The Dartmouth-Westport Chronicle
'Westport’s Worlds' lecture by William Wyatt provides an entertaining look at town history
August 18, 2004
Although tucked away in a rural corner of the southeast coast of Massachusetts, Westport has had a ‘walk on’ role in many major periods of American history and actually took the lead role in one of them. William Wyatt, deftly mixing droll humor and archived facts, produced evidence of this in a 45 minute lecture in the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s theater on Thursday, August 5.
Wyatt, a Westport resident since 1986 and president of the Westport Historical Society since 1999, is a retired professor of the classics at Brown University and a museum docent. The man knows his way around history.
His fact filled talk, Westport’s Worlds, was conversational in tone and accompanied by enough slides to illustrate points but not so many as to make a listener’s eyes glaze over. It was also entertaining. While showing the first slide, he identified seven distinct areas which comprise Westport’s geography - North Westport, Westport Factory, Head of Westport, Central Village, South Westport, Westport Point, and Westport Harbor/Acoaxet. Pointing to Central Village, Wyatt told a story that had the listeners in stitches about why Westport doesn’t have a town green. “The Quakers thought if a town green was built, the Congregationalists would erect a church there and the Quakers would have to pay the taxes to support the minister.” Probably an apocryphal story, Wyatt deadpanned, but it put the audience on notice that the evening’s history would be leavened with humor.
Since it was formed from a part of Dartmouth in 1787, Westport has had cultures in industry, agriculture, and the sea. “Topographically, the north of Westport is elevated, the drop in elevation allowed the use of water power, and it became home to early 19th century mills,” Wyatt said. In 1795,William Rotch, Jr. bought 20 acres of land in Westport Head, including a grist mill, saw mill, forge, store house and blacksmith shop. “For the next fifty years, Rotch provided metal, wood, grains and other materials for whaling ships.” In 1837, one mill consumed 300,000 pounds of cotton. An astute businessman, Rotch seems to have been one of first Southcoast entrepreneurs to become involved in all three cultures at the same time.
Rotch’s enterprises were embedded the one of the great eras of American maritime history, the whaling industry. While driving over a small bridge marking the east branch’s headwaters on Old County Road in Westport, a traveler would be surprised to learn that whaling ships weighing hundreds of tons were built there.
Wyatt reeled off the names of several vessels that were built at the Head from 1805 to 1828. The 1827 vessel Iris was the heavyweight at 311 tons. Anticipating the audience’s question, Wyatt said that once built, the ships were floated on casks down to Westport Point, where they were fitted for sea with spars, sails, and hardware. The Hix Bridge, built in about 1783, posed no problem to Westporter’s ingenuity. They portaged the ships around the west end of the bridge on rollers and refloated them down the river. One wonders if this was one of the first applications of the term “surf and turf”.
All told, Wyatt reports there were 326 whaling voyages from “the Point” between 1775 and 1881.To this day, Westport maintains fishing interests, although its port isn’t as lively as in the nineteenth century. Showing a slide of the Westport Point monument to men lost at sea from 1818 to 2003, Wyatt noted that making a livelihood on the sea has always been a dangerous business. One way locals decided to respond to ships running aground on Hen and Chickens reef was to build a rescue station on Gooseberry Neck in 1888.
Wyatt told also of Westport's maritime connection with three wars. The 1856 locally built schooner Kate Cory made five voyages in the Atlantic Ocean and was burned in 1863 by the Confederate forces aboard The Alabama. In World War II, a submarine observation post, complete with machine gun emplacements, was built on Gooseberry Neck. And at the height of the Cold War in 1971, Wyatt says, “Westport drew national headlines and entered the world stage.”
“Off the New England coast, Russian ships had been sucking up not only fish but also gear and lines belonging to the Prelude Company of Westport. Prelude filed a lawsuit and caused a large Russian vessel to be seized for six days by U.S. marshals in California. Russians drove to Westport, arrived at the Prelude office, and paid $89,000 for the lost gear.” Most importantly to local fishermen and the nation’s fishing industry, “the 200 mile international fishing limit was established that protected U. S. fishing boats from encroachment by foreign fishing fleets.”
As in other parts of America, race and racism have visited Westport. On the positive side of the ledger, Wyatt cited Paul Cuffe’s arrival here from Cuttyhunk. Part African American, part Native American, and son of a freed slave, Cuffe built boats south of Hix Bridge at Tripp’s Wharf (including his vessel, The Traveler), formed his own company, and was accepted by other traders. He became a cultural force, built a school here, and helped build the Quaker Meeting House. He envisioned a society in Sierra Leone without slavery but died before he could make it a reality. On the other side of the ledger, Wyatt noted a local influence of the Ku Klux Klan from the New Bedford area and the burning of crosses in Westport in the1920s and 30s. “A cross was burned as recently as 1938 in the Head area,” he noted, and such blatant racism has not resurfaced since then.
Nor did Westport escape the effects of Prohibition. “Rum running became a lucrative if dangerous sideline of some Westport families. The Feds did manage to shoot up one vessel, killing one smuggler, but most others, using local knowledge, out-navigated the revenuers with their intimate knowledge of the local waters.” His tongue firmly in cheek, Wyatt quipped, “I won’t mention names.The bootleggers have long since passed away although their families still reside in town, and I certainly wouldn't want to stir up any trouble.”
Wyatt noted that Westport’s harbor entrance has always been hard for outsiders to find. Aside from the revenues getting lost or coming to grief on uncharted reefs as they chased local entrepreneurs during Prohibition, he recounted an anecdote about a British sea captain in 1778, who, “frustrated because he couldn’t find the entrance to Westport harbor to burn the Point, lobbed a shell at the Davis house in Acoaxet.” As far as anyone knows, the sea captain’s reputation received more damage than the Davis abode.
Mr. Wyatt asserted that several Westport businesses are international in scope. He named the Pine Hill Equipment Company, which engineers, installs, repairs hydraulic equipment all over the world; Mid City Scrap, which processes scrap metal and sends it all over the world; and the local fishing industry which he believed exports swordfish to Japan and tautog to Korea; and the Westport Winery. In a lighthearted aside that met with laugher and agreement, Wyatt added to this vaunted list Butler’s Colonial Doughnut House “which deserves international acclaim for its cream filled delights,” and has actually been written up in national press.
Agriculture doesn’t define the Westport economy as it once did, says Wyatt, but dairy farming and crop production still thrive on a smaller scale. Actually Westport is the largest milk producing town in the state. And there’s always the matter of the Macomber turnip, born and bred in Westport in 1876 by Adin and Elihu Macomber.
An unusual episode of Westport history began with the arrival of a French-Canadian religious group, The Mission of the Holy Ghost, in 1921.The sect was led by a charismatic man named Eugene Richer LaFleche. Local residents had no idea what the foreign speakers were doing there or believed in, and called them “holy jumpers.” The two groups kept a healthy distance from one another, a condition aided by the fact that the sect settled on Great Island on the west branch of the Westport River. “They became objects of suspicion and remained in town for some years, then left” Wyatt reported. This group still exists in Montreal and the west coast. In a remarkable coincidence, Wyatt himself bought a house once owned by the sect and was visited at least twice by curious sect members.
In summary, Mr.Wyatt said that Westport, blessed by its proximity to the sea on the horizon, other enterprising towns outside its borders, and the good earth at its feet, has placed no obstacles to prosperity to its citizens. Through the pages of history, Westport has been on at least one occasion a chapter, on others a footnote. Because of the Cold War incident which resulted in the creation of the international fishing limit, one can agree with Wyatt’s sentiment about Westport, “We are small, but widely known.”
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