The Hackettstown Sand Bar

For much of the twentieth century, the Hackettstown Sand Bar — the town’s Sandbar Beach — was where Hackettstown learned to swim. A public beach along the Musconetcong River, near what is now the Charles O. Hayford State Fish Hatchery, it was run by the town Recreation Commission with lifeguards, a snack bar, and a summer playground program. On a hot day, it was where the whole town went to cool off.

It was also where the town’s children took their Red Cross swimming lessons. In the summer of 1969, the Hackettstown Gazette counted 123 of them enrolled in a single session — beginners working through “heads under, everybody!” while the older swimmers earned their certificates in the river.

The instructor who directed that water-safety program was Miss Lenee Fiedler — Leonard and Helen Fiedler’s oldest daughter — a qualified Red Cross instructor, watching the same river the whole town swam in.

She had earned that chair the long way. As a little girl she took her own lessons here from Charles Morrison — “Chot” to the whole town — who stood on the cement dock with a foghorn, bellowing instructions across the water. It scared her so badly she ran out and wouldn’t go back. Years later she was standing in his place, running the same program — “with a different approach,” she says.

The water was deeper then, with the dams up, and children climbed the diving tower’s levels and jumped. The record the beach handed down with the job still amazes her: no one was ever lost in this water. On the packed afternoons, hundreds swam at once. She remembers recreation commissioner Nelson Hoyt walking down to her chair on one of those days — there’s no way you can keep your eye on all these people — and her answer: “Nelson, we’re doing our best.”

A public beach on the river was the kind of place a small town built its summers around: children through the long afternoons, families toward evening, the snack bar busy in between. Lenee had walked down from 227 Main Street as a girl, the way half the town’s children did; her mother had brought her here as a baby.

The end came in the middle of a summer day in 1969. Lenee was in the lifeguard chair when the telephone rang in the bathhouse — the Recreation Commission calling: water tests had come back showing contamination from upstream, and everyone had to leave the water. She got on the PA herself and cleared the beach, telling parents that children with open cuts should be seen by a doctor. “That was all we knew,” she says. For the rest of that summer the lifeguards still came every day — to guard a beach no one was allowed to enter. “It was absolutely gorgeous. The water was beautiful… and it never reopened for swimming, ever again.”

The town adapted the way small towns do: the next season, lessons moved to backyard pools volunteered by Hackettstown families. The Sand Bar stayed where it was — the access road unmaintained now, the bathhouse gone — and it was never an official swimming hole again. But the family never quite gave it up: years later, Lenee’s daughter January swam there often with her own two daughters and their dogs — a fourth generation in the same water. A piece of Hackettstown summer lived on the Musconetcong — and the lifeguard who cleared the beach that day has never stopped remembering it.