From the archive · mid-20th century

The Hackettstown Sand Bar

By The Fiedler Family · July 9, 2026 · HKT-1969-001 · Photograph · mid-20th century

Black-and-white river-beach scene: a young woman in a one-piece bathing suit stands among children holding kickboards, more children lined up on a diving platform at left.
Lenee Fiedler (center), who directed the Sandbar Beach water-safety program, among her swimmers on the Musconetcong River, July 1969.
From the collection of Lenee Fiedler · 1969

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.

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. The Sand Bar ran that way for decades before it finally closed — a piece of Hackettstown summer that lived on the Musconetcong, remembered by the generations who learned to swim there.

The Sandbar Beach's tall wooden diving tower on a concrete pier in the river, children climbing its levels and swimmers in the water below.
The Sand Bar's diving tower — the part of the beach so many Hackettstown people still remember, and can hardly believe was really there. An older photograph, given to Lenee Fiedler; date unknown.
From the collection of Lenee Fiedler

Sources

  • The Hackettstown Gazette, "Enrollment 123 in Swim Course," July 17, 1969
  • Fiedler family collection and recollections

← The Fiedler Local History Archive