170 Ocean Boulevard

Overview

There stands a three story stone house. Its original portion as seen in the basement foundation is believed to have been a stone farm house, and probably dates back to about 1750. Uniform buttons of British Colonial officers were found in the 1980s, when its mud floored crawl space was excavated and deepened. Logically, the British troops staying there were from the 14th and 15th Regiments under Col. O'Hare, who marched along the shoreline from Belford in order to embark for Sandy Hook in 1778, to be joined there by General Clinton's army after the Battle of Monmouth.

During the War of 1812, there was a blockhouse on this land.

Numerous enlargements and renovations have produced the present floor plan. The house has a checkered past. It was once lost to a bank. Twice sold for $1 to pay a debt. Home to an apparition of a woman in a wedding gown walking the upper floors. Willed to a priest of the Society for the Preservation of the Faith. Subdivided into apartments and allowed to decay after the mid 1950s, before its total restoration in during the 80s and 90s.

There are Rum Runner tales from the 1920s. A tunnel that went down to the bay...

People: Point Lookout and fifty surrounding acres of the former Hooper Estate were acquired by Charles Sears in the late 1850s. Sears was a grain and flour merchant and a social and religious liberal who, in 1843 co-founded an experimental communal settlement, the North American Phalanx in Colts Neck. He served variously as its director, secretary, president, leading intellectual, and historian-author, until its collapse in 1856.

Land he retained there contained superior beds of marl (a green sand used as fertilizer), which Sears sold to farmers near and far. This led him to buy the waterfront acres at Point Lookout, where he dug and shipped marl along the eastern coast. he lived there and built a bayside landing reached by a downhill roadway named "Sears Landing Road" today. The old stone house still contains an 1896 painting by Charles Payne Sears.

Atlantic Highlands Green Map
updated 02/2010 by Atlantic Highlands New Jersey