The Village Improvement Society, Part Two

Looking up at the Sea Mark atop Pigeon Hill, c. 1915 ¹
 

Allen Chamberlain devotes an entire essay in his history of Pigeon Cove to a five-acre parcel atop the Hill known as the Sea Mark, which has passed back and forth from public to private to public ownership several times between the colonial era and the present as its value as a navigational landmark has been more or less appreciated. Public or private, it was pastureland during most of the years of settlement, which helped emphasize the silhouettes of two monarchical elms at the crest that guided mariners in the days of sail. ²

Looking down toward the sea from the top of Pigeon Hill, c. 1912 ³
Andrews Point juts into the ocean at left,
adjoined to Halibut Point just off the photograph.

Pigeon Hill has made excellent pasture land because it is a drumlin, a large mound of glacial till within the surrounding thin-soiled landscape and moraines. The gargantuan glacier capped this drumlin with an 'erratic,' the largest boulder on Cape Ann estimated to weigh 2,000 tons. In the nineteenth century Amos Rowe, one of the founding members of the Pigeon Hill Granite Company, discovered that it split as easily as quarry stone and cut it up into thousands of feet of curbing. ⁴ [An irresistible digression.]

The Pigeon Hill promontory was acquired by granite entrepreneur Ezra Eames in 1838. The Town of Rockport bought it from his heirs in 1929 to construct a standpipe for the public water supply at high elevation. Ezra Eames' name will turn up again in this story.

Granite watering trough (1862) presently in front of the Old Castle c. 1715

As we have seen in Part One, the Village Improvement Society (VIS) came to recognize part of its mission in preservation agency. It accepted stewardship of the Old Castle in 1929 from the three children of VIS founder Abbie Story. The Society welcomed for display a 4-ton granite watering trough that had originally stood in front of the old ox barn on the north side of Granite street next to the Keystone Bridge at the entrance to Pigeon Cove. ⁵

The initiatives of the VIS continually  featured the names of public-spirited citizens of Pigeon Cove. Charles H. Cleaves (attorney and ubiquitous photographer) and H. Chester Story (son of Abbie) anchored a fundraising committee in 1915 to purchase as open space the 10-acre Austin W. Story estate (Pea Grove Woods) on Pigeon Hill, "containing practically all the virgin growth of hard wood trees remaining in the village. To do it all the cash in the treasury and every resource known to us was used to raise money." ⁶ Over time two more parcels adjoining the Pigeon Hill pastures were added.



The conservation and historical acumen of the VIS was greatly enhanced when Allen Chamberlain moved to Rockport. Among his other books he had written Beacon Hill--Its Pastures and Early Mansions in 1925. He and Chester Story collected blacksmith shop tools and paving cutter's equipment from those waning industries as permanent exhibits in the Old Castle. Chamberlain undertook a painstaking survey of ancient deeds and documents to authenticate his 1940 monograph on the evolution of Pigeon Cove's development. ²

Chamberlain was also a past president of the Appalachian Mountain Club and prominent member of several New England recreational/ecological organizations. Along with Charles Cleaves he led the effort to preserve as parkland several tracts of land on Halibut Point during the 1930s.

Gott Avenue c. 1935. Cows grazing at the present-day parking lot of the State Park.

The Trustees of Reservations (TTOR) became the effective sponsor of land preservation on Halibut Point, at a time when the Rockport Granite Company had closed and upscale coastline at Ocean View had faltered. The undeveloped tracts and abandoned quarries of the old Gott and Andrews farms lay quietly dormant. A generous donor provided funds for the purchase of 12 acres alongside the quarry land, running down to the sea. This tract had been sold to Ezra Eames for its granite potential by the heirs of Joshua Gott in the mid-nineteenth century. Eames' granddaughter Maude Weatherell sold it to TTOR in 1934. The granite extraction on this land had been limited to splitting boulders and exposed ledges.

The pasture gate beside the 1702 Gott house

Allen Chamberlain, Charles Cleaves, and H. Chester Story formed the TTOR Local Committee for this Halibut Point Reservation. They monitored its condition and set their sights on acquiring adjacent parcels for preservation. Between 1936 and 1941 they did garner an additional 28 acres for TTOR between Gott Avenue and Phillips Avenue, part of which is pictured below, at a cost of $1,000. For reasons that are no longer understood TTOR sold this land in 1954 for the sum of $13,200. The transaction was approved by the State Supreme Judicial court.

Looking across the pasture toward the ocean,alongside the stone wall pictured in the photograph above.

In 1935 Louis Rogers, formerly Treasurer of the Rockport Granite Company and presently a liquidation agent for its mortgage holder, tried to interest the State Legislature in purchasing 52 acres of Halibut Point for $42,500. Despite the support of the Commonwealth's Commissioner of Conservation and the urging by Cape Ann's State Representative and State Senator, the Legislature was unable to allocate the funds. Twenty years later Dr. Richard Webster bought the property, which the State eventually did take by eminent domain as a park in 1981.

Sources

1. Postcard courtesy of Robert Ambrogi's website vintagerockport.com.
2. Allen Chamberlain, Pigeon Cove, It's Early Settlers & their Farms 1702-1840. The Sandy Bay Historical Society (SBHS) in 1999 reprinted the original publication by the Village Improvement Society of 1940.
3. Vintagerockport.com.
4. Lemuel Gott, History of Rockport, 1888.
5. "VIS Historical Notes," SBHS.
6. SBHS files.
7. This and the following photographs by Charles Cleaves, courtesy of The Trustees of Reservations.