Shoal Harbor, Intersection of Port Monmouth Road & Main Street, Belford, Monmouth County, NJ

Significance: The Shoal Harbor fishing community is one of the last remaining traditional fisheries in New Jersey and the last such community on Raritan Bay. The community is a distinctive, vernacular built environment constructed by its users and directly embodied the "baymen's" ethos. In the face of the inherent unpredictability of fishing as a profession, the fishermen have adapted their built environment to reflect this uncertainty, while simultaneously creating a continuity of methods and materials. Belford, historically the bay's principal finfishing port, retains the enduring "baying" tradition and exhibits the same basic methods and means of survival that accompanied the beginning of the commercial fishing industry in the 1870s. While the numbers, both of fish and of fishermen, have dwindled in the last 30 years, the tradition and physical evidence of the fisheries remain at Shoal Harbor.
Survey number: HABS NJ-1237
Building/structure dates: ca. 1873 Initial Construction