Starting January 1, 2025, I intend on writing and posting the history of 150 years of Sea Girt. One year per day. This is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Sea Girt. Wait, didn’t we just celebrate 100, a few years ago?
In 2017 Sea Girt celebrated 100 years since its incorporation as a municipality in 1917. The town threw a grand party, a fireworks show and a year’s worth of fun. So what’s all this about 150?
150 years recognizes the 1875 founding of Sea Girt as a resort community.
The Sea Girt Land Improvement Company was organized in 1869, in a syndicate led by Philadelphia yarn manufacturer Paul Thurlow. Thurlow’s brother Stephen L. Thurlow a coal magnate had purchased the Sea Girt farm and estate of Naval Commodore and US Senator Robert Field Stockton in 1866, and planned to have a resort community built around the old Stockton mansion.
Stockton had purchased the property in 1853. He combined three farms. Oceanside was the northern part of the town. It was the former estate of Montrose Graham, also called the Bell Farm and it hugged Wreck Pond. The Garrett Curtis property was to the west and south and the area around Newbury’s Pond of Thomas Shearman’s farm was the last piece. Stockton named the area “Sea Girt”.
Another anniversary, the 175th of the naming of the area will come in 2028. But the resort syndicate and the community recognized the launch of land sales in 1875, and the first maps and brochures laying out the town. The town’s signage still commemorates the 1875 founding.
This series is intended to give you a view of life and people in Sea Girt in each of its first 150 years.
Happy Birthday Sea Girt. You are as beautiful now as you were when you were called by early newspaper reports as “The Paradise of Watering Places”.
I hope you enjoy this walk through our history.