The saga of Nat Ewer II and the Lucy Evelyn is as American as apple pie. It is a tale of setbacks and new beginnings, the chance to start again. When Nat and his wife, Betty, sat in a New Bedford, Massachusetts auction house in 1948 to bid on the ship, it was destiny that brought them together and would bind them for the rest of their lives. The Ewer’s son, Nat III, remembers how it was for his parents, his brothers, and sisters, and for himself with Lucy in their lives. The ship and the entire development that was centered on it was not just a business. It was family. “My father was very sentimental about the ship,” recalled Nat III. “[the day of the 1972 fire] It was hard to call him and tell him. That was his lifetime achievement.” A lifetime, indeed, was what it took to come to the radical idea of making a business out of a large ship pulled onto dry land. But it made simple and well-learned sense — Nat II needed a ship for those times when water flooded Long Beach Island, and the Lucy Evelyn needed land to stay away from the water that almost wrecked her several times over.
The three-masted schooner was built in Harrington, Maine in 1917 for Capt. Everett Lindsey of Machias for what would be 1.5 million dollars today. He chose the name to honor both of his little girls, Lucy, and Evelyn. And almost immediately she seemed to be a damned ship. The day of her maiden voyage, loaded and manned, was delayed for months at the last minute because of a sudden freeze that would trap her in the harbor for the entire winter. Things progressed in what became an all-too-familiar pattern of success and failure for her.
Her pearly white paint job gave her a glow in the Caribbean and Atlantic sun as she crisscrossed the ocean over the years, at times setting records for fastest crossings. But tribulation was never far from her horizon.
She nearly sank off Cape Cod and kept afloat in part because of her cargo of lumber. She grounded and lost her rudder another time. Later, a tug could not hold her on course, and she grounded yet again. Horrid weather supposedly blew her nearly to Africa just trying to round Cape Cod bound for New York from Maine. When she suffered the latest financially disastrous trip in early 1948, Capt. Lindsey had had enough. The Lucy Evelyn was tied up at port and he put her on the auction block in hopes of recouping his losses and making the crew of the last voyage whole. Nat Ewer II waited that day until her lot came up and made his move.
As Nat III remembers it, his father’s own professional trials and tribulations began about 1938 when he ran a little gift shop, he called the Sea Chest on the old Beach Haven boardwalk. When the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 roared by, devastating the Island, it also wiped out the last remnants of the once-lengthy boardwalk dating back to the 1890s and the heyday of the two grand old hotels, the Engleside and Baldwin. The Ewer’s Sea Chest was among those casualties marking the end of an era. “Everybody had good pickings on the beach,” Nat III recounted. “All the stuff that was in the gift shop was strewn 10 miles either side of it on the beach.”
At the auction in New Bedford in 1948, Nat II was amazed at the price being asked for this white schooner that was one of several possibilities he was determined to bring back to Beach Haven to finally solve his war on flood damage. In the end after some last-minute bidding drama, Nat and Betty were the new owners of a $1,550 cat-infested, old refrigerator-filled, paint-peeling derelict being sold to satisfy the final meager debts of a frustrated and defeated old Maine captain. For the poor ship and her plagued new owner, this was another chance at redemption for both to chart a new course toward a future together. It was a match made in heaven. But it would take a little longer to be realized.
They say history is cyclical. Eventually it will repeat. Lucy’s false start at her beginning before she could live her life on the sea was decided by fate to be the same way she would be reborn for her new life as a land-locked ship sailing the ocean of dreams brought on board by all her guests as she was packed, summer after summer, for years to come by excited families. After careful planning, the Lucy Evelyn was towed down from New England up through Little Egg Harbor Bay and anchored off Beach Haven the summer of 1948. It was then that everyone discovered her draft was deeper than they thought and the water near spots where Nat II thought she could be berthed was far too shallow. So, she sat just offshore, within sight of her future home, for months until channel dredging by Harvey Cedars’s own Reynold Thomas and the right high tide could bring her home where she would stand tall for twenty-four years. Tuesday morning, February 8, 1972 she was destroyed in a fire.
The three-masted schooner was built in Harrington, Maine in 1917 for Capt. Everett Lindsey of Machias for what would be 1.5 million dollars today. He chose the name to honor both of his little girls, Lucy, and Evelyn. And almost immediately she seemed to be a damned ship. The day of her maiden voyage, loaded and manned, was delayed for months at the last minute because of a sudden freeze that would trap her in the harbor for the entire winter. Things progressed in what became an all-too-familiar pattern of success and failure for her.
Her pearly white paint job gave her a glow in the Caribbean and Atlantic sun as she crisscrossed the ocean over the years, at times setting records for fastest crossings. But tribulation was never far from her horizon.
She nearly sank off Cape Cod and kept afloat in part because of her cargo of lumber. She grounded and lost her rudder another time. Later, a tug could not hold her on course, and she grounded yet again. Horrid weather supposedly blew her nearly to Africa just trying to round Cape Cod bound for New York from Maine. When she suffered the latest financially disastrous trip in early 1948, Capt. Lindsey had had enough. The Lucy Evelyn was tied up at port and he put her on the auction block in hopes of recouping his losses and making the crew of the last voyage whole. Nat Ewer II waited that day until her lot came up and made his move.
As Nat III remembers it, his father’s own professional trials and tribulations began about 1938 when he ran a little gift shop, he called the Sea Chest on the old Beach Haven boardwalk. When the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 roared by, devastating the Island, it also wiped out the last remnants of the once-lengthy boardwalk dating back to the 1890s and the heyday of the two grand old hotels, the Engleside and Baldwin. The Ewer’s Sea Chest was among those casualties marking the end of an era. “Everybody had good pickings on the beach,” Nat III recounted. “All the stuff that was in the gift shop was strewn 10 miles either side of it on the beach.”
At the auction in New Bedford in 1948, Nat II was amazed at the price being asked for this white schooner that was one of several possibilities he was determined to bring back to Beach Haven to finally solve his war on flood damage. In the end after some last-minute bidding drama, Nat and Betty were the new owners of a $1,550 cat-infested, old refrigerator-filled, paint-peeling derelict being sold to satisfy the final meager debts of a frustrated and defeated old Maine captain. For the poor ship and her plagued new owner, this was another chance at redemption for both to chart a new course toward a future together. It was a match made in heaven. But it would take a little longer to be realized.
They say history is cyclical. Eventually it will repeat. Lucy’s false start at her beginning before she could live her life on the sea was decided by fate to be the same way she would be reborn for her new life as a land-locked ship sailing the ocean of dreams brought on board by all her guests as she was packed, summer after summer, for years to come by excited families. After careful planning, the Lucy Evelyn was towed down from New England up through Little Egg Harbor Bay and anchored off Beach Haven the summer of 1948. It was then that everyone discovered her draft was deeper than they thought and the water near spots where Nat II thought she could be berthed was far too shallow. So, she sat just offshore, within sight of her future home, for months until channel dredging by Harvey Cedars’s own Reynold Thomas and the right high tide could bring her home where she would stand tall for twenty-four years. Tuesday morning, February 8, 1972 she was destroyed in a fire.
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