Times passes. People pass. Houses sometimes pass with the people who live in them.
This is not a column to point fingers, pass judgment or get shorts in a twist.
It is just to mark literally a milestone, the end of an era.
It was the end of the line for Joe and Helen Garland’s house on Eastern Point. Sad really, one of the original 11 Eastern Point “cottages” and where Joe had written most of his books from his little writing study that overlooked the quiet curve of Raymond’s Beach. The view was especially influenced by the motions of the tides, constantly rising and falling, always cycling through its changes, a huge clock tempering Joe’s work, his moods and his inspiration. He couldn’t look over his typewriter carriage without seeing the tide as he wrote.
The house had been called Black Bess after the stunning rock formation it overlooked. Built in 1888 by David Greenough — a fabulously successful Boston lawyer — it was later bought by Joe’s grandfather, also named Joseph, over a hundred years ago. The view feasted on the western shore and its vivid sunsets. Blessedly, all the stunning little open spaces and rock nooks around the house had been left alone to preserve the magic. You couldn’t get a boat in or out of Gloucester Harbor without going by Black Bess. It faced into the wicked winter’s west winds but took major storms and hurricanes over its shoulder, assuring its longer term survival.
The Thomas E. Lannon was Fishtown’s first cruising schooner to take on the tasks of a regular multiple daily sail schedule for the public. Tom Ellis, the skipper and visionary creator of the regular tourist schooner sail industry, used to swing by Black Bess every day to fire the Lannon’s onboard cannon for the Garlands and Joe would have his cannon at the ready for its answering reply. Both booms would echo across the harbor to the granite cliffs of the western shore and back to the point where it would rebounce the echo again until it died. Tom Ellis’ son, Heath Ellis, who now captains the vessel, still fires off of Joe’s house but only on special occasions like Fiesta, Schooner Festival weekend or on Joe’s birthday. Sadly, today there is no one to fire its answer back.
Joe had a small boat that he sailed from time to time tucked into his side of Raymond’s Cove. It was a mostly tranquil spot until it wasn’t. He had earlier lost one of Howard Blackburn’s boats in that very spot. It was Cruising Club, which was chronicled in an agonizing front page Times picture of boat builder and artist Larry Dahlmer trying to pull it off the rocks in Joe’s corner of Raymond’s before it was ground into splinters. He was not successful in that effort. I scavenged one of the distinctively colored green and red topside planks that washed down the beach by the next day. I saved it in my barn, intending to present it to Joe someday but there never seemed like an appropriate time that wouldn’t have saddened him. Contrary to Joe’s “legend,” he wasn’t that much of a sailor, only a few times a summer. He had built a fabulous “railroad” of 2-by-4s which wended is way down the rocks to the water from the house, allowing him to slide his dinghy down and in. But it was a bear to land and pull the rowboat back up, which no doubt limited his trips. Finally, a storm blew the whole railroad into smithereens.
The Garlands and Black Bess were a Gloucester fixture for many decades. As neighbors, they could sometimes be a pain in the butt, but who isn’t? They filled out a house that deserved them as owners. When you rounded their corner of the road, first came Black Bess, then the lighthouse, then the breakwater.
Now we’re down to just two of them but who knows how long they’ll last?