Gosport remembered

Celia Thaxter's account of the last years of the "wretched little community" on Star Island makes it hard to imagine how any of the children of Gosport survived. The women, Celia wrote, grew old before their time from domestic work, while the men after fishing, lounged aimlessly on the rocks and drank heavily. In her book Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) Celia asks one Star Island mother whether she fears that a steady diet of beans, pork fat, and thick black coffee might kill her baby. No, the mother replied. The hot coffee helped the baby keep his head up. That same child, by Celia’s account, did not survive to adulthood.

Consumption was a major killer among the native Shoalers. Celia noted with irony that many summer visitors with similar ailments traveled great distances to convalesce on nearby Appledore Island in the same rejuvenating sea air. Gosport fishing families got little fresh air in the winter. They lived almost entirely indoors, their windows tightly shut with rags filling every crack. Their tiny homes were sealed tight, Celia wrote, "so that the air of heaven should not penetrate." Celia wrote:

I have seen a little room containing a whole family, fishing boots and all, bed, furniture, cooking-stove in full blast, and an oil lamp with a wick so high that the deadly smoke rose steadily, filling the air with what Browning might call 'filthiest gloom,' and mingling with the incense of ancient tobacco pipes smoked by both sexes...and if by any chance the door opened for an instant, out rushed a fume in comparison with which the gusts from the lake of Tartarus might be imagined sweet.

In the midst of all this apparent misery and sadness, we can count on brother Cedric Laighton to uncover a humorous vein. Rev. Beebe, like the ministers before him, incited both love and derision among the Shoalers. In one instance, the locals complained to Rev. Beebe's superiors that he had stolen the Gosport church melodeon and refused to offer Sabbath Day services. An investigating committee visited Star Island and cleared the reverend of all charges.

In another lively incident, Nett Caswell, a fisherman’s wife, got into a scuffle with Mrs. Beebe. (Nett and Lemuel Caswell ran the Atlantic House and had sold a plot of land to Rev. Beebe.) According to Cedric, Nett believed that Mrs. Beebe had stolen a couple of “webs” of cloth. When similar webs of cloth showed up three years later at the Beebe home, a group of Shoalers confronted the minister and his family. Writing to his sister Celia, Cedric embroidered the dramatic story as follows:

Nett rushed upon Mrs. Beebe and commenced to slap her in the face; the town clerk, unwilling to leave without an honorable spar, rushed at Beebe and slapped him in the face; and Aunt Sally, 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 walked slowly and majestically away from the Parsonage, amid the tears and groans of the House of Beebe.

Farewell my darlings

Rev. Beebe built the family cemetery for his three lost daughters apparently intending to stay on Star. With another minister from Portsmouth, around this time he also helped design and built the monument to explorer John Smith, dilapidated but still standing today not far from the graves of his girls. But the harshness of the Shoals won out. Four years later, according to most reports, Rev. Beebe and his remaining family moved on to Littleton, NH. Their land, like most land on Star Island, was eventually sold to John Poore, who built a great hotel there to compete with the Laightons on Appledore. With the departure of the fishing families, the town of Gosport ceased to exist. After the hotel burned in 1875 and was rebuilt, Poore himself moved on, selling out to the Laighton brothers, Oscar and Cedric. They ran it until the church conference era when the Star Island Corporation purchased Star and Appledore. A century later the same group still runs the summer conferences on Star. The Oceanic and Star Island itself are hauntingly similar to the way they appeared over a century ago.

More haunting still are the two visible inscriptions on the marker that stands amid the ruins of the old Beebe Cemetery. Below Millie's name the worn memorial reads: "Dying she kneeled down and prayed: Please Jesus, take me up to the Lighted Place. And HE did."

Mitty passed away 11 days after her second sister died of the disease contracted on the mainland in Kittery. Her farewell is etched into the fading stone barely to visible to island visitors who seek out the graves. We can almost hear her voice, weak, nearly lost, against the hissing of the flickering oil lamp. It is the voice of an obedient Christian child, the daughter of a minister sent to save fewer than a hundred souls in a lost tribe of New Hampshire fishermen in a town soon to expire.

"I don't want to die," Mitty whispered with her final breath, "but I'll do just as Jesus wants me to."

The Beebe family was among the last to leave Star Island as it became a tourist Mecca. But eventually Mitty’s family, like every Star Islander, sold their land and moved away forever. The Oceanic Hotel survives, but the town of Gosport, NH is gone. Many of its citizens are buried in open view. The Caswell Cemetery, ringed by a low stone wall, stands prominently beside the hotel on the sloping front lawn. The great granite obelisk to pre-Revolutionary Era missionary Rev. JohnTucke is the tallest tombstone in New Hampshire and visible from the mainland. But the sheltered memorial to the sad short lives of Jessie, Millie, and Mitty is rarely seen except by passing gulls, fishing boats, and the most dedicated island searchers.

SOURCES: (1) Gosport Remembered (1997) edited by Peter E. Randall and Maryellen Burke, Portsmouth Marine Society; (2) Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) by Celia Laighton Thaxter; (3) Letters to Celia by Cedric Laighton (1972) edited by Fred McGill, Jr

Copyright © 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Robinson is editor of the popular history Web site SeacoastNH.com where this article appears exclusively online. His corgi dog is named Rev. Beebe. His latest book is Maritime Portsmouth: The Sawtelle Collection (2011) edited by Richard M. Candee. His dog’s name is Rev. Beebe.