The 1870s are gone. Here come the Nuns.
There was a US census in 1920. Sea Girt appeared for the first time with 110 residents. The place was still pretty empty as reflected in the following story from November 1920. Hunter William Morris was out with a dog near Chicago Blvd and the railroad tracks. They found a middle-aged man, dead for months, shot with a single bullet. The revolver, still in his hand was missing only one bullet from its chamber. The victim was dressed in a silk shirt and striped suit with a summer cap. The body had been there since summer. It was quickly ruled a suicide.
The Devlin’s accumulated three additional houses before Thomas died in 1893. Airenda sold them in the 1920s. These are the Ventnor Cottages, later known collectively as the Beacon House.
Thomas Devlin’s estate auction cleared out the Blue House, the Beacon House, and the Parker House. All the furniture and buildings went up for sale, one by one. Airenda Devlin was retiring, and distributing assets to her children.
The “Blue House” on Chicago. The Devlin’s called it Parker House West.
Dora Arnold purchased the Parker House and renamed it The Arnold. In a separate sale, The Beach House and its furniture and fixtures were auctioned off.
The Parker House lost its name for a few years.
Nora Stubbs, owner and operator of the Warren Hotel in Spring Lake began plans for a new resort, The Stockton in the Pines. They would demolish the old Beach House with the exception of the Commodore’s mansion which they had plans to repurpose as a tea room. But they also had to retreat further back from the edge of the ocean. Erosion had eaten away the beach and its jetties did nothing but erode beaches northward to the Lighthouse. The foundation of the hotel was moved back 150 feet west.
The demolition of the Beach House 1920 (John Shibles collection)
The War Department of the Federal Government had allocated funds in 1899 to secure the permanent opening of the Manasquan River waterway, but it repealed its mandate and returned the funds. A half-built jetty created a dangerous sand bar and also robbed the beaches of sand for almost half a mile north. The canal from the Manasquan River to Barnegat Bay through the marshes of Point Pleasant and Bay Head had begin in 1915. Stopped during the World War, the inland waterway was still at least five years from completion. Until that was completed, the Manasquan Inlet was not a priority.
The Tremont was purchased by Carriageman, turned Garageman, Tim Hurley. Horace Rounds also sold his beautiful home on Boston Blvd. and moved to California.
The Rounds home was used as a focal point of entertaining and fundraising during the 1910s in Sea Girt.
The Tremont had also aged past the point of a high-quality hotel, but Hurley was looking for a different type of owner. The rumor in town was that an asylum or some other type of institution would take over.
The Asbury Park Press reported,
SEA GIRT MOVES TO BLOCK SANITARIUM “As a result of reports which have been circulated through the borough of Sea Girt for some time to the effect that the Tremont hotel on Chicago boulevard, owned by Tim Hurley of Spring Lake, was to be transferred into an asylum sanitarium, or similar institution, by a syndicate, the borough council has drawn an ordinance prohibiting the construction or operation of any such institution within certain sections of the borough.”
The ordinance points out “certain zones within the borough in which the erection or operation of asylums, nunneries, almshouses, homes for the aged, parochial schools or buildings for similar use will be prohibited. “
All rumors in a small town tend to have at least a kernel of truth. Tim Hurley was in discussions with the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth. The Sisters founded the Academy of Saint Elizabeth, the first secondary school for young women in the state, near Morristown in 1860. Eventually, the nearby community became known as Convent Station because of a railway station built during the 1870s with funds provided by the order, to accommodate their needs. In 1899 the religious order also established the College of Saint Elizabeth on the same campus, becoming the first four-year liberal arts college for women in New Jersey and one of the first Catholic colleges in the United States to award degrees to women. That same year, they established St. Aloysius Academy, a private school for women, in Jersey City.
The leader of the Order, Mother Mother Mary Xavier Mehegan, thought a quiet house by the sea would be restful for the sisters. Five years after her death, the Sisters found the Tremont available.
A postcard of Stella Maris, the new name for the Tremont
For the Order, the hotel at Sea Girt could have had multiple uses, but the ordinance made it clear that they couldn’t use it as a convent or as a healthcare facility. They settled on a summer home for teachers to rest. Nuns and lay teachers were instructed to quickly cover up after bathing and return to the house. They were banned from posing for photographs out of their robes or mingling with the seculars.