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is a Borough in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the borough population was 1,818.
Sea Bright was formed as a borough by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 21, 1889, from portions of Ocean Township, based on the results of a referendum held the previous day. The borough was reincorporated on March 10, 1897.
While Sea Bright's formal history starts in 1869, there was, in the early 1840s, a small cluster of wooden shacks nestled among the tall grass-topped sand dunes of the barrier beach. This was the fishing village of Nauvoo. Long an enigma to local historians and often misinterpreted as a Native American word, the origin of "Nauvoo" is Sephardic Hebrew. It is clearly the same word that Mormon leader Joseph Smith gave to the Illinois town he founded in 1839. Meaning literally "beautiful of pleasant place," New Jersey's Nauvoo might well have been named by Smith as he visited Monmouth County in 1839. In an event, moved by Mormon influence, Nauvoo was the name chosen by local fisherman for their tiny settlement on the Jersey Shore.
One of the earliest accounts of the barrier beach, published a dozen years before Sea Bright's existence, describes a steamboat journey from New York to the Ocean House, a low rambling wooden structure situated on the beach opposite the mouth of the Navesink River. Built in 1842, this first hotel on the sandy strip offered "excellent fishing, fine sea bathing and capital accommodations" for three hundred patrons. At the Ocean House one "found a number of beach carriages", as they are called, awaiting the arrival of the boat from New York City to take passengers to Long Branch.