The Story of Small Point

On the Anniversary of The Ash Wednesday Storm of March 5, 1962, a Memory of What the Waves Swept Away.

Mr. White’s sausage, Jersey tomatoes and scrambled eggs, served on a Small Point plate.

A few months ago, I was scrolling through Instagram and paused on a post from the Long Beach Island newspaper, The Sandpaper (a thinly veiled penny-saver). The Catholic sisters of the Maris Stella Retreat & Conference Center were selling an oceanfront portion of their property in the town of Harvey Cedars for $21 million.

As a Catholic who grew up spending summers in my parents’ house in Harvey Cedars, Maris Stella was known to all. We attended mass at the property’s old boathouse every Sunday, where I sat and stared out the window at boats, birds, and a strange small island with a house that seemed to be abandoned. Later, in my teen years, we would take the boats out there to party. As a beach-badge checker, I skipped checking badges on the stretch of beach where the nuns sat out sunning themselves, some with their wimples and habits, some of the more modern sisters in suits. No need to check badges there; God was not required to pay for beach access in Harvey Cedars.

It seemed wrong to me that the sisters would sell their property. Many people were up in arms about it. Long Beach Island is so changed today. Where there once were small family homes, now there are large family estates. The LBI of my youth is unrecognizable. And soon it will be less so, with ten homes built on the Maris Stella ocean-front property, replacing scenery that has remained the same since the mid-twentieth century.

The former boathouse, one of the remaining buildings from Small Point, now Maris Stella.

---

Maris Stella wasn’t always a summer haven for nuns needing their day in the sun. I learned about the property’s history—as I learned so many things at the shore—from an old lady at a yard sale.

The yard sales that sprouted every weekend on the island were my education in “stuff.” There were five kids in my family and I learned early on that if you wanted quality time with my parents you had to get up early. By 7 a.m. on Saturdays we were out driving in the car, treasure hunting up and down the island, stopping in towns with names like Surf City, Ship Bottom, Brant Beach and Beach Haven. There, people whose families had settled on LBI many decades ago put their possessions out on their front yards and sold them for a quarter. Yard sales, tag sales, rummage sales—whatever you called them, we partook. And, through my rummaging, I began to learn both about the history of objects and the island.

LBI was particularly magical for this, as the people holding the sales were a mix of seamen living in cedar cottages and Victorian homes and wealthier families enjoying their first modern vacation homes. Back in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, homes on Long Beach Island weren’t the vinyl-siding-clad monsters of today, houses the size of big-box stores. The architecture was a beautiful mix of the old grand homes, fisherman’s shacks, early-20th-century cottages and the mid-century modern beach homes.

I uncovered all sorts of curious prizes at the yard sales: early-19th-century shadow boxes; 18th-century polychrome painted tea pots; monumental mid-century sgraffito vases by Fantoni; a reverse-painted, diamond-finish, woodland scene lamp by Handel. Later, I’d look them up at the library or even later via Google. These were the times of my young life. Treasure hunting.

---

Small Point Plates

On one of my many trips up and down the island yard-saling, my dad at I stopped at the home of Roberta, a painter. There could be no greater yard sale than that of an artist; their creative minds and lack of funds made for excellent stuff. Roberta’s house did not disappoint. While looking at a table of dishes and glasses, I noticed a box under the table. It was filled with plates, the heavy early-20th-Century kind. There were also soup spoons and dessert forks. Upon closer inspection, I realized they all had one thing in common, the words “Small Point” were printed or etched upon them.

“I bought them at a yard sale from the sisters,” Roberta explained to me. I must have given her a quizzical look, because she went on. “The sisters of the Maris Stella,” she added, “before the mansion washed away.”

I remembered hearing stories of a Harvey Cedars mansion that had been destroyed in the great storm of 1962—a hurricane that wreaked havoc on LBI. After the storm, I heard the nuns bought the property where the mansion had stood, along with the surviving buildings from the estate.

I could see the Maris Stella from where we were standing. I had purchased items from the nuns at Maris Stella yard sales. But those things mostly amounted to modern stuff: Pyrex pie plates and a fondue pot. Roberta had purchased these items fifty years earlier after the sisters bought the estate from the son of the previous owner. It seems they had an early yard sale in which they sold quite a few of the previous owner’s worldly possessions. Roberta had bought the plates, cups, knives, spoons and forks from them. She said she had resold the cups and saucers already.

Box in hand, I went home to investigate. I had a mystery to solve.

---

The image of Frederick P. Small that accompanied his obituary in The New York Times.

Frederick P. Small

During the later years of my parents lives, when I took Dad out alone to give Mom a break, we would bring all our yard-sale finds home and show them to Mom. We’d put it all on the dining room table, presenting each item one at a time and she’d ooh and ahh and make us feel like we’d found true treasure. I’d offer her first dibs on items and the Small Point plates were no different.

But first, I searched the Internet for any information about Small Point in Harvey Cedars. I found an article from The Beachcomber, another island newspaper, now defunct. It talked about Small Point and its namesake owner, Frederick P. Small.

According the article’s author, Neal J. Roberts, he learned of Frederick P. Small from the book Two Centuries of History on Long Beach Island by John Bailey Lloyd. Small was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1875. After learning shorthand while still in his teens, he became the official stenographer for the Maine House of Representatives and from there he went to business school.

At 21 years old, he began an entry level position at the American Railroad Express Company (which became American Express) and rose to vice-president by 1912. He became the company’s president in 1923 and guided it through the good times in the Roaring Twenties and the terrible times of The Great Depression. This is how Small got rich.

Lloyd wrote, “If Long Beach Island has been the vacation retreat of some fascinating characters over the years, none is remembered with greater fondness and admiration than Frederick P. Small of Harvey Cedars.”

It seemed that Frederick P. was a bit of a Gatsby type. On his ten-acre lot there were greenhouses where he grew his prized orchids and flower beds filled with copious blooms. And Small was generous with his gardens. The property was open to the public. An article in the 1952 Star-Ledger—now also a defunct newspaper—read:

Here, in the exclusive, expensive borough of Harvey Cedars, visitors may tour the lush botanical gardens of the Frederick P. Small estate which is planted with row on row of flowers and shrubs native to the Jersey coast. There’s no charge—and the entire estate is threaded with yellow gravel roads so that visitors may view all the flower beds without leaving their cars.

If Small was a Gatsby sort with the public, he was also modest and frugal in his personal habits. He collected stamps and took public transportation. He took the bus from his home at 885 Edgewater Avenue in Ridgefield, New Jersey, to his LBI estate in the town of High Point (now called Harvey Cedars). Amex didn’t survive the Depression by accident.

The Small estate in Ridgefield, NJ.

Small knew how to throw a party. In the August 11, 1939, edition of one of my father’s favorite papers to get on the island, The Atlantic City Press—now also defunct—a headline read, “Frederick P. Small Entertains 500 Guests.” Apparently, there were sports, swimming, boating, pistol practice, shuffle board, bowling, lunch, dinner, moth-boat races, and pistol contests between police forces from Ridgefield and Toms River. (if you don’t want party crashers, invite the police forces from several towns for a pistol contest.)

Dinner for 163 included shrimp, clams and a large lobster for each guest. After dark, guests were treated to color moving pictures of scenes from the estate’s seven acres of flowers, the government inlet project at Barnegat City (this was the original name of Barnegat Light) and scenes taken at that year’s World’s Fair. May I remind you this is 1939, the year the first major color films, like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, were presented to the world. Small spent money where it counted.

---

But, you’re wondering, where do the plates come in? Well, a long, long time ago wealthy families had family crests and because they were wealthy they also had lots of stuff; and just so everyone knew it was their stuff, those crests went everywhere, including on their china and cutlery.

When the industrial revolution and capitalism came along, families with no lineage became wealthy. They didn’t have crests, but they did have estates. And so they could name those estates grand things like Tara and Pickfair and put those names on their stuff, especially their many sets of fancy china and silverware.

One of the remaining buildings from the Small Point estate, now Maris Stella.

So, you see, Frederick P. Small named his summer home Small Point and put that name on his plates. After he died in 1958, he left his estate to his daughter Katherine, his son Frederick A. Small and the property caretaker, Bill Lange. Katherine’s death quickly followed her father’s and Fred Jr. and Lange decided to sell the estate to Mother Ellen Marie McCauley.

Mother Ellen Marie didn’t care about the name Small Point. The sister named the new estate the Maris Stella, a much more fitting name for “the reflection on the sacredness of creation” that was supposed to take place at the property. And so, she sold the plates at a yard sale to Roberta, from whom I would buy them fifty years later.

And then, just three years later, on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 1962, Long Beach Island was hit by the storm of ‘62.

A scene from Long Beach Island after the storm of 1962. Internet photo.

It was a five day hurricane, one of the ten worst storms of the 20th Century in the United States. And just like that the mansion at Small Point and everything in it—the glory of Mainer Frederick P. Small, the savior of American Express—vanished without a trace.

Except for the plates.

Odds and Ends…

Everleigh, the elegant cocktail bar started by Michael Madrusan and the late Sasha Petraske in the Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne, in 2011, has closed its doors. Madrusan had worked for Petraske at Milk & Honey when he lived in New York. The Eveleigh brought Petraske’s precise school of cocktail-making to Australia. The bar won several awards over the year and, in 2017, put out the book A Spot at the Bar. With the closing, and previous closures of The Varnish in L.A. and Milk & Honey in London, the only remaining Petraske-school bars that remain in operation (Little Branch, Dutch Kills, Attaboy, Seaborne and the barroom at Wm. Farmer and Sons) are all in New York … The James Beard Foundation announced the six recipients of its 2025 America's Classics Awards last week. They include Sullivan’s Castle Island in Boston, Gaido's in Galveston, Dooky Chase in New Orleans, Lucky Wishbone in Anchorage, AK, The Pioneer Saloon in Ketchum, ID and Lem’s Bar-B-Q in Chicago… Shakespeare & Co., the independent New York book store chain, will close its location on the Upper West Side. Its other locations will remain in business. The chain began in 1983. A previous UWS location was famously featured in the film “When Harry Met Sally.”… Gard’s, an old Milwaukee saloon on W. Burleigh Street, will resume serving its famous Friday night fish fries this weekend. The bar’s dining room has been closed since Covid. The building has a long history as a bar, sailing under various names, and a saloon has stood on the corner lot since at least the 1850s… Fred’s World Famous Burgers, a corner bar and eatery in Burlington, WI, is worth a stop to sample said hamburgers. Fred’s, in business since 1980 (though it looks older), uses beef from a local butcher and a custom mix of seasoning to create a solid tavern-style burger. All for $7 for a quarter-pound cheeseburger; $10 for a half-pound.

---

Robert is back next week with lots of travel and cocktail content! 👏👏👏