Resident Eugene Klein explains his exhibit on the history of Stone Harbor’s train travel and development.

Stone Harbor Museum President Nancy Cope said that trains are always a big draw for history buffs, and that’s why they asked resident Eugene Klein to apply his technical skills to an exhibit that gathers those memories together and demonstrates the impact train travel had on the development of Stone Harbor.

“It’s interesting. It all had to do with transportation,” Cope said.
Klein’s exhibit documents Stone Harbor’s era of train travel through photographs, timelines and diagrams, which are displayed on a storyboard in the museum’s main exhibit hall among other records of the town’s colorful past.
In the late 19th Century, real estate speculators began arriving on Cape May County’s undeveloped barrier islands with an eye toward capitalizing on warm sand and sea breezes. But even though Stone Harbor, like so may seaside towns, offered all the natural beauty buyers wanted, a key problem remained. How did you get them there?

There were few options--boats or trains, and neither was particularly convenient. Stone Harbor was purchased in 1907 by the South Jersey Realty Company for $90,000, and the town’s growth from the development of inns and cottages are documented at the museum.
The town’s earliest guests arrived via the West Jersey railroad line from Townsend’s Inlet and traveled along what is now Second Avenue.
Passengers then disembarked at The Pennsylvania Railroad Plaza at 88th Street, and much of the town’s earliest development occurred near there, Cope said.

According Klein, rail service from the south was spotty at best. Storms frequently wreaked havoc with the tracks, and visitors to Stone Harbor were forced to make several time-consuming train changes to reach their destination.
As the town developed a movement grew to tie the island directly to the mainland, first by road and next by rail. New Jersey Governor dedicated the new Stone Harbor Boulevard in 1911, and by 1921, Mr. L. Robert Lewis was operating a tiny railroad company from a station on 96th Street. That spurred the development of the southern side of town, Cope said.
Train travel—once critical to the town’s development—was short lived here, however. Transportation in America was soon moving quickly along another track with the invention and mass production of the motorcar, and the last passenger car pulled into Stone Harbor in 1932.
Freight continued for a bit longer, but eventually was discontinued in 1953 after the Garden State Parkway was extended to Cape May.

“There’s no sign of it, now,” Klein said. The train tracks were all taken up for use as scrap metal during World War II, but the legacy endures.
An hour with the train exhibit at the Stone Harbor Museum will have you imagining a world long since gone. And if you squint toward the wetlands to the north of Stone Harbor Boulevard, you might even be able to conjure the steam rising from the engines that brought progress to town.

The Stone Harbor Museum, 235 93rd Street, is open 1-4 p.m. Sundays through June 16, when it operates with extended summer hours.
There history buffs can learn about the development of Stone Harbor through photographs, documents, oral histories, and DVD’s that depict highlights of the town’s beginnings.
Klein’s train exhibit will soon be published in book form and will be sold at the museum. For information call 609-368-7500 or visit stone-harbor.nj.us/museum.asp.