Where does the street name Bell Place come from?
Why was the prime real estate of Sea Girt available for purchase by Robert F. Stockton in the early 1850s?
Why is March 9th False Teeth Day?
Dr. Charles Montrose Graham was the first person to purchase land in Sea Girt to enjoy the beach and recreation. He was the first wealthy businessman to summer here. His estate was called “Oceanside” and he visited from his townhouse at 11 West 11 Street in New York in the 1840s.
The Graham farm is noted on this early map of Monmouth County (1851). The heirs of Thomas Sherman and Garrett Curtis would provide the other land for Stockton to assemble Sea Girt. Fresh Creek Pond is Spring Lake.
Dr. Graham was born in NY in 1771. He was the son of Aennis (Ennis) Graham, a New York merchant born in Scotland, and Elizabeth Sydenham, who remarried after her first husband, a Britisher, died.
Ennis and Elizabeth dealt in fine clothing. They advertised superfine broadcloth, cashmere, fine breeches, white crepe, Genoa velvets, silks for necks, vests, and breeches, embroidered gold and silver buttons, hair buttons, silk stockings, knee garters, silk ferretti, silver buttons and loops for hats, mens gloves, sleeve buttons, mens thimbles, and livery lace.
During the Revolution, New York City was occupied by the British. Aennis was a patriot. He left the Tory-controlled city and was hiding his portable wealth at his Bound Brook estate.
On December 2, 1776, as Washington fled across New Jersey, British troops arrived in Bound Brook. Three soldiers knocked on Graham’s door and demanded his gold watch. They searched and then left the farm, A few days later, a large body of Hessians made off with his servant Oliver, but again found nothing else to plunder. On the 19th of December, a Loyalist named George Fisher used a detachment of the Queen’s Own Light Dragoons to visit the house again with some Tory refugees, and this time under the threat of bayonets to the chest, they dug up a strong box under Ennis’ barn.
They took £6,150, a sum worth $1.3 million today. £3,000 was in coin and a large collection of silver. He also lost rings, watches, earrings, and buttons made of gold, garnet, and brilliant stones. When Ennis rode to New Brunswick to try and lodge a complaint, the British officer took his horse and gave him a mare that died as soon as he mounted it. Elizabeth appealed to the British officers and they did return an engraved silver tankard made by New York Silversmith Meyer Meyers in 1770.
Aennis did not survive the war and passed the following December. Elizabeth, left with young Charles, made claims on her family's behalf after the war. New York and New Jersey had some of the strictest confiscation laws. Loyalist property was confiscated and was redistributed to families who had made claims.
Elizabeth returned to New York after the war and provided Charles Montrose Graham with enough money to be educated as a doctor with an expertise of the mouth.
On March 9, 1822, (now officially known as National False Teeth or Denture Day), Graham obtained the first American patent for a new device to hold porcelain teeth against the gums. His invention represented an improvement over the wood and other contraptions worn by George Washington.
His business would provide an opulent life for the early 1800s. Dr. Graham owned a New York townhouse that still stands in Greenwich Village adjacent to the First Presbyterian Church and an entire block of townhouses to the west of 5th Avenue which he had built and rented.
Charles also owned a farm in the ‘country’, the northern part of Manhattan. His Harlem Lane farm “Content” had ten acres of land and livestock, where his son Charles II grew prize-winning grapes and broccoli in the 1840s. His other two properties were a copper mine in Northern New Jersey, and his seashore farm in southern Monmouth County.
He purchased the Van Mater farm near Manasquan Village and called it “Oceanside”. The land ran from the Wreck Pond Inlet south to somewhere around current Washington Avenue, about half of the town. He would hire local families to work the farm. From the Doctor’s will we know that Oceanside is where he spent summers in his later years. Like today, his children and grandchildren enjoyed the beach at their Grandfather’s house.
Tragically, in 1849 he lost his two grandsons. The first, Charles Montrose Graham III, joined Audubon’s journey during the gold rush of ‘49. “Montrose” was just 22 when he joined the party of young men looking for adventure with the son of the most famous naturalists in the country. Gold fever had swept America after gold was found at Sutter’s Mill and no less than 80,000 people struck out for California.
John Woodhead Audubon was the son of the famed naturalist painter. He. raised a crew of ninety-eight gentlemen. Montrose Graham, funded by his grandfather, was one of the wealthy untrained boys who set out with dreams of adventure and riches.
The journey was later described as “one of the most poorly-planned Forty-Niner expeditions on record”. It was typical of mid-1800s attitudes to assume that a good upbringing and pedigree would see great men through adversity, while they often discounted the importance of training, planning, and experience. They were not miners, had little or no experience in the wild, and most were rich boys who had never been off the East Coast.
They left New York and took an unconventional route, in the most indirect way. Fourteen stage coaches through Pittsburgh overland before taking to rivers and sailing down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. There they took a steamer across the Gulf to the Rio Grande and trekked across the Mexican desert toward the coast with plans to go north to San Francisco through the mission towns of San Diego and Los Angeles. Ten men died of cholera from bad water in Mexico, then robbed by bandits. But the spirit of the mission was truly destroyed when Montrose was killed in a careless accident with a dropped gun.
“Montrose Graham was guard over my tent, his last watch, as Simon called the guard he faced me. Weed let his rifle fall, the cock was down on the nipple, contrary to a positive order. In falling, the hammer struck the ground first, with the whole weight of the gun on it and as if the trigger had been pulled, off it went.... Everyone was shocked by the shot, but two exclamations rang out in the dark, ‘My God, Mr. Audubon killed?’ and the other ‘Who’s hurt?’...a groan from Mr. Graham told us who it was. Someone said, ‘It’s not much, just a pistol ball’. Graham said ‘Only a pistol or not, it dropped me like a hot potato’.
All loved Graham, he was the handsomest man of the ninety-eight of us, just twenty-two, and captain of his tent.”
The shot went through his ankle. They left Montrose and his cousin at Saltillo where Graham later died of his injuries. Audubon’s trip was a bitter disappointment. He got the rest of the party to California but they disbanded with no gold to show for their troubles.
After news of young Montrose Graham III’s death reached Oceanside, there seemed to be lingering bitterness between his grandfather (Dr. Charles) and father (Charles Jr.).
When the Doctor prepared his will in 1852, he went out of his way to give his namesake and only son Charles Montrose Graham Jr. just a gold watch and debt forgiveness, while he gave his son’s wife Helen the townhouses and the Harlem Lane Farm.
He gave his only surviving, and now newly married grandson Edward Ennis Graham a copper mine, Oceanside (the Sea Girt summer residence) and another house at Squan Village.
In the 1850 census, Charles Jr. worked as a boat builder on the Manasquan docks and on the New York farm, while his son Edward Ennis entered his occupation as “Gentleman”, and he lived at his grandfather’s farm at Oceanside with his wife Sarah Jane while Thomas Bell Junior worked the Oceanside farm for the Grahams. But the grandson Edward Ennis died shortly afterward, likely drowned.
Edward Ennis Graham and his son little Ennie in the old graveyard at Osborne and Main in Manasquan
A 1907 news story in the Altoona Press indicated that the owner of the property, Dr. Graham had drowned at the Wreck Pond inlet. But all records show that the doctor died peacefully in New York in the spring just after he prepared his will. The doctor’s son Charles II was still alive when the Stockton’s lived at the farm, and the place of death for 25-year-old Edward Ennis was Manasquan in the summer, so he was likely the one that drowned.
Ennis was survived by his young widow Sarah Jane and a baby son, “Little Ennie” who died at age 5 in 1854. They are buried together in the old Presbyterian cemetery at Osborne and Main Street Manasquan. Without another heir, Sarah inherited the property.
She remarried almost immediately to the farmer who worked her land, Thomas Bell Jr. He was the son of Thomas Bell Sr. a Scott who had amassed over $20,000 in land in Eatontown and Westchester.
With the Doctor and his heirs dead, Thomas had no need for the Bell farm which he now controlled. After the sale to Stockton, Sarah and Thomas Bell Jr. moved to his family’s Eatontown farm, which he inherited when Thomas Sr. died.
Bell Place where the Public Works and Elementary School are located, is the only physical reminder of the Bell Farm or Oceanside. The Graham townhouse is still in Manhattan.
Thomas Bell farmed this land before marrying the widow of the land owner. They sold the land to Stockton.