Jersey Shore Magazine
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1495076
j e r s e y s h o r e • S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 37 continued on page 38 Digging The Point Pleasant Canal – Ninety Years of Dreaming and Planning The Point Pleasant Canal first connected Barnegat Bay with the Manasquan River in 1925, almost ninety-eight years ago. The two mile ditch had been the dream of local planners since the early part of the nineteenth century—and it became a nightmare shortly after its opening. In 1833, the New Jersey Assembly authorized the creation of the Manasquan River and Barnegat Bay Canal Company to connect the bay to the Manasquan River at a location very close to the present-day Canal. Nothing came of this plan or similar ones proposed periodically through 1911. A 1903 plan, for instance, called for eight bridges and a railroad draw through what is now Twilight Lake in Bay Head and Lake of the Lilies, Little Silver Lake, and Lake Louise in Point Pleasant Beach. Its cost was estimated at $155,000. com- pared to the $5,000. estimate for the original proposal seventy years before. In 1912, proponents shifted their interest to the site that was even- tually selected. The beachfront area had been developed to an extent that the original proposed route was now impractical. Four years prior, in 1908, the state began dredging its portion of the Intercoastal Waterway, a channel north from Cape May. Although an initial attempt to have the Canal included as part of the Waterway had failed, by 1915 the project was finished north to Bay Head, and the state purchased the right-of-way for what was to become the Canal. With an initial $30,000. appropri- ation from the legislature, the Canal was finally begun in 1916 with dredg- ing through the Bay Head marshland. A half mile was dug before the United States entered World War I, and con- struction was suspended. Progress resumed in 1918 after emergency defense funding was secured. For seven more years, exca- vation proceeded at a snail's pace because the state would make only The Manasquan Inlet today. Tom Lynch / AngryFishGallery.com