Camden County is turning a private marina into a park. But what happens to the beloved 100-year-old boat that’s docked there?

Walking through the North Camden marina and boatyard where she and her family lived and made a living for more than 30 years, Annie Sadler paused to point out the scenery.

“That’s Petty’s Island right there,” she said, gesturing toward a lush expanse of green across the blue-gray waters of the Delaware River’s back channel.

“And from over here you can see Philadelphia.”

Local residents and visitors will one day be able to enjoy these views and other features of the Pyne Poynt Marina, a beautiful and somewhat remote place in the city that has long been privately owned.

The county is purchasing the seven-acre property from the Sadler family for $633,000 and plans to connect it to the county park and regional trail systems.

But the future of the Light Ship Barnegat — a vintage vessel that has been moored at the marina for decades and was included in the purchase — is less certain.

The 130-foot, 668-ton vessel was built in Camden in 1904 and once served as a floating lighthouse off the coast of New Jersey. But over the years, the Barnegat has settled into the mud, and thieves have pilfered much of its gear.

“It’s great news that this ship is now owned by the county — an entity with resources and the ability to act,” said Jack O’Byrne, executive director of the Camden Shipyard Museum in the city’s Waterfront South neighborhood.

“The Barnegat is on the national and state register of historic places,” he said. “It might not be seaworthy at this point, but there are ways to display this historic ship without necessarily having it on the water.”

The ship could be displayed on land with its light masts restored to cast their beams across the Delaware at night, O’Byrne said.

The Barnegat was brought back to Camden from Philadelphia in 1994 by Annie Sadler’s husband, Rodney S. Sadler. From 1980 on, the couple operated a marine services company and raised their five kids on the marina property, which fell into disrepair after Rodney Sadler died in 2019.

Under a resolution the county Board of Commissioners unanimously approved April 20, the marina site at the confluence of the Delaware and Cooper Rivers will eventually become part of Camden County’s park system. It also will serve as the western trailhead of the 32-mile LINK cycling and walking path being developed to connect Camden and Winslow Township.

“Rod would be very happy about it,” Annie Sadler, 75, said while visiting the boatyard Wednesday with their daughter, Laura. “He believed in Camden.”

The property is next to the county’s Pyne Poynt Park and “will open up another part of the Delaware River” to the public, Commissioner Jeff Nash said.

“My hat is off to Annie Sadler,” he said. “She and Rod were community activists who meant so much to North Camden. Annie had other offers for the property, but she wanted to preserve it for the residents of Camden.

Nash said he would like to see the Barnegat restored, adding that the county will have to “take a hard look” at whether preservation is feasible.

About 50 small boats that remain on the land and in the water at the boatyard and marina will have to be removed, and there are several buildings, including a house, on the site, as well. No timetable for clearing the site has been set.

Said Camden Mayor Vic Carstarphen: “I can’t say enough about the good partnership the city has with the county and the state in order to provide Camden with some of the best parks and open spaces in the region. The new park and trail system will be something people will enjoy for generations to come.”

Since the late 1980s, the downtown portion of Camden’s once-industrial waterfront along the Delaware has been substantially redeveloped.

But only after New Jersey’s Riverfront Prison was closed and demolished in 2009 did the North Camden and Cramer Hill waterfronts begin to emerge as destinations for recreation.

Improvements to Pyne Poynt Park and the creation of the Cramer Hill Waterfront Park on the former Harrison Landfill site have brought new life to a once forlorn, largely inaccessible stretch of the river north of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

Stakeholders are thrilled at the prospect of increasing or maintaining public access to parts of the Delaware and Cooper Rivers that were once essential to the life of Camden but are unknown to many city residents.

“Growing up here was like living in the country,” said Laura Sadler, who lives with her mother in Cherry Hill. “I’m glad it will be fixed up so other people will be able to enjoy what we had here.”

Said Camden County’s parks director Maggie McCann Johns: “Camden has always had a connection to the water, and there’s so much potential for [the boatyard and marina] to be a special place for the city.”

She also said the new park could eventually include a boathouse or another facility to house some of the educational, boat-building, and kayaking programs sponsored by organizations such as the Center for Aquatic Sciences, the Shipyard Museum, and UrbanPromise.

“The marina property has the potential for being transformational for the youth of Camden, in particular, by bringing people to the North Camden waterfront in a way they haven’t been for generations,” said Dan Baugh, president of the Upstream Alliance, a Camden-focused nonprofit that advocates for public access to clean water.

Built by the New York Shipbuilding Co. in South Camden in 1904, the Barnegat went into service that year at Five Fathom Bank off Cape May and by 1927 was deployed as a navigation beacon along the New Jersey coast. During World War II, the Barnegat served as an “examination vessel,” dispatching crews to inspect ships entering the Delaware Bay.

After it was decommissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1967, the Barnegat was sold to a maritime museum in St. Michaels, Md., which sold it to Philadelphia’s Heritage Ship Guild for display at Penn’s Landing in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1994 the Guild donated the Barnegat to Sadler, who had it moved to Pyne Poynt in the hope of making it a tourist attraction.

“He called the project from ‘From Birth to Berth,’ since the ship was built in Camden and back home in Camden,” said Annie Sadler.

But her husband’s plan was scuttled by the larger campaign to have the Battleship New Jersey permanently docked on Camden’s downtown waterfront.

Michael Lang, a retired professor of public policy at Rutgers University in Camden and the founding executive director of the Camden Shipyard Museum, said he hopes the Barnegat plays a part in the site’s future.

“I just think Rodney must be so happy up there knowing what could happen,” he said.