Research Notes
Isles of Shoals, where a garden outlived the hotels
The Shoals were kept alive twice by selling a stay on rocks that could not feed themselves: first by a family who turned a hotel and a garden into a reason for writers and painters to come, and then, after fire and debt took both hotels, by conferences and a laboratory that kept the buildings going by giving up on luxury altogether.
The race for a hotel
A lifeboat crew pulls at the oars off Star Island while yachts race for a hotel that has only just learned how to be a hotel. The race was the new hotel's advertisement: boats from up and down the coast, racing for a silver punch bowl.
Nine islands lie off the New Hampshire coast, five in Maine and four in New Hampshire, split by a line drawn through rock and water. They lie in N'dakinna, the homelands of the Abenaki, Pennacook, and other Wabanaki Peoples. European fishermen worked them from the early 1600s, and for a long time the Shoals set the price of cod. The town on Star Island was called Gosport, its houses clustered at the northern end under a small church on the highest rock.
A town that thinned out
By the time visitors started writing about Gosport, the town was already thin. The province had ordered most of its people to the mainland during the Revolution, worried about their loyalties and unable to protect them from British ships. The families who stayed lived hard. A visitor who lodged with the Caswells found the whole island smelling of fish, and walked ashore over heads and bones left where the fishermen threw them. Water was short. Fuel was short.
Thomas Laighton was a Portsmouth grocer, printer, and politician, and he bought four Maine-side islands from the Haley family: Smuttynose, Cedar, Hog, and Malaga. He renamed Hog to Appledore. He reopened the Haleys' Mid-Ocean House on Smuttynose. On Appledore he built a hotel, and opened it the next summer. At its peak it could take five hundred guests, on an island with no soil to speak of, no trees, and no town behind it.
The lighthouse child
When Celia Thaxter was four, her father Thomas Laighton became keeper of the White Island light. The family moved to Smuttynose and began taking paying summer guests, then to Appledore to build the hotel. Celia married her tutor, Levi Thaxter, and after a spell on the mainland she came back to Appledore and stayed, writing poems and making a garden in front of her cottage.
The garden was fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide, in raised beds, with plants set by height and vines to shade the porch. That is a small plot to build a reputation on, and Thaxter knew it. She wrote about poppies blazing scarlet in thin soil, and sweet peas the color of deep rose, smelling like rich wine until mignonette cut the sweetness. She said the little spot of earth where her flowers grew was like a mass of jewels. The soil was crumbled rock. The flowers ran mad with color anyway, and seeds visitors took home came up pale and ordinary on the mainland.
Thaxter filled vases and bowls in her parlor with cut flowers, and the parlor filled with writers, painters, and musicians who had come for the summer air and stayed for the talk. Hassam remembered the salon as a jolly, refined, interesting, and artistic set of people, like one large family. The hotel's guests were hand-picked, mostly from Boston.
The man who bought the village
John R. Poor, a Boston spice merchant, came to Appledore with his wife and daughter in August and found no room at any price. Guests were sleeping on the piazza and on billiard tables. Oscar Laighton, Thomas's son, gave up his own room, and Poor slept on the sofa in the letter-writing room. Poor asked to buy Smuttynose. Oscar and his brother Cedric, who ran the hotel after their father's death, said no: a Norwegian fishing family lived there.
He bought Star Island instead, quietly, through a Portsmouth go-between named Nathan Mathes. Oscar later wrote: Following a unanimous vote of the townspeople of Gosport, Mathes was given title to all the houses and land, with two exceptions: a fisherman named John Bragg Downs and a minister named George Beebe. Poor's workmen then pulled down the fishermen's huts and turned the sturdier houses into summer rentals.
"when we discovered that he was secretly buying out the inhabitants of Star Island and the whole village of Gosport."
On the cleared ground facing the harbor, Poor built a hotel 265 feet long, with 147 sleeping rooms for 300 guests and a stone pier longer than anything Appledore had. The Appledore House, twenty-five years old, suddenly looked battered and out of date. In its first month the new Oceanic took 1,098 names in its register. It advertised ocean breezes free of dust and mosquitoes, and sold metropolitan living on an island at sea, to guests from Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Thaxter, watching from Appledore, wrote that the noisy and objectionable people came to the Oceanic, and the more discriminating guests moved to Appledore, where the atmosphere continued one of refinement and culture. Two hotels, two crowds, a quarter of a mile of harbor between them.
The night the Oceanic burned
One November night it was struck by lightning at three in the morning. Only two workmen were living in it, and they jumped from a window. With no one to fight the fire, the wooden building was gone within the hour. The Downs family, the last Gosport fishers left on Star, ran from their nearby house in their nightclothes and saved a featherbed and a gun. John Downs lost his barn and saved a cow and a hog. Nobody was hurt.
Poor collected his insurance and rebuilt, but not in the same place and not to the same design. His workmen put up a new lobby and dining room, then joined together the three surviving small hotels the Caswell brothers had run: the Atlantic, the Gosport, and the Caswell houses. The second Oceanic was a patchwork, and the patchwork is the building that still stands.
The brothers lose both houses
Oscar and Cedric Laighton bought Star Island and the Oceanic from Poor the next year, and for a while they ran both islands. Their sister Celia died, and the business faded with her. The brothers were never good at money, and they kept two big wooden hotels going on islands that needed everything shipped in. By the time hundreds of Unitarians held their first annual conference in the Oceanic, the Laightons were in freefall, and after Cedric died the bank foreclosed on Oscar's mortgage.
Boston Unitarians and Congregationalists who had been meeting at the Oceanic formed the Star Island Corporation and took over the hotel and the island, to keep it from being sold to a commercial resort company. The Oceanic stopped being a luxury hotel and became a conference house, where people came for a week, ate together, and went to chapel.
Twenty years after Celia died, the Appledore House and her cottage burned, and nothing of the hotel was rebuilt. For half a century the island belonged to gulls and poison ivy. Then students came: a marine laboratory, run by Cornell and the University of New Hampshire, took over Appledore, and volunteers replanted Celia's garden in front of the ruined cottage foundation, fifteen feet by fifty.
What is left
Stand on Star and the Oceanic is still there, because it was never one grand building: it was three fishermen's houses, joined together around a new lobby and dining room, and a conference house could live in them when a luxury hotel could not. The islands did not survive because they were beautiful. They survived because someone kept planting, repairing, and coming back for a week in summer, long after the fishing town and the grand hotels were gone.
See the photographs in the archive: STA-0306 STA-0284 STA-0302 STA-0288 STA-0291. Each record links back to its source.
Appendix
Timeline
- 1614 — John Smith visits the islands and maps the coast.
- 1715 — Town of Gosport established on Star Island.
- 1775 — Most Gosport residents are ordered to the mainland at the outbreak of the Revolution.
- 1800 — Gosport Chapel, a stone meetinghouse, built on the highest point of Star Island.
- 1839 — Thomas Laighton buys Smuttynose, Cedar, Hog, and Malaga from the Haley family; Hog is renamed Appledore.
- 1847–1848 — Appledore House built and opened the following summer.
- 1858 — Celia and Levi Thaxter acquire the Appledore cottage where Thaxter makes her cutting garden.
- 1873 — First Oceanic Hotel opens on Star Island the week after the Fourth of July; Thaxter's Among the Isles of Shoals is published in book form.
- 1874 — First Gosport Regatta, more than 50 boats, 13-mile race from Star Island to Boon Island and back.
- 1875, July 24 — Oceanic Regatta, shown in STA-0306.
- 1875, November 11 — First Oceanic struck by lightning at 3 a.m. and burned within the hour.
- 1876 — Oscar and Cedric Laighton buy Star Island and the Oceanic from John Poor.
- 1894 — Celia Thaxter dies; An Island Garden is published, illustrated by Childe Hassam.
- 1897 — First of many annual Unitarian conferences in the Oceanic.
- 1899 — Cedric Laighton dies; the bank forecloses on Oscar's mortgage.
- 1914, September — Appledore House and Thaxter's cottage burn; the hotel is not rebuilt.
- 1916 — Star Island Corporation takes over the hotel and Star Island.
- 1966 — First Shoals Marine Laboratory students arrive on Star Island; Appledore is developed as the laboratory's home in the late 1960s to early 1970s.
- 1977 — Thaxter's garden reconstructed from her 1893 plan.
- 1980 — Isles of Shoals listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Photographs
- STA-0306 — "Oceanic Regatta, July 24, 1875, Life Boat, by Hobbs, W. N. (William N.), 1830-1881", 1875. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/305.jpg
- STA-0284 — "Old Church on Star Island", c. 1870. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/283.jpg
- STA-0302 — "Light House on White Island, by S. C. Reed", c. 1870. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/301.jpg
- STA-0288 — "Appledore House, by Davis Brothers 7", c. 1870. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/287.jpg
- STA-0291 — "Near the Landing, Appledore Island, by Hobbs, W. N. (William N.), 1830-1881", Undated. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/290.jpg
Titles, places, and years follow catalog-v2.json. Source unrecorded means the catalog gives no named collection. All photographs are public domain, via the source pages linked from the catalog.
Sources
- Star Island Corporation, History and Geography — https://starisland.org/the-island/history/
- Celia Thaxter, Among the Isles of Shoals (1873), Project Gutenberg — https://www.gutenberg.org/files/77366/77366-h/77366-h.htm
- J. Dennis Robinson, The Brief Life of the First Fated Oceanic Hotel, SeacoastHistory — https://seacoasthistory.com/the-brief-life-of-the-first-fated-oceanic-hotel/
- Cultural Landscape Foundation, Celia Thaxter Garden — https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/celia-thaxter-garden
- Thaxter, Celia Laighton, Encyclopedia.com — https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/thaxter-celia-laighton
- UNH Magazine, Nothing More Surprising — http://unhmagazine.unh.edu/sp09/thaxter.html
- SeacoastNH, The Science of the Historic Appledore Island Garden — http://www.seacoastnh.com/the-science-of-the-historic-appledore-island-garden/?start=1
- Shoals Marine Laboratory, history summary — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoals_Marine_Laboratory