Last year we published a story about a hotel that existed on Bassetts Island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As is often the case with local history, much of the research behind the article was anecdotal, gathered from second and third hand recollections of the time.
Our story and interest in recording and preserving the history of Cataumet and Pocasett caught the eye of Ellen O’Flaherty, whose family owns property on Bassetts Island. Dr. O’Flaherty’s first-hand knowledge introduced a new understanding of the Island’s past. We have excerpted her correspondence to share with you:
“There was a house on Bassetts Island that might have been mistaken for a small hotel when seen from a passing boat or from the Patuisset shore. However, the island could not have supported even a small hotel. The limited supply of fresh water on the island is held in a collection of floating pockets trapped under the island, about 20-24 feet down at the level of our property. These pockets can be depleted after a summer of heavy use, and they are replenished only very slowly by rainwater and snowmelt. Then a new well has to be dug to access a new water pocket.
Garbage and human waste would also have been a major problem. Septic tanks were available in the US in the 1880s but did not begin to become common until the 1900s. Sewage would have been fed into a cesspool or discharged into the open water, neither of them a good solution for a hotel when the drinking water and bathing beach are right there.
But the house does have an interesting history. Brothers Reginald and Morris Gray, financially comfortable young bachelors from Boston, bought Bassetts Island from its four local owners in 1882. At that time, Bostonians were actively seeking shorefront property in Bourne for summer cottages, and the “Dude Train” was about to begin bringing husbands and fathers down from Boston for summer weekends. By 1884, the Gray brothers had built a house on the northern point of the island directly across from Patuisset, a substantial two-story building with what appear to be two chimneys.
There are suggestions that the house may have been known as “the Bassett’s Island House,” Which sounds very much like the name of a hotel.
It must have been a lark for the young Gray brothers to buy an island. No doubt they invited their friends out in the 1880s and 1890s to fish, stroll, enjoy the expansive private swimming beaches, and raise a glass over a freshly caught fish dinner. But subjected to over fifty years of island weather and likely neglected for at least several years after the family’s new house had been built at the far end of the island, the old house came down in the 1938 hurricane. The debris was cleared and brought to shore, a process that involved a horse whose shoes were removed so that it could swim back and forth between the island and Patuisset. A hole on the Mill Pond side of our property was probably dug at the same time to receive small items from the house. We have retrieved sherds of a pretty, blue-sprigged pottery from it as well as parts of an old wind-up alarm clock.”
Ellen J. O’Flaherty and the O’Flaherty family Bassetts Island
