OPENING CEREMONIES
The summer of 1873 was a game changer at the Isles of Shoals. Most conspicuously there was a massive new hotel preparing to open. The gleaming white monolith dominated the forty acres at what used to be the island village of Gosport. The villagers had vanished and many of their ramshackle huts had been leveled. The workmen who had ignored Maren Hontvet’s plaintive cries for help in March were now hammering in the final nails. And what had been the peaceful island of Smuttynose across the ocean harbor was now an infamous murder site.
For twenty-five years, the Appledore Hotel had reigned supreme at the Isles of Shoals. A generation of summer visitors had come to know the Laighton family. Guests roamed every rocky cove, cliff, and cairn. They heard the familiar island tales of ghosts, pirates, and shipwrecks. Eliza Laighton, whose doctor described her as “morbidly obese,” served up three enormous meals each day to hundreds of hotel patrons. A typical supper menu offered the following bounty from the sea: broiled fresh mackerel, salt mackerel, broiled scrod, fried halibut, fried cod, broiled saltfish, fish balls, fish chowder, hashed fish, perch, pickled lobster, plain lobster, spiced or smoked salmon. And that was in addition to heaping plates of beef, turkey, chicken, ham, tongue, all varieties of eggs and potatoes, baked beans, fresh baked breads, and preserved fruits. The only competition ten miles out to sea had been the Laighton’s own dumpy Mid-Ocean House hotel on Smuttynose and the three smaller guest houses on Star Island run by Origen and Lemuel Caswell.
Besides the cool “healthful air” and the spectacular sunsets, visitors to Appledore were often treated to celebrity sightings. Classical musicians gave impromptu concerts while famous painters set up their easels on the hotel piazza. American poets and writers, the rock stars of the Victorian era, were ubiquitous in Celia Thaxter’s cottage salon. But it was her connection to the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, founded in 1857, that made Celia herself the most sought-after celebrity on the island. Due in large part to its two-hundred-year connection to Harvard University, many Americans, especially New Englanders, saw Boston as an intellectual capital, a “latter-day Athens” according to one historian. If Boston was the nation’s cultural hub in the 1860s and ’70s, then the Atlantic Magazine was the hub of the hub. And when the elite magazine’s authors and editors took a vacation, they frequently found their way to the Laighton family hotel.
James Russell Lowell, the first editor of the Atlantic, had been among the original guests at Appledore in the 1850s. Considered America’s first “man of letters,” Lowell was also a bit of an alcoholic, suicidal, and absentminded. But he set the bar high for the new Atlantic magazine by paying a decent rate to big name nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Whittier, Melville, and Longfellow. An abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights, Lowell’s own four-hundred-line poem titled “Pictures of Appledore” is a perfect example of the lofty (most readers today might say “stuffy”) literary style that characterized the magazine in its early days.
The first five editors of the Atlantic Monthly, including Lowell, James T. Fields, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and William Dean Howells, all had strong connections to Portsmouth, to Kittery, or to the Isles of Shoals. So it was only natural that readers of the magazine became familiar with Celia Thaxter’s poetry and her legends of the Shoals region.
As Atlantic readers moved westward with the expanding nation, so did the reputation of the Isles of Shoals. Like Celia Thaxter, the second Atlantic editor, James T. Fields, was Portsmouth-born. His wife, Annie Fields, became Celia’s closest friend. As a partner in Ticknor & Fields, James became the most important Boston literary publisher of his age. According to a contemporary, Fields was “the shrewdest of publishers and the kindest of men.” It was Fields who pushed Hawthorne to complete The Scarlet Letter, who urged Henry David Thoreau ahead in his writing, who made Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier wealthy, and who published the works of Charles Dickens in the United States.
Ticknor & Fields purchased the ailing Atlantic Magazine in 1859 and Fields served as editor until 1871. Fields encouraged Celia to write her classic Among the Isles of Shoals that first appeared as installments in the magazine in 1869 and 1870. Journalist Horace Greeley, no easy critic, found Celia’s Atlantic essays on the Shoals, with their vivid “pen pictures,” to be “the best prose writing I have seen for a long time.” William Dean Howells, who succeeded Fields as editor of the Atlantic, had also been smitten by young Celia’s natural beauty during early visits to the Appledore Hotel before the Civil War. Howells continued to publish Celia’s poems and championed her bold, realistic essay on the Wagner murder in 1875. Each mention of Celia and the Shoals in the Atlantic was free publicity for the Appledore Hotel. It was Celia’s depiction of her romantic isolated kingdom that lured Atlantic readers to the islands. And it is likely that this publicity attracted Boston spice merchant John R. Poor to open the competing Oceanic Hotel on Star Island in 1873.
“One of the brightest figures in literary Boston for many years, was Celia Thaxter,” a critic wrote after the poet’s death. “She was the best of good company. Everybody wanted her.” Professor Jane E. Vallier, a scholar of Thaxter’s work, reminds us that Celia was among the most popular and frequently published poets of her time. She “set the moral tone” of the Appledore resort, Vallier says, and turned the island into a sort of utopia. It is against her high standard of behavior that the murders appear especially abhorrent.
Celia’s rock star status does not translate well in the roughly two dozen surviving photographs we have of her. Even as a child, she appears perpetually solemn, thoughtful, dour, and shy. She frowns and averts her eyes from the camera. She never ever smiles and grows matronly as the years pass. Yet contemporaries remember her not only as fearless and independent but also as endowed with an infectious laugh. Her “broad chest” and “vigorous physique” erupted with peals of laughter, one hotel guest recalled in later years. Always social, rarely intimate, Celia was the ideal hostess. Yet she confided in letters to friends like Annie Fields that the crush of admirers often left her exhausted and depressed.
The Oceanic Hotel offered no such celebrity host when it opened in the summer of 1873. While the Appledore resort had evolved from the mind of Celia’s eccentric father, Thomas Laighton, the Star Island project was a financial investment pure and simple. John Poor was among a number of newly rich Boston businessmen seeking to diversify his holdings by cashing in on the tourism boom then sweeping the New England coast. In the coming years, a glut of summer hotels would spring up along the sandy beaches and rocky bluffs close by. On a clear day, hotels stretching from Boar’s Head in Hampton to Bald Head Cliff in Ogunquit, Maine, were visible from the Shoals. These big wooden hotels sported big names like the Sagamore, the Passaconaway, the Champernowne, the Farragut, and Wentworth by the Sea. Many would, as wooden hotels often did, expire in flames.
In the same month as the murders, with Louis Wagner languishing in a Maine jail awaiting trial, details of the rising Oceanic Hotel began to leak into the local newspapers. Although the Laighton family complained privately of John Poor’s devious acquisition of Star Island, Oscar declared publicly that the new hotel was no threat to the Appledore. “There is business enough for all,” the Portsmouth Journal reported, “and there will never be hotels enough built on the Isles of Shoals to accommodate all who wish to rest there.”
At four stories high and 262-feet long, the Oceanic could not quite match the enormous 500-guest peak capacity of the Appledore House. But it was newer and boasted a sturdy stone dock 350-feet long and 20-feet wide. An enormous circular cistern carved into solid rock could hold 100,000 gallons of water at Star Island. The Appledore, by comparison, looked and operated like a pre–Civil War hotel for an exclusive set of carefully vetted guests based largely in the Boston area. The Laightons depended on referrals and on Celia Thaxter’s literary fame to draw paying guests. John Poor, however, had deep pockets and used his fortune to advertise the Oceanic as a metropolitan-style hotel, targeting vacationers from Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and beyond.
The final incorporation of the Oceanic was a rocky process. New Hampshire legislators wondered why Mr. Nathan Mathes, who had scooped up all the Gosport real estate in his own name, was not part of the Oceanic Hotel Corporation. The five incorporating parties included John R. Poor, John A. Poor, and Daniel E. Poor, a family name also associated with lucrative railroad speculation and the Standard & Poor investment agency. The new hotel company boasted $300,000 in operating capital. But with the peak summer season about to begin on July 1, New Hampshire legislators continued to table the Oceanic Company’s requests. The state finally sanctioned Poor’s corporation on July 3, 1873, and the doors opened five days later.
In the first month of operation, 1,098 guests signed the Oceanic register, filling 182 rooms and the many converted fishing cottages on the island. A renowned Boston caterer prepared and served meals in a spacious dining room and the kitchen featured an ornate meat-carving table, marble coffee urns, enormous stoves and grills, “hot closets,” and patented fish fryers. The Oceanic boasted modern steam-powered elevators and superior plumbing, special baggage rooms for long-stay guests, a bowling alley, separate men’s and ladies’ billiard rooms, and the best ferry service on the east coast. Oceanic advertising promised perpetual ocean breezes that were not only healthy, but free of dust and mosquitoes. The thermometer, according to a visitor testimonial, was permanently “nailed at 70 degrees.”
That summer, John Poor personally hosted a private charter and sumptuous banquet for members of the press corp. After coffee and cabanas and many hearty toasts, the reporters were treated to a tour of the murder site on Smuttynose, followed by cod fishing and yacht sailing. A grand “hop” with a live orchestra topped the evening. In the spirit of camaraderie, Mr. Poor invited Appledore Hotel proprietor Oscar Laighton and 150 of his guests to dance the night away in the grand Oceanic ballroom.
As part of his 1873 media blitz, Poor contacted yacht clubs up and down the New England coast, hoping to stir up more elite business. His promotional efforts led to the first-ever Gosport Regatta the following summer. More than fifty boats entered a thirteen-mile race from Star Island to Boon Island in Maine and back. The winner was the yacht America for which the famous America’s Cup race later took its name. But according to Celia’s biographer “Rozzie” Thaxter, this new wave of wealthy summer tourists left much to be desired. “So many noisy and objectionable people came to the new Oceanic Hotel,” Rozzie noted, “the more discriminating guests moved to the Appledore House where the atmosphere continued one of refinement and culture.”
The opening of the Oceanic killed the Gosport fishing village. It also ended the chance for summer visitors to meet the hard-bitten old Shoalers in their natural habitat. The strange synergy that had existed between the early hotel guests and the quirky fishing families was gone forever. By the summer of 1873, the former inhabitants of the island had faded into the misty realm of legend along with ghostly pirates and frozen shipwrecked sailors. The family of John and Maren Hontvet, living and dead, had moved to Portsmouth, never to return. Their Red House had become the “must see” attraction of the summer. Victorian visitors bought hundreds of stereoview picture cards of the Smuttynose murder site as naturally as if it was the Grand Canyon or a battle scene at Gettysburg. Others took more palpable keepsakes, cutting away chunks of the blood-stained house with pocket knives.
Author William Leonard Gage watched the transition firsthand. For fifteen years, beginning in 1860, Gage took the summer ferry from Portsmouth to the Isles of Shoals. (“I know of no steamer ride in the United States more delightful,” Gage once wrote.) Before the arrival of the Oceanic, Gage had often lodged at the Gosport House on Star Island operated by Origen Caswell and his wife, Mary, whom the writer greatly admired. Origen was the bravest, truest, noblest man Gage had ever met and never allowed a drop of liquor in his lodging house. Gage would come to miss the quaint simpler times among the poor folk of old Gosport village. He recalled exciting days on the ocean, fishing in a small boat with the Caswells. One time, they hauled in a hundred cod and mackerel in a single trip.
But Gage had little sympathy or respect for the “degraded islanders” of Gosport whom he described as lazy, drunken, and bickering. “He who could swear the hardest was the best fellow,” he wrote of the last of the Shoalers. Gage admired the new Oceanic Hotel, but was not always impressed by its clientele.
“From the Boston or New York point of view, it is certainly a success,” Gage wrote of the Oceanic in 1875, “and whether in beds, or electric signals, or grand piano, or spacious dining hall, or noble piazza, or spacious corridors, or billiard or bowling alleys, or elegantly appointed tables, with their perfect galaxy of waiters—it has few if any superiors.”
“There was no style, no fashion, no excess of ornamentation,” among the old Shoalers and early rusticators who visited the island, he recalled. Those authentic Yankee characters had been replaced by a new generation of socialites and partygoers. “People went out to the Shoals to enjoy the ocean and the rocks, not to waste the summer and criticize one another,” Gage wrote, comparing the very different eras. “Among the crowds who frequent the Oceanic, you not infrequently meet some who have never taken the pains to walk out and see and hear the dashings of the sea.”
Despite his nostalgia, Gage was honest about the good old days at Gosport. “Would I go back to them? I hardly think it,” he wrote.
In 1869, before the arrival of John Poor, a travel writer named B. F. DeCosta had described Gosport as “the most perfect picture of a fisherman’s village that I have seen on the New England coast.” Four years later, it was gone.
“The Isles of Shoals have been transformed from a fisherman’s paradise to a famous summer resort,” the New York Times declared, “to many, the most attractive on the New England coast.” But the change took its toll. “Like the Indians, however, [the fishermen] have disappeared before the onward march of civilization.”
Samuel Adams Drake, another prolific author of Victorian travel guides, said it best. Drake found it ironic that the hotel industry at the Shoals began with Thomas Laighton, a man who was pathologically reclusive and downright antisocial. It was stranger still, Drake wrote, that John Poor believed that his “monster hotel” made Star Island a better place.
“Thus by the so-called hand of improvement,” Drake wrote with undisguised sarcasm, “was the ancient village of Gosport swept off the face of the island to which, like some lonely sea bird, it had clung with precarious hold for more than two hundred years. In all New England we do not recall a similar instance of a whole village being improved out of existence.”
But the grand Oceanic Hotel, as John Poor first imagined it, would not survive for long. Like Louis Wagner, its days were numbered.