This Delaware Bay village is the most New Jersey place you’ve never been

A few Saturday’s ago, the day before the Blizzard of ’26, I did a driving tour of NJ’s Delaware Bayshore.  There are places that most people in Garden Staters have never been to - and places I’ve always been intrigued with. No boardwalk. No funnel cake. No shore traffic crawling down the parkway. 

One place is just basically marsh grass, bay water, the smell of low tide, and a small grids of maritime homes connected by five short streets and one road in and out of town.

That place is Fortescue, a tiny fishing village on the Delaware Bay in Cumberland County, and if you've never heard of it, that's mostly by design.  On my tour I was most fascinated by this spot and wanted to focus a little more on it.

I had seen Fortescue on maps, not giving it much thought.  Then at one point in the 2000’s "The Dennis & Judi Show" would get calls from time to time for a listener in this town who spent the majority of his days fishing.  I remember him mentioning on the show that they sold bait out of old soda machines.  From then on my fascination began but I never had a chance to visit until a few weeks ago.  

The town that the weakfish built

Fortescue sits at the southern end of Downe Township, surrounded on three sides by wetlands, with the wide grey expanse of the Delaware Bay out front. At its peak — the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s — it was one of the most famous fishing destinations on the East Coast. Boats were packed so tight in the bay during weakfish season that locals say you could almost walk from one to the next without getting your feet wet. Fortescue called itself the weakfish capital of the world, and nobody argued.

Then overfishing collapsed the weakfish population. Federal regulations followed. The fish that built the town largely disappeared, and with them went the boats, the bait shops, the restaurants with their own fishing fleets, and a way of life that generations of South Jersey and Philadelphia families had built their summers around.

What stayed were the people who couldn't imagine being anywhere else.

Sandy hit hard — and Cumberland County got nothing

If the weakfish collapse was a slow wound, Superstorm Sandy in 2012 was something else entirely. Fortescue lost thirty homes on the beach. Roads and bulkheads were destroyed. The damage across Downe Township was estimated at $30 million. And then came the part that still makes locals' blood pressure rise: Cumberland County was not initially among the nine New Jersey counties designated for federal recovery funds. Not one penny came to Fortescue while Shore towns to the north were rebuilt with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Residents responded the only way they knew how. Bumper stickers appeared all over town. Two words: No Retreat.

Some took buyouts and left. Most didn't. The ones who stayed rebuilt on their own, raised their houses, replaced their septic systems, and went right back to the bay. Some federal and state recovery funds finally arrived in 2019 and 2024.  

SEE ALSO: A South Jersey kid's guide to what North Jersey may never understand 

The people who won't leave — and why

I've been to Fortescue and have stood at the edge of that marsh during the peak of day.  But plan to return this summer at sunset.  Those who have witnessed watching the light go flat across the bay choose watching this sunset over anywhere else in the world. 

There is a silence there that you genuinely cannot find ninety minutes from Philadelphia. Telephone poles are the tallest things on the horizon. The bay stretches so wide you can almost convince yourself you're looking at the ocean.

The people who live there full time — a population of less than 200 by the last census — are not people who stayed because they had no other options. They stayed because they made a choice. Because the bay is in them. Because Betty Higbee, who ran the diner and wrote the history of the town and whose family built what locals called "the house that weakfish built," spoke for all of them when she said: this is nothing more than a little fishing village. And a damn good one.

The other Jersey Shore — and why it matters

New Jersey spends a lot of time talking about the Shore. We mean Asbury Park and Seaside and Wildwood and the towns that fill up every summer with traffic and noise and people looking for a good time. That Shore is real and it's ours and there's nothing wrong with it.

But there is another shore. A quieter one. One that faces west instead of east, where the sunsets drop into the bay and the herons wade in the marsh grass and the charter boats still go out in the spring chasing stripers and drum. Where no one ends up by accident.

Fortescue is still there. The people who belong to it never left. And if you've never been — you should go before everyone else figures out what they've been missing.