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Rockport Mass.

The Deadly October Gale of 1841

So many Cape Cod fishermen perished in the Great October Gale of 1841 that the peninsula’s young women refused to court men who went to sea.

The storm wrecked at least 190 vessels. Sidney Perley, describing the Great October Gale in Historic Storms of New England, wrote,

The ocean roared as though with an unbridled madness, and its waves ran mountain high, throwing their spray far into the sky, and forming a majestic yet fearful sight.

October Gale

The wind kicked up on Saturday, October 2, and by midnight it blew a gale, with rain in Massachusetts and snow in New Hampshire. The sun rose to a clear sky on Sunday morning, but immediately disappeared behind black clouds. The sky took on a wild look. By 11 a.m., heavy seas were throwing vessels onto rocks and beaches.

The gale reached its fiercest at 2 a.m. Monday, October 4, and continued to blow hard until that afternoon.

The Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire were covered with snow the next day. A foot and a half of snow fell in Middletown, Conn. The trees, in full leaf, ‘broke the forest and shade trees in an extraordinary manner.’ The oldest residents of the town couldn’t remember seeing any snow so early and so destructive.

A vessel named Maine broke loose of her moorings in Portsmouth, N.H., and wrecked on Scituate Beach, killing the captain, his daughter, five passengers and one crewman.

On the North Shore of Massachusetts, as many as 40 vessels, mostly fishing schooners, were lost in the October gale. Only two of the 16 fishing vessels in Rockport, Mass., survived the storm. The wreck of the Forest, in which the entire crew perished, left 31 children fatherless in Gloucester, Mass.

Cape Cod

The October gale flooded Nantucket streets, demolished its ropewalks and threw its barns into the sea.

Cape Cod suffered the most. The beach from Chatham to the highlands was strewn with the parts of 50 wrecks. In one day after the October gale, 100 bodies were taken up and buried. The Truro Insurance Company failed for a lack of men to take charge of its vessels.

The Town of Dennis lost 26 men, 18 of which had been schoolmates. Eighteen vessels from West Harwich were destroyed.

Wreck of The Garnet

19th century fishing schooner

On Saturday night, October 2, most of the Truro fishing fleet on the Georges Banks left off fishing and made for home. Only two of the nine ships that set out made it.

Capt. Joshua Knowles in the Garnet and Matthias Rich in Water Witch just barely survived the storm.

Knowles left a detailed record of the perilous voyage. The Garnet sailed out of Provincetown Harbor on October 2 and headed out to Georges Bank under full sail. As the wind grew stronger, Knowles took in sail until morning, when only the foresail was set. The wind blew the foresail to ribbons by nightfall, and Knowles set the mainsail. Soon the wind shredded that too, leaving only the jib.

Titanic waves pushed the vessel toward deadly shoals. Joshua Knowles ordered all crew members below deck except for his brother Zack.

Joshua lashed himself to the helm, and the brother tried to bring the Garnet about. But a huge wave struck the vessel, putting her on her beam ends and washing Zack overboard. He managed to hang on to the mainsheet and survived.

The foremast broke, the mainmast came down. As the storm raged, the brothers chopped furiously at the rigging while the crew moved the ballast to the windward side to right the vessel.

They survived. The storm finally abated, and they jury-rigged a mast. They then found some potatoes floating around, which they cooked for their first meal in two days. At dusk, a Liverpool packet called the Roscius picked them up. The ship captain turned out to be from Truro.

Truro’s Worst Tragedy

First Congregational Parish of Truro

The 57 men and boys in the seven other fishing vessels out of Truro were not so lucky. All died at sea, and only a few of their bodies recovered.

All 57 lived within two miles of each other. They were related to nearly everyone in town. Eight were Snows and eight were Paines. And three were boys not yet 13 years old.

During one of his trips to Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau recalled asking a man in Truro, “Who lives in that house?” The man then replied: “Three widows.”

The town, with a population around 2,000, had 105 widows. Young women became reluctant to marry fishermen.

An obelisk in the Congregational Church yard commemorates the 57 October gale victims:

Then shall the dust return to the
earth as it was and the spirit shall
return unto God who gave it.

Man goeth to his long home and the
mourners go about the street.

Image: First Congregational Parish of Truro By Judy Moehle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518277.

This story about the Great October Gale was updated in 2022.

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Babson’s Boulders: A Millionaire’s Odd Dogtown Legacy

Eccentric millionaire Roger Babson had an unusual hobby that mortified his family: During the Great Depression, he hired unemployed stonecutters to carve inspirational mottoes into boulders in Dogtown, a ghost town between Gloucester and Rockport, Mass.

Roger Babson

Babson (July 6, 1875–March 5, 1967) didn’t care what his family thought. Supervising the work allowed him to revert to his boyhood pleasure of driving cows through Dogtown Common.

“My family says that I am defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with these inscriptions, but the work gives me a lot of satisfaction, fresh air, exercise and sunshine,” he wrote in his autobiography, Actions and Reactions.

Today, hikers can walk through the maze of trails in Dogtown and read Babson’s boulders for little lessons in self-improvement. ‘Courage,’ ‘Help Mother’ and ‘Get a Job’ are but three of the 24 slogans chiseled into stone.

Dogtown Wilderness

Roger Babson’s ancestors had lived in the inland town of Dogtown, then called the Common Settlement, from about 1650 to 1750. They were farmers, merchants, midwives, preachers and sea captains who settled away from the harbor to avoid attack.

At its peak, an estimated 100 families lived in the Commons. Families started moving away, closer to the coast, as threats from the sea diminished after the War of 1812. Vagabonds and itinerants moved in, and the wives of sailors and soldiers who never came back kept dogs for protection. Some of the last residents were suspected of practicing witchcraft.

Babson took pride in his heritage, and wanted to improve upon Dogtown’s reputation for strangeness. He and his cousin Gustavus Babson in 1927 bought 1,150 acres of the rocky cow pasture that had once been their ancestors’ home. They would later sell it back to the City of Gloucester for a fraction of what they paid for it.

Dogtown in 1908

The son of a dry goods store owner, Babson went into investment banking after graduating from MIT. He was a nationally syndicated columnist and investor who famously predicted the 1929 stock market crash. He served on corporate boards and as assistant secretary of Commerce under Woodrow Wilson.

Legacies

Babsonalso founded a gravity institute in New Boston, N.H., and established three colleges, including Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. His fortune largely derived from the securities analysis and investment firm he founded, now known as Babson-United. He wrote nearly 50 books, mostly about investing. But he also wrote a tourists’ guide to Cape Ann and a volume called Cheer Up! Better Times Ahead! published during the Great Depression.

Babson wanted to be president of the United States. A publicity stunt suggested he had a Lincolnesque rags-to-riches personal story. In 1929 he built a 500-square-foot log cabin in Dogtown. It was in the style of the original settlers and furnished with Colonial furniture and artifacts. ‘Boston Millionaire Deserts Civilization To Live With Birds in Wilderness of Witches and Pirates’ read a July 28, 1929, Boston Sunday Post headline.

Cellar Holes and Boulders

While not giving investment advice, Babson catalogued the cellar holes in Dogtown and hired masons to carve their numbers into nearby stones. After the stock market tumbled, he decided to give work to 35 unemployed Finnish stonecutters and at the same time impart inspiration to visitors to Dogtown. He consulted the self-help and inspirational books in his ‘Good Cheer Library’ for ideas. He came up with two dozen:

Courage, Ideas, Help Mother, Kindness, Loyalty, Be On Time, Get A Job, Industry, Initiative, Integrity, Keep Out Of Debt, Save, Spiritual Power, Study, Truth, Work, Be Clean, Be True, Prosperity Follows Service, Use Your Head, Ideals, Intelligence, Never Try/Never Win and If Work Stops, Values Decay.

Babson thought other cities would be so impressed with his boulders – which he called his ‘Life’s Book’ — that they would adopt the practice and make it part of their educational system. He may have been right about the stock market, but he was wrong about that.

Foolish Notions

Some people hated the rock carvings. Babson acknowledged his family did. And when Babson’s masons carved a rock on Leila Webster Adams’ land without her permission, she launched a campaign against Babson’s defacing of the landscape.

“Just look at that horrible thing,” Mrs. Adams said to reporters. “Why the idea of a man like Roger Babson, so well-known and popular, going about carving such things as ‘Prosperity Follows Service,’ ‘Keep Out of Debt,’ and ‘When Work Stops, Values Decay.’ Whoever heard of such foolish notions?”

Presidential Run

In 1940, Roger Babson finally got to run for president of the United States. He campaigned on the Prohibition ticket against Franklin D. Roosevelt. He denouncedalcohol, drugs, gambling, indecent movies and publications. Babson also advocated reducing debt and taxes, helping farmers, conserving natural resources, and ‘assuring workers and consumers a fair share of industry’s products and profits.’

The man from Dogtown came in fourth behind Roosevelt, Wendell Wilkie and Norman Thomas.

Arthur M Blank Center at Babson College.

Roger Babson died in 1967, after living a long, productive life punctuated by eccentric pursuits. He hoped the boulder carving would continue after his death. It didn’t, but Babson College, Babson-United, the Gravity Research Foundation and the carved boulders of Dogtown survive.

This story about the strange boulders in Dogtown was updated in 2023. “If Work Stops” image CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8398990. Dogtown By Alice Curtis(Life time: 1871-1961) – Original publication. I am unsure about the date of first publication.Immediate source: https://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/dogtowns-present-inhabitants-1908-3/, PD-US-expired, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53626823.

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Rockport Motif No. 1, The World’s Most Celebrated Fishing Shack

A red fishing shack at the end of a granite wharf in Rockport, Mass., is an unlikely celebrity. The picturesque old building, known as Motif No. 1, may be the most painted building in the United States — if not the world.

It has also appeared in movies, as an award-winning float, on magazine covers, on a postage stamp, in a 1960s Winston cigarette ad and as a Kentucky bourbon bottle.

Motif No. 1 in July 2009

Today, Rockport’s boosters shamelessly promote Motif No. 1 as a tourist attraction. Other coastal cities and towns shamelessly steal its image as their own.

Why ‘Motif No. 1?’ It’s a term used to deride artistic cliches. And Rockport attracted plenty of artists who seized on the cliche of a red fishing shack. Kristian Davies, in Artists of Cape Ann, tells the story:

Built around the time of the Civil War, its prominent position at the end of the pier made it a natural backdrop for artists painting harbor pictures. Finally in the early 1930s, while critiquing a group of students’ pictures, several of which featured the little red shack, Lester Hornby, using a term often employed by French students to describe frequently painted sites, exclaimed, “What – Motif No. 1 again!” His fateful words stuck and since then the little red shack has been referred to as “Motif No. 1.”

And for the past six decades, Rockport held a festival called Motif No. 1 Day. In 2020, organizers had to cancel the physical event because of the pandemic. They did, however, put on a virtual event.

History of Motif No. 1

The shack was originally built circa 1884-85, according to L.M. Vincent in In Search of Motif No. 1: The History of a Fish Shack. Today’s Motif (or “Motive,” as the locals call it) is actually a replica. Rockport rebuilt it after the Blizzard of ’78 destroyed the first one.

Painting Motif No. 1 — again.

Motif No. 1 was first used for storing gear and fish. In the 1890s, the U.S. Naval fleet began to summer in Sandy Bay. The great battleships sent out launches to bring tourists to the ships. Visits by the ‘Great Fleets’ became a premier summer event on the North Shore. Advertisements in Boston suggested people rendezvous next to the ‘fish shack on the rocks’ to catch a launch to the ships, according to Leslie D. Bartlett in a 1998 Gloucester Times column.

Peaceful Coexistence

For decades Motif No. 1 ‘settled into a peaceful coexistence’ with fishermen and tourists, even after the naval fleet stopped visiting in the 1930s, wrote Bartlett. It continued to attract plein air painters. Finally, the artist John Buckley bought the shack in the 1930s to use as his studio.

Then in 1933, the little fish shack became the toast of the Chicago’s World Fair. The Rockport Legionnaires decided to build a replica float of the Motif for the American Legion’s convention in Chicago. The convention happened to coincide with the World’s Fair.

Enthusiasm for the project spread beyond the Legionnaires to the townspeople and the Rockport Art Association. They all worked on building a 27-foot float into an elaborate tableau. Not only did it include a scale model of the shack, but reflecting drop cloths gave the illusion of water on which half-boat sideboards sailed. Barrels and nets were made to scale by hand.

The 1933 World’s Fair float.

The float was then driven to Chicago over three days on an old bus chassis. At night it stopped, illuminated by floodlights, and brochures about Rockport were distributed to passersby. Finally in Chicago, the float parked at Navy Pier where thousands came to take pictures of it.

Motif No. 1 took first place in the Legion parade’s historic fleet competition. It also inspired a standing ovation at Soldier Field. The Motif float then returned to another parade in Rockport, where 4,500 people welcomed it as a conquering hero. (You can buy a DVD called The Little Fish Shack that Charmed Chicago World’s Fair 1933.)

A Sore Red Thumb

You can see Motif No. 1 from just about everywhere on Rockport Harbor. As a result, one critic said it “sticks out like a sore red thumb.”

It got the formula for its trademark weathered red look in 1942 from a well-known artist, Aldro Hibbard. He liked to paint outdoors in winter and started the Rockport Summer School of Painting. According to Bartlett,

Hibbard organized Rockport artists to paint the old fish house, four gallons of crank case oil were added to a red paint mixture to prevent glare, and he warned them to “keep away from that barn red.”

Then in 1945, the Town of Rockport bought the Motif as a monument to Rockport citizens who had served in the military.

The Rockport Board of Trade subsequently launched The Rockport Anchor, an annual publication promoting Rockport history and events to tourists. The Motif, of course, graced the cover. That year Rockport held the first “Motif No. 1 Day,” a late May festival to encourage tourism. Since then, the festival attracted crowds of tourists every year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the annual festival didn’t happen.

Because of its iconic look, other locations began to misappropriate Motif No. 1’s image. The little red shack appeared in advertisements for towns in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Cape Cod, and for Virginia Beach and Portland, Maine.

Fame

On April 4, 2002, Motif No. 1 graced a postage stamp as part of the postal service’s “Greetings from America” series. The postal service commissioned artists to create stamps with a vintage look similar to 1940s postcards. So artists designed stamps featuring Motif No. 1 and Mount Greylock, representing eastern and western Massachusetts.

Motif No. 1 also appeared in at least two movies. The dentist’s office in Finding Nemo has a picture of Motif Number 1 hanging on the wall, a tribute by director Andrew Stanton to his hometown of Rockport.

Another film, Disney’s The Proposal, used Rockport Harbor to represent Sitka, Alaska. The Motif was slightly altered with a large “SITKA” sign.

Yelp!

Motif No. 1 has now entered the Internet Age now, inspiring snarky comments on Yelp:

Um, come on Rockport chamber of commerce. There is no way that this little red fisheman’s shack is really the most painted building in America.

Rockport Motif Number 1

But alas, no one can PROVE it isn’t true… so therefore it must be! Every place needs a “most famous” icon.

Well the original “Motif” was destroyed in the blizzard of 78. The one that stands now is a replica. I guess this is ok, but I found it oddly cheap and disappointing.

Then I took a photo of it! Some part of me must have bought into the myth of the mystique.

This story was updated in 2023. Image of Motif No. 1 in July 2009 By J. Ash Bowie – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7280145. Motif No. 1 surrounded by boats, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19484606.

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