PhotographHighlands, the bay, and Sandy Hook from the ridge at first light, the city on the horizon.Above the Hook original.

Four hundred years, in pieces.

We are collecting the history of Highlands — the peninsula, the hills, the ferries, the fort, the fleet, the families — and giving it back to the town it came from. We build it in public, chapter by chapter. Nothing here is finished.

1764Sandy Hook LightLibrary of Congress, HABS NJ-326.

1776Tupper's dispatchLOC, Washington Papers.

1908Highland BeachSandlass family collection.

Not yet heldBootleggers, c. 1928

Not yet heldTrudy comes home, 1926

What's here

Two square miles, and more history in it than most counties.

BeforeChapter 00

The Navesink Lenape lived on this bayshore for thousands of years before a sail appeared on the horizon. Shell middens, fishing camps, a path along the ridge that is still a road.

Acc. 000 — held

AI reconstructionAn imagined view of the Navesink Lenape on this bayshore, before contact — not a photograph or a record of the place, an impression of it.AI-generated by Above the Hook over a real photograph of the shoreline. Interpretive, not documentary.

AI reconstruction

1609Chapter 01

Robert Juet, keeping the log aboard the Half Moon, looked at these hills and wrote that it was a very good land to fall with. It is the first written sentence about this place, and it is a compliment.

Acc. 011 — held

ArtifactChart of the entrance of Hudson's River, from Sandy Hook to New York, 1778.Robert Sayer & John Bennett, London · 1778 · New York Public Library. Public domain.

1764Chapter 04

New York raised the money by lottery, bought four acres from the Hartshorne family, and put a lighthouse at the end of the peninsula. Forty-eight oil blazes behind glass. It is still burning.

Acc. 041 — held

ArtifactSandy Hook Lighthouse, built 1764. Historic American Buildings Survey, 1937.Nathaniel R. Ewan · Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS NJ-326) · Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

1900Chapter 09

A beach club at the end of the peninsula, sixty-two summers of it, with a bathing pavilion and a railroad running right to the sand. Then the government took the land and knocked it down.

Acc. 090 — held

PhotographHighland Beach in its later years — the cottages, the bathhouse rows, and the road along the spit.Sandlass family collection. Used with permission.

1926Chapter 11

A girl who summered on this shore swam the English Channel and beat every man who had done it before her. The town met her at the ferry.

Acc. 112 — homecoming photographs wanted

Not yet in the collectionTrudy Ederle's homecoming, Highlands, 1926. If your family has a photograph of that day, we would like to scan it.Acc. 112 — open

1920sChapter 12

Boats that went out for fish, and boats that went out for something else and came back up the Shrewsbury at night with their lamps out. Rum Row sat twelve miles off the beach and this town knew every man on it.

Acc. 121 — collection open

Not yet in the collectionAny photograph of a Highlands rum-running boat, crew, or landing. Names optional.Acc. 121 — open

SinceChapter 18

Storms that took the boardwalk. Storms that took the houses. A town that rebuilt each time, on the same hill, out of the same stubbornness.

Acc. 180 — held

PhotographBay Avenue after the water went down.Contributed. Photographer unknown.

Why we're doing this

A photograph in a shoebox. A story told at a kitchen table and then not told again. A name on a stone nobody can place anymore.

Most of what happened here was never written down in one place, and the people who remember it are not getting any younger. This is an attempt to gather the pieces, and to do it together.

The history here doesn't belong to us. It belongs to the families who lived it, and to a town that has been rebuilding itself on the same hill for four hundred years. We are just the ones holding the scanner.

Nothing here is finished. It isn't supposed to be.

How we do it

Everything carries its source

Every claim on this site has a citation and every image carries its attribution on the frame. Where sources disagree, we say so and show the disagreement. What we can't resolve, we don't publish — because the people in these photographs had names, and getting them right is the entire point.

Color is marked as color

Where we've added color to a photograph, the frame says so and the original is one click away. We colorize to invite, not to deceive. The full method →

Where we stand

We have not written this in partnership with Lenape descendant historians

And we are not going to imply otherwise. The chapters that treat Navesink life rest on published archaeology and on documents written by Europeans, with all the limits that carries. We say so on the page each time rather than letting a citation imply a partnership we don't have.

Written with, not about

If you know this material — through study, through family, through the Lenape communities whose history this is — and we have gotten something wrong, or flattened something that deserved better, we want to hear it. Corrections are credited and the chapter gets revised. Write to us →

Bring us what you have.

Somewhere in this town there is a boardwalk snapshot with three kids in it and no date on the back. A deed in a drawer. An hour of somebody's grandfather talking about the fleet, on a tape nobody has played since he died.

We want it. We'll scan it and hand it right back. Your name goes on it, or doesn't, however you want it. If it's a recording, it stays yours — you can pull it back any time.

WantedThe ferry landing, any year before 1950

WantedAnyone who worked the clam boats

WantedBay Avenue storefronts, 1930–1970

Bring us something

voices@abovethehook.com · corrections@abovethehook.com

Who we are

A community art project with a scanner.

The Highlands History Project is built by Above the Hook. It is funded by members, not advertisers, and everything on it is free to read.

If a fact on this site is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we fixed it. That is the whole correction policy.

Watch

Play the episode: Above the Hook on The Slate, Episode 02 — The Slate · Episode 02 · “How Eric Kane Put Highlands, NJ on the Map.”