The Schooner AJ Meerwald is a representative “new style” Jersey oyster schooner, a vessel type that worked under sail while pulling a dredge to scrape oysters from the floor of Delaware Bay as crews culled the catch and piled the decks high. Compared with the smaller, more complex-rigged “old style” schooner with a clipper bow, this type used a spoon bow that provided a larger deck, and along with the dredge and winder engine, helped increase the oyster harvest. Built in 1928 by Stowman and Sons Shipyard in Dorchester, New Jersey, for the Meerwald family of South Dennis and named for Augustus J. Meerwald, she later served in World War II as a fireboat crewed by the U.S. Coast Guard between Philadelphia and Camden after her masts were removed. Purchased in 1947 by Clyde A. Phillips and renamed Clyde A. Phillips, she harvested oysters under power, and in 1959 Nicky Campbell refitted her as one of the first surf clammers to harvest clams in the Atlantic Ocean. She then worked along the East Coast from North Carolina to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, for various captains, mostly under the ownership of American Clam, before being retired in 1980. After her clam license was sold in 1986 to Donnie McDaniels, who gave the vessel to Capt. John Gandy for future restoration, her hull sank in the Maurice River in 1988 and was raised by the Delaware Bay Schooner Project. Lifted from the river in 1992 and set in a cradle in Bivalve, she underwent a 26-month hull restoration beginning in 1994, was rechristened and launched again as the AJ Meerwald on September 12, 1995, and was commissioned on May 12, 1996, to begin a new life as a sailing classroom. In 1998, she was designated New Jersey’s Official Tall Ship.