Absegami: The Island Before the City

Before the hotels, before the boardwalk, before the casinos with their blinking promises, there was an island. A barrier island roughly ten miles long, dense with pine and cedar, laced with tidal creeks, its dunes raked by salt wind off the open Atlantic. The Lenni-Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking people who had lived along this coast for thousands of years, called it Absegami.

The word means something like little water, a reference to the shallow bay on the island's western shore, where the opposite bank sat close enough to see. The South Jersey branch of the Lenape were called the Unalachtigo, the people who live near the ocean. Each summer they moved onto the barrier islands to fish, gather shellfish, and harvest the marsh grasses.

Each autumn they returned inland to the forests for the hunting season. The island was not a permanent home but a seasonal one, threaded into a larger pattern of movement across the landscape. European settlers began occupying South Jersey in the sixteen hundreds.

An English landowner named Thomas Budd bought a large tract that included Absecon Island in sixteen ninety-five, though almost no one built on it, the island was too remote, reachable only by boat, its soil too sandy for farming. The first person to actually live there year-round was a farmer named Jeremiah Leeds, who built a cabin on the island in the late seventeen eighties. For the next seven decades, his descendants would be nearly the only inhabitants.

By eighteen fifty, fewer than ten dwellings stood on the entire island. The city that followed did not arise from the land itself. It was built by a railroad.