Today, an adventure pal and I set off down the Black Horse Pike, then 559 (my favorite stretch of backroad in South Jersey, to Somers Point for lunch at the diner, followed by a visit to the O.C.H.S. Museum in the Library Community Center Complex on 17th Street.
After admiring the absolutely gorgeous white Easter dresses of the turn of the century and the many other items of interest, not least of which where the switchboard and collection of telephones, I found a beautiful postcard of the Sindia and the mast on the beach that I remembered from my own childhood. The Sindia went aground in December of 1901. Many households in Ocean City had collections of ceramics from the cargo which washed ashore in crates and was retrieved by the citizens. A good deal of it is in the Ocean City Museum collection now.
When I was a child, a portion of the mast was still visible sticking up about 8 or 10 feet from the sand down the 17th Street end of the beach. Sea life always held a place of mystery and fascination in my imagination, not least because of that mast and the ship buried beneath the sand, but also because of Scott Storage, next door to my Grandmother' house on Asbury Avenue. There were many ships mastheads and other paraphernalia in storage there, ships' wheels, for example. And I had been the kind of child who read voraciously from the treasure my mother made available to me of classics like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.
Also, you may recall a tv series called Adventures in Paradise that ran from 1959 to 1962, starring Gardner McKay as a sailboat captain who went from island to island in the Pacific solving crimes and ferrying mysterious clients. I was in love with him!
Today, Friday, March 16, 2018, the main exhibit was beautiful and unimaginably intricate Easter dresses from the Victorian period. The more you know, the more interesting thing are, and so, knowing that my grandmother (the one who lived in Ocean City) and her mother made a living as seamstresses, has always made clothing more interesting to me than its uses. I used to make all my own clothes at one time. My great-grandmother was listed in the census as a dressmaker when she was 16, in an age when all clothes were made by individual people.
The cutwork and beading and detailing of those Victorian dresses spoke to the eye straining, backbreaking labor of immigrant women who worked from sunrise to dark, seven days a week, to eek out a pittance to let them live on. Still, the dresses are a monument to their effort and creativity, as well as to the confinements and hampered lives of women of that time. Those corsets - that delicacy of cloth, a woman could hardly move!
From the museum, through the library! I found a book, Scenic road trips through New Jersey, on the sale shelf for $1. What a bargain!
But again, I had to marvel at how little is ever said about South Jersey other than the seashore. Has no one ever heard of Greenwich, Bridgeton, Salem? Still, it is a pretty book.
1735 Simpson Avenue, Ocean City 609-399-1801 is the address and phone number of the O.C.H.S.Museum
and the staff wants you to know about:
SUNDAY BRUNCH BUFFET
Historic Houses of Ocean City
fundraiser
April 15, 2018 12:30 Clancy's by the Bay, Somers Point, NJ, Tickets $25
I find this time of year especially enjoyable at the seashore - no traffic, free parking right at the foot of the boardwalk at 9th Street, and I am not a beach person, so the cold doesn't bother me. Today was sunny and bright and delightful!
I bought 2 postcards in the gift shop, one of the ship, the Sindia, and one of Fralinger's Salt Water Taffy to send my brother in West Virginia in honor of our shared childhood at Grandmom's in Ocean City, NJ. Also, Grandmom's brother, Yock, used to work at the postoffice and any post cards that came in with postage but no addresses, he would put our address (in Philadelphia) on it so we got mysterious greetings from total strangers all the time! He was a prankster as well as a postal employee.
Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
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