Buried Treasure
Queen Victoria died on January 22, 1901, ending the Victorian era. Pablo Picasso opened his first art show. Frank L. Baum published The Wizard of OZ. The world was moving forward into a more progressive century.
Buffalo NY wanted to show the world the power of water-generated electricity at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Niagara Falls provided the power. 63-year-old Annie Taylor went over the falls in a barrel and lived.
On September 6, anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in a handshake line at the fair. Marriott Morris’ sister Bess was there.
Bessie wrote home to her parents in an unsettled tone:
“I scarcely know where to begin so much has happened since we left home, and we are all in a tremble with this terrible attack on the President had it not been that the Mayflower banquet [that] came last evening and we were resting up for it, we too would have been in the crowd at Music Hall yesterday and might have been crushed, and not only that but the papers say that the trolley cars coming in from the grounds were stopped by the mobs but no one was hurt.”
She also wrote that she wished to take a refreshing dip in the ocean at Avocado, one of her father’s two cottages at Sea Girt.
Library of Congress print
Mckinley’s second VP, Teddy Roosevelt, a reform-minded governor in NY would take his place. TR was nominated by the party machine to “kick him upstairs” to VP, since he was causing problems with the party machine politics, and rooting out corruption.
McKinley’s original VP Garrett Hobart died in office. Eight days after the Buffalo shooting, TR was President. Teddy would play a role in Sea Girt.
That summer gold coins dated 1702-1708 washed up in Beach Haven on LBI . They were likely from a Spanish Galleon, or perhaps pirate treasure.
As talk turned to treasure, the Asbury Journal told the story of an enterprising fisherman from Point Pleasant. Divine Compton was out fishing in his leaky boat, plugged in dozens of spots. His old-fashioned, frugal ways were a bit of a punch line with the younger men. For forty years he had been a dayboat fisherman and he earned most of his money in the summer and fall, fishing close to shore. He had to hold on over the long winter where he lived in a small cottage with his wife.
Captain Tilden of the Eugene in 1884 with a king fish. All photos from the Marriott Morris Collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia
He was fishing weakfish off Sea Girt, about 1,000 yards offshore with drop lines and filled his boat with his catch. The last fish he landed was dead. The fish was bleeding, through a hole in the head..
An hour later Devine was telling his experience and exhibiting the strangely killed fish in Zimmerman's Osborn House hotel in Manasquan.
“A dozen loungers had explanations of the cause of death, but not until Dave Allgor jabbed his knife into the wound in the fish head was the mystery solved. The knife blade struck a hard substance and after a little gouging out dropped a big lead bullet. 'I must 'a been nigher shore than I thought, and that bullet,’ said Devine, slowly, ‘sailed high of the targets on the rifle range. A narrow escape, a narrow escape, by cracky.’”
“‘That's the first fish I ever heard tell of.’ said Nathaniel White, ‘gettin' struck by one of the soldiers' bullets.”
Someone else commented they had bullets fall around their boat as they were passing the campground. The danger was real. In 1936 Samuel Peterson was hit in the leg while fishing with 25 others on a party boat.
Captain Curtis brings in his fishing boar 1887
Devine did some rough calculations. He decided that 16 years of firing 10,000 cartridges a year, some 1.6 million bullets must be in the sand just off the rifle range.
Each bullets in a Springfield cartridge weighed near an ounce. 100,000 pounds of old lead worth five cents a pound. “That's just $5,000 worth which is buried in the sand around the rifle pits an' in a straight path a few hundred yards out to sea."
1887 shot of Captain Curti’s boat launching at Sea Girt
One of his fellow fishermen asked, “What about the shots that hit the targets?” Compton was convinced that was a much smaller amount and the ‘mining beats fishing any day’
Devine and his friends left Zimmermans after drinking and discussing the idea late at night, but about one in the morning there was a knock at the door. Devine had come back for the bleeding fish with the bullet hole in his head. No need to waste a good fish.
There is no evidence the dredging of the sand off the rifle range ever took place. At least some lead must still be out there.