When the Caswells Ruled Gosport
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Caswell Cemetery and Lemuel Caswell's Atlantic House on Star Island, NH

ISLES OF SHOALS HISTORY

On Star Island the Caswells dominated the harsh fishing village in the 19th century. Hardworking and hard-drinking they scraped out a living on the Isles of Shoals for generations. Then in 1873 the Caswells – and all the citizens of Gosport Village, NH disappeared.

 

 

 

SEE: Caswell discoveries on Star
SEE: Celia Thaxter section 
RELATED STORY: Clarence Caswell Ejected from Cedar Island   

Caswell Clan, Shoalers  Since 1776   

From Thomas Laighton's arrival as lighthouse keeper at White Island in 1839 until the death of his son Oscar a century later, the Laighton name reigned supreme in the annals of the Isles of Shoals. Laighton built the sprawling hotel on Appledore in 1847 and spawned a new tourist industry. Daughter Celia Laighton Thaxter popularized the region with her poetry, books and literary salon. Oscar and brother Cedric eventually expanded their island empire to include the Oceanic Hotel on Star Island.

But long before the Laightons, came the Caswells. In 1711 the first Caswells joined a hard-drinking, hard-working Shoals fishing community that was already a century old. But unlike many seasonal fishermen who commuted from Europe, the Caswells stayed. They survived the dangerous fishing trade and the brutal winters on the windswept rocks. Although patriot forces cleared the feisty Shoalers off the islands during the Revolutionary War, many Caswells came back. They grew wealthy by island standards. By 1866, a hand-drawn map of Star shows at least a third of the homes belonging to different Caswells, with others owned primarily by the Randall, Robinson, Downs, Berry, Haley, Beebe and Newton families.

Today a dozen Caswells rest in a rock-walled family cemetery on Star Island near the Oceanic Hotel, the last surviving Victorian hotel of its size in the region. In fact, the Oceanic is a cluster of Caswell family buildings joined by a long wooden veranda. When the first Oceanic burned in 1875 soon after it was built, owner John Poore reconfigured the surviving buildings into a second Oceanic Hotel. The largest, the former Atlantic House, had been run by Lemuel Caswell. Another, the Gosport House, was once run by Lemuel's brother Origen Caswell.

There were faint whispers coming from the Caswell cemetery earlier this summer. A hotel staff member found an 1853 penny while weeding one of the island gardens. Meanwhile, a team of carpenters uncovered a chalked date – 1868 -- inside a renovated wall at Orgen Caswell’s Gosport House. The construction crew then found a heavy metal bar built into the floor. This artifact may finally explain how the massive building was lifted into the air, moved to a new foundation and a floor added underneath.

Caswell Clan Continued




Caswell Clan Continued 

We get a sense of the Caswell’s success, and of their fecundity, from an 1828 probate record. In his will, patriarch John Caswell meticulously distributed his holdings -- garden plots, potato cellars, fish-drying areas and pathways among six children and a host of island relatives. His will divided his house up room by room, even assigning ownership of hallways, closets and entranceways to different people.

Rare image of Gosport Village around the Civil War era / from Gosport Remembered, Peter Randall Publishing

Like the Haley family of nearby Smuttynose, the Caswells were the royalty of Star Island. It was not much of a kingdom-- an island reeking of stale fish and covered in ramshackle huts and upturned dories. Back then, as the joke goes, there were only two types of Shoalers -- the heavy-smoking, hard drinking, fish-smelling, tobacco spitting, foul mouthed heathen type -- and their husbands. Women, Celia Thaxter tells us, did most of the labor and grew old before their time. When the men were not fishing, they were drinking or lounging upon the rocks. A bill from one Star Island fisherman shows he could polish off four gallons of rum in a single month.

We can cobble together a picture of the Caswells from early documents and written impressions left by island missionaries and the first tourists. Richard Henry Dana, author of "Two Years Before the Mast" stayed at Joseph and Sally Caswell's earliest island guest house in August 1843. Dana's first impression was wading up the beach through heaps of stinking fish heads and fish bones. But he came to enjoy the Caswell's hospitality and the dramatic rocky island.

Joy Thurlow Leclair, a Caswell descendent, lectures to amateur historians on Star Island in the Caswell Cemetery / SeacoastNH.com photo

Another early anecdote comes from none other than novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne who spent a 10 days at the Appledore House in the summer of 1852. Hawthorne visited Star with his college friend Franklin Peirce, who was about to become the nation's next president. Hawthorne described Joseph Caswell in his journal as "being very drunk" and dressed like a typical fisherman in "red-baize shirt, trousers tucked into large boots". Joseph Caswell was also the Gosport town clerk, manager of the island school and Gosport town policeman.

But it is from the Laightons, the family that ultimately ruled the Shoals, that we get the most colorful and often comic view of the Caswells. In his autobiography, "Ninety Years on the Isles of Shoals", Oscar offers an affectionate story of fisherman Asa Caswell who rarely spoke to anyone. He recalls a day old Asa stopped by the Laighton's hotel to sell a fresh 28-pound halibut at a nickel per pound. One of the hotel guests asked Asa where he had caught the big fish. Asa Caswell ignored him. When the guest took the aged fisherman by the sleeve and insisted that he reveal his secret fishing spot, the old Shoaler replied:

"Look here young feller, when I was of your age, I kept my mouth shut. Then nobody knew I was a cussed fool."

CONTINUE "The Caswells on Isles of Shoals"



EARLY LIFE ON STAR ISLAND (Continued)

Another often told story comes from Cedric Laighton who reported island gossip to his older sister Celia when she was married and living in Massachusetts. Netty Caswell, wife of Lemuel, the story goes, was missing a few "webs" of cloth from her home at the Atlantic House. Netty was famous for her elaborate meals at the rooming house and was not fond of the island preacher. When the cloth showed up at the house of Rev. George Beebe, the island minister, Netty Caswell confronted the cleric's wife as a small crowd watched. Cedric wrote:

Oregen Caswell owner of Gosport House / Portsmouth Athenaeum photo"Nett rushed upon Mrs. Beebe and commenced to slap her in the face. The town clerk (Origen Caswell), unwilling to leave without an honorable scar, rushed at Rev. Beebe and slapped him in the face. And Aunt Sally (Caswell), seeing everyone so pleasantly employed, determined to have her share and so commenced to slap Beebe's baby. After the slapping was over, the trio marched slowly and majestically away from the Parsonage amid the tears and groans of the House of Beebe."

Origen Caswell, depicted in the Beebe slapfest above, has an otherwise flawless reputation. Named for an early missionary to the Isles of Shoals, Origen walked like a saint on rocky Star Island. William Leonard Gage, a Harvard graduate and summer visitor, described Origen as "one of the bravest, truest men I ever met".

"At a time when drinking and brawling were universal among the Shoalers," Gage wrote in 1875, "Origen was an example of temperance and quietness; trusted by all and loved by all."

Origen and Lemuel Caswell built their hotels before the Civil War, really just large rooming houses, to handle the overflow of guess coming to the Laighton’s hotel on Appledore. According to one report, that meant as many as 2,000 overflow guests in a single year. When both the Atlantic House and Gosport House burned in a series of fires around 1866, the Caswell brothers rebuilt them. But it was the success of the Laightons that ultimately ended the Caswell reign. Hoping to trade on the tourism boom at the Shoals, a Boston developer name John Poore, bought up almost every scrap of Star Island property in 1872, including everything owned by the Caswells.

Lemuel Caswell, opwner of the Atlantic House / Portsmouth Athenaeum photoMany of the Shoalers, it has been suggested, were deeply in debt after the Civil War, having bought their way out of military service. This may account for the mass sale of the island and the end of Gosport Village. With the exception of two households, the entire population moved to the mainland in 1873 as the first Oceanic Hotel was being built. The hard scrabble village of huts and fish flakes was replaced by a monolithic wooden hotel with its grand halls, billiard rooms and bowling alley. Fashionable Boston notables now lounged on the ancient rocks. Origen died just after selling out, but his brother Lemuel lived to rue his decision to leave the island.

"Nearly all the Gosportians left have been over here lately," Cedric wrote to his sister Celia from Appledore in November of 1873, "and they one and all say that they bitterly regret having sold their homesteads. ..Lem (Caswell) was up in Mother’s room talking to her for two hours and she did nothing but laugh! Lem says if he don’t get a place on the Shoals to live, he shall be crazy."

Lemuel Caswell did get another place on the Shoals. He briefly revived the old hotel on Smuttynose Island, formerly run by the Haleys and the Laightons. He opened a grocery store there. Years after the grisly 1873 ax murder at Smuttynose, Lemuel was the landlord of the infamous Hontvet House there. When tenants complained that tourists were cutting out pieces of the woodwork to take blood samples as souvenirs, Lemuel wryly noted that he was making more money off the tourists than his tenants.

Unlike generations before him, Lemuel Caswell died on the mainland in 1898 and was buried in Portsmouth. Only his Atlantic House remains, towering above the fading tombstones of his ancestors. An epitaph on one of the Caswell stones sums up nicely. It reads: "Death is a debt to nature due. I’ve paid the debt, and so must you."

 

 

PRIMARY SOURCE: "Gosport Remembered: The Last Village at the Isles of Shoals" edited by Peter E. Randall and Maryellen Burke, Portsmouth Marine Society, 1997. This book has recently been reprinted in paperback. Also thanks to Joy Thurlow Leclair, a Caswell descendant, for her family research.

Copyright © 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.