Lost Tucker's Island

Anna Linda shouted, "I'll have to go to that one-room schoolhouse! We'll be living in a cramped and stinky houseboat. It's not fair! I want to stay here in town. I don't want to go to that horrible deserted island!"The island Anna Linda was upset about was called Tucker's and was only five miles offshore from her hometown in New Jersey. It was 1920, and ten-year-old Anna Linda and her older sister, Elizabeth, had to move with their parents. Dad was a clammer and needed to make a better living. Tucker's was originally called Sea Haven and was a small tourist attraction in the nineteenth century. Visitors would travel by boat to stay in the hotels and cottages. After the causeway was built to Long Beach Island, people stopped sailing to Tucker's and went by car to vacation on the larger island.Tucker's became a lonely place with abandoned hotels and windswept empty shores. It had no bridge and no roads, but it did have a lighthouse and a Coast Guard Station. The two sisters traveled over the bay with Mom and Dad with very low expectations. They missed their friends, their school, and the town of Tuckerton where they could walk to everything. Little did they dream of the adventures that awaited them. Life was hard on this desolate island, but they learned to weather its challenges. Years later, they were saddened by its demise.

-- Kathleen Donnelly