History of Gloucester, Massachusetts

and its Maritime Culture

The Sea-Going Heritage of Gloucester

 and the surrounding towns of Rockport, Essex and Manchester-by-the-Sea on Cape Ann

Books by Chester Brigham on Cape Ann's maritime culture:

New for 2008! 

A true story for children of a hen in wartime Britain.

To purchase, send a check for $9.00 ($7.00 plus $2.00 for first-class mailing) to Whale's Jaw Publishing, 11 Dennison Street, Gloucester, MA 01930

Gloucester and Cape Ann

Cape Ann is a granite knob projecting into the Atlantic Ocean halfway between Boston, Massachusetts and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Its one city is Gloucester, adjoined by the towns of Rockport, Essex and Manchester-by-the-Sea.

Gloucester set the maritime character of Cape Ann beginning in the 17th century when an English company of "adventurers" set up the first year-round fishing station in Gloucester harbor. The venture did not prosper, but the pattern of fishing out of Gloucester harbor for a living had been established. In the 18th century, merchant traders of Gloucester sent cargoes of fish and mixed merchandise to the Baltic, Europe, the Mediterranean and South America, until wars and financial crisis stifled that trade.

When other Massachusetts trading ports turned to manufacturing, Gloucester held fast to its maritime heritage by turning to fishing on the nearby shoal banks that teamed with cod, halibut and haddock. To haul great catches farther and farther from shore, in every weather and season, the Gloucester schooner evolved - a magnificent instrument for speeding bountiful hauls of groundfish to market in record time. There was a price to pay for challenging wind and weather in these sleek greyhounds of the sea, and over 5,000 Gloucester fishermen were lost at sea, the greatest numbers in the second half of the 19th century. Still, by the end of that century, Gloucester was the dominant fishing port of America's Atlantic coast.

The other communities of Cape Ann shared the triumphs and tragedies of Gloucester's determination to survive through commitment to the fisheries. Essex was most closely allied to Gloucester commercially, because it was in the shipyards of Essex that the greatest numbers of the proudest Gloucester schooners were crafted, almost entirely of wood.

Gloucester's dominance in the fisheries ended when the sailing schooners were replaced by engine-driven vessels. But the Portuguese, and later the Sicilian, fishermen setting out in beam draggers and seiners have sustained Gloucester's historic role as a working fishing port. Other maritime activities - whale-watching, sportfishing, recreational boating - have provided welcome infusions to the economy of Cape Ann over the years. But Gloucester proudly continues to identify - for better or worse - with the fisheries.

Notable institutions that celebrate and keep alive the maritime traditions of Cape Ann:

Gloucester Maritime Heritage Center is a working historic waterfront museum where wooden vessels are hauled and repaired, vessels that trace the fishing history of Gloucester can be viewed , and educational exhibits and programs are specifically designed to appeal to family visitors.

Essex Shipbuilding Museum. The great majority of the Gloucester fishing schooners were built in the shipyards of the town on Essex. The Shipbuilding Museum preserves the history of that wooden shipbuilding industry, and maintains one of the best collections of the tools used in building the great vessels that fished under sail. The traditions of the shipbuilding trades are kept alive through courses on boatbuilding, and the construction of modern-day schooners, Chebacco boats, and sailing dories.

Gloucester Adventure, Inc. is a non-profit group formed to preserve the schooner Adventure. Built along schooner lines in Essex in 1926, Adventure fished under power for years, and was later stripped of its power plant and went on to a second career as a passenger-carrying windjammer along the Maine coast. Gloucester Adventure, Inc. was formed to restore the vessel and educate the public as to the important role of fishing in American history

The Cape Ann Museum is home to a splendid collection of Cape Ann art, most notably of Gloucester artist Fitz Henry Lane. The Museum explores the connection between artists and place, examining how Cape Ann affects the artists it attracts and how those influences carry over in a broader sense to the history of art in America. Also, in its Fisheries & Maritime Galleries, the museum displays artifacts and displays of the fishing industry that has had such a powerful influence upon the arts of Cape Ann.

 

Gloucester Harbor from Half Moon Beach

 

Gloucester's Last Tide Mill Building Still Stands

Hodgkins Tide Mill building after conversion to a residence, 1940

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