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:

"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.

Many 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.