Another great turn-of-the-century summer cottage in Rockport’s Headlands neighborhood is this c.1910 Craftsman house on Norwood Street. The listed early owner was L. S. Haskins who likely utilized the house as a summer residence. Architecturally, the cottage follows the Craftsman form with a low-sloped roof with broad eaves, shed dormer, exposed rafters, and rubblestone foundation and columns of stones taken from the site and nearby neighborhood.
The coastal towns of Gloucester, Manchester, and Beverly on the North Shore of Massachusetts often are known for their historic summer “cottages” but great examples can be found right here in Rockport! This is “Windswept”, the W. W. Blunt cottage, located in the Headlands section of town, just south of the harbor. Walton W. Blunt worked as the Treasurer and General Manager of the Boston Journal newspaper and resided in Boston, later purchasing multiple adjoining house lots in Rockport for a summer residence. The two-and-a-half story house was designed by a Rutherford Smith, who sought to utilize fieldstone found nearby for the foundation and chimneys and shingle siding above. Detailed descriptions of the new house were featured in a local newspaper in 1909 and mentioned tennis courts on the grounds, an apartment for servants, and a billiard room in the third floor. It is not clear when the house got its name, “Windswept”, but the name is just too fitting!
Reverend Ebenezer Cleveland (1725-1805) graduated from Yale College in 1749 and would move to Rockport (then a parish town of Gloucester) accepting the call as the village’s pastor for its Congregational Church. By around 1755, he lived in a house on this site next to the church before becoming a chaplain in the French and Indian War, fighting at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and helping to establish Dartmouth College. The property here was later owned by Jabez R. Gott, a deacon of the Congregational Church and the original cashier of the Rockport National Bank until his death in 1876. Sometime in the next decade, the Cleveland House was converted to a summer hotel, known as the Granite Shore Hotel. The original Georgian-era structure was heavily altered and expanded to provide new rooms and amenities for seasonal guests. An 1905 book showed rooms available at the Granite Shore for $2 a night. By 1919, the rates were $3 a day or between $15 and $18 a week! The hotel closed sometime in the 1940s and the building is now home to art galleries.
This shingled house in Rockport may look like an ordinary 1880s residence, but it was actually built as an important piece of infrastructure! This is the Commercial Cable Company’s Relay House, built in 1884 to serve as a terminus to a transatlantic cable providing communication across the Atlantic Ocean. Up until 1884, a French company, the Atlantic Telegraph Company, was the sole provider of transatlantic telegraph cables. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, was dissatisfied was the 50 cents per word he had to pay for transatlantic telegraphs. Seeking to break ATC’s monopoly, he convinced millionaire John W. Mackay to create the Commercial Cable Company. That company put down two cables from Ireland to Nova Scotia with two other lines to the United States, one to Rockaway Beach, Long Island, and the other to Rockport. This building housed offices on the first floor and a billiards room for employees on the second floor with machine shop in the basement to service equipment. Cable operations continued from this building until 1935 when newer international communications made cable lines obsolete. The Relay House was converted to residential use, and while it has been altered, it still maintains its significance architecturally and historically.
Levi Sewall (1805-1880), a native of Maine, built this stunning granite Federal style house in Rockport, Massachusetts in 1832 in preparation for his marriage to Mary Ann Robards. The granite blocks used to build the house were hauled by oxen from Sewall’s own quarry in Pigeon Cove, which is said to have produced stone of excellent quality. Sewall was one of the towns earliest entrepreneurs in the granite business and did quite well, supplying the building material to many of the region’s buildings in the mid 19th century. The property was inherited by Levi and Mary’s son-in-law, Frank Scripture, who took over the family business. Levi Sewall’s descendants occupied the Sewall-Scripture House until 1957, and ever since, it has been home to the Sandy Bay Historical Society and Museum.
After the Tamarack Lodge hotel of Rockport, Maine, burned down in 1954, nearby resident Helene Bok began to envision what would be the best use of the charred landscape. Her project became the Vesper Hill Children’s Chapel, an absolutely stunning outdoor chapel that is open to the public. Her dream was to build a refuge that would be open for all people and “speak in and of itself of the beauty, goodness and truth of nature, life and God.” It is not clear to me who the designers were, but the structure and grounds are elegantly sited on the hill, overlooking the harbor in the distance. Helene planned the chapel to partially sit atop the rustic stone foundation of the former hotel on the site, with an open post-and-beam wooden structure above. After Helene’s death, Elmer Crockett, a designer for years on the Olmsted staff in Maine, oversaw the grounds and maintained a biblical herb garden. The chapel is today approached by a roofed stairway and surrounded by mature trees and locally harvested stones. It is truly a hidden gem in Mid-Coast Maine.
The story of “spite houses” are always so interesting!
This large Federal style home in Rockport is a rare extant example of a spite house in Maine. The story goes… James McCobb, an Irish immigrant, arrived in what is now Phippsburg in 1731. Living in a log cabin with his Irish-born wife, Beatrice, he raised a large family of 10 children, among whom was Thomas McCobb (1778-1815), who became a sea captain. In 1774, James built a handsome Federal period house for his second wife, Hannah Nichols, with whom he had three children (twin daughters, and a second son, also named Thomas). He married a third time in 1782 to Mary Langdon Storer Hill, who had a son, Mark Langdon Hill, from a previous marriage, who ended up marrying one of McCobb’s daughters, one of the twins, who was a half-sister to Thomas. While Captain Thomas McCobb was away at sea, the Hills, which included Thomas’ half-sister/wife of Mark Langdon Hill, broke his father’s will and took the homestead for themselves. When Captain Thomas McCobb returned from his voyage and discovered what had happened, he vowed to build the most beautiful house in Maine and one that would dwarf the one he had been deprived of. The house was promptly dubbed “The Spite House”.
This house was built in 1806. Ironically, Captain Thomas apparently never married and left no descendants, as a result, when he died in 1815 in Boston, the house was given over to the Hill family. The house had fallen into disrepair and was purchased in 1925 by Donald Dodge of Philadelphia, who moved the house, to save it from demolition, over 85 miles by boat from Phippsburg to Rockport. He also transported a 1796 house from South Harpswell to be used in the construction of the wings that were subsequently added onto the Spite House. The property now sits on Beauchamp Point, not visible from the street, in a desirable enclave of summer residences, with sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean.
During the 19th Century, Rockport, Maine, (then named Goose River as a village in Camden) was a major supplier of lime to East Coast markets. These kilns near the harbor converted limestone rock supplied by 15 local quarries into lime used to make mortar & finish plaster. The burned lime was packed into wooden casks and shipped by schooner to cities all down the coast. In 1817, three hundred casks of lime from Rockport were sent to Washington, D.C. for use in the rebuilding of the United States Capitol, which had been damaged by the British during the War of 1812. In 1852, the citizens of Goose River voted to change their village’s name to Rockport for its rocky terrain. In 1891, Rockport split off from Camden, taking its industry and lucrative harbor with it. A disastrous fire destroyed many of the lime kilns here in 1907, which occurred about the time that cement began to replace lime in building construction. After a few years the kilns were shuttered and remained here as fossils of industry ever since. Local residents in the 1970s gathered together and advocated for the preservation of these significant local structures and gathered funds to stabilize the kilns.
Charles Saunders, a carpenter, and his wife Annie Saunders, seemingly built and lived in this Shingle style cottage in the Ocean View summer colony of Rockport. The couple shows up in census records as living here in 1910 while in their 50s. The house likely dates to the 1890s and is a great example of the Shingle style for a middle-class residence. The house features a corner tower and a wrap-around porch with continuous shingle siding and columns. The property was deeded to a Lawrence Regester in 1924 when Annie sold the property after Charles’ death. The shingled cottage has remained in a great state of preservation for its existence!
When Andrews Point in northern Rockport, Massachusetts, was opened for development by speculators Eben B. Phillips and George Babson, they envisioned the colony, “Ocean View” as a rival to other nearby summer colonies of Beverly Farms, Gloucester, and Magnolia. Roads were laid out and house lots were plotted with larger lots for big summer cottages along the coast and smaller cottage lots at the interior of the development. The rocky coast and more limited access compared to its rivals, caused Ocean View to lack in sales, but there are still some great remaining cottages to be found here. These two early cottages are great surviving examples of the modest, middle-class homes for summer residents. These two charming Victorian cottages sit side-by-side and were owned by an L. Brigham and Benjamin Lewis and both are in a great state of preservation 150 years later.
Buildings of New England 