Parker M. Wilcox: Baybury History

The town of Baybury Shores, like many communities in eastern Massachusetts, had been settled in the mid-1600s by unruly European folk who were neither suitably devout nor upstanding enough to be allowed to remain with the Pilgrims in their village near Plymouth Rock. While white New England Protestants are rarely described as perfidious or disorderly, the outcasts who landed in Baybury Shores were quite naughty by the standards of the day. They consorted with Quakers and hobnobbed with the Dutch. They refused to hire a minister. They held clambakes on the Sabbath, often including in the fixings that undesirable crustacean, the lobster. The only reason they had not been banished from the colony altogether was that they made their clam chowder with milk and cream, instead of with clear broth or tomatoes as heathens do. This hardy group of First Comers survived for more than two centuries by farming, digging clams, building ships, fishing for cod, and trading up and down the eastern seaboard in schooners and clipper ships.

Tea importer, quarry owner, and Baybury Shores philanthropist Horatio Hollings Hathaway was born on October 17, 1810. His death on All Hallow's Eve in 1889 is often said to have been caused by drowning while bobbing for apples. The Elizabethan-inspired Hathaway Memorial Library was donated to town on the tenth anniversary of his death by his heirs. Some folks have claimed that after dark in late October, eerie gurgling and gasping sounds can be heard in the building. Skeptics attribute the noises to old plumbing but cannot explain the distinct smell of ripe Northern Spies.

Eventually the old Yankee residents, the Hathaways, Bordens, Tuckworths, Scussets, and Boggses, among others were joined by more recent immigrants.

The Late Comers, Portuguese Catholics arriving around the turn of the 20th century, added liveliness and vivacity to the mix, with their spicy foods, boisterous religious festas, and fist fights with the French Canadians, who had wandered down from L’Acadie, Quebec, about the same time, looking for a more exciting life than growing potatoes. Both groups first entered the work force in the cotton mills in neighboring Hope Falls before diversifying in the building trades. Last but not least, around WWII came a handful of Norwegians from Skudeneshavn who were attached to the ocean and faced the cold New England winters with stoic resignation. They brought to Baybury Shores a tempering Lutheran influence and the love of open-face sandwiches, scallops, and pickled herring.

The town’s motley population, drawn together over the entire course American history, resulted in a picturesque village made up of a hodge podge of architectural styles and streetscapes, where it was not at all unusual to find a quaint colonial Cape Cod cottage next door to gingerbread trimmed Victorian gothic revival house across the street from Depression era bungalow and a 1950s split level ranch around the block from a row of tenement houses built for mill workers in the 1890s. Boundaries were marked by neat picket fences, ancient stone walls, privet hedges, and, in one place, a couple of car engines and a pile of used tires.

Most folks in town liked the place, and few strayed more than about twenty miles away.