serendipitous legacy for those in Barnegat City.

The transport had run aground off 6th Street. “These types of ships would come all the way up from down south headed for New York all the time,” Morse recalled. This one stuck around long after the initial drama, with another ship headed for the wreck from far offshore.

A year after the wreck of the Sumner, Morse recounted, “there was a schooner reported wrecked off Barnegat Light.” This was the 104-foot, 167-ton three-masted J.A. Holmes, formerly a Great Lakes logger now owned by a British company transporting lumber from Cuba to Canada. On September 10, 1917, reports of her distress came into the Barnegat City Coast Guard Station, who responded immediately though the location given was far out. “[They] had to go out in the middle of night. They got out there and found it miles offshore and sure enough the [J.A. Holmes] was awash and busted up with leaks. But it had not sunk. It had been beaten up in the storm. And on the aft sail was a flag upside down, which was a wreck signal. But there was nobody on board. So [the Coast Guard] came back. There was nothing they could do about it. It was just derelict.”

Word arrived a few days later that the steamer Malden bound for New York had encountered the J.A. Holmes at sea earlier and had safely evacuated everyone onboard, taking them on to the city and accounting for the ship’s ghostly state when the Barnegat Light station crew found her. But the J.A. Holmes was not destined to drift about the Atlantic. She had a date with the wreck of the Sumner and the people of Barnegat Light.

“The thing that was remarkable about it,” chuckled Morse remembering the ironic turn of events, “was that [the J.A. Holmes] came in on a northeast wind from wherever it had been abandoned up north of us at sea and it hit right in between the bow and the stern of this wrecked transport.” Indeed, the currents wedged the schooner into the widening gap of the Sumner as it slowly broke up that year. Over time, the J.A. Holmes, too, began to come apart in the fall of 1917 just beyond the breakers off 6th Street.

This was to be the first of many times the broken-up wreck of the Sumner would cause havoc on passing vessels. Like the schooner Lucy Evelyn, the Maine-based lumber transport destined to end up on Long Beach Island under much happier circumstances, the J.A. Holmes’ also had a hold full of lumber on her regular route. What happened next was a scene common at any home improvement store but bountifully bizarre on the beaches of Barnegat Light as the J.A. Holmes broke apart and the logs within floated out into the surf for days.

“Our beach was a lumber yard,” Morse described with amazement. “Everybody ran down and got lumber out of the surf as fast as they could and piled it up. And the insurance company for the schooner came down, looked at it, and said it was so drowned in sand that they couldn’t save anything. Whatever we pulled out was ours. Well, we had enough lumber to build boardwalks around the house along with everybody else!”

This was an early example of the kind of ocean-based recycling practiced in Barnegat Light over the years as resources were scarce and took a long time to come if ordered. From shipwrecks to the lighthouse keeper’s house and Oceanic Hotel when they were demolished, salvaged flotsam and jetsam make up the walls and framing of many an old cottage in town.

As for the nuisance wreck of the Sumner, she was eventually dynamited by United States government personnel in what remains the largest explosion ever seen around Long Beach Island.

Portraits Under the Lighthouse, Part II will be continued in the next issue of Echoes of LBI.