When James A. Bradley (1830-1921) is remembered, it's as the founder of Asbury Park and the name for Bradley Beach. There's a statue of him in the park across from Convention Hall.
But one of his many legacies is that he founded the Asbury Park Health Department in 1880. Then he personally bankrolled it, for ten years. That may be why Asbury Park dominates the early reports of the local boards of health of Monmouth County, posted by Rutgers on their web page, New Jersey Health Statistics from 1877 to 2000.
In 1880, after legislation was passed requiring every municipality in NJ to form its own board of health, the NJ Board of Health began including the reports of the local boards in their annual report.
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The reports of the Asbury Park Board of Health provide a first-hand look at the beginning of a well-funded and progressive local health department at the turn of the last century. They are especially insightful from 1888 to 1904, when they are as long as 53 pages, and include copies of inspection forms, ordinances, and, starting in 1896, photographs. Most of the annual reports of the other municipal departments are no more than a paragraph, or are absent - even those of Long Branch, the oldest Health Department in the County, established six years earlier in 1874.
The 1904 report includes a testimonial in the form of a Board resolution for Bradley, who was retiring after twenty five years as Asbury's “pioneer sanitarian”. Some of his “firsts” for the City: establishing the Department in 1880; starting utilities like public sewer (1881), drinking water (1886), municipal trash removal (1889), and street lighting (1888); and preparing for emergencies by establishing quarantine hospitals (1885).
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Here are some samples, pun intended, of these original materials that Rutgers has made so accessible for seeing how similar and how different Health Departments were, at the beginning.
Health Department (from reports in 1880, 1888, 1894, 1897, 1898, 1899)
When the first office opened in 1880 in Park Hall, formerly on the southeast corner of Main Street and Cookman Avenue, the Department had one inspector. By 1893, there was a “small corps” of inspectors supervised by an Executive Officer, something like today's Health Officer. They were assisted by police officers, who had been made “special sanitary inspectors” for enforcing nuisances (a common partnership for the time). A 62-page “Health Inspectors' Guide” for training recruits is included in the 1890 report by the State Health Department. When Asbury Park changed from a borough to a city in 1897, the department relocated to the new municipal offices at Bond St. and Mattison Av.
The Board passed ordinances and issued permits to protect the public health. One example: according to Images of America: Township of Ocean, blocks of ice were cut from ponds and stored in warehouses, then delivered to homes, restaurants and hotels to keep food from spoiling during the summer. On March 18th, 1885, the Asbury Board required a permit to sell ice in the borough to stop it being harvested from local ponds where the shoreline had “received deposits of garbage and night soil”. The application to sell ice in the 1897 report lists the lakes that were banned for harvesting: Deal, Sunset, Wesley, Fletcher, Sylvan, and Heroy's Pond. Pictures of the “stagnant pools and polluted ponds” are on page 238 of the 1898 report.
In January 1889, staff began recording “systematic meteorological observations and records” that were published in the NJ Weather Service Bulletin. In 1898 the Department bought their first camera. There is a picture of a weather station at the beach on page 161 of the 1899 report, and on page 163, a woman standing in a path cleared of snow that was well over her head. They had taken a picture of the Great Blizzard of 1899. It dropped 34 inches of snow in Cape May that February, and is still the highest single-storm snowfall recorded in NJ, according to David Robinson, the State Climatologist. The Health Department reported that 21.9” inches of snow fell in Asbury Park from February 11th to the 13th, 1899.
Sewer System (from reports in 1881, 1884, 1893)
In 1881, nine miles of sewers were completed of the “first sewer system on the NJ Shore”. Asbury's sewer pipes were built separately from storm water pipes, which was an innovation for its time. This was when most cities built what are now called Combined Sewer Overflow systems - and there are still almost 700 of these CSO outfalls discharging raw sewage into the Hudson-Raritan Estuary when it rains.
According to “Images of America: Asbury Park”, the original outfall “ran under the beachfront at the foot of Wesley Lake.” It's described in the 1884 report, “Notes of Popular Health Resorts” by the State Board of Health: “intermediate close tanks near the shore [that] receive the fouled liquids from the sewers, and then at night, or at proper intervals, empty into the sea with the outgoing tide.” But the State seems uneasy with Asbury's “trust to the ocean as the great reservoir”. The report points to an unnamed city where a storm had overwhelmed a similar system and sent “down to the sea-beach of the city enough of cut lemons and other floating material to convince observers that at that point it would not do to conduct the foul materials into the sea.”
Drinking Water (from reports in 1880, 1885, 1886, 1887, 1897, 1899, 1900)
Bradley founded the city “out of a wilderness” in 1871. For fourteen years, residents drank water from their own shallow wells, polluted by privy-vaults (outhouses) and wooden cesspools. In July of 1885, the Neptune Water Works Company, formed in 1880, began operating the borough's new community water supply. Seven artesian wells were drilled as deep as 420 feet into the Mount Laurel-Wenonah aquifer (Figure 14). A 12-foot-diameter water tank stored 100,000 gallons on a tower that was 125 feet high. By the summer 1899, the system supplied 800,000 gallons of drinking water, and water meters were installed in 1900.
The Department continued to sample, and when necessary, condemn the wells of buildings that had not connected to public water. In 1886, eight of fourteen wells were “properly closed” after “the chemist's results [were] compared with the Inspector's observations”. The 1889 report has pictures of a polluted well on page 183 and the Health Department Laboratory on page 153.
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