County restoring World War II battery in Middletown
By John Burton
MIDDLETOWN – The Monmouth County Park System is undertaking a project that will preserve and protect what had protected the Jersey Shore and New York Harbor more than 70 years ago.
The park system is repairing and restoring the Battery Lewis at Hartshorne Woods Park to serve as an attraction for visitors, giving them a sense of the location’s importance during World War II.
Gail L. Hunton, supervising historic preservation specialist for the county park system, said that’s a needed task to remind the public of a time that is only getting further away.
“For us of a certain age, we grew up hearing stories of World War II,” Hunton said. “But for younger people, it’s ancient history,” history that shouldn’t be lost due to the passage of time.
The park system began repairing the Battery Lewis at Hartshorne Woods Park last year. During World War II, the site housed two enormous 16-inch cannons in 600-foot-long enclosed concrete-built batteries that have connecting corridors to hold ammunition.
So far, the restoration work done in 2013 included restoring the batteries’ concrete exterior, repairing damage, painting and removing graffiti.
That portion of the project cost about $250,000, allocated from the county capital budget, according to Hunton.
The next phase, expected to cost an additional $500,000, will involve work to make the site ready to receive a 68-foot barrel from a former 16-inch cannon. It weighs 120 tons and is similar to what had been here during war. The originals were dismantled and scrapped after the war, Hunton said.
The U.S. Department of the Navy is donating the barrel of a gun that had been on the U.S.S. New Jersey.
The park system will have to pay to have it transported from Navy shipyards, located in Norfolk, Va. The park should have that by late fall, she said.
The plan is to have a true-size exhibit with descriptive easels and guided, informational tours of the site that will give visitors a true sense of the location’s role in the nation’s defense, Hunton said.
Located on the portion of the park 787 acres, overlooking Sandy Hook Bay and with New York Harbor in the distance, the U.S. War Department (now called the U.S. Department of Defense), purchased in 1942 approximately 224 acres of what at the time was private property in the Navesink Highlands, just south of the U.S. Army’s Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook. The site, which is the highest natural point on the eastern seaboard and at the southern entrance to the New York Harbor, had high-ranking military members at the time thinking it would be a prime location for an artillery installation.
“The purpose of it was to defend the Harbor of New York,” Hunton said.
Early in the war, there was a fear of another attack like Pearl Harbor. Hunton noted there were sightings of German submarines off of Sandy Hook. At the time, the 16-inch cannons (which referred to the diameter of the cannon’s barrels) were the largest artillery weapons in the U.S. arsenal, intended to withstand naval or aerial assaults.
The U.S. built only 20 of the 16-inch cannons, which had an effective range of 25 miles, she said.
The War Department constructed what became known as the Navesink Military Reservation which, along with the batteries, had housing for personnel and a 100-foot observation tower which were torn down by the Department of Defense by the late 1940s.
During the 1950s and the Cold War, the site was home to the control headquarters for other weapons – the area’s Nike missiles the U.S. Air Force had at Fort Hancock and elsewhere in the region.
“This area reflects the enormous efforts that were taken to defend the United States” during a remarkably short time, Hunton said. The installation was constructed in less than a year and became operational in 1943 with the guns mounted in May of that year.
The area offers an important insight into our history, Hunton said. “Every historic site illuminates an important part of our past.”
Hunton will be offering a lecture on the battery site for the Atlantic Highlands Historical Society meeting, on Wednesday, Sept. 17. The meeting, free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. at the Strauss Mansion Museum, 27 Prospect Circle.
The county acquired 600 acres of the Hartshorne property for parkland in 1973-74. The 224 acres of Army property was given to the county at no charge in two installments, the first in 1974 with the transfer of 161 acres when the site was first decommissioned and then in 1984 when the county acquired 63 acres.
The park hosts 250,000 visitors annually.
