The "Seven Presidents" and the New Jersey Shore
A Fascinating Sidelight of Monmouth County History
In 1869, US President Ulysses Simpson Grant declared Long Branch, NJ the nation’s “Summer Capital”. He established a residence in the area, spending summers in Long Branch and Elberon, an unincorporated enclave of the city, and began a tradition continued by six subsequent presidents (not all consecutive), who escaped from Washington (notorious for its bad weather as well as its bad ethics and politics) and vacationed and recuperated in the balmy sea breeze. The presidents varied in quality, from decent, liberty-minded statesmen like William McKinley to stolen election recipient Rutherford Birchard Hayes and the notorious power luster and white supremacist, New Jersey’s own Woodrow Wilson. Grant, Hayes, James Abram Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, and Wilson came to be known (at least locally) as the Seven Presidents.
Around this time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a stretch of beach in Long Branch was the site of Nate Salisbury’s Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Salisbury co-managed and co-owned the spectacular with Buffalo Bill Cody himself. The show featured Cody, Annie Oakley, and Chief Sitting Bull. When not on one of its many tours, Long Branch was the show’s home. According to Wikipedia (so it’s gotta be true), Elberon was sort of a precursor to Hollywood at the time, home of many theatrical shows and their performers. Salisbury invested in nine sealed cottages in Long Brach in 1900. Known as The Reservation, the cottages stood near the site of his and Cody’s gun-slinging Wild West revue. One building, Navaho Lodge, survives.
The site of The Reservation and Nate Salsbury’s Buffalo Bill Wild West Show is now Seven Presidents Oceanfront Park. Part of the Monmouth County Park System, the park includes a mile-long stretch of beach, notable shore wildlife, a snack bar, showers, a volleyball court, and a skate park. The county park is open every day; some amenities (including the snack bar) are only open during the summer season. Navaho Lodge has been relocated to a site many yards from its original location and is now an Activity Center for the park system (and, if accompanying signage is accurate, a residence for park rangers). (For the record: as a radical individualist/capitalist, I do not support the idea of government parks—but in the context of this culture, with government’s near monopoly on parks and government forcing me to pay for them, I have no reservations about visiting them. Besides: To paraphrase the late, great PJ O’Rourke, there are many more expensive and destructive things a government can do than run a county park.) The park’s entrance is at the intersection of Ocean and Joline Avenues, right before Joline ends and New Jersey State Route 36 continues north onto Ocean.
About a mile or so south, on the west side of Ocean Avenue in Elberon, is a castlelike structure known as the Church of the Presidents. All seven attended this Episcopal church during shore sojourns. It is the only remaining structure from their era directly associated with them.
Postscript: Garfield’s Final Destination
On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield twice on a sweltering summer day in Washington. Garfield had been president for less than four months. Reportedly, Guiteau was incensed about being rejected for a job in the Garfield administration, believed he was essential to Garfield’s successful election campaign (and not recognized as such), and thought assassinating Garfield was the only way to end an internecine conflict in the Republican Party. (Unlike other political assassinations in the United States, I can find no evidence there was anything mysterious about Garfield’s assassination.) At that time, Joseph Lister’s pioneering antisepsis work was widely used in his native United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the consensus among US medical professionals of the day, including Garfield’s doctors, was to reject Lister’s ideas. (So much for the consensus of US medical professionals.) Ergo, the doctors fecklessly probed Garfield’s more serious wound (one bullet grazed his arm), trying and failing to extract the bullet. Their fingers were not sterilized, and the possibly nonfatal wound became infected. (Many doctors today believe Garfield would have survived the assassination attempt had the American doctors of that time already adopted Lister’s techniques.) The doctors decided the cooler climate of Garfield’s seaside resort, as well as his view of the beach and ocean, would be conducive to Garfield’s recovery, or at least his comfort. So, an emergency railroad track was laid to transport Garfield to Franklyn Cottage, his oceanfront residence in Elberon.
Garfield never recovered from the infection and died in his bedroom in Franklyn Cottage on September 19, 1881, exactly two months short of his fiftieth birthday.
Today, one can turn east from Ocean Avenue onto Garfield Road, drive several yards into an alley-like cove of residences, and turn north onto Ocean Court. Aside a modern beach house, at Ocean Court and Garfield Terrace, a tombstone-like monument commemorating the site of Garfield’s death sits where Garfield’s bedroom used to be. The rails of the emergency railroad track used to transport him to Elberon were torn up and used to construct the nearby Garfield Tea House, which still stands. (Garfield Road is not to be confused with nearby Garfield Avenue, one of several streets in the area named after the Seven Presidents.)
Seven Presidents Oceanfront Park, Church of the Presidents, the Garfield Tea Room, and the Garfield death site monument are just a few of several fascinating historic curiosities in Monmouth County available for those residents and visitors who know where to look.
Thanks to my local Lyft driver Phil for informing me about much of the above and to my friend and mentor Scott Holleran for his many acclaimed and award-winning pieces that inspired this.
Thank you for this 'local' history lesson, about which I was aware. To think this northern Jersey shore location (not Atlantic City) was a precursor to Hollywood is a new insight. Good & interesting piece.