Just faster than the Coast Guard

that’s all a rumrunner boat had to be….

Prohibition was a wild and colorful time in New Jersey - especially where rumrunners thrived between the woods and the sea. A bootleggers boat had to only be faster than the coast guard and there was plenty of money to be made on illicit booze.

Hollow Pines seeks to recreate the excitement of that era, from the cedar stands, lakes and hunting shack of the Pines to the wetlands, the shellish, the bay, the seasonal excitement on the Island, and all the wonder and fear of the sea beyond it.

When the Volstead Act was ratified in 1919, New Jersey’s barrier islands were starting to bustle with its earliest stages of tourism. Earlier just a place where men came to fish and hunt, grand hotels and boardwalks were being built with thirsty patrons coming from New York and Philadelphia.

While these histories are well documented, there was another community that worked the fishing boats, the ferries and the new restaurants. They were carpenters, railway builders and baymen who thrived on the back bay, between the vast wooded pine forests and the shoreline.