The Name Underneath

For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the island had one name. Surveyors used it. Mapmakers used it. An 1834 state geological survey called it a wedge-like barrier island, five miles long, a mile across at its widest. An 1857 Cape May County survey divided its older and newer formations into Old Beach and Young Beach. A weekly newspaper ran under the masthead Five Mile Beach Journal (opens in new tab) from 1898 to 1923.

"Wildwood" is younger than that. It was a real estate brand.

On May 1, 1895, two merchants from Vineland — Philip Pontius Baker and his brother Latimer — incorporated a borough on the central tract of the island and named it after the dense maritime forest standing where they'd bought the land. Their company was called the Wildwood Beach Improvement Company. Within thirty years, they and the developers who came after them would clear most of the forest the name referred to.

For a while, the two names coexisted. Five Mile Beach was the island. Wildwood was the borough on the island. So were Anglesea and Holly Beach. The geography and the real estate didn't have to agree.

Then in 1922, county engineers filled in the Turtle Gut Inlet — the tidal channel that had separated the southern tip of the island from Two Mile Beach (opens in new tab) for as long as anyone had bothered to measure.

The two landmasses welded into one. The new island was no longer five miles long. The newspaper held its masthead one more year, and then it didn't.

The name had stopped being true.

We use it anyway.

The older name describes a place that no longer quite exists: an island with a closed inlet, a maritime forest mostly pulled up to make a street grid, a coastline that has gained roughly forty billion pounds of sand since 1950. Five Mile Beach Co. is the geography. Wildwood is what got built on top of it.

We named Five Mile Beach Co. after the part underneath.