Life-Saving Service for the New Jersey coast. He also served as superintendent of the U.S. He retired to his home in Cape May, where he began a successful career in hostelry. Sawyer returned to his command and served out the rest of the war with distinction. His wife's personal plea with President Abraham Lincoln ultimately won him a stay of execution and then an exchange for two Confederate prisoners, including the son of Robert E. Sawyer's name was one of two drawn from a pool of seventy-five captains in a lottery to determine who would be executed in retaliation for previous Union executions of two Confederate officers. Captured by Confederates, he ended up in Richmond's infamous Libby Prison. He received two serious wounds in his thigh and cheek at the Battle of Brandy Station, before his horse was killed, throwing him out of the saddle and knocking him senseless. On a reconnaissance mission, he was shot in the stomach. In Woodstock, Virginia, his horse was shot out from under him and landed on his right leg, resulting in a permanent, painful limp.

Sawyer was an officer in the 1st Regiment, Cavalry, New Jersey Volunteers, and his Civil War record reads like a dramatic novel. The energetic proprietor, Henry Washington Sawyer, had previously operated the Ocean House. Two years prior to this 1878 image, the site was a salt marsh. The coastal maps, obtained for the atlas by special permission from the United States Coast Survey, constituted, at the time, the most complete delineation of the New Jersey coast ever published. Since so many of the oceanfront structures pictured in this volume no longer exist, its pages raise a particularly poignant voice for the Victorian life that was lived 'down the shore' in its businesses, residences, resorts, and entertainments. Those words equally might have described the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The contour of the coast has been changed to a remarkable degree in many places. It is impossible to estimate in dollars and cents what the loss will be. It is beyond question the most severe storm that has visited that portion of the Atlantic coast within the memory of the present generation. The storm is raging with great violence along the entire New-Jersey coast from Sandy Hook Point to Cape May City, and up the Delaware River as far north as Trenton. 390 pp., including illustrations and maps. Historical and Biographical Atlas of the New Jersey Coast (Philadelphia: Woolman & Rose, 1878). The headline of a nineteenth-century New York Tribune article proclaimed 'A Coast Line Changed':Ĭover. Large storms have ravaged the Jersey coast time and again. Their locations are plotted on the coastal maps. By the 1870s, a string of lighthouses had been erected and/or refitted 'so that in sailing the light of one is not lost till the next is in sight.' Also, a system of forty-one lifesaving stations had been organized, accelerated by funding from Congress in 1871. In addition, there is an alphabetical list of more than two hundred known shipwrecks, followed by a north-south listing of another 125 vessels wrecked between Manasquan and Barnegat Inlets. The first hundred pages document the history of the New Jersey coast, by county and township, and provide biographical sketches of the 'most prominent citizens along the coast, who, by their talents, industry, or means, had materially aided to advance growth and prosperity'.

The volume's numerous elaborate engravings of public and private properties and the detailed hand-colored plans of towns and villages-all demonstrate the publisher's desire 'to preserve and perpetuate in some substantial form a record of the past and present condition of that portion of New Jersey. From the north point of Sandy Hook to the south point of Cape May, the coastline stretches for about 130 miles, embracing parts of Monmouth, Ocean, Burlington, Atlantic, and Cape May Counties. Displayed in these pages is the golden age of the Jersey shore, certainly the state's most volatile landscape to be mapped over the past 350 years. 390 pp., including illustrations and maps.įirst atlas of the New Jersey coastal regions.

New jersey seashore map