by Chester Brigham
At one end of the Goose Cove
causeway stands a house that looks as if it did not start out to be
a house. Too big and boxy. It was, in fact, the Hodgkins Mill. And
it remains today an architectural artifact of the fifteen
water-power mills once in operation on Cape Ann. Looks innocent
enough now, this residence. But the introduction of a tide-driven
sawmill and grist mill had profound consequences for the entire
Annisquam area.
Before the 1830s, Goose Cove
was simply an arm of Ipswich Bay. Vessels often fitted out along its
shores. When a northeaster was in the offing, fishermen from Pigeon
Cove and Sandy Bay sailed around to Goose Cove and moored their
boats on the lee shore. They would then have the shortest hike back
across Dogtown Common homeward.
Then, in 1829, in response to a
petition from the town, the Essex County Commissioners authorized
Gloucester to lay out a public highway across Goose Cove, with a
drawbridge and sluice “of such width as to admit of a draw for the
passage of vessels at least twenty-four feet wide in the clear.”
Well and good. A route across the cove would shorten the distance
from The Green to Annisquam village from five miles to two. And
eliminate the need to travel up steep Pilgrim Hill (today’s Holly
Street), around the head of the cove and up again over Bennett
Street and on to the village church – a route seldom taken except on
foot or horseback.
But there was more. The town
was also “empowered to construct … suitable sluiceways … through
said highway and build flood gates … for admitting and stopping the
tide waters, for the purpose of creating mill privileges.” Aha –
here was the commercial carrot. The town could lease or sell “mill
privileges” for much-needed revenue.
A committee was appointed for
the very purpose of putting the water rights up for bids, and Capt.
Gideon Lane III of Annisquam became the lead investor. Gideon was
well-known about town as a skipper who had been taken prisoner by
the British right on Cape Ann. It was during the War of 1812, just
nineteen years before. Twenty-three-year-old Gideon was sailing a
cargo around Cape Ann, hoping foggy weather would provide him
sufficient cover from the patrolling British fleet. He guessed
wrong, his vessel was boarded and he and his crew captured. After a
bit of haggling, the British agreed to take Gideon’s father aboard
their frigate as hostage in his place until young Gideon raised the
ransom demanded for himself, the ship and its cargo. The son hurried
to Boston and managed to raise the sum demanded – much to the relief
of his father, who otherwise would have faced the likely death
sentence of incarceration in a prison ship.
In the years following, Gideon
married his heart’s desire, Dorcas Babson, also of Squam, and
dabbled in various ventures. But the mill was his most ambitious
enterprise. The building went up in 1833 and 1834 while fill was
going in for the causeway that would double as a dam. A sluiceway
was opened half-way along the causeway, and originally included a
drawbridge. It is difficult to picture a sluiceway and drawbridge
working in tandem, and apparently the design did not succeed. The
structure was smashed by ice a few years later, and a new sluiceway,
without drawbridge, was cut through at the present location of the
bridge at the northern end of the causeway. So there was now an
express land route from Gloucester harbor to Annisquam, and a mill
powered by the strong, dependable action of the tides, far more
efficient than “Marm” Killam’s old mill at the head of Goose Cove.
That mill had been driven by the flow from a freshwater stream,
unreliable in any season.
In 1835, a year after the new
mill started up, English writer Harriet Martineau, traveling through
Annisquam, was fascinated by its operation. “We crossed the bridge,
close by the only tide mill I ever saw. It works for six hours, and
stops for six, while the flow of the tide fills the pond above. The
gates are then shut, and a water-power is obtained till the tide
again flows.”
Miss Martineau saw Goose Cove
as a “pond,” and this once proud ocean estuary had indeed been
demoted to a mill pond. No vessels of any size could negotiate the
tide gates, and there was no more fitting out of ships along its
shores. By 1839, “the cove was used by those living on it, mostly
for the purpose of bringing up stores, hay & manure in wherries,
scows or gondolas” (“gundalows” the locals would have said). In
other words, only small boats could squeeze through the tide gates.
The town chronicler reported that the cove ceased to have a history
for years thereafter.
It would be pleasing to report
that Gideon Lane, one-time prisoner of war, prospered from the mill
enterprise. Indeed, as “Agent for Goose Cove Mills,” his assets were
substantial. Among much other property, he was assessed, in 1836,
$3,500 for the mill’s “land, etc.”, another $500 for its “stock,
corn, etc.” and subsequently for its “horse & carts.” But Gideon
said the mill venture lost $10,000 (around $90,000 in today’s
dollars), and that his own loss amounted to over half the total.
Combined with reverses in ship-owning and shipbuilding, the debacle
drove Gideon into bankruptcy in 1842. He and his family dodged
poverty when he was granted a political appointment to a job in the
Gloucester Custom House.
The mill was sold to William Hodgkins and,
with members of the Hodgkins family owning and operating the mill
for the next seventy years, it became known as “Hodgkins Mill.”
Sawmill operations were shut down when the supply of logs on Cape
Ann petered out, and that part of the mill was converted to offices.
Thereafter the mill concentrated on producing flour and meal.
Harriet Hyatt Mayor, looking back fifty years, remembered that in
the 1880s when miller Hodgkins, “silver of hair and beard,”
purchased a load of corn (grain), “a schooner thus laden, would pull
up the channel leading to Goose Cove … and lie along the north wall
of the mill.” If the tide ebbed after midnight, the mill would grind
all night. Tide mill operations were at the mercy of the transit of
the moon.
Hodgkins Tide Mill Details
All remained quiet along the
Goose Cove “mill pond” until, in 1869, one John Wheeler petitioned
to have the long-defunct drawbridge on the causeway replaced.
Wheeler said he owned land on the cove that boasted outstanding
granite reserves just waiting to be tapped. He wanted to begin
quarrying operations and float the cut stone out through the
sluiceway. The city engineer was caustic in dismissing the idea of
floating heavy loads of stone through tide gates against the
incoming tide. The engineer also ventured his opinion that, to make
the operation pay, Wheeler would have to transmute the blocks of
granite into bars of gold.
John Wheeler was not easily
discouraged. Five years later he petitioned the Massachusetts Joint
Legislative Committee on Harbors for permission to “build wharves in
Goose Cove.” According to the Cape Ann Weekly Advertiser of February
4, 1874, the city responded that Wheeler’s petition was “but a flank
movement” to pressure Gloucester into restoring the drawbridge.
Wheeler’s petition was denied, and the quarrying boom on Cape Ann
passed into history without ever reaching into Goose Cove.
Around 1900, the last bag of
flour was filled at the Hodgkins Mill. By then, flour from local
mills had to compete with large-scale production from thirty giant
mills in Minneapolis, where Charles Pillsbury was consolidating the
industry. Subsequently the gates were removed from under the
sluiceway bridge, and the tides once again flowed unimpeded in an
out of Goose Cove. Maritime activity picked up. In the 1940s “Bunt”
Davis and Ben Dolloff built thirty-some-foot fishing vessels on the
shore in front of their neighboring houses on the north shore of the
cove, then took them through the sluiceway to their moorings on
Lobster Cove.
The mill building was sold out
of the Hodgkins family and passed through various incarnations. It
was variously a youth hostel, and a restaurant, and a residence of
owners with divergent notions of decor. Fortunately, through all the
changes, the building itself has retained its signature form and
character. The current homeowner is to be commended for recently
spiffing up the fine old building – the mill that for many years
shaped lives and fortunes throughout the Goose Cove area.
Research assistance provided by Sarah Dunlap of the
Gloucester Archives Committee, Stephanie Buck of the
Cape Ann Museum, Fred Buck who volunteers at the
Museum, and Bud Warren of the Tide Mill Institute
