James Bradley and the Temperance Dream by the Sea
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
On the twenty-fourth of January, eighteen seventy-one, a New York brush manufacturer named James Adam Bradley bought roughly five hundred acres of scrubby oceanfront between two shallow lakes, Wesley Lake and Deal Lake. He had visited the Methodist camp meeting town of Ocean Grove just to the south, found it restful, and decided to build a resort of his own next door. Bradley was a self-made man, raised Catholic and later a devoted convert to Methodism, and the town he imagined would reflect that faith.
He named it after Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in America and the tireless circuit rider who spread the church across the young republic on horseback. Asbury Park was to be, above all, a temperance resort. Bradley wrote his convictions directly into the land.
The deeds to the lots he sold forbade the sale of liquor. For decades this was a dry town by design, a place he advertised for healthful relaxation and quiet reflection rather than rowdy pleasure. He laid out the streets himself, planted trees, and set an evening curfew.
He famously fussed over the smallest details of public conduct, discouraging hot dogs and, once he became mayor, frowning on bathing costumes he judged immodest. Whatever you make of his rules, Bradley understood the ocean was the attraction, and his greatest gift to the town was the boardwalk. He built a promenade running roughly a mile along the beach, and that wooden walk became the spine of everything Asbury Park would become.
The railroad from New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and Jersey City delivered summer crowds by the thousands, and the little temperance colony swelled into a grand Victorian resort of hotels, pavilions, and pageants. Bradley also helped develop the neighboring borough of Bradley Beach, which took his name. He lived to be ninety-one years old, dying in nineteen twenty-one, the fiftieth year of the city he had willed into existence out of sand.
Today his statue stands in Bradley Park, near the great Convention Hall, looking out over the water that made his fortune and his name. The dry laws are long gone, and the town he built has been through boom, ruin, and rebirth many times over. But every board of that boardwalk still traces the line one determined man drew in eighteen seventy-one.
