An Old Seashore Memory

Back when I was a little boy of about eight years old, I remember taking a ride in a rather beat-up, old white station wagon with my dad and Grandfather to Cape May, New Jersey.

I do not recall why we went there - there are some fishing boats in which we might have gone fishing that day, perhaps from the nearby town of Bivalve, NJ.

Bivalve, located in the wide Delaware Bay at the end of the road through a salt marsh having towering sea grasses, is known for its oyster and clamming fleet and is named after the mollusks having two shells.

At the end of the low, rutted road through the tall grass, were mountainous piles of clam and oyster shells. I can still hear the raucous noise made by the sea gulls as they fought each other of any scraps of food they found.


Source

But I digress. My Grandfather spent his summers as a young boy in Cape May. Back then, the trek from Philadelphia to Cape May consisted of a ferry boat ride over the river to Camden, and a lengthy, sandy, single-track road through the pine barrens.


A road so narrow that when another car came along, the drivers would pull over, running half off the road, and at places where the rut was deep enough, they would watch that the roof of the car didn't strike the other one as it went past. I remember my grandfather saying a good trip meant only changing one flat tire along the way. Sometimes, he said, it was much easier and faster to take the five hour train ride. The train no longer goes to Cape May anymore.

Down among the fancy Victorian houses along the beach, my grandfather's mother had a small house a couple blocks from the bustle of the Roaring 20's beach.

My grandfather often went fishing, for Flounder, Sea Trout, and Striped Bass. Going by his stories, the fish must have been born weighing about 10 or 20 pounds or so, because he never seemed to catch anything smaller than that.

So, on that long ago day, while my Dad drove us to Cape May, my Grandfather told me the story about a concrete ship.

Even though I was a young boy, I was dubious. "A concrete ship? No way!" My Grandfather then related the strange tale of the S. S. Atlantus, built entirely from concrete.


The S. S. Atlantus was built by the Liberty Ship Building Company in Brunswick, Georgia and launched on December 5, 1918 and was the second concrete ship constructed in the World War I Emergency Fleet. It was built from concrete because of a war-time shortage of steel.

The war had ended a month earlier, but the Atlantus was used to transport American troops back home from Europe and later to transport coal in New England. In 1920, after a very brief career, the ship was consigned to a salvage yard in Virginia.

In 1926, the Atlantus was purchased by a Colonel Jesse Rosenfeld to be used as part of a ferry dock in Cape May, New Jersey for a proposed ferry between Cape May and Cape Henlopen, Delware. Concrete ships were thought to be ideal breakwaters.


So the Atlantus was repaired and towed to Cape May. On June 8th, a storm hit and the ship broke free of her moorings and ran aground 150 feet off the coast of Sunset Beach. Several attempts were made to free the ship, but none were successful.

The ferry idea was then put on hold for about 40 years and it wasn't until 1964 that the first ferry crossed the 17 mile expanse of the Delaware Bay.


A sign on the beach read:

S. S. Atlantus

Remains of experimental
concrete ship. One of twelve
built during World War 1.
Proven impractical after
several trans-Atlantic trips
because of weight.

Broke loose during storm
(June 1926) went aground.
Attempt to free her were futile.
You can see how the wreck slowly weathered (here.) I remember standing on the beach looking at the remains of the S. S. Atlantus in incredulity and wide-eyed wonder. I also remember a huge crowd of horseshoe crabs crawling up the beach to lay their eggs that evening.

I would give almost anything to be able to go back to that day and enjoy it once more.