Doctors Island
The Story Behind the House on "Doctor's Island" / Black Rock, Hull, MA
Every June my relatives and friends and my own family returned to Green Hill in Hull, MA for the summer.
We spent most of our time outdoors and on the shore - swimming, sailing, fishing, rowing, picnic-ing, body surfing, snorkeling and learning how to recognize that blue lips and shivering meant get out of the 50+° water.
Doctor’s Island with its house and boathouse always set the backdrop for these times.
Sometimes it seemed warm and calm, other times stormy and fearsome.
But whatever the season and mood of the sea the island with the house on it drew artists of every type and age. It became a “Motif Number One” of the South Shore or at least the Cohasset Art Festival. Here’s a few examples:
Very occasionally the “people on the Island”, as we called them, would visit. A circling swarm of yelling seagulls announced their arrival. The shutters would open and the flag appear. From child-to-child passed word that “The people are on the island!”
We often wondered,
“Who built that?
Why?
Who owns it?
What’s it like inside?
How can they stand the seagulls?”
Absent the facts, legends filled in:
“It was a hunting shack owned by the Annette’s.” or
“A kind Doctor set it up to get away.” or
“Once in a storm they flew the flag upside down; Jack Blake saw it and called the Coast Guard,”, etc.
No one on the hill seemed to know the real story. And we left it at that.
60 years after these summers, Al Buckley, a carver of wooden birds, whose family built most of homes up behind Black Rock Beach down Forest Ave and Linden Lane…
…shared the real story, this monograph (see “Resources” below for a full copy):
In 1965 one Gilbert Sanders Tower, a Cohasset historian, had hand-written this two page history of “The Island” as recalled by Paul Winsor who lived just behind Black Rock Beach at the base of “the Hill.”
Mr. Tower writes,
“Originally, by tradition, a fisherman's shack, the oldest part is believed to have been built way back in about 1867.”
He continues…
“Mr. Harry D. Reed of Boston became an early owner. In the period when shooting coot was a popular sport, …
…the lodge provided a convenient place for cooters who enjoyed getting out on the ocean on a little boat to struggle against the elements for some wild ducks. The gunners had strings of wooden decoys which they anchored at a spot where the coot might stop for a rest. …
… Then they would shoot from the boat at the birds in flight.”
Source: Ocean State Outfitters, Narraganset RI - https://www.youtube.com/user/1974jsbrooks
So the hunting part of the legends held up!
Winslow Homer captures the likely scene off the Island in his painting “Right and Left” created in this same period. Note in this subset of the painting, the gunner in a boat shooting - fire and smoke - by the duck’s right webbed foot.
Mr. Tower continues,
“In 1901 Mr. [Horace] Cook became owner … affectionately referred to as "Uncle Horace”, he was a grain merchant whose place of business was in the Grain Exchange Building, Boston. He built additions to the lodge and used it for refuge where he could camp out when he felt like it. Mr. Cook … kept a log … in which he recorded his visits and the names of his many friends…[such as,]
“Dr. Nathaniel Emerson … a noted surgeon”…
... and, I discovered, a founding member of the Hawaiian League of 1887, also known as the Annexation Club, which authored the Bayonet Constitution forced on King Kalākaua.1
“Dr. Emerson helped Mr. Cook add to the cottage and to build the stone boat house … behind it.”
Could he be the ‘Doctor' of Doctor’s Island?
Mr. Tower writes,
“The added rooms were built from wreckage washed up in the storm of 1898.”
The barque Lucy Nichols wrecked off these “Black Rocks” in the Portland gale of November 1898.
The hut, stocked with firewood saved three crewmen off the Lucy. Joshua James and his Humane Society Lifesaving crew rescued them from Doctor’s Island. US Life Saving Records of that rescue refer to it as a “gunning hut.”
Could the “wreckage” framing the house extensions have come from the Lucy Nichols?
Mr Tower adds,
“General Logan was once Mr. Cook’s guest.”
He after whom the Massachusetts State Senate named the former Jeffrey Field in East Boston the “General Edward L Logan Airport.”
“Also General Pershing before he became famous was a guest, He and Uncle Horace looked alike.”
Mr. Cook went abroad every year. He was a great club man, belonged to Algonquin, Boston Athletic Association & Exchange Clubs.
Mr. Edwin Hatch used to be caretaker of the island for Mr. Cook. He lived nearby on Stony Beach Ave, [near Gun Rock beach] He used to row Mr. Cook out and back.”
This “Captain” Hatch stood out for us children. Many would dress up as Captain Hatch in the annual Labor Day Parade. He held his lobster prices at 50 cents a pound for years, despite inflation, because, as he said, “the math was easier.” He was a volunteer Lifesaver with the Humane Society and participated in their last lifeboat rescue of men from the Schooner Nancy stranded on Nantasket Beach on February 19, 1927.2
Mr. Tower continues,
“Mr. Cook died in 1943 and left the rock and cottage to Mr. George H. Hopkins, who for years had been associated with Mr. Cook in his business and who naturally had become attached to the place. Then Mr. Hopkins died in 1958, so since then Mrs. Hopkins has been owner.”
It was this Mrs. Hopkins with her daughter and son in law, the Leaders and their two daughters Christine and Beverly who greeted Mr. Tower on his visit to the island with Paul Winsor in the early 60’s.
The House on the island remains, seemingly unchanged – except that newly arrived Cormorants have pushed the gulls almost off -- but the hill and its residents have radically changed. Today private homes own the Common that used to allow seaside walks in front of the homes at the top of the banking. Only three houses on the hill remain summer cottages. A new, more moneyed class of property buyers have torn down many of the old homes to build multi-million-dollar year-round mansions. Far fewer children swim at rocky beach; and the July 4 and Labor day parades have ended — a very different place than we remembered as children.
But, the memories remain as does this strikingly beautiful island and house and the sea around Us.
Resources
Gilbert Tower’s History of the Island - Handwritten Copy
Gilbert Tower’s History of the Island - Digitized Text
Nathaniel Bright Emerson (July 1, 1839 Waialua, Oahu – July 16, 1915, at sea) was a medical physician and author of Hawaiian mythology. Source: Emerson, Nathaniel Bright (1915) Pele and Hiiaka: A Myth from Hawaii, Honolulu: Honolulu star-bulletin limited. (1915). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Bright_Emerson#/media/File:Nathaniel_Bright_Emerson.jpg. Retrieved July 4, 2022,
Galluzzo, J. J. (2021, March 12). How A Ship Named Nancy Found Her Way To Final Resting Place Here. Hull Times. Retrieved November 5, 2022, from https://thehulltimes.com/how-a-ship-named-nancy-found-her-way-to-final-resting-place-here/
Lists Edmund Hatch as a volunteer on the Lifeboat rescue
Thanks David. Glad you liked it. And yes, I am thinking Dr. Emerson may well be the source of the "Doctor" in Doctors Island. Seems he engaged heartily in shaping it to today's look. - John
Nicely done John. It is both thorough and visually stunning. I wonder if Dr. Emerson is the source the the "Doctor's Island" moniker?