POOR KAREN AND MR. POOR
By 1870, the scene was set for two island tragedies, the infamous Smuttynose murders in Maine and the demise of the ancient fishing village of Gosport, New Hampshire. These events may never have happened if not for the arrival of two key characters. It was Karen Christensen, sleeping in the dark kitchen of the Hontvet House, whose sudden cries of terror exposed the midnight robber who became a vicious killer. And it was the wealthy Boston merchant John R. Poor who greedily bought up all the property of the Star Island fishing village to build a luxurious Victorian hotel.
Maren Hontvet was sometimes lonely in her isolated Smuttynose home, Celia Thaxter wrote, until her sister, Karen, arrived from Norway in March 1871, bringing her own spinning wheel. Celia offered few physical details of Maren, describing her only as short with bright gray eyes. But Celia was charmed by Maren’s “beautiful behavior” and her intelligence. Maren was “so gentle, courteous, decorous, she left on my mind a most delightful impression.” The author was less taken with Maren’s spinster sister who began working for the Thaxter family at the Appledore Hotel soon after her arrival.
“Karen was a rather sad-looking woman, about twenty-nine years old. She had lost a lover in Norway long since, and in her heart she fretted and mourned for this continually. She could not speak a word of English, at first, but went patiently about her work and soon learned enough, and proved herself an excellent servant,” Celia wrote years later in the Atlantic Monthly.
By all accounts, Karen was unhappy with her life in America and perhaps unhappy with life in general. Despite Celia’s upbeat picture of the Norwegian “settlement” at the Shoals, there was much sadness below the surface. Members of the community almost starved during long winter storms. One Norwegian fisherman was shipwrecked and another drowned. An elder Ingebretsen went insane. Annie Berntsen, whose family lived briefly at Smuttynose, suffered from profound depression. In the winter of 1881, Annie was found dead at age eighteen of “brain fever,” most likely a suicide. Ovidia was “raving mad” and taken by boat, by train, and by carriage, screaming all the way, and installed at an insane asylum outside of Boston. Celia’s biographer Rosamond Thaxter assigned their condition to the prolonged isolation and loneliness of the islands, to their homesickness for Norway, and to a general sadness that overtook the Norwegian community following the murders of Karen and Anethe in 1873.
The tragedy of the Appledore maids Ovidia and Annie Berntsen was still in the future when Celia Thaxter wrote about Karen Christensen in her essay “A Memorable Murder.” Karen had been “in service” to the Thaxters at the Appledore Hotel for almost two years prior to the murders and had left her job just two weeks earlier. Besides visiting occasionally with her sister at Smuttynose, Karen had also lived briefly with the family of Joseph Pettigrew, a boot and shoe salesman with a store in the heart of downtown Portsmouth. Curiously, the top floor of Pettigrew’s store housed the studio and darkroom of a popular Portsmouth photographer, and yet no photograph of Karen is known to exist. We have only Celia Thaxter’s word picture of Karen as a very neat and clean woman, sitting at her spinning wheel by the fire wearing a gown made of blue cloth she had woven herself in Norway. Karen’s standard uniform included a crisp white apron and a white muslin bow attached to her linen collar.
“She had a pensive way of letting her head droop a little sideways as she spun,” Celia wrote, “and while the low wheel hummed monotonously, she would sit crooning sweet, sad old Norwegian airs by the hour together, perfectly unconscious that she was affording such pleasure to a pair of appreciative eyes.”
Celia Thaxter is best known today for her island garden, her decorative painting, and for romantic poems focused largely on the sea and the flora and fauna at the Isles of Shoals. She applied the same clinical observation to her Scandinavian servants, studying them as she would a sandpiper, a wild rose, or a colorful species of kelp. “My little Norwegians are such treasures!” she confessed in a letter to writer Annie Fields. “So sweet to look at, so gently bred, with manners as near perfect as can be.” And as with the birds and flowers of the Shoals, Celia turned these observations into verse. Her short poem about Karen Christensen was aptly titled “Karen.” It appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and then in her first book-length collection of poems entitled Driftweed that appeared in 1879. “These little verses are like weeds that sprang out of the rock and never knew cultivation,” Celia told her Boston publisher. And, indeed, her candid view of Karen—“She is not pretty, she is not young”—may seem downright unkind.
In the poem, Celia added a fictional young man named Waldemar who is secretly in love with Karen, but Karen is so consumed by grief over her lost lover back in Norway that she is blind to Waldemar’s affections. The poet clearly borrowed the name Waldemar from one of the Ingebretsen boys who lived on Appledore Island. In the poem, Celia warns her housekeeper to stop pining away and to live for the moment.
O homesick Karen, listen to me:
You are not young, and you are not fair,
But Waldemar no one else can see,
For he carries your image everywhere.
Students of the Smuttynose murders have suggested that Waldemar may have been based on Louis Wagner, who, according to the local gossip, had feelings for Karen and killed her in a jealous rage. The Boston Traveller, soon after the murders, even theorized in print that Wagner killed Karen “out of revenge because she would not marry him.” The theory is unfounded. Karen was ten years older than Wagner, who was generally considered a ladies’ man. According to John Hontvet, who insisted that the newspaper retract the false story, Louis and Karen met on no more than half a dozen occasions and only when others were present. While living with the Hontvets on Smuttynose, Wagner spent most of his time with Maren and later with Anethe. Nothing supports the theory that Karen and Louis had a romantic connection, but despite public denials by the Hontvets, by Karen’s friends, and by Wagner himself, the rumor lives on.
Karen was very likely on duty as a maid at the Appledore Hotel in August 1872 when a wealthy Boston businessman named John R. Poor stepped off the ferry from Portsmouth with his wife and daughter. It was a banner year for tourists, Oscar Laighton recalled in his memoir, and there were no vacancies to be had at any price. Guests were sleeping on the piazza and on billiard tables. But Mr. Poor was an important man from Massachusetts who insisted on spending the night. Oscar dutifully gave up his own room to accommodate Poor’s family, while the owner of the world famous Stickney & Poor Spice Company slept on the sofa in the hotel’s letter-writing room. This inauspicious event would soon lead to the disappearance of the town of Gosport.
Stickney & Poor got its humble start in 1815 when Boston grocer William Stickney began grinding mustard seeds by hand and delivering the spice to customers in a wicker basket. By the Gold Rush era of 1849, mustard was not only a table spice but a medical necessity. Mustard plasters, a hot poultice made of powdered seeds spread on cloth, were placed on a patient’s chest or back to prevent colds, improve breathing, and relieve pain. By the Civil War, using steam-powered machinery in their Charlestown factory, the company’s familiar yellow-and-red mustard box was an American icon. Widely promoted with colorful advertising and a team of aggressive salesmen, Stickney & Poor became a household name for a wide range of peppers, exotic spices, herbs, yeast, ground coffee, and even patent medicines. A bottle of Stickney & Poor’s Pure Paregoric, for example, was a potent mixture of opium and alcohol. Five drops of the soothing liquid was recommended in the Victorian era for crying babies as young a five days old and twenty-five drops could put teething infants or restless children quickly to sleep, sometimes permanently. Such drugs, described as “baby killers,” were eventually taken off the market in the twentieth century.
According to Oscar Laighton’s memoir Ninety Years at the Isles of Shoals, Mr. Poor was captivated by the burgeoning tourist business at the Appledore Hotel. Poor asked the Laighton brothers if he could purchase Smuttynose Island. Oscar and Cedric declined the offer, explaining that Smuttynose was then occupied by a Norwegian fishing family. “Mr. Poor had been with us a few days,” Oscar recalled, “when we discovered that he was secretly buying out the inhabitants of Star Island and the whole village of Gosport.”
Seeking to diversify, Poor was ready to invest a lot of cash into the lucrative summer resort business. On Star Island, according to Rosamond Thaxter, Poor found that the surviving fishermen were “a rather pitiable and worthless lot.” The Spice King did not do the dirty work himself. Poor employed a go-between named Mr. Nathan F. Mathes of Portsmouth, who gobbled up the deeds for all but two of the island properties for a reported cost of fifty-four thousand dollars. By September 1872, following a unanimous vote of the townspeople of Gosport, Mr. Mathes was given title to all the houses and land with the exception of two holdouts, fisherman John Bragg Downs and the Reverend George Beebe. Downs, who was financially stable and had been born at the Shoals, refused to capitulate to the developer from Massachusetts and kept his home and tiny plot of land. Rev. Beebe had even deeper emotional ties. Rev Beebe had served since 1857 as the last Christian missionary to the fishing families of the island. Like Rev. John Tucke a century before, Beebe had been their spiritual leader, doctor, attorney, teacher, justice of the peace, carpenter, tax collector, and more. When the preacher’s daughter, Mitty, attended school on the mainland for the first time in 1863, she contracted scarlet fever. Back on the island, the deadly disease spread to Mitty’s two younger sisters, who died in quick succession. The graves of the three Beebe girls are still visible among a jungle of cedars, lilacs, and poison ivy at the far end of Star Island. Most tourists miss the hidden spot. Eventually, the sad Rev. Beebe and his wife detached their hearts from the island and moved on like the others.
Why did the Shoalers sell out? While some served honorably in the Civil War, others were in debt for fees paid to avoid military service. To make things worse, the fishing had not been good in recent years. Fish stocks were declining in the Gulf of Maine and a number of species had been fished almost to extinction. The giant cod weighing up to 120 pounds that had so attracted Captain John Smith were long gone, and by the mid-1800s, the teaming schools of mackerel and the all-important menhaden, or “pogies,” used for bait were getting harder and harder to find.
There was a technical revolution going on too. Men who traditionally caught fish using hooks and lines from small boats could no longer make ends meet. Trawl, or “tub,” fishing vessels employing hundreds of baited hooks, were taking over. But the costs of such a boat and all that equipment was beyond the means of most Shoalers. The lack of fish, the cost of high-tech trawling, overdue state taxes, and the lingering Civil War debts were more than the impoverished villagers could handle. The offer from Mr. Mathes to buy up the island property, at first blush seemed like a godsend. To sweeten the deal, Mathes offered to pay off the Gosport war tax and to clear the books of $3,800 in overdue New Hampshire taxes.
The local paper soon revealed that Mathes was merely the front man and that the secret “Boston capitalist” behind him was the wealthy John R. Poor. And just as quickly, Poor’s workers razed the fisherman’s huts and renovated the more substantial buildings for use as summer rentals. They cleared a large footprint of land on Star facing Smuttynose across the ocean harbor. Construction teams graded the rocky land and began to erect an enormous skeleton of what was to become the luxurious Oceanic Hotel. The 265-foot structure, according to Cedric Laighton’s letter to his sister Celia, would cost Mr. Poor thirty-five thousand dollars to construct. The final cost was double that amount and Poor’s new company would invest nearly three hundred thousand dollars to obtain the island and fit out the hotel. The Oceanic promised to open 147 sleeping quarters for 300 guests, boasted wide corridors, modern conveniences, a fine spacious dining room, a dance hall, and elegant fixtures. A large new stone pier would outstrip anything seen at the Appledore.
In a single swipe, one of the oldest continually-occupied European fishing outposts in the United States was obliterated. Removed permanently to the mainland, most of the displaced Gosport villagers quickly came to regret their decision to sell.
“Nearly all the Gosportians have been over here lately and they, one and all,” Cedric wrote to Celia, “bitterly regret having sold their homesteads.” The displaced Shoalers cursed Mr. Mathes and protested among themselves. Most begged John Downs to lease them a tiny parcel of his land on Star Island and pleaded with the Laightons to sell them building lots on Appledore or Smuttynose, but to no avail. Lemuel Caswell, whose family had lived on the Isles for generations, told Cedric that “if he don’t get a place on the Shoals to live, he shall be crazy.” It was no idle threat. Ten years earlier, Lemuel’s uncle (also named Lemuel Caswell) had killed himself at the Shoals by cutting his own throat “from ear to ear” with a razor.
But the die was cast. Fishermen at the Shoals were suddenly on the verge of extinction. Only men like John Hontvet, who could afford a bigger boat, more hooks, and more bait, stood a chance of surviving. Beside his brother, Matthew, John was so successful that he could occasionally afford to take on extra help aboard the Clara Bella. One of those men was a Prussian immigrant named Louis Wagner, who had found his way from New York to Boston to Star Island exactly at the wrong time in history. Like a fish out of water, Gosport Village was gasping its last. Wagner, too, unable to make ends meet, was in desperate straits in 1872.
Unlike the Hontvets, Wagner had not yet gotten his fair share of the American dream. And unlike the old Shoalers whom he was living among at Gosport, he had no property to sell to the wealthy hotel developer. He was about to become homeless again. So when John Hontvet offered Wagner not only a fishing job, but also a place to stay in his home on Smuttynose Island, it was a rare stroke of luck. If Wagner had been a religious man, which at the time he was not, he might have seen the hand of God at play. Finally, things were looking up.