Feature

The Forty-Eight Hour Cure

A clam out of Sandy Hook Bay cannot legally be sold until it has spent two days cleaning itself. The building where that happens is the reason Highlands still has a fishery at all.

The cureTwo days of doing nothing, on purpose

A clam does not know it is dirty. It goes on doing what it has always done — pulling a few gallons an hour through itself, keeping what it wants and passing the rest — and in clean water that habit is the entire technology.

Put a Sandy Hook Bay clam in a tank of circulated, sterilized seawater and leave it alone for 48 hours, and it will purge itself. That is depuration. It is not a wash and it is not a chemical treatment. It is the animal cleaning itself on a clock, and until the clock runs out, selling it is illegal.^[1]

Everything else in this story is about who pays for the tank.

Before the plantsWhat the whale was to Nantucket

The trade is older than the tank by a century.

Parkertown stood where the Navesink met the bay, and it was organized around one animal the way a mill town is organized around one river. A visitor in 1889 wrote that clams were to Parkertown what the whale had been to Nantucket — which is the kind of line a visitor writes, and also, for a while, true. Early in the century the borough had 10 processing plants. By 1975 there were two.^[2]

The work split the way work split. The men went out in the dark and raked the bottom. Their wives opened the clams, stripped them, and strung them 25 to a string for shipping.^[2] A borough historian writing in 1975 could still describe that as a going concern, in the present tense, on the same page where he counted what was left of it.

1974A decade of asking

By the second half of the century the bay had a problem the rake could not solve, and the clammers were the ones holding it.

What stood between a Highlands clam and a legal plate was 48 hours in a facility nobody in town owned. The Baymen's Protective Association spent more than a decade asking for one. They got it in 1974, built on $50,000 of public money.^[1]

It is worth being plain about what that means. A group of men who worked with their hands in the dark, in a trade the rest of the state had stopped thinking about, ran a lobbying campaign for ten years and won a piece of public infrastructure. Not a subsidy. A building.

The mid-1980sThe drive to South Jersey

It lasted about a decade.

The health standards a depuration plant has to meet do not stay where they were, and by the middle of the 1980s the 1974 plant could not meet them. It closed. After that a Highlands clammer who wanted to sell his catch had to put it on a truck to South Jersey, pay to have it purged down there, and pay to bring it back.^[1]

That arithmetic does not appear in any account of the era as a crisis, because it was not one. It was a cost. It is simply that the cost was larger than what a lot of men were clearing, and they stopped going out.

The fishery did not close. It thinned, one boat at a time, for reasons that never made a headline.

1991–1998A man who did not see it open

James T. White was a clammer. He was also a schoolteacher, and he had been mayor of Highlands, which is an unusual combination anywhere and a useful one here: he knew the bottom, he knew how to explain a thing, and he knew where the money was kept.

In 1991 he secured a $1.3 million grant from the Port Authority, tied by agreement to a nonprofit public depuration facility — not a private one, not a municipal department, a nonprofit holding it for the men who worked the water.^[3]

He died before it opened.

The plant that carries his name opened in 1994 on a borough parcel. In 1998 the Baymen's Protective Association incorporated as a nonprofit and took it on, which is the structure the grant had required seven years earlier.^[3] The association still runs it.

Now40 million clams

More than 40 million clams a year go to market out of that building, which is among the largest depuration facilities on the East Coast.^[1]

It sits at the edge of a town most people drive through on the way to the beach, and it looks like what it is, which is a shed with tanks in it. There is no sign explaining the 48 hours. In February 2025 the borough floated changing that — an interactive maritime museum inside the working plant, seeded by a $50,000 grant from the state Economic Development Authority.^[4] A plan, with money behind it, and not yet a building.

The thing worth seeing there is not the tanks. It is that a public building exists at all for a trade with no lobby, no brand and almost no constituency — and that it exists twice, because the first one closed and a dying man went and got the second one.

Photograph · not yet acquiredThe depuration plant — either one. The 1974 plant the Baymen's Protective Association won with $50,000 of public money, or the J. T. White plant that replaced it in 1994.Not yet held. First ask: the Baymen's Protective Association, which has run the plant since 1998 and would hold its own record of both buildings. Second: the borough, which owns the parcel and is planning a museum inside it. Permission has not been sought from either.

What we are missingThe part that is not written down

Held until sourced

Almost none of the human part of this is written down.

The 1974 campaign. Ten years of lobbying produced minutes, letters and names, and we have none of them. Who led it? Who went to Trenton?

The men. The Baymen's Protective Association is the through-line of this entire story and we can name exactly one of its members. We would like to name more, correctly, with their families' say-so.

The buildings. We have no photograph of the 1974 plant, and none of the J. T. White plant either.

The work. How long is a tide's raking? What does a bushel bring now against what it brought in 1975? Who still goes out?

If you clammed here, or your father did, write to us. This is the chapter of the Highlands waterfront that has the least written about it and the most people still alive to correct it.

Sources

Quahog of the Commons. The Counter. January 2020. Source for the Baymen's Protective Association lobbying more than a decade for a public purification plant and winning one in 1974 on $50,000 of public money; for the mid-1980s closure on rising health standards; for the trucking costs to South Jersey that followed and the men they drove off the water; and for the volume and standing of the plant today. ↩
James W. Brydon. The Story of Highlands. Borough of Highlands. 1975. A borough history written from inside the era it describes. Source for Parkertown as a clamming hamlet, for the 1889 visitor who said clams were to the town what the whale had been to Nantucket, for 10 processing plants early in the century falling to two by 1975, and for the division of the work — men raking in the dark, women opening and stringing. ↩
The James T. White Clam Depuration Plant. Borough of Highlands. Source for White's $1.3 million Port Authority grant in 1991, restricted by agreement to a nonprofit public depuration facility; for his death before the plant opened; for the 1994 opening on a borough parcel; and for the association's 1998 incorporation as a nonprofit. ↩
Two River Times, February 2025, “Highlands Officials Float Interactive Maritime Museum”. Source for the borough's plan to put an interactive maritime museum inside the plant, seeded by a $50,000 EDA grant. A plan announced in February 2025, not a built thing — read it as an intention with money behind it. ↩