The Highlands History Project

The water keeps giving.

Four hundred years of the same view.

Enter the first chapter Have five minutes? Read Rum Row

Highlands has been remembered in pieces. We're putting them somewhere.

A community archive built with the families who kept it — every image credited, every claim cited. Why we're doing this

A sepia photograph ca. 1892 of the Great Switchback R.R. loading tower at Highland Beach from a second angle — seven passengers on the platform under the GREAT SWITCHBACK R.R. signboard, the large ticket board reading THE FINEST SPORT OF EARTH 3¢ ROUND TRIP, two men and barrels at foreground left

A colorized photograph of the Great Switchback R.R. at Highland Beach ca. 1892 — the gravity-railroad loading tower with red-lettered signs reading GREAT SWITCHBACK R.R. THE FINEST SPORT OF EARTH 3¢, the wooden coaster trestle behind, two men and barrels in the foreground

Original Restored

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The Great Switchback R.R. at Highland Beach · ca. 1892 · Sandlass Family Collection · via ATH archive See it in the archive Read its chapter

400Years covered

15Chapters

131Items in the archive

21Contributors, credited by name

Four hundred years, in order

Deep timeThe Land Itself Before recordThe Navesink 1524First Sails 1651Purchase and Settlement 1764The Light and the War 1828The Twin Lights Century 1830The Painted Shore 1839Wrecks and Rescue 1874Guns on the Hook 1881Highland Beach 1900A Town of Its Own 1920Rum Row 1944The Sea Takes Back 1945Party Boats and Postwar 1962The Public Coast

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The chapters

Start here · 5 min

1920–1933 · Prohibition and the rum fleet

Rum Row

The bootleg capital of the East — and the town that built the boats.

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A Landsat satellite view of Sandy Hook and the Navesink Highlands — the peninsula from tip to ridge, the river mouths between

Deep time

The Land Itself

A stranded sea floor, and a new one being built beside it.

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1764–1783

The Light and the War

The oldest operating lighthouse in America, and the town of refugees that grew at its feet.

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1881–1963

Highland Beach

The sea never beat this family. New Jersey did.

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All fifteen chapters

Most of this town's history is in somebody's basement.

A photo album on a closet shelf. A menu from a restaurant that burned down. An hour of your grandfather talking about the fleet. If you have something, we want to see it — we scan it, and credit you by name on every image.

Bring something in Sit for an interview