Sea Girt takes itself seriously

Charles Hinchman was a practical manager of the Sea Girt Company. The camping on the Company’s land had to stop. Camp Cedar had become a nuisance. Cutting wood for fires, and staying for weeks was discouraged for the first time. The Company placed newspaper stories that guards would prevent entry on any Sea Girt Company property. Access to the inlet for Big Sea Day would be unwelcome.

Initially, there was speculation in the press that the farmers, who had never asked permission for the last 65 years might just show up anyway. Then just a few weeks before the second August Saturday, Point Pleasant Land Company offered their beach. There was plenty of sand for the wagons, but few cedar trees to provide shade and to tie up horses.

The farmers split up. Many vendors did not get the message and showed up at Wreck Pond, only to find a lack of customers. Others went to Manasquan on the other side of the guard camp. A handful of vendors set up there. Rain on Saturday morning killed the mood, and many farmers left, many deciding not to come back.

A 1912 one man band on the beach at Squan during Big Sea Day

Big Sea Day was smaller in Squan. But it was halted again in 1916. The polio epidemic in New York was the excuse. Manasquan officials were worried that vendors and farmers in close proximity would spread the infant paralysis to residents at the shore, so they withdrew vendor permits.

Fewer farmers returned each year, and by 1926 an article appeared in the Asbury Park Press, noting that Jersey Wash Day, or Big Sea Day was a ‘distant memory’. They joked that every day is Big Sea Day. If a farmer wanted, he could get in his car and drive his family to the beach.

Big Sea Day was revived as a beach party for Manasquan’s 50th anniversary in 1937 and in Point Pleasant in 1952. Fewer farmers, and more locals, and the tradition lives on each summer in Manasquan with fun, music, whiffleball, and charity fundraisers.

The Governor also needed a more serious place to hold office. The tiny Shearman farmhouse was inadequate, but no governor wanted the political backlash of building themselves a mansion at Sea Girt. The answer came in the form of The New Jersey State Pavillion, erected at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. Most structures for the fair were temporary and the house was dismantled and moved to the Sea Girt Guard camp. It cost $15,000 to recycle the house.

The place made a perfect NJ Governor’s summer mansion because it was an exact replica of Jacob Ford’s Mansion which served as General George Washinton’’s, Headquarters in Morristown from 1779-1780. The old Governor’s Cottage, The Shearman farmhouse, would serve as officers’ quarters.

Edward Stokes, Governor would stay at Sea Girt through the end of the NRA competitions in September.

Little White House at the St. Louis Fair

Sea Girt Postcard of the reconstructed house in 1905

The shooting line in front of the Rifle Association clubhouse (NRA History page)

The NRA had their own clubhouse and all kinds of tournaments. There were prizes and trophies, and shooters came from all over the nation. The Hilton Trophy (round in the picture below), was commissioned by Tiffany & Co for Henry Hilton, who had been the attorney for AT Stewart and inherited his ‘Iron Palace’, Manhattan indoor shopping mall. The $5,500 trophy was bronze and steel. It was one of the most elaborate of the Victorian era symbols of victory, which were generally replaced by “Loving Cups” and cleaner design in the new century

When the trophy was completed in 1879, The Spirit of the Times noted: “The trophy itself is a unique work, and possesses many attractive qualities to commend it to connoisseurs and art lovers, apart from its higher interest as an emblem of victory. The form is that of a shield, an irregular, oblong shape, drooping like a curtain. The center presents a superb picture, in repoussé steel, of an Indian buffalo hunt. In the foreground three Indian riders, mounted on their spirited ponies are pursuing with bow and lance the leaders of a herd of buffaloes, which extends in interminable numbers, far away in the distance. The action of horse and rider is admirably expressed, and the headlong fright and fury of the hunted brutes shown with striking reality….The whole design is surmounted by a sculpted eagle, and in the detail of the ornament, silver, copper, gold, and the new Japanese metal [mokume], which has lately been developed, here are successfully employed.”

The NRA games and the regular units of the National Guard attracted thousands of tourists. In 1905 the trolley system which had been serving the area around Asbury Park used the popularity of the longer season at Sea Girt as one justification to extend the line.

The Atlantic Coast Electric Railroad Company was reorganized in 1905 as the Atlantic Coast Electric Railway.

During its height of service, the tracks connected the communities from Long Branch to Manasquan. In Sea Girt, trolleys crossed Wreck Pond and ran south along Third, then came up Trenton Blvd to the entrance to the Camp, before heading to Manasquan.