From Shell Pile to Sea Breeze: NJ’s Most Desolate Places

From Shell Pile to Sea Breeze: NJ’s Most Desolate Places

“Shell Pile is named for the great heaps of oyster shells stacked outside the packing sheds. This is a community of about 1,000 Negroes living in wooden barracks erected on stilts over the salt marshes. Negroes here live their own lives in their own way, and present a united and rather hostile front from the rest of the world. Strange whites are not welcomed in Shell Pile.”—WPA guidebook to New Jersey, published in 1939 The Maurice River in Cumb…