History
The History of High Bar Harbor
HIGH BAR HARBOR
by John Bailey Lloyd
High Bar Harbor, a lagoon community of nearly 400 single family houses, lies surrounded on three sides by water and marshland just to the west of the borough of Barnegat Light. It is connected to Barnegat Light by a county road but it is not a part of that borough. It belongs to Long Beach Township. It acquired its name from the old High Bar Harbor Gunning Club on the site which, when it was incorporated in 1916, stood on a low sedge island in the bay. When Barnegat Light declared its independence from Long Beach Township in 1904, it neglected to include that island.
In 1943 the Army Corps of Engineers built a dike to restrict the strong flow of the tides in the Barnegat Inlet by stopping the southward drift. Within a few years, they found that they had inadvertently created thousands of acres of sand all around the former High Bar Sedge joining it to Long Beach Island. There was only one access road to the newly accreted territory. It was at 20th Street in Barnegat Light.
For a time the borough of Barnegat Light, seeking a source of potential tax revenue in future housing, tried to claim the new territory of High Bar Harbor as its own. The conflict was finally settled in favor of Long Beach Township and the courts declared 20th Street in Barnegat Light to be a county road. The way was now open for development and in 1953 builder Arnold Desiderio of Whipanny, New Jersey bought the whole tract and started High Bar Harbor which to this day is limited to 400 single family homes most of them on lagoons. It remains a part of Long Beach Township.
John Bailey Lloyd, noted LBI historian, author of "Eighteen Miles of History on LBI" and "Six Miles At Sea" died on July 23, 2003. The photograph above is by David Scull and appears on Mr Lloyd's publisher's web site at http://www.down-the-shore.com/johnmem.html .