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Chapel Is Sunday Reminder

By BARBARA METZLER TOWN BANK - Cape May Beach Chapel was started in 1939 by sisters who were concerned that “people living here could go through the whole week without knowing that Sunday came.” Bob Doan, summer “preacher” at the chapel, Clubhouse and Elwood Drives in North Cape May. recollected what he'd been told about the involvement of Mary Fehr and Agnes Millar in beginning the chapel 44 years ago. In the.l930's, lots were cheap on the bay shore. When Mary Fehr moved her ailing son to Town Bank on the advice of doctors who told her that her child needed “seashore air," she bought her three lots for $25 apiece. "There were just woods here then,” her daughter, Vivian Dilks, remembered. NOT LONG AFTER Fehr’s decision to build a summer cottage in Town Bank, her sister, Agnes, also bought land. Th<*i followed Fehr’s aunt and family, and an uncle and his family. As their children grew older, they, too, purchased lots and built summer homes. “One came and they all came,” said

Dilks. "It was all family when We first moved here.” Most of the families were from Havertown, Pa. In those days, the males of the families went home to work during the week, leaving the women behind without transportation, “We had no facilities, just hurricane lamps and outhouses.” said Dilks. When Sunday arrived, the families often had no transportation, or felt that it was too far to go to Cape May to church. “My mother was always a Sunday School teacher,” Dilks said. SO NATURALLY, when Fehr. a former, private secretary, became concerned about the number of children going without proper Sunday instruction during the summer months, she took matters into her own hands. Gathering the children from various , neighbors and relatives, Fehr led her group to the shore where she seated them in rowboats belonging to the residents, told them Bible stories, and sang songs with them. Soon after that, Mary Fehr began to dream bigger dreams. She found that the group could meet in a clubhouse at the

end of Elwood Drive, a building that was given to the Town Bank Community by the developer, Warren Smadbeck, president of the Home Guardian Company of New York, which owned much of the Town Bank area. But Fehr’s dreams didn’t end there In 1939, the Cape May Beach Sunday School Association, now grown to include more than children and rowboats was incorporated AT THE FIRST ANNUAL meeting, it was resolved that the group would purchase 20 lots for building of a chapel from the Home Guardian Company to “be made and dedicated to the preaching of eternal salvation through the shed blood of Jesus Christ." Construction of the ('ape May .Beach Chapel began “They bought 20 lots for $500, almost an acre of land,” said Doan, who did not become involved with the chapel until the family bought a home on Elwood Drive in 1947 The payments on the Idnd were $25 a year tor 20 years at a tour percent interest rate. 1 Page IK Pleasei

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Special Section of the Herald and Lantern June 15, 1983 - — »<■