Many homes in Sea Girt have been knocked down and rebuilt. This nicely restored older home at 316 Baltimore Blvd. dates from 1897. Its old, but we have older.
The Lighthouse was first lit in 1893….
This one on the boardwalk (leftmost) was built in 1890 for Quaker, activist and philanthropist Phoebe Wright 1890.
Here it is on the right in the early 1900s.
The Blue House, built in1883 on Chicago and first. At one time Thomas Devlin bought it for overflow from his Parker House, and advertised it as “Parker House West”
Devlin’s Parker’s House was established in 1879. It’s still going strong.
The railway station/library was built in1876…
This old girl predates the founding of the town. 1873 is the estimate for the Ridgewood House, which has continuously operated as a rooming house for over 100 years.
What it looked like in 1908, crabbing the 1st Ave bridge.
Stockton’s Beach House on the ocean is long gone, but the building that is Rod’s today was where his wife Maria Potter Stockton slept. She was afraid to sleep so close to the waves, so Stockton built this house for her in the 1850s. Since 1933 it has been a restaurant with the following names: Bill Dann’s, Lady Gay, Emillions, Charlie’s, Leo’s, the Pump House, Pal’s Aweigh, PJ Clancy’s Pavilion, The Commodore Stockton, The Stockton and now since 1981 Rod’s Old Irish Tavern. The Leo’s postcard is closer to the original building
But before Maria Potter Stockton slept here, she slept at the oldest house in Sea Girt.
The winner is this farmhouse, which belonged to Thomas Shearman, and was built before 1850. It once fronted Sea Girt Avenue, and the 120 acre farm along Newberry Pond (Stockton Lake) was a source of sheep, cows, and horses for the area. When Shearman died, John Shearman sold to Joseph Mount, who sold the land with the house to Stockton who put this together with two other farms to create his “Sea Girt” Estate. He built his famous house on the dunes, and a crescent shaped race track for his thoroughbreds, (the infield is now Crescent Park), as well as the house on what would become Washington Ave. where Rods is today. The farmhouse was his first base of operations before the Beach House was built.
As his health failed in 1866, Stockton sold to Stephen L. Thurlow, a coal executive from Wilkes Barre and when Thurlow rand into financial difficulty he sold to the Sea Girt Land Improvement Company.
Director John C. Lucas’ brother William farmed this land while the northern part of town was developed. When John Lucas died, and the company was mired in financial trouble, William Lucas moved to Spring Lake to run hotels with his wife. The house had the good fortune to be on the property first leased for the Sea Girt National Guard Camp in 1884. It has been preserved. For twenty years it served as Quarters One, the Governor’s summer quarters, before the New Jersey Pavilion of the 1904 St. Louis Exposition was moved in pieces to become Quarters One, or the Little White House in 1905. The Shearman house was then Quarters Two and moved to its present location. The Little White house was lost to decay, but the DOD preserved and renamed the old Shearman farmhouse building Quarter’s One, and it serves visiting officers to the camp. It stands as the oldest building in town.
The Little White House and the Shearman farmhouse to the far right, 1907