Rum Row

Prohibition did not arrive in Highlands and build an industry. It found one and put it to work.

That is not a flourish. The borough's own history says so plainly: when Rum Row was established off New York Bay in 1920, Highlands became the main port of the trade, and it became that because of two things it already had — boat-building yards, and the daring of its rum runners, who were mostly fishermen and clamdiggers.^[1]

Men who already knew how to get a small boat off a beach in a sea, and men who already knew how to build one.

The rest was geography. First stop inside the Hook. A straight shot to the biggest thirst in America. For thirteen years the water gave and the powerful took, and the town in between built the boats that outran the cutters — until a line was drawn on a map in Washington and the boats couldn't reach it any more.

New Jersey did not want this.

Along with Connecticut and Rhode Island, the state held out against Prohibition until 1922, when it became the last state in the union to ratify it — two years after the Volstead Act took effect. In theory New Jersey was then dry. In practice it earned the nickname Boot-Leggers Paradise.^[1]

Bootlegger, for the record, comes from the practice of slipping a bottle of the good stuff into the tops of a pair of foul-weather boots.^[1]

Provenance. This section rests on The Story of Highlands by Fletcher Pratt, via the Borough of Highlands — the same mid-century transcription that carries the Chapter 3 deed material. Pratt's own citations are not reproduced anywhere we can reach, and this project has not sighted them. Flagged, not laundered.

Every rum boat that mattered launched from the same shore. The Twin Lights threw a beam that could be read at sea; the peninsula sheltered a fleet of skiffs redesigned for a single task; and the current out of the Narrows carried a crew north with the wind on their shoulder.

Enforcement got dramatically more effective, and the boats this town built for the job became the wrong boats for it.^[2]

Bill McCoy did not invent the phrase. It was in the language before he got there. What he did was earn it, and then let it stick to him.^[4]

He was a boatbuilder and a non-drinker who worked out the whole system: anchor a schooner in international waters off a big thirsty city, and let smaller contact boats take the risk of the last three miles. He started in July 1921, running the Henry L. Marshall out of Nassau under British registry, refitted for 1,500 cases, first delivery off Atlantic City. Later he had the 127-foot schooner Arethusa, renamed Tomoka, which could carry 6,000.^[5]

He hauled rye, Irish and Canadian whisky, and other good liquor. He would not cut it. He would not pay protection to the land syndicates. And he invented the way it travelled: the burlock — six bottles jacketed in straw, three on the bottom, then two, then one, the whole thing sewn tight in burlap. Compact, stowable, and quiet in a small boat. The Coast Guard called them sacks.^[6][5]

That is what the phrase attached itself to — a man selling a product he never drank, refusing to water it, in a package he designed himself.

He was gone before the line moved. On November 23, 1923 the cutter Seneca took him with specific orders to do it even if that meant bending the rules about international waters; the British flag was, that day, a technicality the government had authorized itself to ignore. He got nine months, and negotiated the charges against his brother Ben away as part of the deal.^[4][7]

On the money. The one local price figure this project holds is that a case of Canadian whiskey cost the runners $7.50. It reaches us through the same mid-century Fletcher Pratt transcription that carries the Chapter 3 deed material, and it is stated with that attached rather than laundered into the prose. No other figure for what the trade paid or charged is sourced, so none is given.

Will Sandlass did not choose any of this.

He opened the Bamboo Gardens at Highland Beach in June 1908 — fifty thousand lineal feet of Cuban wood — and added the airdrome theatre in 1917.^[8] It was a dance pavilion and a movie house at a rail-and-steamboat beach resort, and it had been running for twelve years when the Volstead Act took effect.

Two months later he found himself in the middle of the rum-running trade, on the sand it was landing on.^[9]

The excursion parties kept coming all that summer. The bands from Rector's in New York kept playing. The pictures kept running. A resort built for one century's leisure economy went on operating in the middle of another century's crime, because the trains still arrived and people still wanted to dance.^[9]

The full Sandlass story — the resort, the family, and how it ended — belongs to Chapter 8, Highland Beach. This chapter borrows one summer of it.

Sources · the Bamboo Gardens opening of June 1908 and the 1917 airdrome · Highland Beach through the Prohibition years, for the excursion parties, the Rector's bands, and rail traffic peaking in 1920. Held back: an eminent-domain sequence — the Army taking ten acres in 1962 and the state the ten after that — is unverified and belongs to Chapter 8. It is not published here until that research settles it.

By 1933 the Twenty-First Amendment closed the trade, and the boats turned to fluke and stripers. The captains kept their engines. The sport-fishing capital of the Jersey Shore inherited the fleet, and the party boats at Bahrs still carry the lineage.

But the boat itself never stopped.

The Jersey Speed Skiff is a racing class today, run by the American Powerboat Association, and the rules require two people aboard: a driver, and a rider whose job is to look out.^[10]

That second seat is a vestige of Prohibition. It exists because a hundred years ago somebody had to watch for the Coast Guard while somebody else drove.

Every summer, on the Shrewsbury, they still run them.^[10]