By Eileen Moon
ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS – New Jersey’s Tall Ship, the oyster schooner A.J. Meerwald, will sail into Atlantic Highlands harbor June 12 carrying a rich cargo of maritime history from the days when vast fortunes were made by the oystermen of Delaware Bay.
The Meerwald will travel up from its home port at the nonprofit Bayshore Center at Bivalve to spend two weeks here as guests of the Atlantic Highlands Historical Society and the Atlantic Highlands Yacht Club.
During the visit, the Meerwald will host a series of day and evening sails that include Thursday evening BYOB oyster-tasting cruises featuring Cape May salt oysters, a history sail and kid-friendly outings that include helping the crew raise and lower the sails.
The visit will begin with a meet-and-greet with the crew at the Strauss Mansion, the home of the Atlantic Highlands Historical Society, at 7 p.m. June 12.
“Last year, the crew broke out into sea shanties,” said Lynn Fylak, historical society president. “It was a lot of fun.”
It was Fylak who proposed the idea of hosting the Meerwald last year in connection with the society’s celebration of the 125th anniversary of the historic Strauss Mansion. Since it was also the 90th birthday of the Meerwald, it seemed like a perfect fit.
“I always wondered why we didn’t have a history festival in our port,” Fylak said. “That’s when Capt. Dan Schade of Classic Boat Rides suggested I talk to the Meerwald. That started the conversation.”
According to Josh Scornavacchi, the Meerwald’s chief mate, the town of Bivalve, where the Meerwald is home-ported, once had more millionaires than any other town in the state.
Some 500 vessels like the Meerwald plied the waters, working from dawn to dusk six days a week, dropping off their hauls of oysters and turning around for more.
Onshore, the oysters would be bagged and shipped by train across the country, bringing a seemingly endless supply of dollars back to Bivalve year after year. In Philadelphia, Scornavacchi said, hungry pedestrians would buy raw oysters instead of hot dogs from carts on the street.
A sailors’ town sprang up along the waterfront on Delaware Bay with shops and bars and restaurants ready to take in their share of the profits from the oystering trade. “It was almost like going to a strip mall,” Scornavacchi said. Sailors would come ashore for a rowdy Saturday night, attend church on Sunday morning and climb back on their boats.
Many of those sailors – and a few captains as well – were African American, Scornavacchi said. “It was somewhat unusual compared to the rest of the country,” he said. Even before the civil rights movement, African Americans were making a living at oystering, but often were paid less and faced a tougher climb if they sought to captain a ship.
Brian Keenan, executive director of the Bayshore Center at Bivalve, and the organization’s historian and curator Rachel Dolhanscyk, will talk about African American oystermen during a lecture hosted by the historical society that will take place in the Atlantic Highlands Senior Center in the harbor at 7:30 p.m. June 19.
Today, the town of Bivalve and its sister towns along the Maurice River are among the poorest in the state, Scornavacchi noted.
The heydays of oystering dwindled when a parasite in the ballast water drained from an Asian ship began killing off the oysters in Delaware Bay. “A lot of the oystermen gave up right there. They had to find other occupations.”
The Meerwald, too, fell on hard times. Built in 1928, the schooner had the unusual distinction of being named for a man. Most boats are named for women, Scornavacchi said. But A.J. Meerwald’s two sons named the boat for their dad as they followed in his footsteps as oystermen.
After more than a decade on the water, the boat was commandeered by the U.S. Coast Guard at the start of World War II and converted into a fire boat. Its masts were removed and it was covered in steel.
After the war, the boat was returned to the Meerwalds, still a fireboat. By then they had taken up chicken farming, Scornavacchi said, and sold the boat. It later saw service as a motorized oyster dredger, a clamming boat and finally a shipwreck festering in the water until someone pulled it out and put it in storage, Scornavacchi said.
He credits its resurrection to an environmental activist named Meghan Wren, who heard some customers talking about the boat as she was bartending.
After purchasing the Meerwald for $1, she founded a nonprofit organization, the Bayshore Discovery Project, and launched a fundraising campaign that raised the $800,000 needed to restore the boat. It was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 and designated as the state’s official Tall Ship by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in 1996.
Visit ahhistory.org for more details on the Meerwald’s visit and accompanying events.
