From Shell Pile to Sea Breeze: NJ’s Most Desolate Places
“Shell Pile is named for the great heaps of oyster shells stacked outside the packing sheds. This is a community of about 1,000 Negroes living in wooden barracks erected on stilts over the salt marshes. Negroes here live their own lives in their own way, and present a united and rather hostile front from the rest of the world. Strange whites are not welcomed in Shell Pile.”—WPA guidebook to New Jersey, published in 1939
The Maurice River in Cumberland County was at one time the epicenter of the New Jersey oyster industry, processing much of the East Coast’s mollusks for packing plants and the food industry. In the late 1800s and again in the 1920s, the town saw eighty train cars a day carrying out oysters from the Delaware Bay. In 1955, the industry was at its peak, but in 1957, a
mysterious disease called MSX killed 90 percent of the oysters and clams that came out of the bay and adjoining rivers. This left many of the fishing villages belly up, beached, and left for dead. The population in the Port Norris area today (which includes Bivalve and Shell Pile) includes just nine year-round homes. With billions of clams and oysters giving up their calcium crusts to the shucking line, what, we wondered, ever became of the shells? We were also curious as to whatever became of the “1,000 Negroes” living in barracks on stilts that the WPA report described. Were their descendants still as hostile toward strange whites as the guidebook claimed they were in 1939? With these questions burning in our minds, we set out for the most extreme outer reaches of the New Jersey mainland in a quest to see for ourselves where the shells line the shores.
The first thing one notices when nearing the town of Shell Pile is the pungent stench of fish in the air. Currently, most of the oysters processed there actually come from the Long Island Sound, but the local industry is witnessing something of a comeback of the native Delaware Bay oyster population. Today there are about twenty-five oyster boats working the bay, though many local fishermen have turned to crabbing as a means of support. Not much of the scenery has changed since the WPA report, except for the lack of people (Negro or otherwise). In fact, not one resident was sighted during our entire expedition there. Heading out to the farthest point of Shell Pile, we spotted through our binoculars a huge white mountain along the shore to the northeast.
Leaving the main part of town (if you could say that there is a main part of town), we passed an apparently abandoned church. Upon closer inspection, we noticed a sign on the building that read services held occasionally. Judging from the boards on the windows though, we surmised that even this modest promise was an overstatement. We also noted a multitude of 
muskrat crossing signs along the side of the road on which we were traveling.
Following our noses, we turned down a small road that led us out through a seemingly infinite expanse of marsh grass. Finding ourselves in Port Norris, we passed the Miller Berry & Sons mattress company, a firm that makes coffin liners with the slogan, “The last mattress you’ll ever sleep on.” We were almost too distracted by the open back door of the 18-wheeler parked there, coffin mattresses stacked to its roof, to notice what lay just ahead of us. There, at the very outer limits of the New Jersey subcontinent, stood the mother of all shell piles.
It was a gleaming white mountain, at least four stories in height and covering several acres. Way at the top, a lone tractor operator jockeyed his front-loader back and forth, reshaping the mound, immersed in a cloud of laughing gulls. This, we thought, must surely be the fabled shell pile of legend, though we were actually now west of that town, near Egg Island. The mounds are quite breathtaking, and a robust stench of rancid clams is pervasive, even in the dead of winter.
After pondering the awesome spectacle of the shell pile for a while, we decided to continue on our journey up the Delaware Bay shore, eager to find what might still lie ahead for us. Like Mohammed seeking his mountain, reaching the piles of shells along New Jersey’s Delaware coast was for us an ardent, and almost mystical, adventure.
Coffins and Eelgrass
When we passed the Miller Berry coffin liner company on our way to finding the shell piles, we pondered why the firm was located in such a desolate spot . . . and then it came to us: eelgrass! Eelgrass, kelp, and those blackish balls of seaweed can be found anywhere along the coast of New Jersey. At the turn of the century, eelgrass brought high prices in the Philadelphia and Boston markets; funeral directors and coffin makers used it to fill the liners of coffins because of its resistance to bugs and to fire. Prisons and steamship companies also used eelgrass in making mattresses. Henry Ford even used it in the upholstery of his Model T. A blight in 1929 killed off most of the eelgrass growth, but you can still find it today mixed in among the discarded cigarette butts, beer cans,
and beach whistles along the high tide line.
Caviar in Bayside
Located farther northwest up the coast, the town of Bayside has the distinction of once being the caviar capital of New Jersey. In fact, the original name of the town was Caviar. Around the turn of the last century, sturgeon were plentiful in the Delaware; their eggs, known as roe, is the stuff of which caviar is made. These giant prehistoric egg bearers were so plentiful in fact that caviar merchants from Russia, long hailed as the caviar capital of the world, would come to New Jersey to buy their roe and then ship it home to Mother Russia for processing. Alas, though, like the oyster, the sturgeon population in the Delaware Bay declined sharply in the twentieth century, and the town of Caviar became known as Bayside.
See Ya in Sea Breeze!
After a brief sojourn to the all-too-normal-looking town of Fortesque, we set our sights on the most desolate spot in New Jersey, a little-known speck on the map called Sea Breeze. This town, we had heard, was a crusty, weatherworn village of stilt houses on the lonely windswept 
Delaware Bay shoreline. Like something out of an H. P. Lovecraft novel, this place supposedly had all the elements of a decrepit, dying shantytown. One would expect the inhabitants to have a swarthy froglike appearance, but to our surprise, we found a mysterious absence of residents (froglike or otherwise) to fill us in on the local history. The road to Sea Breeze carries you through marshland, with the occasional sod or shrubbery farm to be seen here and there. A curious feature of the landscape are the innumerable little reed mounds that dot the marsh for as far as the eye can see. Looking something like beaver huts only smaller, we wondered what they were. It was then that we remembered the omnipresent muskrat sand across the road to keep outsiders from getting any closer.
Trapped, we had no choice but to turn back and take the dog for another run. We sped off toward the other side of town (actually just the only other road in the town), with Cujo running alongside us, barking and growling. With our hellhound friend now a few hundred yards behind us, we felt brave enough to venture out of the Jeep, though not too far, and see what we could see. The Delaware Bay has a long history of beached shipwrecks due to the rough oceanlike currents, which can dredge up old wrecks after big storms. The beach (for lack of a better word) had the remains of an ancient barge that had washed ashore, its splintered boards strewn about like pick-up-sticks. Dead horseshoe crabs littered the shore.
A chill ran down my spine when to my left I saw another dog, wolflike in appearance, sneaking around the car. I slowly opened the door, jumped in, and yelled to Mark, who was taking photos along the beach, “You’re on your own, pal. I ain’t getting out.” Totally defenseless out on the sand, Mark froze as the dog ran over to him at a half gallop. In my mind, I saw Mark turning into a big ham steak ready to be devoured, but fortunately, the canine just sniffed around, then relieved himself on a nearby tuft of marsh grass. Satisfied that during our brief stay in Sea Breeze we had seen all that the town had to offer, or was willing to show, we set off on our long journey home. Our trip to the most desolate spot in New Jersey proved to be just what it promised. It seemed to us that the seldom seen inhabitants of Sea Breeze wanted to keep it that way.
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The preceding article is an excerpt from Weird NJ magazine, “Your Travel Guide to New Jersey’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets,” which is available on newsstands throughout the state and on the web at www.WeirdNJ.com. All contents ©Weird NJ and may not be reproduced by any means without permission.
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