Qualla: Ventnor City, New Jersey

Ventnor City, New Jersey: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dclemens1971, CC BY 4.0. In January 1889, Mrs. S. Bartram Richards - wife of the secretary-treasurer of the Camden and Atlantic Land Company - was looking at a stretch of empty barrier-island sand south of Atlantic City and trying to think of a name for the new resort her husband's company wanted to build there. She had just returned from a trip to the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England, where she had been charmed by a Victorian seaside town called Ventnor. The name made her think of summers and oceans. The Camden and Atlantic Land Company took her suggestion. Fourteen years later, on March 17, 1903, the New Jersey Legislature formally incorporated Ventnor City, New Jersey - the only city in the United States to bear the name, lifted from a town of 5,000 people most Americans have never heard of.

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Image: Dclemens1971 | CC BY 4.0

Ventnor City, New Jersey: Between Two Other Cities

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smallbones, Public domain. Ventnor occupies the middle of Absecon Island, sandwiched between Atlantic City to the northeast and Margate to the southwest. The geometry shapes everything about the town. The boardwalk - 1.7 miles of weathered planks running along the Atlantic - is physically continuous with t...

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Image: Smallbones | Public domain

Ventnor City, New Jersey: Notable Roster

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnTPaff, CC BY-SA 4.0. For a city of nine thousand, Ventnor has produced an unusual cross-section of accomplishment, eccentricity, and at least one footnote of American cultural notoriety. Walter Evans Edge served two non-consecutive terms as Governor of New Jersey - 1917-1919 and again from 1944-1947 ...

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Image: JohnTPaff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ventnor City, New Jersey: A Sleepwalking Death

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Shoemaker and Ken McKeen of Sandpiper Studios, Inc., CC0. Among the strange entries in Ventnor's roster is the Reverend Charles Henry Parkhurst, the New York Presbyterian clergyman and reformer who in 1892 delivered the sermons that began the takedown of Tammany Hall corruption in Manhattan. Parkhurst spent his summers in Ventnor with h...

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Image: Robert Shoemaker and Ken McKeen of Sandpiper Studios, Inc. | CC0

Ventnor City, New Jersey: The Gambling Vote

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnTPaff, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mike Segal, born 1922, was a Ventnor businessman who in the early 1970s led the petition drive that put casino gambling on the New Jersey ballot. The 1974 statewide referendum failed. Segal and his coalition regrouped, redrafted the proposal to legalize gambling only in Atlantic ...

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Image: JohnTPaff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ventnor City, New Jersey: The Walsh Act and the Beach

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Like Margate and Longport, Ventnor operates under the Walsh Act commission form of government - three commissioners elected at-large to four-year terms, each running a department, who choose one of their own as mayor. The system suits small shore towns where the line between gove...

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Image: Famartin | CC BY-SA 4.0