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Community
Information
Family plots and rows of headstones in the cemetery of
Cold Spring Presbyterian Church, affectionately referred to as "Old Brick,”
provide an accurate and intriguing glimpse of nearly 300 years of Cape May
County history – men who sailed the high seas, war heroes who never returned,
families wiped out by typhoid and an amazing number of people descended for the
those who arrived aboard the Mayflower. In fact, there are more descendants
buried here than anywhere outside of Massachusetts.
From the days in the 1600s when settlers came to southern
New Jersey in search of whales to the 1950s when Chubby Checker put Wildwood on
the map with his Peppermint Twist, Cape May County has had a most interesting
past and an even more exciting future.
During the 1800s, several presidents summered in Cape May
often using Congress Hall as their Summer White House. John Phillips Sousa
played on the lawn of the grand hotel during the era when visitors arrived in
this seashore town by steamer and railroad. Located below the Mason Dixon Line,
the country has often had a southern feel to it and nowhere is that more obvious
than at the Chalfonte Hotel, a bastion of genteel summer living and hospitality
since the 1870s. Indeed, Cape May itself with its collection of authentic
Victorian homes, most of them built after the Great Fire of 1878, is on the
National Historic Register.
Cape May Court House is an historic town of century-old
homes, white-steepled churches and the old court house building, another
National Historic Landmark that gives the town its name and its identity.
One of the townships oldest homes, the John Holmes House c. 1755, houses the
Cape May County Museum, a repository of history and artifacts from the days of
Lenni Lenape tribe through the settlement of the Southern New Jersey area.
The county’s nautical history is documented by the Cape
May Lighthouse, built in 1859 at the entrance to Delaware Bay and the Hereford
Inlet Lighthouse constructed on the Atlantic Ocean side of the peninsula in
1874. Coastal fortifications from World War II including an artillery
bunker at Cape May Point and a fire control tower used to direct fire at enemy
targets off the coast are being restored.
Today, the county is dotted from Upper Township to Lower
Township, from Woodbine to the barrier islands with historic sites, old
churches, one-room schools and other bits of history that continue to weave an
interesting story for future generations.
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