The Doctor and the Railroad

A physician in the mainland town of Absecon named Jonathan Pitney believed in the healing properties of sea air. He had watched his patients recover faster in summer, when they could breathe off the ocean. He was also, by all accounts, a shrewd man with an eye for land values.

In the early eighteen fifties, Pitney began lobbying Philadelphia investors with a vision: build a railroad to the barrier island, develop it as a health resort, and make a great deal of money doing so. He found his partner in Richard Osborne, a civil engineer from Philadelphia who drew up a city plan for the island, streets named after the states, avenues running toward the ocean, the centerpiece a grand hotel. The state of New Jersey chartered the Camden and Atlantic Railroad in eighteen fifty-two.

Workers graded the track across the flat South Jersey pinelands, through cedar swamps, over tidal creeks. On July first, eighteen fifty-four, the first train made the run from Camden across the river from Philadelphia to the new terminal on Absecon Island. Six hundred passengers were aboard.

The ride took four hours and left them dusted in engine soot. When they arrived, the United States Hotel was still half-finished, but a reception was held anyway. Atlantic City incorporated that same year, on May first.

Within months, real estate prices on the island multiplied. The train could put a Philadelphia office worker on the beach in under two hours. A city that had not existed a decade earlier was being built at speed, plank by plank, from sand.