Harvey was founded in 1891 by Christian leader Turlington W. Harvey, a close associate of Dwight Moody (founder of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago). Harvey was originally intended as a model town for “Christian” values and temperance (no-alcohol), it was closely modeled after the company town of Pullman (which eventually was annexed into the city of Chicago).

These men who crossed the bay from bustling Colonial communities to pasture their cattle and harvest the salt hay used for cattle feed and mulch were some of the first white visitors to what is now the south end of Harvey Cedars. Whalers were the other group who used the outer beach here. As early as the mid-1600s men came north from Cape May and south from New England to pursue the abundant North Atlantic Greenland whale. They set up a lookout on the northern edge of Great Swamp, which extended from Surf City to the southern boundary of present-day Harvey Cedars. A 30-foot tower, nicknamed an "owl's tree," projected above the highest dune, giving the whaler a good vantage to spot the "right" whale, which migrated in February and March. This industry died out in the 1830s when the species had been so over-hunted a profit could no longer be made.
Until the hurricane of 1821, which made a direct hit on the New Jersey coast and destroyed the freshwater swamp with sea water, a great forest covered the south end of town on land that is now well out to sea. Stumps hacked by hand-hewn axes were observed during a blowout tide about a quarter mile offshore shortly after 1900 and again in the 1930s. Reports of earliest travelers tell of rows of huge dunes on the barrier beaches, and there is little doubt that Harvey Cedars had the same topography. The earliest town photographs show high dunes backed by a lush growth of bayberry, cedar, sumac, poison ivy and holly, then wide salt marshes stretching to the bay. (This type of dune formation still exists in a stretch of beachfront in nearby Barnegat Light.)
In 1886 the Harvey Cedars Beach Co. purchased and mapped the land from Sussex to Bergen avenues. That map shows Harvest Point extending to include Wood's Island, but it's probably not accurate, as a photograph taken just ten years later shows a walking bridge from the island to the point across a goodly expanse of water, although not as wide as today. Most of the activity in the late 19th century centered around the Lifesaving station, one of the first in the country, and the Harvey Cedars Hotel, now the Bible Conference. First opened about 1850, by 1870 the hotel was a sportsman's boarding hotel known as "Kinsey's," run by Civil War veteran John Warner Kinsey, whose family would figure in the town's history until the present day. Wood's Island William Sayen, from Wayne, Pa, built an expansive summer home in 1892 on the island off Harvest Point from the hotel, now called Wood's Island. His granddaughter, Katharine Wood Leonard, later remembered Harvey Cedars as a "thriving summer resort" with the hotel (at that time still separated from town by a stream), a boarding house containing the post office, Francis Fenimore's oceanfront mansion, and a large, elaborate pavilion on the ocean. (The Fenimore house was moved back from the sea twice, but both it and the pavilion washed out in the 1944 hurricane.) Vacationing children and adults alike swam, sailed, clammed and crabbed, and in the evenings had marshmallow roasts on the beach or played cards. They met the train to see who had come down or waited for the fishing boats to land to buy the makings of an inexpensive dinner.
The Borough of Harvey Cedars was formally incorporated on December 11, 1894, when a group of men living near the hotel seceded from Union Township (today's Barnegat Township on the mainland). Capt. Isaac Jennings, owner of the hotel, was named mayor. He died shortly thereafter. Jason Fenimore, who lived on the bayfront at Burlington Avenue, soon became borough clerk and his brother Francis became mayor in 1899.